Chivalry is dead because flowers are expensive.

I just bought some flowers. This doesn’t mean I’m not an asshole. I am an asshole, demonstrably so. It’s just that my species has not rendered the human conscience an atavistic nuisance like e.g. the appendix. These flowers are whim-purchased.

Author: Paul Beatty, womb-sharing brother of Pete, from whom I glean this bloggrategy.
Books: White Boy Shuffle.
Times Read: twice, most recently via a nonstop cover to cover session that transpired a week ago while I paced within the small damp cell of consciousness insomnia provided me.
Type of Alcohol With Which Book Goes Best: weed.
Take on Book: White Boy Shuffle is literature. It is ferociously acerbic and kind of poetic without being Ashberry Berryman lame. It is both a four-on-the-floor, 3-chord punk song and a pair of shoes tied at the laces caught on a line fifteen (15 is chosen arbitrarily here) that overhangs a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. If you prefer straight formal description, it is a Bildungsroman about a black teenage poet cum basketball star cum messianic iconoclast named Gunnar Kaufman. Gunnar is from inner city Los Angeles, but this story is to Finding Forrester as Kool Keith is to Young MC. A chart detailing this book’s themes would do well to include individualism v. collective identity, as well as suicide/negation as a form of self-empowerment.
Kind of Animal Book Would Be: Laughing hyena. Which reminds me, doesn’t Allen Iverson sort of realize in adorably human form the non-human characteristics of Mighty Mouse? I think I would get a tattoo of Allen Iverson if I was to get a tattoo of any Illadelph Half-Life icon. On a second sidenote, the room I’m living in now is probably as big as the house my roommate and I shared last year. It is BIG. And I’m paying $117 a month for it. God bless Me.

Author: Ken O'Brien
Title: Buffalo At the Broken Heart
Kind of Alcohol With Which Book Goes Best: Rubbing alcohol.
Take on Book: This was my SoDak nation book. I decided to see if there were writers from my fair state. There are. Their use-value varies. This book is about a rancher who changes from raising cattle to raising buffalo. This particular rancher likes to read a bit in the summer, and his writing reflects this habit, which is good. Plus I have a predilection of late for big country, and I know the land this guy lives on so it made things a little easier. The story is serviceable, its narrative arc is not the equivalent of a stuttering epileptic, meaning its smooth, and, as I am now firmly ensconced in MT once more, I see lots of cows and buffalo, which increases the book's staying power.
Kind of Animal Book Would Be: If indie rock darling Connor Oberst procreated with an albino chameleon, this book would be the literary equivalent of their love child.

Author: Wallace Stegner
Title: Crossing To Safety
Kind of Alcohol With Which Book Goes Best: Port.
Take on Book: There are some self-conscious semi-pomo moments in this book e.g. the scene in which the narrator, a college professor/writer, responds to his friends' daughter's entreaty to write about her parents by noting that books about regular people and their struggles lack sufficient gravitas to be of interest to modern day readers. Incidentally, the book is about regular people and their struggles, namely the narrator, his wife, and the parents of the inquiring daughter. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I read it in a mood in which standard fare gravitas and verbal precocity did not prove titillating. The narrator's wife does spend time in an iron lung, though, and this episode, while not gripping, catalyzed enough puzzlement for this reader as to compensate for the everyday people stench one finds on every page.
Kind of Animal Book Would Be: One of those dogs which lacks back feet and uses a wagon or other wheeled device in its place, but this particular crippled dog - say, a yellow lab/coyote mix - would have some audaciously undoglike skill, such as shuffling cards or juggling.



Title: Oblivion
Author: David Foster Wallace
Kind of Alcohol With Which Book Goes Best: Grain alcohol.
Take On Book: Who knows? I just took it to cool coffeehouse type places and college libraries as the literary equivalent of taking your sister's baby to Grant Park to grab girls' attention. Ha. I read it. Alone, without proper light, while pummeling myself with a mace. It was hard. But good. Really quite good.
Kind of Animal Book Would Be: Ocelot.

