Tuesday, August 30, 2005

The Gauntlet

I was overfull with excess of everything.  I sat on a wooden chair with a straight back and a cushioned seat, and they came over and sat on either side of me.  They bore expressions of earnest concern and reserved skepticism.  The evening lay heavy on my lap.

The one turned toward me, placing her elbow on the table.

You know, we’ve got Jews here too.

She leaned in almost imperceptibly.

They bury their own.

She paused, briefly, respectfully.  Her face was wrinkled like recycled wrapping tissue.

So, she continued: you want some pie?

I, too, paused. 

What kind of pie?

The other responded immediately:

That’s okay, we’ll get you some of each. 

They returned with a plate bearing a quarter each of four different pies.  The matter was closed.

Monday, August 29, 2005

Wide Wide World of Weekend

ITEM: We netflix’d Kung Fu Hustle this weekend.  It was a hoot - lots of wire-fu rockem-sockem action, mixed with a healthy dose of classic Warner Brothers cartoons.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, and it’s good exercise to suspend one’s disbelief for so long.  The most similar film that comes to mind is Big Trouble in Little China, which has long been one of my favorites.  But if you are liable to rent this puppy at some point, here’s a hint: I usually prefer to read subtitles than to listen to lip-synched dubbing.  This time, however, I’d recommend the dub - we ran subtitles under the dubbed dialogue and the spoken words were much funnier, more detailed and more interesting.  The subtitles were terse and almost misleading sometimes.  Also, the dubbed dialogue was very well voiced and well edited.  Curious, but there you have it.  Like a flaming palm of buddah, dude. 

ITEM: also on the media beat, and this time on the local front (outlanders, you can skip this item), KPIG radio is now broadcasting in San Franscisco on am 1510.  I almost never listen to the radio except for NPR and classical music - not even those ostensibly comedic morning shows.  However, the pig is where it’s at.  Great music - the only place I really can get into country, plus blues, bluegrass, and all sorts of cross-breeds; Elvis Costello, Blind Boys of Alabama, the Waifs, and loads of treasures from their live archives; also, funny parody commercials and very mellow on-air personalities.  They used to be only audible in their home stomping grounds of Santa Cruz; then they went on line for a while but I think they got in trouble for it somehow.  And now they’re back on the air here in SF.  This means I no longer have to bring my iPod in the car.  The pig will attend to all my aural needs. 

ITEM: On the international front, I could not help but notice that last week the french press exhumed criticisms of Lance Armstrong, the egocentric ubermench who actually won the world’s toughest bike race seven times in a row.  Now they’re saying that his 1999 urine sample tested positive for steroids.  Lance is remonstrating in appropriate ways (ie, not by providing more samples for his detractors to wash out of their chemises), but I think the story itself demonstrates its own weakness.  In it, the primary spokesman for the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, is Dick Pound.  That’s right, Dick Pound of WADA is complaining about tainted seven-year-old urine.  And who can blame him.  If my name was Dick Pound and I represented WADA, I bet old urine would be about the only thing I’d be able to concentrate on.  At least we know now why the leader’s jersy is yellow.

ITEM: Local media again, but with an international appeal - when we took a stroll in the park on Saturday we were delighted to discover that the museum concorse had been opened to pedestrians and the new De Young Museum was open for tours.  Though there is as yet barely any art in it, the building itself was a significant draw.  The old De Young was a venerable egyptian-inspired design, ultimately redesigned and upgraded to a more austere renaissance-styled structure.  This was slowly stripped of all personality until it was little more than a clumsy exhibition hall, literally supported by an external skeleton of girders in case of earthquakes, for which the building was very much underprepared.  Eventually this eyesore was destroyed, amid great outcry over the demise of the city’s architectural heritage.  Really, it wasn’t such a great building anymore, though it once had been; we couldn’t even get major international exhibits anymore because of excessive underwriting costs.  So we’ve been several years now without a real fine arts museum, and once they started letting us see the new facility I was excited to see what they’d come up with.  After all, it’s only about five blocks from my apartment.

Well I’m not too impressed.  It’s a big shiny box with an interesting twisting tower, nicely-textured copper cladding, and some provocative geometry.  However, it’s also stark, brutal, and a rejection of all that this beautiful victorian park has meant for a century.  In a quest for modernism, even simple truths about the park have been ignored - like that there are birds here.  Pigeons are already roosting at the roofline, which drops sheerly to a narrow pedestrian pathway along the front of its long, featureless facade.  Now artlovers are going to be subjected to guanobombings before and after their visit to the galleries.  They could have built a small inward-curving coping against the front edge, or angled the wall, or done any number of things to break this facelessness and help avoid the falling birdturds, but instead they’ve opted to put loudspeakers on the roof and play, at high volume, the calls of birds that attack pigeons.  These birds already exist in the park but are not availing themselves of the squab harvest opportunities that this museum presents to them.  Instead, it’s just goddamn noisy.  And the pigeons could not possibly care less. 

