Fall Work, Ashcan, 5k, and Sandra Bland

1.

Winter is coming and I hate winter.  But I am coming around a little more to the idea of liking fall.  For most of my life, I’ve been staunchly against fall, citing the fact that it is a sad harbinger of winter, and the end of summer, and the season where everything dies.  But the past few years I’ve started to feel I’ve just been repeating what I’ve always said, instead of being honest about my changing views.  Fall is kind of nice.  I like wearing longer pants and hoodies.  I like crunchy yellow leaves.  So yeah, another example of allowing myself to evolve here.  Granted not on any sort of major topic, but I wanted to make it public: sure, I like fall.

2.

Work is going terrific!!! I am back to working in Harrisburg and no longer doing my crazy commute.  I work (approximately) 8am-4pm Monday-Friday.  I’m having a blast!  I’ll have a more detailed password-protected blog about it within the next week, but I wanted to give that quick update.

3.

My favorite painting of all time is John Sloan’s “Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street”.  The reasons are many.  First, Sloan is my favorite painter overall: his pioneering “ashcan” style–which denotes his muted color pallet, a brush technique that was representational but bordered on abstract, and choice of subject matter–speaks to me and to my view of the world.  This painting in particular (which I’ve included below) hits me on a gut level.  The titular streets are in the “tenderloin” district of New York City, which is another way of saying the poor or “slum” area.  In this work, Sloan chooses to show us this area in broad daylight at a busy intersection.  We are looking at a corner business that is perhaps of some disrepute–a brothel or perhaps a burlesque theater?  There are some finely dressed folks around, but they are not the same kind you’d find down by Central Park.  The focus of the scene is on a woman in distress; she is in nightclothes and carries a pail, is obviously upset.  Most scholars of this painting suggest this woman is drunk and is emotional.  The passersby–especially the two finely-clad young women nearby who could not be more different than the drunk woman–look on with judgement and perhaps even amusement, but no one in the scene seems to have empathy or concern for this woman.

There is a lot more that could be discussed about the painting.  Sloan did not waste a centimeter of the canvas (a quick for instance–Sloan’s decision to place the drunk woman at the bottom of the canvas, rather than center her, leaving him space to paint lots of sky, whereas he could have provided more surrounding context of the city instead; an interesting topic of discussion, that one).

 

4.

I have made some mention on Facebook that I have begun running, and even signed up for my first 5k (this coming Saturday)! I’m super excited but also currently undergoing a substantial amount of worry as, just 3 days ago I did my longest outdoor run yet and have had some very minor signs of some stress fractures in my shins the past few nights.  Now, these symptoms are very minor and it is 100% possible I am inventing them.  Any way you slice it, I am running the 5K this Saturday and will keep training this week on elliptical machines to avoid high impact work, and should probably know after the 5k (because my body will tell me) if I have to take a break from running and maybe evaluate my running style, etc, moving forward.  But I want to be a runner super bad so even if I have to take a significant break and make some adjustments, I’m on it.  On a side note, the running has really been a key factor in helping me get close to my goal weight: before the weekend I was 144 (goal is 140)…the weekend saw a lot of eating so I’ll know where I’m at when the dust clears on Tuesday :)

5.

Police kill innocent black people with an alarming frequency.  You don’t have to eat animals or their secretions in this day and age.  America should be a country that welcomes immigrants.  Respect women’s reproductive rights and the rights of their bodies.  Resist any and all attempts to make our culture white, male-oriented–including the language you use.  Climate change is real. There is no need to wear wool or leather in this day and age.  Do whatever you want when The Star-Spangled Banner is playing, including eating food, walking to the bathroom, keeping your hat on (I mean really) or sitting or kneeling.  Fund art programs, NPR, Meals on Wheels, and Planned Parenthood.  Oh, and in Major League Baseball, the designated hitter rule continues to be an absolute scourge.

Jamboree

1.  Here are some questions I would like answers to:  obviously there is a bone in your nose, because it is able to break.  But skulls never have a nose bone, just a hole where the nose was.  What’s going on with that?  What is an electric acoustic guitar?  I mean I get the basic concept, but still.  When you cast a shadow, it is because your body is blocking light rays, but your shadow isn’t pitch dark; some light is still landing there; what mechanism is at play there?  Why can’t beggars be choosers?  Why do I love Furbys so much?  What the heck is fire?

2.  Ever since I became a vegetarian, I’ve noticed (at least on social media) a fair amount of mildly confusing hostility toward us.  Now I know that, like any subculture of people, there is a vocal minority that will actually make unprompted attempts to make meat-eaters feel bad, recruit people to the cause, etc (which honestly I say more power to them, it’s an important issue), but most of us just quietly eat our vegetables and say very little about it; what we do say is because this is an important part of our lives that we are passionate about; how odd to think we should be passionate about how we eat but remain silent about it.

So why do some people get so upset at vegetarians when most of us are largely leaving you alone?  And when most of us bite our tongues at the myriad, countless, terribly unimaginative pro-bacon posts that float around?  It is inconceivable that someone would be made to feel bad for voicing a pro-meat agenda, but those of us who are passionate about the lives of animals are made to feel like voicing our opinion would be indelicate?  The answer seems obvious.

Most people know, at their core, that eating meat is wrong.  Even if their conscious mind firmly believes there is nothing wrong with eating the carcasses of butchered creatures, deep down, at core, they know.  In our modern world, with all the options available to us, the wholesale slaughter and consumption of literally countless beings is radically unnecessary and a moral evil, and this fact resides in most of you.  So while I initially recoil every time one of my friends posts a completely unprompted anti-vegetarian meme, I recover quickly, secure in the knowledge they’ve done so because they wish, deep within themselves, they had the courage to act on what they know to be true.

3.  Let’s talk about sports for a minute; but more to the point, let’s talk about language and sports.  Even more specifically, let’s talk about “clinch”.

Now, in English at large there are quite a few ways to define exactly when one has “clinched” something.  It can mean to settle or finalize, but also to assure oneself of future reward.  In American sports, for many many years, it has meant strictly the latter; that an individual or a team had passed a mathematical hurdle in order to be assured of a reward–typically a playoff berth, but more rarely something like a batting title or a similar individual achievement.

In decades past, the word would be used something like this by a sports announcer:

“And with one more strike, the Padres will win their third game of the best-of-five series, thereby clinching their appearance in next week’s League Championship Series!”.  As in, with this win, they now are assured of moving forward.  They have WON this series, and have CLINCHED an appearance in the next round of the playoffs.

Then, a few years ago, I was watching one of the championships of the major American sports–I don’t remember which–when moments after the winning team won and had just begun their celebration, the announcer said something like this: “And with that, the winning team has clinched the championship!”

I knew it sounded wrong but it took me a few seconds to suss out why.  Really, they clinched it?  To my understanding, they won it.  Clinching implies it has secured further games.  There is nothing after the championship.  The season is over.  There is no longer anything to clinch.  They won the championship.  Nobody ever clinches a championship.  When did they clinch it, in the half a second from when the buzzer started to sound until it was done sounding?  Let’s end this madness, please!

4.

I know, intellectually, that humankind did not have anywhere close to the technology to put a person on the moon until right up until the moment we did so.  In fact, it was almost a miracle we were able to pull it off when we did it.  But it has always struck me as odd–and this is a really challenging thought to put into words so bear with me–that over the long and storied history of humanity, that somebody didn’t get there almost by accident at some point.

OK, let me pull it back a little bit.  Thinking about early Mount Everest climbing, the accepted knowledge is that Sir Edmund Hilary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, were the first human beings to summit the mountain.  And for all we know, they were.  It’s certainly not easy to get up there, and there’s no discernible survivalist reason to do so.  But human history is long, and there have been billions and billions of people walking over the surface of this planet well before we started keeping track of what we all were doing.  It seems to me the likelihood that some human being, at some point in deep history, for reasons completely unknowable to us, once trod upon that summit before Sir Edmund Hilary’s DNA was a glint in an amoeba’s eye.

Now it is harder to make a case for people having gone to the moon in ancient history.  I’m not some conspiracy theorist or quack, I’m just playing the numbers game (but without actual numbers).  While I will go out on a limb and say it is LIKELY a human summited Everest somewhere in the deep past, I will only say that it seems totally feasible that someone got to the moon at some point.

How?  I have no idea.  Some rudimentary capsule on top of a vast amount of explosives?  I really don’t have a working theory.  It does seem to me that if some human in history worked out a way to get to the moon, they probably didn’t arrive alive or live very long once they got there.

Just imagine, though.  Imagine we go back to the moon someday with more time and means to explore it.  Imagine an astronaut is walking down an embankment in a crater.  She sees a small cave tucked into an alcove.  As she approaches to explore, she sees footprints!  Closer still, sitting in dirt on the windless surface, a tattered copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”.  She hesitates before entering the cave.  What a story this would make!

And for you smarty-pants out there, I know lunar soil is called regolith, but that would have really ruined the pacing there.

Chaos in Capitol Heights

My love and I live in a rebuilding section of a partially blighted/ partially hip neighborhood of a medium-small city in a region dominated by medium-sized towns.  Like most places in this world, the South-Central Pennsylvania area is chock-a-block full of places you could live; towns, villages, county seats, “townships” the East Shore, the West Shore, and on and on, and most of these places are all close enough to all the other places that, within reason, one could choose to live in most of them and commute to work in a nearby area.