Finally I found the post on Iraq’s elections at coggdogg.blogspot.com quite thoughtful and a good read. You should go over there now. Don’t act like you have something else to do. Slacker.

five hypothetical formative experiences that might transpire in the very near future

1) something will happen to you tonight, some inner valve will click on, and you’ll begin to live up to that of yourself you’ve enshrined in your mind’s eye when you’ve put the impulse towards self-pity to bed and begin to get that wistful little kid-feeling notion that reality is just a fabric that you can stretch and make answerable to your benevolent and joy-infused will. You will take this internal click and be led by it, into rooms filled with worthwhile people, into conversations, into states of mind that make conversations more than manageable and even at times enticing, and you will not cut down these people with whom you interact with pre-emptive cynicism that veils your fear that they might cut you down first. You will simply flow in and out of various interactive tableaus with magnanimous ease, and you will bask in the corona of light that surrounds this night, which is exactly the kind of night that young creative happy people who are successful by their own standards of success always seem to be having.
2) Tonight you will sit on a couch and play co-pilot to your semi-close friend, who, armed with the remote, will flip from channel to channel in search of a new distraction. You will drink six of the cheapest beers one can buy, and toss off sarcastic comments concerning the array of images your friend puts before you. You will intermittently break from the television to talk of things that happened in the recent past, when the two of you were closer, and each of you will secretly half-heartedly resent what the other has made out of him or herself before quelling your envy and resuming the peculiar enjoyment you glean from your friend’s company. Your time together will end with an awkward hug that you thought would be a handshake, and you will go home with a foreshortened sense of what the next week of your life might look like.
3) You will fill your newfound friend’s sink with water tonight and take gravity bong hits of Christmas tree weed from a milk carton you’ve cut in half as your newfound friend, with whom you made acquaintance earlier in the night while severely intoxicated, regales you with stories of his or her life before coming to the city. You will also succumb to nostalgia, find in him or her a radiant charm, and commit various indiscretions that sometimes take place between two young consenting adults overcome with desperation that has nothing to do with other people in the least. You will then, in classic big city fashion, sneak out of his or her apartment early tomorrow morning, and catch a cab, and for the duration of the ride to your lonely apartment, within which you and your thoughts will end up wrestling one another for hours, a deep sense of increasing shame inscribes itself on your heart.
4) You will go to a quiet bar for a quiet drink, gaze at the mirror behind the bar and see someone luminous walking behind you, and instantly fall in love tonight. The bartender will dry glasses with a white towel while eying you and discerning what has just transpired. He will nod knowingly, and, a true comrade-in-arms, bring her a drink and point to you. She will smile and cast her eyes to the floor. But then you will doubt yourself, ascribe the feeling to the music you heard on the ride to the bar or the cough medicine you talk earlier this afternoon, leave your drink and go home to fall asleep to a dream of grabbing at a lizard and having its tail come off in your hand.
5) Tonight your mother will call and tell you, in her clenched-fist voice, that her mother has died. You will make arrangements to return home, feeling empty and detached from the goings on around which your entire life used to be constellated. You will feel like you are endangering yourself by staying in your apartment alone so you walk the streets and shift everything that you see on the street to the slant of your solemn perspective. You will walk for hours, first in squares and then long out-and-backs before buying a bottle of red wine and sitting on a stoop of a neighboring apartment watching cars and cabs drive by. You will not cry, and there is nothing wrong with that.