They are going to finish the landscaping now; the museum will reopen for real in October.  These guys used to be scattered around the grounds of the concourse; now they’re huddled in committee amidst the construction equipment till their new pedastals are ready for them.  I like how they are congregated.  So far it’s my favorite thing about the museum.  But this cabal will be broken up soon enough.  Oh well, maybe this Costco of Art will evetually grow on me.  Meantime, this has gone on long enough.  Back to work with you, goldbricker.

Friday, August 26, 2005

Room with a View

I’m sitting in the conference room - a long, narrow chamber filled with several rows of banquet chairs, just barely comfortable enough to endure for 90 minutes at a stretch.  I’ve been here for about an hour, and my ass is starting to get tired.  “Oh relax,” my brain tells it, “at least we scored a good spot here.” Most of the people strugging to stay awake in this room are starting to run low on oxygen and are getting uncomforably warm as they listen to the panel discussion; they’re trapped in interior loocations with insufficient air circulation and too many bodies heaving too many sighs for the hotel HVAC system to accomodate them.  But me, I’ve got the sweet deal - I picked a chair right next to a window that’s letting in the cool fresh outside air, keeping me refreshed and alert as the speakers drone on.  Plus, I can probably look out this very window next to me and see something - maybe even something interesting.  Perhaps I’ll give it a try.

My eyes are tired of staring at the four people behind the long table set crosswise at the front of the room, so I gently shift my gaze ninety degrees to the left.  That’s not so interesting, after all. It’s another hotel, and since it’s just slightly downhill from us, I’m looking straight across, not to an ornate lobby or elaborate facade, but to residential floors, mostly curtained, mostly devoid of personality and activity.  It’s a solid wall of little curtains in little windows, filling my range of vision as I look out across the street.  It’s almost as boring as the panel discussion I’m attending, and to which I feel obliged to return my attention. 

But even as I look back at the talking heads, I notice movement at the corner of my peripheral vision.  There is a little something going on at the hotel across the street.  I can’t see much of it, but I can see this:

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Something Nobody Really Needs to See

Horny?
No, not anymore…

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Answers and Questions - The Weirdness Just Gets Weirder

Thanks, y’all, for your valiant efforts at playing the Fake Crap on SkyMall game.  We had votes for the following fakes: Home Piercing Kit, Dog Shoes, and the AutoMojito.  That’s doing pretty well, folks.  But not quite well enough.  As it turns out, I made up ever second entry on the list.  The others are real.  (and check out those initials you can brand onto some whining liberal’s pale quavering ass.) Tragically, the automojito is still on the drawing board.  Or under it, if things have gotten bad enough. 

so, looking at those seared initials from the branding iron, it reminds me in a roundabout way that Kel and I now have to trade off on our tuesday night yoga class - one of us hangs with the Zachtion figure and one can go to the Y for some twist-n-bend action.  This comes to mind because last night I stayed at home and was not able to revel in the mysteries of the maim shirt.  The maim shirt?, you mumble with thicklipped confusion.  Indeed, the maim shirt, I reassert - allow me to explain. 

Yoga class is held in a room with two walls of mirrors, one of which we face.  When I’m in class I try to concentrate on my own work and the burning soreness in my hamstrings, but sometimes I check out the other students - just for form, of course.  I noticed a few months ago that one of the students, whom I saw in that mirror, was wearing a shirt on which was proudly emblazoned the less-than-zen phrase, “I MAIM.” This is a nice young woman whom I’ve seen in the neighborhood and on my bus every so often, and she’s hardly the sort of aggro workout fiend to advertise a desire to rip off someone’s limbs at the gym.  It seemed anomolous, yet something about the lettering seemed familiar.  It took me a few weeks to remember what it was: the green and orange serifed font.  I was reading the damn thing in a mirror.  She wasn’t saying “I MAIM” - she was wearing a shirt from the University of MIAMI.  Heh.

Except that’s when I noticed something else written underneath the I MAIM - something that wasn’t easy to read backwards.  It couldn’t say what I thought it might be saying when I caught brief glimpses of it between postures.  I didn’t want to stare at her, in the mirror or in real life after class ended.  It took several sneaky peeks before I was fairly confident that her shirt actually said, beneath MIAMI, the word “cornhole.” This struck me as a bit strange.  I saw Office Space like all the rest of you; I know you’re supposed to watch out for those things - not to advertise them on your yoga shirt. 