When Karla and I were trying to figure out just how I could move from Philly to Central PA while I was working an aggressively high-responsibility job in Philly (which prevented me from helping her in the housing search in person), while also not knowing EXACTLY where in the region I would be working, we had a difficult time settling on where the housing search should focus.  Although I could commute to almost anywhere in the region from almost anywhere else, some places are certainly more central.  The uncertainty was a puzzling factor, and my astute love had to shoulder all the legwork herself.

Conveniently, she fell in love with the first place she looked at–the place we live now–in the Capitol Heights neighborhood of Harrisburg, the capital city around which the rest of the region orbits.  It is, quite literally, one of millions of places we could have ended up living, which is what makes this next part so interesting.

Almost directly across the street from our house–certainly less than 50 yards away–is a house that my father lived in for about a year of his life, when he was very, very young–maybe 2 or 3 years old.  He doesn’t remember living there, but my grandmother certainly does.

And this is one of dozens of places that both my father and grandmother have lived over the course of their lives–and for both of them, it is the only time they lived in Harrisburg.

Our neighborhood is one that has undergone many changes over the past decades.  Many city blocks have simply been knocked down and cleared–and are now populated by weeds, mounds of dirt, and conspicuous sewer hookups reaching into nowhere.  Sometimes, beside these long, narrow weed lots you will see townhouses that are over a hundred years old (and they look like it, too).  In isolated spots like this, the neighborhood resembles a “ghetto”.  But then a few blocks later, the empty lots have been built back up; within the last decade rows and rows of new, ultra-modern townhouses sprung up in an attempt to capture the gentrification overflow from the nearby hip “Midtown” enclave–the few blocks that sport the arthouse movie theater, swanky craft beer and local food eateries, the farmers market, and the independent playhouse.  Karla and I live on one of these new blocks; actually for three or four blocks in any direction of our house, all one will find are the brand new townhouses.

Except the house my father lived in, briefly, in his extremely early childhood.  It sits, probably 150 years old, like a beacon from the past nestled between new elephants.  It and it alone somehow escaped the revitalization.  And if my father hadn’t driven my grandmother past the house for a look at it–back when we had the address but I still lived in Philadelphia–none of us would ever have known the significance.

I don’t believe in a higher power.  Of any kind.  I don’t believe in fate or things happening for a reason.  It seems obvious to me that we make these things up to explain the world around us, especially when the chaos seems to clear for a moment into what looks like order.

The chaos doesn’t ever clear into order.  Events that seem pre-ordained or “fated” or just too coincidental to be coincidental, well, that’s just the chaos of the natural world lining up for a split second for you.  If you watch the static on a television screen for hours on end, occasionally you’ll see, for just a second, the outline of the United States, or a dog’s head.  It’s just chaos lining up in your mind.  Reaching for a larger explanation of order is how most human’s minds react to moments like that.  It’s tempting to say that my father’s childhood home being so improbably located next to mine is somehow significant, was for some reason supposed to happen, that it “can’t be coincidence”.  But nobody says that about the traffic they hit coming home from work yesterday, or stubbing their toe in the darkness when all they were after was a damned drink of water, or the three hours they spent in a mindless stupor watching their shows at night–three hours they have actually totally forgotten.  Nobody ever thinks it was “meant to happen” that their doctor is 45 minutes behind, and they have to spend all that time in the waiting room with the old magazines and they forgot to bring their Kindle.

But see, whatever the world is–whether it’s orderly or chaotic or ruled by a God or ruled by particles–it’s that way all the time, not just when neat shit happens.  If it’s all put together by some power or god or fate, then that entity ALSO MADE YOU STUB YOUR TOE.

There isn’t a reason my father’s childhood home is now across from mine, and I suggest that the lack of a plan makes a coincidence like this even more amazing.  The static on the television screen made a really pretty shape with that one.

Fizzy Waterfalls & the Haircut Bigots

Have you ever filled a big cup up about halfway with a carbonated beverage, and when you go to take a drink of it, you can’t really breathe?  What’s the scientific process going on here?  Is the inside of the cup all filled with carbon dioxide?

Since I buy a lot of music on vinyl that I already own in another format, I keep ending up with a lot of “download cards”–these little guys that come in the vinyl records that also let you download a free version of the album–basically a way to try to convince you to spend money on music in any form at all.  Anyway, for awhile I tried to match up these cards with friends I thought might enjoy the specific music the most, but it’s gotten difficult.  If you legitimately think you might enjoy discovering new music that is the kind of music I like, let me know, the first person to say so just automatically gets all my download cards from here on out.

It seems about every six months, some bigot from the middle of nowhere says something atrocious, gets fired from his high profile job, and all the other bigots start freaking out about the First Amendment.  Now, I know I’m not the first to point this out, so I’ll be brief:  the First Amendment protects your speech (and not even all of it!) from the government.  Not from companies.  And the thing is, the people who want the jobs of these rich hate-mongers saved are the same exact people who are always the first to try to get a waitress fired for next to no reason.  Yeah, let’s keep the job of the rich bigot who definitely doesn’t care about you—because the Constitution!—but let’s fire our actual brethren who are down in the trenches with us because your steak was burnt.  I can only imagine what you’d want if that waitress said something you didn’t like!

I’m currently obsessed with the Kay Ryan poem, “The Niagara River”.  Watch the video below to see me tell you why:

The Niagara River

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice–as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced–
the changing scenes
along the shore.  We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

 

It’s kind of difficult to rate your senses, isn’t it?  I was just sitting here thinking, gee, smell has to be the best sense!  But then I thought, oh there is no way smell can compete with touch!  But then I remembered sight.  And on and on.  Senses rule!

I’m getting tired of cutting my hair.  Does this really just have to keep happening?  I mean it’s every couple weeks, for, like, life.  I mean, I get it, body.  You’re good at growing hair on my head and, increasingly, everywhere else.  We’re all very impressed.  But consider your point proven.

My new deodorant smells like soap.

Look at this picture I took:

 

 

It’s My Thought That Counts

It occurs to me with no lack of regularity that, because of my persistent status as single and childless, that I have significantly fewer opportunities to receive presents as the rest of you romantic and procreating beasts.  And hey, listen, I’m gonna admit something most people avoid saying out loud:  I would like more presents!

So recently, I was thinking, maybe it’s not just the lack of Valentines, Father’s Day, and anniversary (as well as the extra gifts one gets at Christmas and birthdays etc, from your significant other and children) that are preventing me from getting a significant amount of free goods.  Perhaps part of the problem is, when gifting times roll around, many of you potential gifters think my interests are limited to just a few things, like pompous music, post-1930s American and British poetry, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and you just don’t know how to buy presents for a guy like that!  And, while it is true that I really love those things, the fact of the matter is, I have literally hundreds of interests, and with the advent of the internet, there is nearly no shortage of ways you can spend money on me! And the internet also means it is very easy for me to re-sell something you may accidentally get me that I already have!

So, in case you have just been hankering to buy a gift for a guy but don’t know who the hell Philip Larkin is, I will here lay out for you a massive list of interests I rarely talk about, but I assure you I am just crazy for!

1.  Soundtracks to movies made before 1980 on vinyl records

2.  Anything to do with early thought on city planning, especially dealing with pioneer Jane Jacobs

3.  I like hats

4.  I like notebooks to write in, but not one with Hallmark-y or sentimental messages printed on the cover

5.  Corduroy clothing

6.  I collect old postcards, preferably with messages written on them, preferably from 1915 and earlier

7.  Single-issue Marvel comics (any title) from between 1993-1997 are usually a good bet

8.  Anything celebrating the state of Pennsylvania, especially including its coat of arms

9.  Back-issues of Discover magazine, pre-2005.

10.  Post-it notes, white-out, index cards, legal pads, mechanical pencils

11.  Owls

12.  Games for the original Game Boy (original only, no Game Boy color!)

13.  First edition of any book by Orson Scott Card, Dave Eggers, Flannery O’Connor, or John Updike

14.  Hoodies or winter coats ordered from the websites of any of my favorite bands.

15.  Anything that you see on this list, if you can find a mousepad that in some way depicts or deals with it, I would like to own that mousepad

16.  I have a genuine interest in the Johnstown Flood.  Aside from the famous book by David McCullough, I own nothing about it.

17.  Aside from the DVDs, any merchandise or materials related to the film “Labyrinth” would be a home run.

18.  I have a high interest in the European particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC (sometimes also called CERN).  Yes, there is merchandise.

19.  I love Grey Flannel cologne but haven’t owned any in years.

20.  Any DVD that says it is part of the “Criterion Collection”…you can buy me that.

21.  I am a big fan of motorized inclined planes, or “funiculars“.

22.  I love backscratchers.  It is not possible for me to own too many of them.

23.  Books or materials about early American filmmaking are always great (post 1910 and D.W. Griffiths only, I have no interest in Edison’s important but dreadfully boring experiments).

24.  Dr. Strange is my favorite comic book character.  I have plenty of stuff but feel free to take a leap of faith, there’s a lot out there.  Statues, figures, and busts are especially desired.

25.  The easiest thing on the list:  I love all Philadelphia sports teams.

26.  I have an interest in Quantum Physics.  There are tons of books and DVDs on the subject.  I will read and watch them all.

27.  John Sloan, the painter.  That man painted my soul.

28.  I am intrigued by the lost colony of Roanoke and would love to learn more about it.

29.  Post-Revolution, my favorite historical figure is Aaron Burr.

30.  I could always use a new (good) digital camera.

31.  I have an interest in but have not read much about behavioral psychologist BF Skinner.

32.  I am a major evangelist for Dr. Pepper, and even more specifically Diet Dr. Pepper, and I will, without irony, wear, brandish, or otherwise use merchandise imprinted with this soda’s logo.