the kids i know'll leave you flabbergasted

1) seriously. the kids i know - even casual acquaintances or friend-of-a-friend type individual - they all leave me crying for more. one friend from college is out in park city doing something w/ the sundance film festival and leaving messages on my cellphone that feature impromptu hellos from my former neighbor, an older girl for whom i had the most intense heterosexual feelings as a preteen and post-puberty adolescent: my college friend met my way-back-in-the-past-friend-upon-whom-i-directed-all-my-libidinous-energy at a bar and thereby confirmed for me that it is indeed a small world after all. i've been playing phone tag with this college friend for like two weeks, and i'm sure the phone conversation we'll eventually have just won't do justice to how badly i want to know everything that's going on his head. phone calls, email, the whole communicative structure does not suffice when set against my rabid fascination with what other people are doing. whether they are in new york, DC, Monfuckingtana , SoDak nation, Chi-city, West Hyde Park (AKA the bay area) - no matter where, my friends flabbergast me and outstretch my wildest imaginative renderings of what they might be accomplishing now and what they might accomplish in the future.

there are too many constituent parts to try to maintain and keep well-oiled. so. i guess lemme know about it. be good. avoid being clever.

2) but enough about individuals other than yours truly. i officially shocked myself today. i am more a math man than a verbal man. so say the scores. i wish i could have remembered what pulchritude meant. alas . . .
3) long sixteen hour drive tomorrow. headed west into the sun for that last part, too. i saw a big white truck today with duelies (two wheels on each back axle, thereby raising the total number of wheels to six) and this message detailed across the back window said:
"GIT ER DONE." I could not agree more. Ungrammatical profundity is America at its finest.

more later after i'd had my goodbye beers.

a dyslexic walks into a bra

and drinks a few shots of whiskey, does a line of coke off of the lid of the toilet, and drives home grooving to BTO. A month later he goes to a barbecue, meets his future wife, has his dad's co-workers help him get into a little business, fails at the business, and resigns himself to fighting over the scraps that are falling from the table to which his dad's friends' mistresses' illegitimate children have been relegated. Dyslexic sighs, walks into another bra, ties one on, slurs throughout the speech passionately defending his right to grab-ass the waitress, and drives home. Dyslexic find Dog while weaving across the unbroken yellow lines. Cop who pulled him over is not swayed by this relevation and dyslexic is convicted of driving under the influence. Dyslexic thinks this is par for the 1977 course, which has been something like the 7th circle of hell in terms of psychic agony endured. Dyslexic abandons whiskey and the Bolivian marching powder, and cedes over his entire being to the whim of Dog.

Shortly thereafter, Dad moves from leading shadowy acronym organization to bigger things, and Dad's friends, thinking him a liability and wanting to keep him preoccupied, give dyslexic a baseball team to play with. To his credit, dyslexic knows and likes baseball, feels its rhythms deep within his bones, and to that degree seems to be getting over his infatuation with cheerleading. He dreams of a career as a baseball commissioner, despite his self-acknowledged difficulty understanding internal nuances of the game. Later, Dyslexic translates Dad's effete Presbyterian whimper into a big affirmative for other dyslexics who've found Dog, and gains confidence in the process. Dyslexic gets out of baseball and, following in his father's footsteps, dives into politics. dyslexic comes into his own, rights all wrongs Dad neglected to right and embraces oedipal blindness. Does all of it in Dog's name.

Today Dyslexic talks of catching the freedom fire, which metaphor seems an odd choice in lieu of recent epidemics of charred bodies and buildings. (Dyslexic's advisors wisely nixed his wish to proclaim that "tidal wave of freedom will be sweeping over the Middle East and other such troublesome regions.") oddly enough, dyslexic's initial walk into a bra three or four decades ago led him down to the path to where and who he is today, which combination of who/where makes millions of Americans everywhere want to hole up in a bra at this moment and drink until tunnel vision distills the room into one single oscillating point that slowly exfoliates outward and covers everything in the amniotic warmth of darkness.