It took me a while to get around to looking it up on line, and as it turns out, it seems that in Florida “Cornhole” is a fairly conventional name for competitive beanbag games - toss a bag filled with dried corn through a board with a hole in it.  Cornhole - good clean fun for the hole family; as the linked ad asserts, it’s “perfect for tailgate parties.” I’m relieved.  The thought that this woman was wearing a shirt that actually meant what I thought of when I thought of the phrase “I MAIM CORNHOLE” was starting to make me a little sensitive about getting into those downward dog poses.  Now I just have to make sense of the fellow with the “Pork the Dolphins” culottes.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

SkyMall Quiz: Eight Flavors of Crazy Crap

I dropped my mom off at the airport this morning, which puts me in mind to offer this little quiz: when I went to visit her in florida a month or so ago, I checked out SkyMall magazine and found some damn weird crap for sale.  Your challenge: which of the following actually are for sale on airplanes, and which exist only in the poisoned precincts of my twisted mind? 

* Fetchers - Dog Shoes to the Stars
* Pool/Hottub Media Sheath to keep newspapers or magazines dry and readable
* Preformed Artificial Recycled Auto-Tire Mulch Garden Borders
* Combination Periodontal Lip Exercise Tool and Tooth Whitener
* Personalized Branding Iron for backyard grilling (or, presumably, home bondage fantasies)
* Home Piercing Kit with lobe, navel, nipple, and reproductive zone attachments (tongue not included)
* Easter Island Moai Head Tissue Dispenser
* The Automojito

Press your “esc” key if you need a flight attendant to assist you.  If you’re sitting with a child, do your own quiz first, and then assist the child.  Please be careful when opening comments, as contents may have shifted during transit.  This quiz can be used as a flotation device.  Happy landings.

Monday, August 22, 2005

Beaten Up from the Inside

It’s been a big week and a big weekend.  The baby has had a very full social schedule, which means I’ve been seeing a lot of people too, including my great-uncle at his 98th birthday party and a whole mess of good folks from work who threw a lovely shindig for the baby’s benefit - at which he behaved with admirable propriety, soiling himself only once.  My sister-in-law visited for about 52 hours; my mom visits for about 18 hours starting today.  We drove down to Belmont on Sunday to see some friends, and then spent 4 productive hours at Ikea.  That accounts for most of my hours, and yet the house is reasonably clean, the garbage has been gathered and set out for pickup, and I finished the 900-page novel I have been reading.  There are a whole lot of things I didn’t get done, but they’ll have to wait.  We did pretty well, over all. 

As I sit here typing this, I can’t help but feel a nagging sensation in my legs.  Let me share a whole goddamn longwinded essay about it.  As if you could possibly stop me, eh?

He told me, with his trademark grin illuminating the room, that I was doing really well - with everything I had control over.  My blood pressure and heart rate were excellent; my skin seemed healthy; my lungs were clear and my muscles and nerves were in good shape for a man of my advanced years.  But that didn’t matter when it came to my predispositions.  I was genetically susceptible to some nasty stuff, and my yoga and shellfish-spurning and various self-abnetagory efforts to build myself a healthy future couldn’t forestall fate.  If my essential molecular nature is to get pregressively less able to handle my sugar intake, I should expect to slip toward the diabetes with which my dad and his dad both grew so familiar.  My blood test told the tale - glucose values creeping up, year after year.  A future of injecting insulin grows more foreseeable each time.  Such is life, and that which we endure to sustain it.

But that was still a yet-to-be, hardly worth consideration in the face of that-which-is: not the incipient diabetes, but the present expression of hyperlipidity. While my sugar is rising, my cholesterol has risen. After years of fighting to control it with diet and exercise, recent testing proves my battle to have been unavailing: I have dangerously high cholesterol levels across the board, and my triglycerides and other supplementary markers offer no evidence of mitigating circumstances.  I need me some anti-lipidizers, and the time is now. 

When he wrote me the scrip for drugs to fight this condition, he mentioned that they might result in some muscular soreness.  This was reiterated by my lovely and attentive pharmacist.  Muscular soreness - I’ve been there, done that.  I figured that I knew what I was in for. 

The pills are small white discs - too tiny to bother a big man like me, I persuaded myself as I popped the first one just before bedtime.  An hour later as I lay in the dark, I felt a strange pressure under my ribcage.  It was my liver.  That was another of the predicted potential side effects. I’d never felt my liver before.  It felt weird, and not exactly in a good way.  It looked like I was going to notice that I was taking drugs after all. 