33.  I have always been smitten with now-deceased scientist Carl Sagan, and any of his books are welcome.  Likewise, his television series, “Cosmos”, and any materials related to it, are high on my love list.

34.  In the realm of living scientists, I have a bona fide man-crush on Neil DeGrasse Tyson and will gladly accept his books, DVDs, or tickets to see him speak somewhere.

35.  I get weak in the knees for Ben and Jerry’s “Late Night Snack”.

36.  Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece of graphic novel literature, “Maus”, is an all-time fave, but is always priced just out of reach.

37.  Toblerones.

38.  Coffee-table sized books featuring the art of Henri Rousseau, and/or merchandise featuring his paintings “The Dream” or “The Snake Charmer“.  If I listed all of these items in order by what I’m interested in right now, this one might be #1.

39.  I have an odd interest in the history of the Mormon religion, specifically the handcart disaster, the Mountain Meadows massacre, and the early life and “visions” of founder Joseph Smith.

40.  I’d love a Polaroid camera.

41.  I love coffee, of course, and there are a few things I still need, primarily a pour-over set for iced coffee and a French Press.

42.  If I hit the lottery tomorrow, two of the first purchases I’d make would be the complete series of “The Fraggles” and “24” on DVD.  Don’t judge me.

43.  My favorite living poet is Billy Collins.  I have all his books.  See what else you can do.

44.  I love riding my bike.  But I’m not a serious biker, like, wearing spandex, etc.  I do it just to cruise around.  But I could use a new lock, gel seat cover, or other biking stuff you might think of.  I could also use a new bike, but if you want to go that far, we should probably collaborate on that.

45.  Anything relating to the old TV shows “Northern Exposure“, “Twin Peaks“, or “Picket Fences“.  I own the entire series of “Northern Exposure”, but other than that, it’s open season.

46.  I find the Donner party very interesting.  I have read this book on it, but nothing else.

47.  I like to use caramel coffee syrup in my coffee and oatmeal.  I can never have too much of it.

48.  I love newspapers, but it’s not easy to find merchandise regarding them, such as hats, shirts, etc.  My favorite newspapers are The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today.

49.  Museum memberships.  Any kind of museum.  Art, history, whatever.  I can’t imagine a gift I would love much more than a membership to just about any museum.  Currently, I am a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but no other museums.

50.  Old coinage, pre-1900, from early America or other countries.  Confederate money would be very cool.

Hot Dog Soup

About once a month, somebody “accuses” me of having an “opinion about everything”.  Some people actually find this to be a negative trait!  While I suppose having constant opinions coming out of one’s mouth might, over time, seem “negative” or “cynical”, what is the opposite?!  Certainly not “optimistic”, it’s just…unopinionated, which I can’t imagine is very different than uneducated.  Or at the very least, uninterested or lacking any substantial level of curiosity about the world around you.  And to me, a lack of curiosity is just about as unattractive of a personality trait as you can have.

“The blog”, as a general phenomenon is sadly going the way of the dodo.  The lion’s share of the content on the internet is now filtered through three or four different social network sites, with instant sharing, commenting, “liking”, where all the people you know are already congregated.  Taking the time to create and maintain your own blog, and then trying to convince everyone to leave the comforts of the social networking site to actually read your blog, is now more trouble than it’s worth for most people.  Myself included.  My blog output has been pathetic for over a year now.  But that might be partially because when I drop a blog bomb on you, like this or this, it goes largely unnoticed and uncommented on.  You people don’t deserve my blog.  Regardless, I mourn the end of the blog era, when, briefly, a bunch of everyday folks fancied themselves writers.  It was fun.  Now we’re all just statusers.

I’m scared by how fast technology is evolving.  I know, I know: what a very typical thing to say.  Everyone who has tons of opinions has that opinion.  But do you know about Moore’s law? If not, you should click on that link and read that article.  Moore’s Law is not a theory anymore; this is how the world is working now, and it is truly ghastly imagining what things will be like even five years from now.  Microchips in our brains is not a joke anymore.  I dare say it is something that will be happening soon.  And hey, look, I’m not afraid of change.  I’m afraid of change happening faster than we can adapt to it or control it.  There were thousands of years from when we invented the wheel to when we came up with the car.  It’s been 80 years since we invented television, and now we’re about to control them by waving our hands in the air.  And that progress is only going to keep speeding up, according to Moore’s Law.

I’d eat Hot Dog Soup, if it existed.

Philly Journal, 9/7

Philly Phacts

1.  Philadelphia is the fifth most populous city in the United States.  It’s kind of a big deal.

2.  The city of Philadelphia is its own county—the only instance of a city-county in Pennsylvania.

3.  The Greek translation of “Philadelphia” is literally “brotherly love”.

4.  It is one of the twelve “four sport cities”.

5.  As of December 31st, 2009, there were 829,873 registered Democrats living in the city, and 134,216 Republicans.

How I’m Doing!

I am really having a grand old time.  Living around people I know again, as well as working at a job whose main training tool is basically telling you to be really really nice to people, has started to make me come back around to caring about my fellow human again.  I love my new job.  I have really, really fallen in love with my mother’s cats, and I dare say they’ve started falling for me, too. Living with my mother is not only easy and tolerable, but downright great (and I don’t care how that sounds coming from a 34 year old; you can stuff your societal norms where the sun, it does not care to shine.  I am talking about your bunghole).  I have way too many fun and interesting things to do, all the time.  This new setup is redefining what I am interested in, and how I spend my time and money; where I’ll end up on that spectrum remains to be seen.  I will say that without a doubt, there will not be a year-end “Top Ten Movies” list of 2012.  I just cannot seem to muster the interest for movies right now (although there most definitely will still be a music list).  I finally got back to Central PA to visit friends and Dad.  It was a transcendant time.  Dad and I’s developing interests in local history are making for lovely, lively, emotional visits.  I only got to see a few friends on that visit but plenty more will be coming soon.  Paul is coming here to see the Phillies vs. Marlins with me next Wednesday, so that should rule.  I’m drinking a lot, a lot, a lot of coffee, and not just at work.  I got a new, finally very nice record player.  I’m kind of obsessed with it.  I’ve decided I like owls now and my sister keeps finding rad owl statues/ figures for me.  I cautioned her not to overdo it but with finds like these, I’m not sure overdoing it is possible.

Here’s a picture of my sister and I at the Franklin Institute

It’s Not Bullshit

Thirft stores.  Elizabeth Taylor in her prime.  Tapioca.  The Occupy Movement.  Chipping from the rough with a nine iron.  Corduroy.  Bevelled edges.  Public transit.  Micro-loans.  YouTube.  Gay marriage.  Blu-Ray Disc.   Crescendoes.  Mark Twain.  Febreze.  Cork boards.  Roe vs. Wade.   Sun Dials.  Road ID.   Martin Luther King Jr. Day.   The Sierra Club.  The three-camera sitcom.  Glossy paint.  The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.   Welfare.  The GI Bill.  Advil.  Waiting periods for gun purchases.  Boots.  Megabus.  Varnish.  Synchronized Swimming.  Egrets.  Carbon offsets.  Matt Lauer.  Not feeding the Mogwai after midnight.   Net Neutrality.   Mandolin.  Psychoanalysis.  Stiff penalties for illegally downloading and stealing music or movies.  The price of a US postage stamp.  History Detectives.  Comic books.  Actually listening to the voicemail I left.  Attempting to find your own true self.   SETI.   The freakin’ elliptical machine. Crosswalks.  Pierced navels.  Bananas.  Tipping the barista.  Sustainable fishing.  Netflix.  Paisley.  Day-Quil.  Hot dogs.    Geothermal energy.  Wearing a seat belt.  Staycations.  Water parks.  The price of concessions at the movie theater (get over it).  Presidential libraries.  Jazz fusion.  Curling.   Abstract Expressionism.  Craigslist.  Dancing in the rain.   The Large Hadron Collider.

Manic Panic

I am currently in the midst of a months-long creative and intellectual mania.  I often say I don’t have enough time in a day, but it has certainly never been more true than it is now.

I attribute this primarily to getting healthy and exercising; it definitely kickstarted an increase in energy, and a change in mood to the extreme end of “good”, and energy plus super good mood=extreme mania, and it’s lasting a long time.  Which is good—damn good—but my lack of ability to do every single thing I want to is getting a little annoying.  Let me describe a little better what the mania entails:

First and foremost, I want to do stuff constantly.  Like, outside of the house stuff.  It being winter, there are a limited amount of things to do, but I have lists of things I want to do when I have time, like “take pictures on Raspberry Street” or “tour the Watson-Curtze Mansion“, etc etc.  When I do have time for activities such as this, it’s damn difficult deciding what to do.

Secondly, I have an enormous list of creative and artistic projects that I want to start, work on, or complete, and the list of projects itself has become a project.  When I’m at work or out and about, I find myself typing ideas into my cell phone’s “notepad” for me to add to the project list when I get home.  Hell, my list of potential blog entries alone is staggering.  This aspect of the mania is the most frustrating, as I am getting more and more interesting and ambitious ideas and I simply don’t even have the time to start on most of them.