Despite What You May Have Heard, Aggravated Assault Is A Serious Offense

quickly, before moving on to other things:

The Iggles' victory was neither surprising nor especially exciting; their defense was the only unit on the field that didn't look hapless for at least one quarter. The Queens, being who they are and coming from where they come, should probably have switched to either the single wing or the wishbone for surprise points on offense, and they definitely should have asked Jack Del Rio to suit up in the linebacker slot. I bet you could a field a defense that was less porous than the Queens' on Sunday exclusively from the children of Hmong immigrants who live in the Twin Cities and work in the textiles industry.


in other news, I have been sick and suffering from feverish delusional dreams for the past four nights. Two nights ago in my dream people were anagrams, or cryptograms, or something like that. in other words, instead of being represented by faces, bodies, voices, and other indications of human identity, people in this dream were a series of letters organized in a semi-complicated puzzle that, once solved, were recognizable as figures from my past. i don't know if this makes any sense but e.g. my second grade teacher was SK8CON"F" or "confiscate. i also had a dream i've been having since i was like 5, which occurs when i have a fever approaching, oh, say 103 or so. in the dream i am lying on the street looking up at the sky/clouds, and i see a city vehicle approaching (not a street sweeper, but a street paver: the kind w/ the big spherical wheel-type thing that flattens the street uniformly). I am stuck to the ground, can't get up and the street paver thing rolls over me. i guess my eyes roll back in my head at this point in time, and i flop around in distress and have to be woken up. So. That's my last five or six days/nights. how the fuck are you?

Iggles & Queens, Iggles & Queens, Don't Fake the Funk on the Iggles & Queens: Vol. I.

Current line: Philly by 8 1/2.

Other than big black athletic quarterbacks, the
similiarity between these two teams resides in
what they've done to their fans. Iggles fans are
like Bills fans of the 90s, except they haven't even
made it the Big Game and then choked: they've choked
right when it was possible to over the sticking point.
Queens fans are hapless masochists, and I would imagine
most of us are cringing at the thought that this
game is certainly not outside the Queens' grasp. Lately,
the Queens haven't been following the the 41-0 playoff loss
script. They are following the Raise Expectations The Better
To Crush Fanbase's Spirit script. As a Queens fan,
I expect a lot from this game. A lot of broken objects
flung against walls and a lot of beer chasing down swallowed
sorrow.



1) the Dorsey Levens factor
In his heyday with the Pack, Levens made the Queens his personal
coterie of prostitutes. It seemed like he caught about seven hundred screen passes a game, and would bust off at least one counter per half for thirty or fourty yards. His mere presence on the Iggles roster should intimidate any self-respecting, non-Alzheimer suffering Queens fan. on the plus side, the Eagles Media Guide reports that Levens suffers from a combination of social awkwardness disorder and an excessive amount of chromosomes:

In 1997, Levens appeared on the television show Oprah to discuss the difficulties of pro athletes in finding suitable mates. “Basically it was about how hard it is to find a woman who is interested in you for you and not for your money and fame,” said Levens. “The embarassing thing was getting all the flowers and candy. The guys gave me a real hard time.”

I bet.



2) the Aristotlean theory of catharsis factor
Queens fans believe they are blessed with the gift of affecting the outcome of the game by yelling at the television. Being mostly docile but hard-working introverts who enjoy Garrison Keillor and woodworking out in the shed, Queens fans relish the opportunity to let out a little emotional rope while watching the game, even drop the occasional "damn it." Though they ultimately bring disappoint into the lives of their fans, the Queens also offer a unique opportunity for cathartic release that, if expressed in a different situation at something other than the idiot box, would be socially taboo in the small towns in which many of their most loyal fans reside.


3) Eagles' Fans Factor
"There will be no fear of playing in Philly, as there was no fear of playing in Lambeau.'' - Tice

Tice is either lying or stupid. Lambeau is to Philly what Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray is to Auschwitz. The verbal abuse Iggles fans dish out is something any true sports fan can admire. While Queens fans gather in bars and their living rooms to yell at the television, Philly fans come together to direct their most base & vulgar impulses at the opposing team, in full view of their fellow citizens' children. It's almost like a kind of locally based fascism, and a source of enduring pride at that. Last year, columnists in Carolina felt it necessary to warn fans against excessive partisan spirt on behalf of their beloved Panthers. I expect nothing else this year. if there is snow, snowballs with batteries embedded in them will be hucked. Perhaps razorblades as well, a la W.T. Vollman's "You Bright and Risen Angels"