The next morning I woke up feeling bad.  My neck was stiff; I could barely move it. My shoulders and back ached as if I’d been in a car wreck.  I staggered out of bed, tried to stretch out a little, gave up, went to work anyway.  As I rode the bus I felt my quads seize up on me, an internal rigidity settling in across the tops of my thighs.  At my desk at work, my forearms fought me as I tried to type - the cramping restricted my circulation and my fingers swole up.  That night I felt handicapped as I clomped around the house, and my bedtime pill seemed anything but benign as it smirked unblinkingly at me from my palm.  I took it anyway and had trouble getting comfortable enough in bed to fall asleep, or even to lie down and relax.  This was a heavy little pill. 

I awoke on the morrow feeling like ground beef.  Nothing was moving and my liver felt like a rock.  Damn, I thought, I must be hella healthy with all this drug in me.  I’d better eat some eggs and make it worth the pain.  Because otherwise, I reasoned, this would really suck. 

I staggered through another couple of days of discomfort so intense that I found myself guarding and protecting myself from simple gestures like loading a cd into the computer or picking up my book bag.  It all just hurt.  I don’t think that I like to complain, but when Dr Andy asked me whether I was having side effects from the lovastatin when we visited his family for a delightful afternoon the following Sunday, I didn’t sugarcoat things.  I bitched those pills right out.  He nodded and grinned (again) as he chopped the thick slices of his latest delivery from his bacon-of-the-month club, admitting that he’d had a similar issue while on the same drugs, and that a mutual friend had gone off the meds because of it. 

“It’s the guys who work out,” he surmised.  “My sedentary patients don’t complain about their muscles, but if you exercise, expecially if you push yourself, it really seems to knock you out.” He stirred handfuls of grated cheese into a bowl of pasta shells and started separating some egg yolks.  “Try cutting the pills in half.  You’ll go to a cardiologist in a month and he can see if a smaller dose works.  It should alleviate your symptoms somewhat.” He dumped the raw egg yolks into the bacon and pasta and cheese, gleefully blending them into a redolent carbonara.  “Meantime,” he continued, “you can eat as much of this as you like, and Heidi made special brownies with two kinds of chocolate melted right into the butter.  Afterwards you can get in the hot tub and see if we can boil some of that soreness out of you.”

We finished the champage and he opened a bottle of boutique sauvengion blanc, luminescent in the goblets and reeking of lychee and grapefruit.  I can’t actually eat grapefruit while I’m on the lovastatin; it cancels out the drug, prevents it from working.  However, now that I’ve cut back to half a tiny pill each night, on his recommendation, my aching muscles are much relieved.  I hope the half-dose is working as it’s supposed to, lowering my cholesterol and reducing the likelihood that I’m turning my cardiac veins into grease-traps.  Butter, bacon and eggs trump a grapefruit any day. 

and for those of you who want a peek at the baby, here you go, dude.  This ought to hold you.  Bonus trivia fact: that tie-dye he’s wearing was one I bought for him in 1987 in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert, long before I was even married, much less a dad.  I’ve kept it in my sock drawer all this time and it’s still pretty trippy.  The good stuff doesn’t fade, I guess.  Have a delightful monday, and I’ll catch you later on.  Oh yeah, the photo in the kitchen: Kel’s making banana brownies.  Yes, they’re delicious.  No, there are no leftovers.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

oh my stars and garters

so some subversive elements have been discussing the possibility of a design change for this site, and here’s what one of them came up with.  I must say it helps me understand a few encounters I’ve had on public transportation late at night, but the tragic news is, despite my affinity for looking fine, i’m still sticking with heterosexuality.  it’s not a choice - it’s a lifestyle, dude.  conclusion: if we redesign the site, mauve is totally on the “not under consideration” list.  and heliotrope, fuscia and cornflower are right behind it. 

the internet: bastion of manufactured ambiguity.  and I wear my ribbon on the left.  like a real man.

Friday, August 19, 2005

A Brief Exchange

Me: It’s mauve, but it’s not gay mauve.

Dave: Dude, all mauve is gay mauve.

Kel: Dude, you’re gay for even saying “mauve.”