The mania is also driving up my appetite for media/ information consumption, even as the mania means I have less time to partake of that particular fountain.  For many years now, most of you know, rather than watch much television, I’ve (through Netflix) watched, on average, one new movie a day.  Even as my appetite for film continues to grow, my attention to other projects and interests is decreasing my time for them.  And the mania has only increased my desire to read; I currently could probably read all day for four straight days and not get sick of it.  Information, information, information, my mind screams at me.  I currently have very little desire to read fiction (although, Mom, I really DO want to read that Stephen King book you sent me, and probably will start it in about 2 weeks).  I read the Erie newspaper every day, and often stop somewhere for a USA Today, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal, depending on what’s happening in the world or if I heard about an article or feature in one of them from one of the websites I simply can’t stop reading thoroughly every day (Slate.  Huffington Post.  Oh, and Hacking Netflix and Deadline).  And my magazine consumption, which I had finally whittled down in recent years, has skyrocketed during the mania.  I can’t seem to read enough science writing.  I currently read all of the “big three” science mags (Popular Science, Discover, and Scientific American;  I’ve been a big Discover supporter for years but right now it’s just not enough), and it seems my hankering for history now bleeds over into magazines.  America’s Civil War has been a mainstay on my bedside table recently, as have some oddballs such as Archaeology and The Saturday Evening Post.  And these are all in addition to the standard entertainment, arts, news, and cultural magazines you’d expect me to be reading.  Oh, and yes, I read books, too!

I have also taken quite a shine lately to just listening to music.  I have found that, in most of my adult life, I have rarely simply sat down, doing nothing else, and listened to music intently.  And now I have started doing it and it is changing my life.  But where is the time???

Oh, and I have REALLY started to enjoy just puttering around my apartment, re-arranging things, finding new homes for this or that, hanging the artwork in new arrays, paging through my old books, putting old photos in little frames, etc etc.

In short, I literally do not have enough time in a day right now.  I already start out with a deficit, working 50-60 hours a week.  Then, remember, I’m spending between 8 and 12 hours a week in the gym, so there is potentially almost 80 hours unavailable a week.  And then there’s sleep, at some point, and getting on the internet.  I have essentially zero downtime.  Please do not misunderstand me: I am loving this.  I am in a constant good mood, and never even remotely close to being bored or sad.  But damn.  Who knew there could be so much to do (without, really, doing anything)?  Also, this is a way of explaining to some of you how and why I might occasionally sound out of my mind, especially after a day that may have been devoted to intense, marathon bouts of reading, followed by writing or otherwise creating something incredibly personal and emotive, followed by going to a hockey game or something, and then back home to shower in the dark while The National plays on my stereo.  It’s a whole lot of fun, but sometimes can make me a little crazy.

I anticipate things leveling off as my body continues to adjust to being some degree of healthy.  But I just had to put it out there how wild and fun and jam-packed my life is at this point, even if it might not sound particularly fun to a lot of you, it is for me.  And almost everything I’m doing or want to do is free or relatively cheap (not to mention my food budget being more than halved in recent months) so I’m actually saving a lot of money recently (concert-going has all but stopped, and there’s much less time to go to the movies now).  How one starts saving money by doing more stuff is some sort of mystery!

Hey, have an awesome day!

Seth’s Favorites of 2009: Magazines

Other favorites of 2009:

Poetry

Television

If you know me, you know I enjoy magazines more than your average bear.  I find them to be a great way to compliment my different interests.  There’s just some level of involvement in things you simply cannot get off the internet, TV, etc.  I subscribe to more magazines than I can possibly read every month, the idea being that when I want to read something, it’s there, but I don’t pressure myself to read every magazine I get (yes, I recycle them).  2009 was a great year for magazines.  It seems the more and more that the death knell gets sounded for the future of the publishing world, the better and better the publications that remain are getting!  And so here they are, my favorite magazines of 2009:

5.  Mother Jones

I’d been hearing about Mother Jones for a few years until I finally decided to pick up an issue off the newsstands this year, and I loved it so much, I subscribed.  Listen:  MoJo is a liberal magazine, and it makes absolutely no secret about it.  I think that’s why I like it so much: it’s one of the only magazines I’ve ever read where I wasn’t left, to some degree, guessing about it’s politics (even hard-line ‘zines like Commentary or American Perspective sometimes leave me scratching my head).  But, more than just being a magazine I agree with, MoJo is a lot of fun:  it’s not JUST about politics, but the wide range of subjects it explores are filtered through the liberal viewpoint, which means I can be guaranteed none of its articles are written by bigoted homophobes.  Did I mention the magazine is fun? Recommended for everyone who used to like The Utne Reader before it became a strictly environmental mag.

4.  The Wilson Quarterly

Over the last few years, I have had a very on-again, off-again, love/hate relationship with The Wilson Quarterly. It is written, basically, for intellectual snobs who are interested in interesting things.  Sometimes this is very, very…well, interesting. Other times it is…well, annoying.  Certainly there is a bit of the snob in me, but even among snobs, there are different kinds of snobs, and we don’t like each other!  Also, WQ is “non-partisan”, which means sometimes I cheer for it, and sometimes it offends me.  This constant yo-yo had it on my shortlist of “non-renewals” at the beginning of the year, but its smart, concise coverage of the economic collpase, Obama’s election, and our insanely evolving media culture this year truly did help to inform the way I’m seeing the world I live in, and for that, I think I’ll keep The Wilson Quarterly around for a few more years.

3.  Poetry

There continues to be no better method for following current American poetry than the gold standard, Poetry. This year saw so much editorial involvement by Billy Collins, I started to think he was on the payroll (which isn’t a bad thing).  Also, at the beginning of 2009, they started using even heavier paper stock, which smells really good.

2. Psychology Today

It’s not what you think.  I discovered this little gem early this year via Maghound (a Netflix-like service that lets you subscribe to numerous magazines–and change which ones you get at any time–in a Netflix-like model.  Check it out at http://www.maghound.com).  Psychology Today is not for psychologists.  As a matter of fact, they probably hate it.  It’s a magazine about pop psychology for everyday people (for instance, why are you jealous?  What happens when you sleep?  Why do you vote the way you do?).  Sure, it can get a bit hokey, and sometimes it reads like either Cosmo or Men’s Health, but regardless, it is ALWAYS a fun read.  It’s like a bon bon of a magazine.

1.  Discover

That’s right.  The science magazine.  Science is my secret interest, and I tried every major science magazine a few years back before I settled on Discover, and my love affair with the mag has just gotten hotter and hotter every year since.  Discover is written for people who are not scientists, but who are not idiots.  If Discover has an article on String Theory, for instance, you’d better already know what String Theory is, to a degree.  But unlike Scientific American, you don’t have to actually be a physicist to understand it (and unlike Science Illustrated, you do have to be older than five).  This year saw a ton of great stuff at Discover: terrific CERN coverage, in depth Darwin and Evolution stuff all year, and I can finally–finally–understand what the Higgs Boson is.  Trust me, that’s no small feat.

Long Distance

I know they do something to the voice
that deadens the highs and lows.  They translate it
into electricity
and microseconds later they relay it as an echo,
a hollow mimicry of speech.
They have to do this.
Sound is too slow, the thunder far behind the spark,
almost part of something else,
someone else.

Cold Clothes interview, Part One

The following is intended as a fun writing exercise for myself.  If you’ve been reading my blogs from the very beginning, you’ll remember I did something quite like this about 7 years ago on my very first OpenDiary blog.  This is going to be a “fake interview” with a somewhat fictionalized version of myself, which is being conducted by an entirely fictional small arts magazine called Cold Clothes. If you read the old OpenDiary one, rest assured, this is a completely new edition of this.  You’ll see I have tagged the entry as both “memoir” and “fiction”–and that’s why it is so fun for me!  I am playing in a semi-real world (specifically a semi-real Carlisle) and with a version of me that both is and isn’t me, and there will be no cues for what is fiction and what is memoir. And put up with the early conversation about “art”–it’s just to make the reason for the interview believable.

Cold Clothes brings you Part One of it’s planned 12-part interview with Pennsylvania bohemian Seth Dellinger.  As our magazine has only a circulation of about 231, we are “simul-publishing” the interviews on our website–www.coldclothes.com–as well as Dellinger’s blog, Notes from the Fire.  And since we are a very irresponsible and erratic publication, we make no projections as to the frequency of the installments.  Now, Cold Clothes managing editor Rufus Paisleyface’s Part One of the interview:

I first meet Seth Dellinger at an outside table at his favorite Carlisle coffee house, the Courthouse Commons.  It’s an early autumn day, but Dellinger doesn’t seem to know it yet: it’s jacket weather, but he’s still sporting just

Dellinger outside the Courthouse Commons coffee shop in Carlisle, Pennsylvania

a t-shirt and shorts.  A few times throughout our conversation, he appears to regret this wardrobe decision.  He orders a tall caramel latte.

Cold Clothes: So, here we are, on a sunny afternoon at an outdoor coffee shop, and you appear to have quit smoking?

Seth Dellinger: Yep.  And yeah, if this isn’t the perfect time and place for a smoke, what is, eh?  But I had to quit, you know?

CC: Why?  Lots of your peers haven’t seemed to give it up yet.

SD: I think smoking always seemed to effect me physically a little more than most people.  I had a diminished lung capacity almost immediately after picking up the habit.  I’d be laying in bed and I could feel my heart beating in my head.  I mean, here I am, a 31-year-old guy who’s been away from drugs and alcohol for years now, who likes to be physically active and moving around and doing things, and I’m feeling my heartbeat in my head.  I didn’t like that.

CC: Does any part of you feel that as a drug and alcohol free non-smoker, your validity as an artist has been breached?  A lot of creative types hang their hats on the guttural experience of “use”.