Introductory Overview of actual game:

David Dixon, Matt "I went to fucking Harvard" Birk, and the Big Uglies up front will absorb most of the blitzing birds without allowing damage to be inflicted. But I do expect lots of missed assignments in the backfield: Onterrio Smith and Michael Bennett looked stoned whenever they are asked to block someone. Of course, Dante is pushing 270, and has a habit of robbing defense tackles of their dignity, so it might not matter regardless. But even the hapless Pack looked like the Buddy Ryan era Eagles last week during the second half. (Speaking of, what happened to Buddy Ryan?)

The Queens offense will do OK, but not great, even though they haven't established a running game since the bygone days of Brad Johnson & Warren Moon. Moe Williams being hurt is only an issue
in the Red Zone, where the Queens tend to struggle due to an adolescent infatuation with fade patterns, naked bootlegs, and Burleson's buttonhooks. Things would work out if Tice could simply call play action to Wiggins the tightend, whose hands are as soft as Moss's twig-like bone structure (one day he is going to catch a pass over the middle and be broken in half by a LB). Red Zone play lead to a Queens lost in their first meeting with the Iggles. "The Eagles beat the Vikings 27-16 in a Monday night game the second week of the season, despite being dominated on the stat sheet. Minnesota held the ball for almost 38 minutes and gained 410 yards, but settled for three field goals when the game still was in reach. Culpepper lost a fumble at the Philadelphia 1 to end a drive in the first half, and a penalty on Moss killed another drive." (thank you anonymous AP reporter)

Nate Burleson and Kelly Campbell need to have big days for the Queens; expect one play from Moss to remind you of his first two breakout seasons, but that's about all.

Jeremiah Trotter makes me wish I could root for the Iggles. The whole defense, in fact, goosebumps my flesh. Solid secondary, solid fundamentals, punishing physicality, and the intangible mystique of being the envy of the NFC's defensive coordinators for about five years now. The Queens defense looks pollyannish in comparison.

on a scale of one to ten, how much do you believe in God?

Caveat: cynicism can be analagous to kryptonite.


There are people and there are People. Without burying myself in semantics, I would submit that the individuals we see in the audience of a late night television show are people. The host of the show, and the guests around whom that night's festivities are organized, are not neatly encapsulated in my awkward dichotomy of people/People. Their televisual selves somehow crowd out their actual selves, the ones who eat shit sleep screw and occasionally flaggelate. Fame is like the projector that takes a tiny little slide and throws up onto the wall - it fucks with dimensions to an extent that makes categorization unbearably clumsy. If this becomes clearer as I go on, all is well and good. If it remains obscure, it shall remain obscure (how's that for a tautological clarification?).

Lower-case "p" people are those with whom you brush elbows when walking off the bus, or exchange glances with while testing the firmness of an orange you might purchase. They are cops directing traffic, waiters taking your order, drivers of big and little cars, etc. Especially in a city, we are surrounded by people the names of whom we do not and never will know. Small towns, on the other hand, make it difficult on someone who simply wants to live out their life as a person. Simple, lower-case personhood rubs against the confined, interpenetrating claustrophobia of small towns. Cities forgive you your mistakes; they offer, in some sense, a new group of people to cultivate as friends to replace the ones who knew what you did on the night you wish you could forget. Small towns make for long memories, and the repeated visits to the grocery store, or the ease with which onlookers attach your person to the kind of car you drive, individuates you in a way beyond your immediate control. You become someone, and in the process shed anonymity and concomitantly you have a personal history that others remember and hold you to.