MORAL: don’t say mauve unless you really, really mean it.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

A Hard Pill to Swallow

Here’s a brief up-date on medical media: this guy has had some cosmetic surgery. He used to sell Viagra to our nation’s apparently increasingly floppy and flaccid population. You can see that he’s sporting horn - the “V” behind his head is merely suggested, an optical trick, having been turned into nothing more than knobby protruberances on either side of his cranium. At one time this would have been considered the mark of the cuckhold, but nowadays it’s the mark of the beast - the hot sexy beast who likes to get it on. If you don’t believe me, this story explains that Pfizer, the helpful folk who put the woodie in a little blue pill, have “pulled” (as the marketing mavens put it) an ad that actually showed horns growing out of a guy’s head as he fantasized about sexy panties. At that time, they said that the problem was that the ad implied an increased procreo-recreational drive, which conclusion was not borne out by hard data.  But now there’s an even further pullback, or -out, or however these things are denominated: the “V” in the print ads has now elevated itself, proudly and firmly, up above our salacious hero’s head. (Sorry, I can’t find a link this morning, but check any Time Magazine and it’s in a full-page ad.) It’s the same guy, but the word “Viagra” floats above him like an annunciation from on high, and he appears with a freshly horn-shorn head. I’m wondering if the FDA’s argument about insufficent evidence of increased sexual interest was only part of the story. In this ever-more parochial country, I suspect that anything linking drugs with the Dark Lord or other devilish phenomena would be more of a liability than an asset.  Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I long for the days when a guy sporting horn wasn’t immediately considered to be an emmisary of the underworld.  And even if he was, that didn’t necessarily make him a bad guy.  Nowadays, horn could get a guy into some serious trouble.  I mean, so I’m told.  The only thing I’ve got sprouting from my head these days is question marks and exclamation points.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Girlymen

We’re in that strange season again - faceball: when football (exhibition games, anyway) and baseball are being played at the same time.  As the local sports pages are starting to fill up with these competing competitions and competitors, I ask myself again, why I truly care so very little.  I enjoy watching the sports and the adroit dexterity they demand.  Human excellence; poetry in motion.  Entertaining and inspirational - when they’re at their best, anyway.

Yet I’m just a fair-weather friend, and when the locals are losing, I leave them to their own devices.  Let me know when they’re winning, and I’ll host a nice brunch to watch them do so.  Otherwise, I’ve got better things to do than sit around while large well-paid men in tight pants get their asses handed to them.  And I think I finally figured out why.  It’s not because I hate sports, or sportsmen - that, I’ve already asserted.  It’s because the local teams are emasculating, at least when they are playing at the same time, and any man who willingly watches them fail is not entitled to his own testosterone.  Here’s how I reach this conclusion:

The local baseball team was transplanted from New York, where they were first named the “Gothams.” After a particularly stirring victory in 1883, their coach called them “Giants” and the name stuck. 

The local football team is called the 49ers, or the “Niners,” for short. They’re a home-grown product founded in 1946, named for hardbitten men who travelled across a continent, drawn by the lure of gold that had been discovered in 1848. 

Both teams have rich histories and can look back on great accomplishments.  Superbowls, world series wins, hall of famers on both fields.... no one can say the teams were never worth watching.  BUT.  But when you have one team that’s the Giants, and one team that’s the Niners, and they’re both on losing streaks (and I define “losing streak” as “not winning the championship,” short of which everything is a loss), and they are playing on overlapping schedules, then what you have is two losing local teams known, collectively, as the ‘Gi-ners.  Or perhaps it’s the gyners.  In either case, I’m not secure enough in my masculinity to endorse teams named, apparently, after female genitalia.  I guess it could be worse.  If they were from Richmond, they’d be the VA ‘Giners.  I’d love to see what those t-shirts would look like.

Monday, August 15, 2005

From You, We Should Be Taking Lessons?

“As I watched this public embarrassment over and over again, it made me realize that my biggest problem with Kozlowski wasn’t the alleged corruption, but the lack of taste. The kind of buffoonery associated with this brand of corporate corruption is just distasteful and alien to me. While watching these high-level company officers cavorting on the shareholder’s dime, it occurred to me that maybe tackiness is at the heart of corporate corruption.”

That’s okay, Donald.  We still respect you.  In a manner of speaking.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Fuscations: Revealing the Errors of My Ways

welcome back my friends, to the blog that wouldn’t end.... it’s time to reveal my mendacity and tell you which of the stories I told on friday are just not true.  Well, only one of them wasn’t true, and I’m delighted to announce the winner who correctly guessed it: NOBODY AT ALL.  Whoo-hoo, I’ve lied my way past all y’all.  Today I am a man.  An untrustworthy man. 