SD: (laughs) So true. Certainly one doesn’t need to have ever used any drugs or mind-altering substances of any kind to make quality art, but I do think you need a sizeable well of life experience to be any good as a creator, and the folks who have always shied away from substances tend to be the same people who shirk a lot of life experiences, although this is certainly not always the case.  Let me say that again: this is certainly not always the case.  And yeah, sure, at first I worried I’d be called a “sellout” or, worse, a “straightedge”, but then I just thought, you know, I’m totally clean because I used things so much I had to stop or die, which is more badass than most of these smokers and drinkers can say.  I’m still badass.

CC: Has if affected your creativity?

SD: Not really.  Now, as before, I’ve not completed any major work that was at all worthwhile (laughs).  But I actually find myself writing a lot more, but the quality downgrades at the same rate as the volume of output, so in the end, I have the same amount of usable material.  I did have to postpone getting together with Duane (Miller) to work on an album we’ve been kicking around for a year now.  I found I wasn’t ready for collaborative work without a smoke yet.  I’m very comfortable writing at home in my own apartment in front of my computer, but the thought of kicking ideas around in Duane’s studio without a cigarette kind of terrified me.

CC: I was under the impression you’d been doing collaborative work with Rothman Hogar very recently?

SD: Well, yeah, but that’s all correspondence work.  Rothman (ed. note: Hogar is Dellinger’s frequent “best friend” and occasionally his “nemesis” artistically.  The two have a long, storied friendship which both are hesitant to talk about.) is currently a writer-in-residence at a university in Norway, and we’re collaborating on a screenplay via e-mail, so it’s still basically solo work because I’m alone while I’m doing it.

CC: Has Rothman’s absence changed the nature of the artistic life here in Carlisle?

SD: Only in the sense that a friend’s absence changes the dynamic of that group of friends.  Since Carlisle’s rise to prominence in the East Coast art scene, there’ve been plenty of personnel changes around here, but the core group remains the same and the general aesthetic remains the same.

CC: OK, now that we’re talking about it, take us back and tell us about the “rise of Carlisle”.  How did it happen?

SD: I’m sure you know that’s not the softball question it appears to be.  There are a few differing versions of how it happened.  Personally, my memory of the first national art media coverage was when Mary (Simpson) and I wrote and produced a play at the Cubiculo Theater here in town that built a slow media following: first the local papers, then the regionals, then the niche national publications, until finally it got a blurb mention in The Atlantic.

CC: That play was Conceited Eagle.

SD: Yep.  Eagle still largely pays my rent, too.  After it’s blurb in The Atlantic, a few regional theaters asked if they could put on a production of it.  Every year it circles a little further out.  This year they’re doing it in Fargo, Kennebunkport, and Denver.  It’ll never make me rich.  It doesn’t even pay the utilities.  Coneited Eagle exactly pays the rent, more or less.

CC: Do you harbor any hopes it will ever go “big time”?

SD: What, Broadway?  Yeah, it’ll probably make Broadway some day, and it’ll play for 18 shows and star someone unusual, like DMX.  I probably won’t like it.

CC: So what made Carlisle become a hotbed of artistic work, rather than this just being the unlikely story of an independently produced play?

SD: It’s almost impossible to say how these things happen.  There were just a lot of us in the right place at the right time.  Some folks interviewed Mary and I about the play a few times, and we mentioned a couple of friends we had–visual artists, musicians, writers, etc–and occasionally they went and interviewed those friends of ours, and people started getting into their stuff and interviewing them, and it was one big cycle.

CC: How famous do you think you can all get?  Could this become a cultural phenomenon?

SD: No way.  The Carlisle scene is bound to stay culty, for a couple reasons.  First, none of us are really pop artists.  I’m mainly poetry.  Rothman writes everything but it’s all very avante garde.  Mary’s a painter.  Jarly (Marlston) is a sculptor.  Duane plays space funk.  Tony (Magni) draws wads of meat.  I mean, c’mon.  The kids are never gonna flock here!

CC: Ryan (Straub) plays some fairly accessible singer-songwritery music.

SD: haha, true, but we’ve been trying to talk him out of it.

CC: How important is it for art to be accessible?

SD: That all depends how accessible you want it to be.  If you’re going for something you want everyone to understand and enjoy, and you end up making something daft, dense, or confusing, then I’d say you’ve certainly failed.  But it doesn’t have to be simple to be accessible.  Charlie Kaufman makes movies lots of people love, including myself.  They’re never going to make a hundred million dollars, but there are lots of fans.  I think it’s just about making what you set out to make, making it play on the level you wanted it to.

CC: Can you give me an example of a time you think that translation has failed?

SD: Sure.  I think Jonathan Franzen’s much beloved novel The Corrections is a failure in that vein.  He seems to want to be writing a really complex, codified novel like Pynchon, but he ends up writing it like a Grisham book.  It was an Oprah book back before Oprah started picking surprisingly good books.  It reads really strange because you can literally see Franzen trying to be dense but it comes off as populist.  It’s like beating off with a limp dick.

CC: So, back to the Carlisle movement: how important is the “group” aspect here?  Would any of you be successful without the group?

SD: We’re not the Beats, if that’s what you mean.  For the most part we participate in different mediums, we have different outlooks, are at very different spots in life.  Mostly, what we create does share a certain tone, a base idea of grit, or the grime of life, but we’re also not afraid to uplift.  You’d be hard pressed to find a photograph with more than three of us in it at any given moment.  I’d love to play up the idea of a group, or movement, because people love that story, but really it’s more like a loose group of friends who are all creative types.

CC: How many of you have been able to quit your jobs?

SD: Most.  But we quit our jobs with the trade-off of living uncomfortably.  We’re not rich.  We’re barely living off of what we do.  Remember, you’re interviewing me for Cold Clothes, not Rolling Stone! (chuckles)  A few of them still labor for their money.  Jarly still works (for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation).  There’s not a big market for original sculpture right now, but I always say, a decade from now, that guy’s gonna be so rich he won’t even remember where Carlisle is!

CC: OK, maybe we’ve got ahead of ourselves.  Let’s go back before Carlisle.  Tell me about growing up in Newville, a small town about 20 miles from here.

SD: Newville is a very idyllic, perfect little shithole of a town.  It was an ideal town for a boy to grow up in.

CC: haha…um, explain?

SD: It had that quintessential “small town” feeling, that sort of close-knit Thornton Wilder thing that makes you feel comfy and safe and free to ride your bike alone all over town at a very young age, but at the same time, it’s a shithole.  It had seen it’s best days.  It had abandoned factories, forgotten corners of the town where the streets quite literally had no name, drainage ditches full of standing water, back alleys with weeds growing through the pavement.  But despite all this, I never found anything sad about it.  My childhood eyes saw all this blight as a great story.  I loved thinking about Newville’s past, what it had been like as a boom town, what those men in tall hats from the black-and-white photographs would think if they could see it now.  It filled me with a deep sense of time very early in life.

CC: How did your family end up in Newville?

SD: Well my grandma and grandpa Cohick–that’s my mom’s side–lived in the area.  My mom grew up on their farm in Oakville, an even smaller town a little further out.  I suppose at some point in time they sold the farm and moved to Newville.  I know Gram worked for the dress factory in town that was shuttered right around the time I was born.  After my parents were married they must have moved to Newville to be closer to them, although I don’t know those details for sure.  Isn’t it strange the questions you never even think of asking your parents?  Dad’s family was from closer to the river (the Susquehanna), the Mechanicsburg, Wormleysburg-type area.  It’s odd to think about, because my parents are divorced now, and Mom left the area, but Dad still lives in Newville, a place he’s not actually from.  It’s weird how life moves you around.

CC: And here you are, living in Carlisle.

SD: Well yes, but there’s not really a difference between living in Carlisle and living in Newville, geographically.  It’s like the difference between living in Chelsea and living in Greenwich Village.  And I suppose there’s barely a difference between where my dad’s parents raised him and where he ended up.  It’s all south-central Pennsylvania.  But I think it’s just neat how life picks you up, moves you around, and sets you down.  Sometimes it’s a lot more dramatic than Mechanicsburg to Newville.

CC: Did you enjoy your childhood?

SD: Listen friend, if you didn’t enjoy your childhood, you weren’t trying.  I fucking loved it!  I mean, sure, there’s plenty of sadness in childhood.  In fact, about half the poems I wrote in 2004 were trying to figure out why childhood seems so sad.  My childhood certainly wasn’t more sad than anyone else’s–in fact, it was probably happier–but I think as children we just haven’t learned how to deal with the truths of the world yet, and we’re very tuned in to the way things feel.  The passage of time feels quite acute to a child.  Boredom feels very acute.  Unfairness, not getting what you want, not feeling loved at every moment–these things take a lot of years to get used to.  And thank goodness we do get used to them, thank goodness childhood doesn’t last forver, because until you get your emotions and reactions under control in the early teens, you’re essentially useless.  But anyway, despite and maybe because of this deep sense of feeling, childhood is an amazing, magical time.  It’s this same “blank slate” idea that makes us so emotionally sensitive which also makes the world an extraordinary place to a child.  “Puddle-wonderful”, as Cummings called it.  Try as I might in my adult life, I’ve never been able to acheive the kind of free-form imaginitive play I had as a kid.  And that’s the thing:  I do try. I mean, I live by myself, I don’t have a job, I’m single and no kids.  Some nights, when I’m home, there’s nothing to watch, I’m sick of the book I’m reading, and I don’t feel like writing.  I look around my apartment and think, I should play.  And why shouldn’t I?  There shouldn’t be anything wrong with a grown-up playing.  So I turn everything off, make my hands into guns, or my golf bag into a dragon, or any number of things, and I give it a go.  But it never works.  My hands become hands again way too quickly, and the golf bag always looks much too much like a golf bag, and I just end up putting on a Radiohead album and pretending I’m a rock star, which is play to an extent, but it’s totally useless grown-up play.  It’s more about commerce and culture and self-glorification than childhood play.  I always remember this essay I wrote in 12th Grade english class about childhood play, and how my teenage life was really missing my childhood play.  That essay is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, because in it, I described childhood play in such a luscious, compelling, chunky way.  I could never write about childhood play like that nowadays.  It’s like my 18-year-old self was still tenuously connected to my childhood self.  I still had a visceral notion of what it had been like.  Not so anymore.  Nope, nowadays remembering childhood is like watching a movie through a bedsheet.  I can’t imagine what it’s like when you get older still; it must be like that childhood happened to somebody else entirely.