It is always astounding, if somewhat painful, to be part of the transformation in which a person becomes a Person. A person becomes a Person to you as the observer when you know and acknowledge them as individuals, when they no longer are merely the dispensable window dressing of a new scene in the drama that is your life. The uptick from person to Person is a reflection of the intrusion they've made on your fantasy that the universe has taken special notice of your life and you the person living it, and everything outside of you and the movie of your life is marginal in comparison. People break you out of that fantasy, and it is not always enjoyble to shatter the two-dimensional screen your self-absorbed self has adopted as a perspective. Sociopaths, narcissists and - at least in the moment of their watching - television-watchers/movie goers see a world full of people; saints, I assume, see a world full of People.

Ahem. This is going off the deep end, perhaps, and is of course a very clumsy attempt to capture something i've been noticing in the net of sloppily constructed dichotomy that cannot subject itself to its subject and is thus a leaky vessel indeed. But nonetheless . . .

Ruminating on moving back to where I recently lived, staying here where I've lived for so long, or venturing out to somewhere new has got me thinking. It is so strange to reconnect with someone for whom you care, and notice in various ways that they have been living in the same time you have: a time that elapses and smooths over once prominent contours to distill and sometimes dismember what came before it. You forget that those beyond your immediate life boundaries are out there somewhere doing things, and you are the absent one, from their perspective. They are reduced in your consciousness, even if memories periodically avail themselves to you, even if you have pictures or are blessed with the gift of video footage. I learned today from something I was reading that "psychophobia" means both a fear of one's inner life and a fear of ghosts. I find the coupling of inner life and ghosts metaphorically interesting,but I also find the literal juxtaposition of inner life and ghosts obnoxious such that the fear of self leads one to phantasize it e.g. "the 'I' I am is a ghost" or Baudelaire declaiming: "The I is another." Hypocrite lecteur, indeed. But I do not discount the validity of the idea that as one ages one becomes more cognizant, and perhaps more fearful, of becoming ghost-like in the inner lives of others.(deep breath). I guess this is like the fear of impending death: what will remain of me when I'm gone, and so on. But at this point in my life I associate it more with a gradual diminishment of presence, a failure to summons acknowledgment from others - the spark of recognition alluded to above in distinguishing persons (cops, waiters, studio audience members) from People (relatives, neighbors, lovers, selves with whom seemingly insoluble connections are formed).
I'm obviously working this out line by line, so your patience is appreciated beforehand, but I think it is a symptom of age to have a heightened sense of the slippages that begin to separate you from others you once considered your naturalized appendages and start to pin you to your solitude. I don't think this is bad. I think a function of age is obviously forming a better self-acquaintance, a more fully realized sense of what works and what doesn't, and the pursuit of whatever path you take to that end may lead you away from others with whom you've shared your life and its irregular contours, or it may lead you directly to them. You may sail off into an apprenticeship in which you are the subject and object of study, or you may find out who you are by saying vows and making babies and giving wholly of yourself to someone else, or you may give yourself over to a group of like-minded individuals, like organized religion or intramural softball, or postmodern fiction, or etc. etc. etc.

What is inherent in you may be anathema to me. Each to their own; everybody's different. Everyone's a Person. But isn't that strange? isn't it fucking astonishing? It seems impossible to imagine what was lost when those 150,000 died in the tsunami; just as impossible to endow them with Personhood, as opposed to thinking of them as dead people. God may be the name of that impossibility, or it may be as nameless as the guy at the Get N Go who sold me this Coke and told me to have a good night.

the Guru of Getting Away from It All

in other news, i am a shark. television is the buoy attached to a line that leads to capitalism's boat, and the buoy tires me until i have to go to the surface and buy something out of boredom. when i breach the surface, the chum line almost overpowers me. i remember now why i came close to the boat in the first place. Thinking it will lead me to something big and immobile, an easily acquired dinner, I follow the chum to its source. It actually leads me to another harpoon in my sandpaper skin.

last night boredom bought my attention, and i bought it a tank of gas and some 30 odd miles of driving. boredom and i consummated our love near mile marker 312, when the wheels slipped out from underneath me for a split second and i thought i had purchased some death instead of a mere night's wandering. i let boredom off and picked some righteous anger. righteous anger and i came to the conclusion, after a fair amount of grapplilng and groping in the dark, that it would be worth it to piss on myself in front of a large unforgiving crowd if in exchange someone would take my car off my hands for the amount i've put into it. i need an old truck that i can walk away from with no qualms if something goes wrong. going going gone.