So, let’s take stock.  Yes, in 1977 I attended a bar mitzvah with a reception at the Sportsman’s Lodge, and they had a “do the bump” contest, which I, improbably, won.  At the moment I was announced as the winner, a hush fell over all in attendance, and over nature herself, as if some violation of the essential conditions of existence had been committed and only subsequently recognized.  I knew something was wrong as I took my prize.  It was only on the way home that I began to realize that I’d crossed a line that was supposed to remain uncrossed at bar mitzvahs, something about personal dignity and salacious behavior and disco dancing.  Strange days, but then again, it was the 70s. 

And Yes, in 1995 I was in the Shakespeare at Stinson production of 12th Night, playing “Sea Captain” and “Male Lead’s Friend,” and was simultaneously writing a story about five people who all write important letters of various kinds that all go into the same mailbox, into which a vandal drops large quantities of dog feces, resulting in very different outcomes for each of the letter-writers.  It might have been great literature, though it probably wasn’t - but that’s no nevermind, I wandered away and lost the damn thing and consigned the whole mess to the scrap heap of literary history many years ago.  I just hope no one tries to publish it under another name, because I’m totally on the lookout for that kind of sneaky crap. 

And finally, Yes, I did take a bike ride, over parental objections, from my home out to Palisades Park, but I only got about 1/3 of the way back before my knee was so blown out that I called home for a ride back.  The homeless guy tried to inspire me to finish, but I couldn’t.  My dad picked me up and was wonderful and understanding and supportive.  I felt bad about making him go so far out of his way for me, but he was great.  And that’s just the kind of story that I can make work as a lie - that I finished my ride, heroically, when I really just foundered and needed to call my dad for help.  Which is as good a time as any to say hello to dad, whom I understand is now reading this blog a bit more often because I sometimes post photos of his grandson on it.  Just Like This. 

I’ll be back later with some non-obfuscatory stuff or other.  Meantime, don’t believe everything you read - and thanks for playing.

Friday, August 12, 2005

Pants on Fire: Obfuscation 2005

Here’s the thing: before I was blogging, I was effectively writing posts in the comments boxes of a few select sites.  There were only a few of them, and I’ve stopped visiting all but one.  That one’s pea‘s site.  pea and I got to be good friends, even though we have never met in person.  But over three or so years of corresponding, IM’ing, phone conversations and occasional birthday gifts, I’ve come to consider pea one of my very closest friends, and her site, a home away from home.  She and I have marvelled more than once at how such a medium as this could support the friendship we’ve grown, but there’s no question in my mind that she knows me better than a lot of people who have met me personally. 

A couple of years ago she put together a little game called Obfuscations.  The point was to see if people could tell a true story from a lie, on line.  Last year I got some kind of weird bug up my ass and didn’t play.  This year I’m playing for sure, though, because pea’s announced that she’s going to leave off blogging after today.  This is her last blog-hurrah, and I intend to share it with her.  So see if you can tell which of these three stories is not true - could be one, two, or all of them.  I’ll clue you in on monday.  No prizes for any winner or loser.  The prize is that we all got to blog with pea for a while.  That should be enough for most anyone.

(stories are in the extended entry, dude.  make your guess in the comments.)

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

One for the Ladies: Crunchy and Buggy - GORPTASTIC DELITE

Here’s a new bit of srivel (scrawl + drivel) that I dedicate with all due respect and then some to two women of valor.  pea, my first true imaginary friend and among my best friends of any ilk, is on her way out of blogsylvania; mimi has offered enthusiastic and cheerful support to my most recent (and ongoing) adventure in parenthood.  Ladies, this one’s for you.  With all due respect.

The word “gorp” sounds like a joke to me.  It might go back to its ironic late-midcentury roots: the way it mimics the ludicrous non-word “grok,” the goofball pinecones-n-wafflestompers lifestyle it evokes.... something in “gorp” just can’t be taken seriously.  This, I consider a good thing in a word.  Serious words don’t know how to have fun, and I’m all about having the fun, you know.  Plus, gorp can be tasty.  That’s the kind of dual-action gorpy goodness to which I, myself, aspire.

This might be (but probably isn’t) why my dear friend pea thought of me when she found the roach cup.  On a recent trip to her motherland in the south continent, she pulled a few knicknacks together for me, and one was a little ceramic mug.  The outside is crudely painted witha crude pastoral scene evoking the crude pastures of a, perhaps, cruder place and time.  Inside the mug, in the center of the base, is firmly affixed a small, vaguely football-shaped lozenge of clay, glazed brown, with a smaller tan dollop at one end; around it have been painted eight angled or curving little lines.  Put all together and viewed fleetingly, the whole thing looks rather like a goddamn cockaroach sitting in the bottom of the mug.  It’s a roach mug, get it?  A bug cup.  Good stuff, there.  Once again, thanks, pea.  For real.