CC: Were you a social child?

SD: Reluctantly.  Which is another way of saying “no”, I guess.  I was pretty much terrified of people I didn’t know.  In fact, I was more scared of kids I didn’t know than I was of strange adults.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I had friends, but it was a long process for me to feel comfortable with them.   I had much more fun playing by myself, controlling all the plot points and characters.  But most of it comes down to fear.  I was one of the most scared kids around.

CC: You were scared of other children?

SD: Absolutely.  In both the theoretical and the very concrete sense.  Theoretically, I was afraid no one was going to like me, that I wouldn’t be understood, that I’d be ridiculed.  Concretely, I was literally afraid other kids would end up beating the shit out of me.  I’m not sure if this just came from being a short kid or not, if maybe it came from somewhere deeper, but it wasn’t until perhaps the age of 14 that I stopped worrying everyone wanted to hurt me.  It had nothing to do with my home life: my parents were not violent or physical.  I got spanked a handful of times, very civilly, very by-the-book.  Sometimes I think I just got born with a “scared” gene, and it’s been the major story of my life, overcoming it.

CC: Did you get in many fights as a kid?

Dellinger, age approx. 2 years, admiring one of his grandfather's sweet potatoes.

SD: No.  One or two, really, though the one was very, very terrifying.  It was this kid Shawn Wilson.  He was one of the baddest ass kids in Newville.  Like, you did not fuck with Shawn Wilson, even at the age of seven.  And I was in this church yard one day, this church yard that was a few blocks from our house on Big Spring Avenue.  I used to go there to play all the time.  They had some swings, a really big lush lawn, and even a small topiary maze.  Of course now, as an adult, it looks like a shrub-lined walkway, but at six, seven, eight years old, it was a topiary maze.  I was there playing by myself, and Shawn Wilson shows up.  At first, he played with me, but then for some reason he pushed me to the ground, got on top of me, wouldn’t let me up.  Of course, I cried immediately, did a kid version of pleading with him, but my fear just fed his aggression.  So he got a bit sadistic on me.  He let me up, but he wouldn’t let me leave.  I’d try to walk toward my house, and he’d run in front of me, knock me down again.  It turned quite epic.  I remember, what seemed like hours into this ordeal, I managed to escape, finally getting onto the sidewalk, y’know, that sign of civilization, and having this immense feeling of relief wash over me.  I felt like I had barely survived with my life.  That’s a moment from my childhood I remember with precision clarity, that feeling.  It’s poignancy is not diminished because I was so young at the time.  I felt like my life had been spared.  That’s a heavy feeling for a kid.  I ran the two blocks home and breathlessly told my mother the story.  She was a substitute teacher at the time, so was often home during the day.  I breathlessly recounted my ordeal.  She was concerned, of course, and very motherly to me, but must have been unconvinced of the epic severity.  I remember wondering why she wasn’t calling the police and giving me some secret grown-up medicine and calling the local news.  And the few times I’ve recounted this story to people over the years, I’ve gotten the same reaction. You see, you can’t ever actually make someone feel how you felt.  It is important to remember this when making art, too.  You can only get them really, really close, and then only if they’ve felt something similar before as well.  I will always be disappointed by anyone’s reception of this story, because I still get worked up thinking about it, over twenty years later.  I probably shouldn’t tell it anymore.  Oh, and Shawn Wilson?  He’s dead now.  A few years back, car accident.

CC: So now you’re the only one who remembers.

SD: Yep.  I’m the only person with the memory of that childhood fight.  And I like it that way.  Shawn Wilson may have grown up to be a different sort of man than the evil bastard who held me hostage in that church parking lot, but I’m still happy to not share anything with him, not even a memory.

CC: What else were you scared of as a kid?

SD: Just about everything.  I was scared of moving things, very much.  Motorcycles, horses, trains, amusements park rides.  I still won’t ride amusement park rides or horses.  I still haven’t conquered everything!  But yeah, fast things.  Bugs, snakes, the sky, night time.  Death was a big one.  I thought about death a lot.  My grandparents.  Rain.  You name it.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t unable to leave the house, or quivering like an idiot any time I was in public.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who had as fearful childhoods as I did.  I learned how to act through most of it.  Sure, I was still scared shitless when our parents would take my sister and I to, say, the Newville Fair, but I gradually learned how to hide it.  Well, hide it the best I could.  It was still no secret to those around me that I was mostly terrified.  But the acting is a skill I’ve really refined in my adult life.  While the fear is mostly gone from me, I now use it to disguise foul moods, sadness, worry.  I could be afraid I’m dying and hide it from everybody for a long period.

CC: Were you creative as a child?

SD: Sure.  But I never had one of those big moments you hear a lot of people talk about.  You know, I knew the moment I opened “Where the Sidewalk Ends” that I was going to be a writer or My parents rented “E.T.” and I knew in the first ten minutes I was going to be a film director. No, I never saw art that compartmentalized, and I still don’t, or at least, I try not to.  As a kid, I just knew I liked things that used that creative part of the brain, that idea that you can laugh or cry or sweat because of things that aren’t really there, or aren’t actually happening.  I was always drawn to that, and to the depth of emotion you can allow yourself to feel at these things.  I was always amazed by those depths.  Also, I remember losing my breath a little bit the first time I saw those little lights along the aisle floors in a movie theater.  That looked like real-world magic to me.

The Seth Dellinger interview from Cold Clothes will be continued!

Notes From the World at Large

Just got back from driving a friend of mine to the District Justice’s office.  Inside, I saw this sign:

You will be prosecuted if you bring a handgun on these premises, and/or cause a handgun to be present.

A few questions: so…rifles are OK?  And how do I cause a handgun to be brought?

Heard on NPR on the way to the District Justice:

Silversun Pickups just might be the next U2.

This is both awesome to hear someone say, and also makes me nauseous.

Also: currently reading my third book on Aaron Burr.  I may be bordering on obsessed.  He’s definitely the absolute most interesting figure in American history, so far as I can tell.

Also:  I think I may finally understand String Theory.  And it seems like total nonsense!

Early Show, First Come, Google, “You lie!”, Manipulating Reality,My Foot is Gross

1.  I’m watching “The Early Show”.  I always do when I am in a position to watch a morning newsmagazine show.  Why, you ask, would I watch the perenially third place, oft-forgotten CBS morning dud?  because I feel bad for it, that’s why.  Timely side-note:  I was watching “The Early Show” during 9/11.

2. True or false:  the phrase is “first come, first serve” not “first come, first served”.  Your tenses need to match.  If you say “served”, you would have needed to say “came”.  Your comments on this issue are desired.

3.  I was in a book store the other day and saw a “Search Engines for Dummies” book.  Really????

4.  I try to not engage in Republican bashing.  I try to be first a thinking person, second a liberal, third a democrat.  I do not like to engage in the acrimonious nature of our current partisan politics, because it’s getting really bad.  But these Republicans are getting out of hand. The GOP talking heads on TV and the radio are ten times more mean, unreasonable and vindictive than the Democratic talking heads, to the point that they are actually whipping up hate.  And now last night a Congressman calls President Obama a liar during his address to Congress?  Shameful.  Shameful.  Shameful.

5.  I watched the “Woodstock” documentary last night for the first time in my life.  I like most of the artists who played at Woodstock and have always wanted to see the doc.  So…why does it suck so much, and why don’t more people know it sucks?  Why does director and cameraman Michael Wadleigh spend so much time on uncomfortable, unnecessary, practically silly close-ups?  Why did Wadleigh and editor Martin Scorcese elect to present most of the musical segments out of the order they happened in?  (remember, a documentary purports to represent reality)  Why does Wadliegh ask people so many questions, instead of just showing us the natural drama as it unfolds–thereby taking an active role in shaping events himself?  Why are there no scenes of any songs from Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, The Band, or Blood, Sweat and Tears, while we see multiple performances from The Who, Joan Baez, Country Joe and the Fish, and Richie Havens?  And I know these really famous artists have great songs that not everyone knows, and I’m all for being exposed to them,  but when I’m watching “Woodstock”, I don’t want to see a deep track–I want to see Janis Joplin’s rendition of “Piece of My Heart”, Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”, The Who’s “My Generation” (some of their more famous songs weren’t written yet at this point), Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Almost Cut My Hair”, and Arlo Guthrie’s rendition of “Amazing Grace”, not all these songs I never heard before.  Why did I have to watch Jimi Hendrix literally noodle on his guitar for ten minutes when that time could have been spent showing us “Foxy Lady” (though we do get to see smokin’ versions of “Voodoo Chile” and “Purple Haze”), and why does Wadliegh shy away from panning the audience during Hendrix, so we could see that most of the crowd had left by then?  That’s called manipulating reality, and I was fully insulted.

6.  The wound on my foot from my biopsy ripped open last night.  I guess we took the stitches out too early.  it’s not bad enough to need stitches again, but it sure is ugly.