This is, as far as i can tell, the last email you sent me.

in various guises, these are selections of responses to my technological entreaties for sustenance-giving work.

1)"Dear _________: I have forwarded your email to Gale Begeman at the Business
Office. She is in charge of personnel in our district. I have also added
your phone number to my subbing list.

John Schmidt, Principal"

2) "I've forwarded your information to Selma and Lauren. They'll be in
touch if a work opportunity comes up.

Take care,
Margit"

3) "Hi ___________,

The biggest thing I would say about submitting your article is that it
should be done in third person. We do have some columnists that write
in
first person, but for the most part, we stick with third. Once you've
attended the meeting and have begun to work on the article, let me know
what
you think your word count for the article might be. We limit word count
to
3,000, but our articles generally run between 800 and 3,000 words,
depending
on the content. I usually work with writers to determine beforehand an
approximate count, although sometimes it changes quite a bit when it's
actually completed.

Thanks and I look forward to seeing your article.

Di"

4) "Dear Applicant,

I am writing to let you know that we are no longer considering
applications for __________________ position. We had overwhelming response to the posting, with nearly 700 people applying. If we have not already contacted you for an interview, I am sorry to report that we will not be doing so. Thank you for your interest, and best of luck with your job search.

All best,
Hillary Frey"

5) "Dear _________:

I received your resume but there is not phone # on it. If you could
email that to me that would be great. Thank you!

_l_
spherion
Joanne Johnson
Client Service Representative
Making the Workplace Work Better"



6) Welcome _____________.
We are so glad that you have joined Express Career Center. As a member you're now a vital part of the Express community. Get acquainted with all the features that Career Center has to offer:

Online Application - complete once, then apply for jobs with one click.
Application Notification Service - notify Express offices of your recently completed application.
Automated Job Agent - define your ideal job, then we'll email you once we find it.
Saved Job Searches - create up to five different job searches and run at anytime with one click.


7) Dear _________, Thank you for your application. It has been forwarded to our Human Resource department. Please do not reply to this message


8) Dear Mr. _________:
On behalf of the _______ Wilderness Association, I would like to thank you for taking an interest in the position of the Rocky Mountain Front Community Organizer.
We were fortunate in the number of highly qualified individuals who applied for this position. After much consideration the selection team determined that other candidates should continue on in the selection process. You should not feel that your elimination from consideration for this position is a reflection on your qualifications, only that in this instance and in the pool of candidates others were felt to be better suited to continue on to the next level of the selection process.
Thank you again for your expression of interest in the ________ Wilderness Association. We wish you success in your job search.
Respectfully,

BLAH BLAH BLAH.

what comes after late capitalism?

first off, is dyke or dike or diek, the old asian bartender at the cove, still slinging drinks there? what about the middle aged guy who never smiles and looks like mike scoscia? if the city didn't have big shoulders, would you really care?

secondly, i went to a bar appended onto a laundromat last night, which i've never done and to be honest plan on making a central part of my hygienic routine until i sack up and buy a washer dryer combo. at this establishment, i noticed three people who had t-shirts advertising the establishment itself. does this qualify as solipsism, or simply three individuals paying respectful homage to a great establishment that they happen to frequent, exlusively?

at this place, i overheard two women in an argument which culminated with: "yeah i read your fucking christmas card and it's sure nice to hear about your kid getting into college, but i expected you to say something about your loser ass husband going to the clink [i almost fell out of my chair at that] and you coming down here drowning your sorrows in old mil light." turns out the two women were sisters who rarely see each other despite living in the same town. i stopped eavesdropping for fear of pissing myself. hardass working class women dont front, and i didn't want to soil their authenticity with my agitprop sympathies.