So - gorp?, you persist in wondering.  Right, back to the gorp.  I like my gorp simple and I don’t really do the store-bought gorp thing too much. I’m a hands-on gorper - a “gorp-it-yourself” kind of guy; I like having a bit more gorp control, a bit more of a say over what goes into the gorpification process.  Peanuts?  M&Ms?  Banana chips?  Screw that noise.  I like to pick up a little granola of my own choosing, my own favorite raisins, and be done with it.  The raisins are big and sweet and chewy and the granola is crunchy and refreshing, lightly sweetened with granny smith apples.  Chocolate-free, bereft of tropical fruits, and nutless - I repeat, utterly nutless.  That’s what I like in a sack of the crunchy stuff.  I keep it clean, man - I keep it simple.  No dissonant textures or flavors.  Just a pure gorpish rush, man.  Gorptastic.

So: I was packing my lunch for work, as I usually do, and I capped it off with a baggie of granola mixed with those enormous raisins in the perfect ratio of about 2 to 1.  But by the time I got the damn thing to my cube and opened the sack for le dejeuner I discovered, to my dismay, that I’d experienced the humiliation of gorp separation.  All the raisins had floated to the top and the granola was huddled down at the bottom of the bag like a bunch of sorry puds.  It was a travesty, man. It was tragic.

What I needed was a means by which to restore a proper gorpic distribution.  I sensed that this would require some sort of handy small container - something nice but that didn’t take itself too seriously.  The baccarat snifters were definitely not under consideration; neither was the ziplok baggie in which the gorp had been originally incorporated (or “ingorporated"). 

And then I realized that the proper tool was right at hand: the buggy mug.  I poured about half my granola and raisins into the mug and it was instantaneously perfectly mixed and ready for my discriminating delectation.  I could just hold it by the handle and tip exquisite little mouthfuls of properly mixed gorp into my yawning gorphole, avoiding also the gorpic indignity of eating out of the palm of my own hand (or that of someone else). 

Plus, as I reached the bottom of the mug, I amused myself by guessing which raisin was really the ceramic roach. Gorptime has never been so much fun.  I can’t wait to feed bugmug raisingorp to a visitor, if ever I have one.  Consider yourself warned. 

and finally, for those who have specifically asked, I am specifically pleased to offer you these two images of an adorable baby.  Once again, you’ve been warned.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Back to Words: My New Catchphrases

I’m glad that the photos of Zach are so popular.  Even though he’s my own boy, it’s easy to belive that he’s especially fun to watch and look at, but that could be a father’s pride.  However, I’m not going to post photos of him that are shot so poorly that he looks drunk, drugged, or mad at me.  So sorry, folks, if you’re here for photos instead of words - my world is turning back into my world, and right now the words are all I have.  Words, and a handful of underexposed photos of the boy acting unphotogenic.  But those, I keep purely for purposes of future extortion, not general public entertainment.

So: words.  Here are two phrases I now am able to enjoy saying on a semi-regular basis, that previously were not part of my usual repertoire:

* Care for some bouncy-seat action?
* All the good nipples are dirty.

Use them in good health.  Aunt Heather comes into town to visit this evening from Huntington Mills, PA.  She’s a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to seeing her.  So let’s get on with this day already!  My seat’s a-bouncing and that doesn’t look too dirty to me....

Monday, August 08, 2005

the grind: it hungers for you

it’s been beyond awesome spending the past two weeks on a trip to get the most fabulous little guy ever, and then having day after day just to get to know him a little.  it’s at the point now that we’re friends; we can hang out and just laugh and shmooze and the time simply flies.  it flies so fast that already it’s monday and soon I’ll have to go back to the office.  i like my office and my work and my colleagues; but none of that makes me any more eager to spurn zach for any of it. 

but anyway, i will be back at my desk tomorrow and that means i’m in the mood for a bit more koreana - the weird odds and ends that made the whole trip so damned real and interesting.  so here they are, for no better reason than that i can look at this and remember what has happened: 

* in our bathroom at the guest house: “Dr. Sedoc” toothpaste.  no other words on the tube were in english. 

*- Dead people are gonna have to cut me some slack.
-- Dead people don’t have to do shit for you. 

* Street names all seemed to feature the word “dong.” My actual favorite: Donggyo-dong.  My imaginary favorites: The Dongwang District and the Donkeykong Palace.

* Zach, finally asleep, his chickenhair silhouetted against a pane of frosted glass, behind which sparkling neon signs cast novas and prominences of everchanging color and intensity like the northern lights.