7.  I am seriously worried that vaccine phobia (caused by people refusing to believe that vaccines DO NOT cause autism, even though they’ve proved they DON’T) is going to start causing a very serious problem.

8.  Today is Einstein’s birthday!

Seth Gets a Biopsy

A month or so ago, I noticed that a mole on my foot had changed color and shape.  This mole is a big mole, and somewhat…um…ugly.  I’ve had the mole as long as I can remember, a at least since I was ten.  I never gave the mole much thought, except…I knew to watch it.  Give it a good looking-over every now and then.

Now, before you get worried, don’t get worried.  I’ll jump to the end of the story and tell you that the mole was just a mole, everything’s fine.  This is not a story about me having skin cancer.  It’s just a story about me worrying about things like that.

I admit, I didn’t make a doctor’s appointment as soon as I should have.  I noticed the mole had changed and thought, Oh, that might be bad, and then I promptly did nothing–for a week or so.  Then, of course, something else happened (itching–which turned out to be dry skin), and at the time, of course, I’m thinking I must have some sort of advanced skin cancer and I’m well on my way to death.  Understand:  I am not a health over-reactor.  I am not a hypochondriac.  I am not even a worrier.  And I am not these things to a fault.  I should react and worry just a little bit more.  Hence, once I started worrying, I started really worrying, because I assumed, hell, I’ve been ignoring everything for so long, I probably missed it when I could have caught it. And then, for about a week, I became the biggest health over-reactor and hypochondriac in the whole world.

I didn’t tell anyone because in the back of my brain, I must have known I was blowing things out of proportion.  The last thing I wanted to do was freak everyone out and then look like a big dumb idiot (which, it turns out, is what would have happened).  But this isn’t a story about how I thought, quite genuinely, I was probably dying for a few weeks.  It’s a story about finally treating my body like it’s 31 years old.

So I went to the doctor (Pion, for those Newville residents reading this), he took one look at the mole, and he says–with no pause whatsoever–yeah that’s highly unusual, we’re gonna have to take that off and run a biopsy on it. Well.  Wang-doodle, slap my noodle, that was weird to hear!  I never thought I’d need a biopsy on anything on my body, at least not until I was old enough to be a different version of me.  I also told him about some of th eother weird stuff happening to my body (which I of course assumed was in relation to the mole) and he ordered a HUGE battery of blood tests.  The nurse even commented THREE times about how “the doctor sure wants a lot of blood.”  Folks:  they took five vials from me.

So then Pion “shaves” the mole off, which is alot more like slicing than shaving.  Now, I know that a whole lot of people in this world have had this experience.  This isn’t like having a triple-bypass or an organ transplant, but it felt strange that I was having such a…well, grown-up would be one way to say it, but old would be another way…experience.  I know, I know, these things happen to people of all ages, but the perception of biopsy is definitely old.

I actually felt a little proud to be having such an adult procedure.  There is not alot about my life which screams adult. Sure, I live by myself, make pretty decent money, have a job with alot of responsibility, etc etc, but much of my life beyond that continues to resemble that of a man in his early twenties.  And why not?  I’m not even sure what else I should be doing, or doing differently, and I love the shit out of my life, but every now and then it’s actually nice to have a reminder that the years ticking by are more than just pages on a calendar; that I am in fact progessing down this long slide–as the Bard would put it, the way to dusty death. I’m not saying I want to die, heavens no!  Just that every now and then it’s nice to know I’m getting older, and it’s good to quote Shakespeare in a blog entry and refer to him as “the Bard”.

So Dr. Pion “shaves” off the mole, which was actually rather rad.  I’m one of these weirdos who thinks anytime you want to numb any part of my body, that’s pretty great.  I.  Love.  It. It is such a strange and otherworldly experience, and you’d better believe I’m watching him do it.  I totally watched him slice that mole off my foot, as though it were happening to someone else.  In fact, we had quite an interesting chat about why most people know where some corporations’ home towns are, but not others.  (most people know Wal-Mart is from Arkansas, but where is Target based?  Most people know Starbucks is from Seattle, but where is Dunk’n Donuts from?).  Unfortunately, the mole was a tad deeper than he expected, so he then had to cut down into the foot a way, which meant stitches, which is also fine by me.  I also like stitches.  They’re so bizarre and strange, and they look like little bugs crawling out of your body.  These are things you don’t get to experience very often, even if they are a tad unpleasant on the surface of things.

Note:  everything I described in the above 4 paragraphs details two trips to the doctor, compressed into one, for the sake of brevity.

I made an appointment for seven days later (which was today) for the removal of the stitches.  Dr. Pion told me he would tell me the results of the biopsy and all the blood tests today, before he removed the stitches, unless there was something absolutely terrible.  And, wouldn’t you know it, as each day passed without a call from the doctor, I began to feel better and better.  All the supposed little things which were happening to me due to my “cancer” gradually fell away.  I fell asleep last night without so much as a thought to the results today; not only because I felt better, but as I said: I’m not a worrier.  Whatever the doctor was going to tell me, he was going to tell me whether I slept well or not, whether I paced the living room or not, whether I stayed up all night Googling symptoms (which I didn’t do once after seeing the change in the mole)–so, I simply…don’t worry.  Except for that time a few paragraphs back where I thought I was dying.

So.  The mole was just a mole.  He called it a blue toober or something like that.  All the blood tests showed nothing wrong.  Thyroid, good.  Kidneys, good.  Liver, good.  Vitamin levels, good.  Blood counts, good.

The strangest thing about the experience is the simple and plain fact that my mole is now gone.  It’s just gone.  It’s been there since I can remember, and now it’s just gone.  Sure, for now, there’s still a bit of a wound wher eit used to be, and I’m sure there’ll be a scar forever, but the mole’s gone, and I kinda miss it.  Sure, it didn’t define me, not even a little, but you get so accustomed to your body over the years that when something seems to just disappear from it you can’t help but feel you’ve been changed on the inside too, just a little bit…maybe just the size of a shirt button.

ps…I now have a prescription for Chantix, too. I’ll be having it filled in a few days.  So it’s gonna happen, but don’t bug me about it.  :)

Learn:

LHC

How about some lists of things because I’m bored?

All lists are ranked, not random

My 5 favorite television news personalities:

1.  Sam Donaldson
2. Katie Couric
3. Andersen Cooper (who used to be number one but is slipping fast!)
4. Bob Novak
5. Diane Sawyer

My 5 favorite golf clubs to use:

1.  Pitching Wedge
2. 5 Wood
3. 7 Iron
4. 3 Wood
5. 9 Iron

My 5 favorite streets in Carlisle:

1. North St.
2. Hanover St.
3. Walnut St.
4. South St.
5. Louther St.

My 5 favorite NPR shows:

1. A Prairie Home Companion
2. Hearing Voices
3. Fresh Air
4. Soundcheck
5. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…

My favorite Seinfeld characters:

1.  George
2.  Elaine
3.  Jerry
4.  Puddy
5.  Uncle Leo

My 5 favorite types of columns:

1.  Tuscan
2.  Solomonic
3. Ionic
4. Corinthian
5. Doric

Top 5 countries I NEVER want to visit:

1.  North Korea
2.  India
3.  Turkey
4.  Bolivia
5.  Cuba

My five favorite flavors for lattes:

1.  Caramel
2.  English Toffee
3.  Pumpkin
4.  Marshmallow
5.  Hazelnut

Top five newly off-myspace blogs:

1.  Scattered is a Pattern
2. Scattered is a Pattern
3. Scattered is a Pattern
4. Scattered is a Pattern
5. Scattered is a Pattern

My 5 favorite incense scents:

1. Nag Champa
2. Dragon’s Blood
3. Sandalwood
4. Jasmine
5. Patchouli

My 5 favorite physicists:

1. Ramsey
2. Salpeter
3. Einstein
4. Sagan
5. deGrasse Tyson

Blogging the Night Away

Last night, my friend Kyle got drunk on rum, watched movies, and fucked around on the internet, blogging his thoughts on what he was seeing/doing.  It looked like marvelous self-indulgent fun, so of course I’m doing it now! (except I’ll be drinking generic diet Dr. Pepper and various coffee products instead of rum!)

Tonight is a “Seth-time” night–I shut out the outside world and treat my apartment and everything in it like an amusement park.  It’s not very often I get to fully enjoy all this crap I’ve got in here!  Most of you will not be the least bit interested by this blog post, so I apologize in advance, but it’s gonna be fun for me, so take a flying leap!  Also, I’ll be editing it throughout the night and adding to it, so check back!

7:30pm: I’m halfway through “Citizen Ruth”, the first movie by Alexander Payne (of “Election”, “About Schmidt” and “Sideways” fame).  Kyle himself chose this movie for me by randomly picking a number (237) and then I counted to that number in my personal DVD collection.  “Citizen Ruth” is a dark comedy about the hilarious issues of abortion, addiction, the religious right, and moral certitude.  I know, hilarious, right?!  But it IS, somehow, and also very, very issue oriented.  I haven’t watched it for probably a year, and am now reminded of why I bought it.  As a rule, I very much dislike Laura Dern (what with her association with David Lynch), but in “Citizen Ruth”, Dern does an AMAZING job portraying this very tortured woman (she’s addicted to huffing paint) who’s had 4 kids taken from her and is being pressured to abort her current fetus, when she becomes a national poster woman for anti-abortion…and then the poster woman for choice…and back and forth and back and forth, all the while Dern continues to skirt the line between intense emotion and light-heartedness…as much as I dislike her, she deserved an Oscar nom for this.