i heard some jazz yesterday. realizing that jazz used to be the musical equivalent of a raised fist for the beatniks and their followers made me appreciate how intractable the past is. not too get all oratorical, but i just don't get jazz as liberating or expressing the restless energy and ambivalence to the rat race that Kerouac and the boys seemed to label it. i guess i dont get them either so no reason to think i could understand historic subcultural thoughts on a once subversive musical genre now solely propagated by public radio.

i'm off to drink guinness in an establishment owned by ukrainians and built under a main street in my town. they are big fans of the orange party, and to that end, regret the recent poisoning of the pock-marked faced guy. it reminds me of a place in prague that was originally a bomb shelter. mostly because of people speaking languages i dont' understand.

Diversified Income Sources I'm Considering Advantage-Taking-Of

1) Centennial Aviation & Business Journal.
Role of: Free lance avatar
Involves: attending aiprort-based function intended to reestablish a South Dakota chapter of the Ninety Nines organization (www.ninetynines.org), a group comprised of pilots who belong to the female gender. It originated in 1929. Go women! Go flight! Attendance should lead to write up of event for which Rider of Wounded Horses will get paid.
1,000-1,500 words. Does anyone have a digital camera to lend?
Status: Target acquired. Recon pending.

2) Sioux Falls School District
Role of: substitute disciplinarian.
Involves: getting fingerprinted, getting Photo ID with accompanying neck strap holder, calling weird electronic scheduling apparatus to - I shit you not - "register for classes," taking attendance, administering day-to-day learning, endorsing and enforcing ethical code that no one would mistake for the Golden Rule, leaving no child behind.
Status: Pending negative results of test for tuberculosis.

3) Temp Service denoted "spherion"
Role of: weekend medical records something or other
Involves: 10 hour weekend shifts every other weekend; "not quite sure yet."

confession

boring. me. i'm it. it's me. also -
insomnia. me. i have it. it has me. also -
trying not to think about not smoking. me again.
still boring? yeah? thought so. sorry.

confession: i once threw a pot of boiling water on a squirrel as it swam around the toilet of the apartment in which i was subletting a room. this was when i was young and stupid and enjoying life, rather than young and boring and sort of like a bird about to fly into a window.
i was hungover at the time, and was ready to drink a cold Old Style in a warm shower. i opened the bathroom door, heard squirrel sounds, and things took their course from there.


confession: in some town in ireland the name of which eludes me, i endorsed the plan of a very drunk fellow american whom i did not like. his plan was to confront a group of what i believe were soccer hooligans who said untoward things to a girl on whom he was plastering himself. he told the girl he liked her alot but i think he was just a virgin and thought his trip to europe would end that. i believe i insinuated to him that she would appreciate his gallant attempt to defend her honor, which i also believe i said with a straight face. the young drunk american (he went to middlebury and the 3rd night of the trip took a drunken piss in the middle of the communal room the tour had booked)caught up with the tour bus three days later. his black eyes had taken on that iridiscent yellowish purple.

confession: in his absence, that girl and i became acquainted.


confession: i'm still boring. and still not sleeping.


confession: with obvious malevolence and a sort of dedication i have never again duplicated, i picked on a fat kid at every possible opportunity throughout eighth grade, a year or two after i had recovered from my own fat stage. (i know, i sound like a fucking born again Christian thinking up reasons to prostrate himself before the Almighty in order to appease his inner-insecurity/self-loating, but still . . .) I was MEAN to this kid, even if no one was around. i had teachers who otherwise adored me take me aside and ask: "so what's going on with you and [Fat Kid's name]?" that's a lame confession, but on the list of Things About Which I'm Most Remorseful, this vindictive petty fucked-up need to inflict some adolescent emotional complex on this kid qualifies.


confession: i was reading something online while writing this piece of shit post. this snippet of dialogue made me laugh:

"I'm serious. Anal sex is the new black."