* At the guest house, as at most all houses and restaurants in Korea, you take off your shoes upon entering; at the guest house, they gave us guest slippers to wear indoors.  The shoes and slippers were stored in cupboards by the front door.  In the heat of late afternoon, these lockers develop a powerful aroma.  Some things are universal, even when everything else is foreign. 

* At the guest house, we used a gas oven for which the first instruction was to turn on the gas with a cock on the wall.  Maybe that’s how most of the world does it, but it was a first for me.  wallcock.  heh. 

* An adbill on a wall with a saluting woman, many flags, and the word “cashbag.” Plazas full of dragonflies.  Everyone on the subway using cellphones far superior to the ones we’ve got over here. 

* Actual names of some huge malls in the busy Dongdaemun district: Multi Funny Mall; Clothing Subsidiary Material Special Shopping Mall.  Actual messages on t-shirts I saw in one of the malls in this district: “FUCK give it away stickybean”; “Gracious Existence of Yearning”.  Actual message on the menu of a restaurant where we ate in this district: “Come and taste original hand made man doo.” Actual messages on patches sewn onto girls’ hightop sneakers at a boutique near the pricy and fashionable Ewha Women’s College district: “FUCK”; “doggy style”. 

* Actual message on parfait glass I was using from our kitchen in the guesthouse: (pictured) a teddybear in bib overalls with a fruitbasket and some flowers. (written) “Destiny / you’re my destiny” (and on the other side) “You call it love They are things / I need to say About the way / I feel when your arms are ... “ (and I swear that’s a verbatim quote)

now it’s time for me to go to bed.  tomorrow I wake up and it’s back to work again.  I hope I never forget any of what has happened over the past two weeks.  meantime I’m doing my best not to turn this site into a slathering homage to young Zach, but for those of you following his saga, he’s doing great and adjusting phenomenally.  I have not taken too many photos of him, but here’s a nice one to tide you over.  enjoy your week and chew carefully.

Friday, August 05, 2005

by next week maybe I’ll find my tongue

back to work on monday.  i feel as if the world has been recreated since i was last there.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

let’s let’em speak for themselves: Morea and the Fabulous One

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Back with Zach

hey man we made it home and all is fabulous with Zachary and his little family.  Seoul is a powerhouse of a city and lots of fun to visit; it’s interesting in part because it’s an ancient city going back over a thousand years, but it’s got almost nothing left that’s more than 60 years old.  They imported some ancient stuff for a little park we visited but mostly it was just intense modern urban living.  Very clean.  Excellent subways.  Oh and we brought home an amazing and wonderful tiny man whom we already love very much.  He left South Korea with us, but clearly Koreans have a penchant for growing with great vitality from new roots, so I have faith that this will be the start of something wonderful for all of us.  Subways will just be the beginning.

Some random notes of Koreana:

* We thought we’d bought chocolate cookies, but instead they were individually-wrapped chocolate-covered and -filled ricegluten cakes, sort of korean mochi, chewy and satisfying and not at all what we’d expected, but in some important ways, better.

* As I walked down the street in a frantically-busy shopping district, known for malls that are open till 5 a.m. and a mecca for stylish youth, a vendor handed me a long skinny twig of - I think - seasoned dried squid snak.  I took it and had a bite.  It was delicious.  I ate my whole squid stick snak.  And I’d eat another. 

* Our neighborhood, where the agency we adoped through is located and maintains the guest house where we stayed, was a busy, though not central, part of town.  Lots of restaurants, small markets, coffee houses, pharmacies.... and “business rooms.” Lots of “business rooms,” advertised in han geul and english lettering on innumerable garrish marquee signs.  I’m not exactly sure what a “business room” is, but the men who left them the small hours of the morning were in no shape for regular business. 

* At a big “western” style discount store like WalMart, there was a rack of fairly tacky knit short-sleeve shirts with stitched, pointed collars and dissonant horizontal stripes.  Over the left breast was a small embroidered heraldic coat of arms, with a unicorn, rampant, in the middle, and the word “BLOG” proudly emblazoned above it. 

* There is an inherent irony in a nation in which hawking a big loogie is S.O.P. in most any situation, but where blowing your nose is considered a major faux pas.  I saw a mother frantically helping her daughter not have to blow her nose on a subway train, pinching her septum and offering responsible maternal advice.  Poor girl.  Poor snot-ridden girl.  Too bad she didn’t just have to hawk one. 

and here’s some gratuitous Korea photos for you.  Today’s theme (besides “korea"): photos that are “portrait"-oriented.