Here’s a scene from the movie that perfectly illustrates how it is played both tragic and comic simultaneously:

7:45pm: Cracking open the first Diet Dr. Thunder (wal-mart brand) of the night.  I really do love this shit.  I don’t buy it for economic reasons.  I actually prefer it to the real deal now.  I have cans tonight, but I usually have 2 liters.  Wal-Mart was actually OUT of the 2 liters last night!

7:47pm: Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) who is about to enter an abortion clinic but is waiting for some protesters to leave, just said “I wish I could take a dump.”

8:02pm: Just took the trash out.  Why do I always insist in doing this in just my socks, when I know full well that the stone parking lot hurts my feet?  I’ve always had very sensitive feet.

8:04pm: Just cracked open the newest Time magazine.  What is this stuff about New Jersey residents protesting Gaddafi?  This seems weird.  I’m gonna get to the bottom of this.

8:07pm: The anti-abortion woman who is attempting to win Ruth to their position just accused Ruth of being addicted to “smelling drugs”.

8:12pm: Perusing the latest TV Guide (that’s right, I get TV Guide) to see if I want to put on the TV or another movie after “Citizen Ruth” is over.  PBS’s History Detectives is looking pretty good.  Anyone ever seen that show?  It’s sooooooo intriguing!  But that is really the only thing coming on a 9:00 that seems worth my time.

8:14pm: Oh man!!!  Burt Reynolds makes his hilarious entry into “Citizen Ruth”!  Gotta love this character!

8:35pm: Just read about this curious phenomenon in Time:  Putpockets.

8:36pm: Flirting on Facebook.

8:54pm: Eating a can of Hormel chili.  Interesting story about me and chili:  about 2 years ago, my friend Mary and I were eating at the restaurant Chili’s.  I was very, very hungry, and was talking about having an appetizer of some kind, at which point Mary says I might as well have some chili, since I always eat chili.  I was astounded!  Sure, I’ve eaten chili in my life, but I’ve never been a chili “fan”, or, as far as I can remember, ever eaten chili in front of Mary before that moment.  I protested, but she insisted that I always ate chili.  Well, wouldn’t you know it, almost immediately after that night, I DID become a big fan of chili, and now I usually have one or two cans in my apartment at all times.  This, of course, always looks to Mary as though she were right all along!  I can in no way convince her that I was not a chili fan before that night!  Also: on my second can of Diet Dr. Thunder.

9:00pm: I’ve opted to watch History Detectives.

9:13pm: That chili was delish!!  And this episode of History Detectives is boring!  (enough WWII already, History Detectives!).  I’m going to step out of the apartment briefly to take some pictures of Carlisle at night.

10:00pm: Back from taking pictures.  Didn’t get a lot of good shots, but I should have: it’s “big trash day”, when people can put couches and refrigerators and all kinds of big stuff out on the sidewalk to be taken away.  However, my limited-ability camera made capturing anything great very difficult.  here are my favorites:

10:16pm: It is apparently impossible to not have these words snake around the pictures.  No matter how hard I try, they won’t simply appear BELOW the pictures.  Consider that my rant for the evening.  Now:  I’m well aware of how this sounds, but I’m now going to put on my vinyl copy of Godspeed You Black Emperor’s album Yanqui U.X.O., light some incense, and read some poetry.  This is going to rule.  Looks like the poet of the night is…Robert Creeley, who rules. Also, when the song “Motherfucker=Redeemer” plays, I am going to play air guitar on a golf club (which I guess is actually golf club guitar) during the 10-minute crescendo.

10:27pm: Texting Joni, who just sprained her wrist.

10:34pm: Internet and cable TV go down, not changing my plans at all, but preventing me from keeping you all updated for a second!

10:44pm: Play air guitar on a golf club, as promised, during the crescendo to “Motherfucker=Redeemer”.  If you have a spare 20 minutes and some patience, you can listen to the song here.  But that is only part one of the song.

11:25pm: Am astounded by one of these Creeley poems I must have always missed:

The Answer
by Robert Creeley

Will we speak to each other
making the grass bend as if
a wind were before us, will our

way be graceful, as
substantial as the movement
of something moving so gently.

We break things in pieces like
walls we break ourselves into
hearing them fall just to hear it.

11:33pm: Making a marshamallow latte.  There’s no actual marshmallows involved; I have marshmallow Torani syrup.  It’s just like a caramel latte except it tastes like marshmallow.  It’s fantastic!  And it sucks typing marshmallow that many times!  Also, smoking another one of these cigars I bought for the birth of Paul’s daughter…uh-oh.  Am I starting to like cigars?

11:48pm: Texting Sarah about music, and still texting Joni, but now about waffles.  Putting Radiohead’s Kid A on the turntable.  This is one of my only vinyls where I can notice the difference in sound quality on the vinyl.

Midnight: Holy shit, “National Anthem” on Kid A is making me move!  Currently dancing around my living room, singing into a golf club…keep moving the needle back again and again…this song has got me stuck in it’s groove!

12:20am: I’ve made a commitment to essentially stage a fake concert here in my living room to the entire Kid A album.  I’m getting sweaty and this latte isn’t helping!  “Idioteque” is blowing my mind and it’s getting difficult to not make the record skip!

12:54: Marshmallow latte #2.  I might not go to bed tonight.  Been awhile since I saw a sunrise…hmmmm…???  I’m gonna let Pandora radio play my Post-Rock station and read some of the Stephen King book I started today, Lisey’s Story.

1:10am: I’ve tried starting this King book a few times now over the last six months, and I just cannot get into it.  Is it, perhaps, that this is the one millionth book King has written about a writer?  This is feeling a bit worn to me.  Plus, the last King book I read before this one, Duma Key (which was about a PAINTER!) felt exactly like this book at the beginning; it seems I’m reading the same book twice–and Duma Key was barely scary at all!  I’m afraid to let myself spend that long (these are loooooong books) on a non-scary, mediocre book again.  But I shall try.  Back to the book!

1:35am: Am totally ambushed by a MySpace Instant Message (that’s right, I was on MySpace!) by one of my friends who insists they have a hilarious YouTube video to show me.  I relent, and they are right, it is hilarious!  See for yourself:

1:38am: E-mailing back and forth with Joni trying to decide on what her new hairstyle will be…I vote for number 1 or number 4.  I think number 1 will be especially amazing on her…it fits her face perfectly.  Do you think I can utilize every single one of my existing blog tags in this single entry?  Probably not, but the tags are getting ridiculous!

1:45am: I just gave Kyle and opportunity to select my next movie for me through the random number system again, but he dropped the ball and signed off Facebook, and Mary jumped at the chance.  She chose number 267 (weird, since earlier Kyle chose 237), and that movie is “Dragonslayer”!  Badass.  This is an old-school movie about…well…killing dragons, back when special effects were still mainly stop-motion and models.  But that doesn’t take away from this movie at all.  It is still VERY creepy in places.  This is another one I haven’t seen in a long time.  Makes me remember my childhood.  For some reason it seems I watched this alot when I was little.  I remember it influencing my “play”…it really sparked my imagination!

1:54am: Bowl of Boo Berry cereal and a diet Dr. Thunder.

2:13am: Between Mary and Kyle, I am having my ass Facebooked off!  Also wondering whatever happened to Peter MacNicol’s film career?  He’s the bomb in “Dragonslayer”, and then he was in…”Sophie’s Choice”, I believe?…I suppose he’s had some success in TV though.  Oh man, MacNicol is entering the dragon’s cave for the first time…this is so tense!

2:50am: Oh man I forgot about this little monster that jumps out of the hole in the cave!  It scared the crap out of me!  It’s a fierce baby dragon!

2:55am: All the lights out and some incense going for the big fight scene.  I might pee my pants!

3:02am: OMG there’s that fucking dragon.  That fucking dragon is popping up right behind Peter MacNicol…you can see it’s reflection in the pool of water.  Now you can see the steam from it’s breath!  This dragon ain’t nothing to fuck with!

3:23am: So ends “Dragonslayer”…so glad Mary picked that one!  And it seems that now just about everyone is asleep…and yet I am wide awake, perhaps owing to my marshmallow lattes.  I’m going to go cut my hair.

3:37am: Mid-cut:

3:45am: Haircut complete.  That’s right, I can give myself a haircut in under ten minutes!  Finished haircut:

Yes, it's true, I look like ass here. I blame it on my overhead flourescent light.

3:55am: Next up, I’m going to rock out a little bit more…I had so much fun earlier jumping around my living room!  This time, it’s gonna be Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Then after that, it’s been decided (by Kyle again, by random number) that I’ll be watching the film “Matchstick Men.”  OK…let the Modest Mouse begin!

4:32am: Nobody can sing like Isaac Brock, lead singer of Modest Mouse.  Now, I’m not saying he’s a good singer–far from it.  In fact, most of the time, he barely sings at all.  It’s more a an in-key snarl.  But nobody else does it. Alot of the time, he actually laughs the words.  he laugh-sings words!  WTF?  It’s amazing and crazy.  Totally sweaty from jumping around my living room pretending to be Isaac Brock.

4:44am: I have elected to skip “Matchstick Men”, as “Needful Things” is on Starz, and I’ve not seen it before.  Also, I have elected to watch this movie while laying down in an attempt to sleep eventually, even though I am not tired yet, and I don’t have to be up for anything tomorrow, now seems as good a time as any to hit the reset button, although I’ll probably become engrossed in the movie and be up until 6 anyway.  I hope somebody out there got some form of entertainment out of the endless blog.  Good night.