Rheumatism of the Will

Of course this is the year during which you’re going to get it done, change yourself, pursue your dreams, and bed down with the love of your of life whose coruscating presence reaffirms and revivifies the ample array of gifts with which you’ve been blessed. It is but a certainty.

Of course this is the year during which the lion and lamb will lie down and you’ll see an ultrasound depicting their two-headed, but otherwise healthy, offspring.

Of course this is the year during which you will simply state what you think, with the requisite generosity of spirit and freedom from cant (sentimental or ironic), and your onlookers will cheer and back-pat you for doing so.

Of course this is the year during which you will continue to be afraid of the shadow your interior self casts. That shit never ends.

Of course this is the year that will leave you spiritually destitute and economically secure, or spiritually resplendent and economically gutter-bound, I forget which.

Of course this is the year during which you will recuse yourself from unspoken duties and responsibilities in order to move to Portland, OR and blow glass (bongs, pipes, ethereal hippie sculptures, etc.) with your new "guest worker" friend Hector, whose fondness for anatomically inappropriate renderings of glass you find endlessly amusing.

Of course this is the year during which engagement with and commentary on books, movies, and songs will feed the starving children of this world. Also, the year during which the products of your defecatory moments will not stink.

Of course this is the year during which you will take six months off in an effort to find yourself and return to your life to find that all the coordinates have changed, leaving you lost and a bit stupefied at the naivete with which you mistook your own subjective shitstorm for a generalized state of disorientation.

Of course this is the year during which cancer will metastasize, bellies of friends’ wives will grow big, too much wedding keg beer will be consumed, and eyebrows will arch in reaction to your planned peregrinations.

Of course this is the year when you will wake up with a terrific headache, ruminate on the 3/4 full bottle of PBR on your bedside table, walk out to the kitchen to find me on your couch, and wonder if today is the day to bring up the fact that it's been a week and we're friends and all, but what the fuck, man?

Oh. Eh. Why. Eye. Eee. OAYIE.

1) Movies

Murderball - crowd noises and yelling emanate from downstairs, where parents and sibling watch this docudrama about paraplegiacs (SP?) playing dodgeball.

In America - I love Irish people. Cute little Irish girls with big eyes, all the more so. I also like painters with AIDs (the one I knew in Chicago at least), so demographically speaking this is right up my alley. I don't like babies dying, though, or - more accurately - the possibility of babies dying. All in all, enjoyable.

Collateral - I have seen this before, in a theatre to boot. I all capitals HATE this movie, despite the soothing Michael Mann cinematography. Don't use a cellphone as a plot device. Tom Cruise, I hope, will be struck down by the Triune God in which we all secretly believe (or am I reaching?).

2) Grandparent outburts

A) Nothing to do about em. Yes, you are in the right, and they are in the wrong (offensively so) but that does not "count." What "counts" is they've had three glasses of wine and your 0-fer in the procreative department leaves you open to thinly veiled if not circumspect probing, followed by a Mortal Kombat finishing move of guilt-cultivation commonly known as "well, if you reallly cared/really tried, you could [INSERT DESIRED BEHAVIOR]."

B) High comedy when outburts are directed at someone other than you. Seeing parents treated like children is good shit.


3) Christmas concert

Every year my friend Wes plays a show at a venue in my newly adopted hometown, which will soon include my actual, smaller hometown within its metastatic boundaries. Aside from the enjoyment I glean from watching young, uncoordinated white people bump and grind, I always leave with a smile on my face. Here's to friends who make music, and to not feeling the need to consume seventeen beers on Christmas Eve Eve.

4) I forget what the point of this was. A long time ago.

To justify the ways of God to men, sayeth John Milton, blind dead poet

Be honest. When you first heard Bush utter “the war on terror,” you knew we were in for another interminable, vague “war” that had all the trappings of the usual wars/campaigns/grand ideological undertakings we [I refuse to scare-quote “we,” even though it stands in for America/Americans, and a few (or many perhaps) would not self-identify as that] have been undertaking since oh say, the late 19th century. Let's stop "wars on" anything: poverty, drugs, war, terror. In the War on Poverty, were poor people the enemy? Let's just use euphemisms for war: "there's a small fire that we need to put out pronto" and what not.



I'm not even concerned with making sense. The malt o meal in the cafeteria today made me seriously take stock of the efficacy of making sense, of which I am not altogether dubious but still.

Patriotism: that thing you do when you do that thing.
Narrative linearity: that thing you do with stories that arc like balls thrown to receivers running fade patterns to the back pylon.
Procreation: that thing you do when you reach that age with the complicated roman numeral symbolism.
Bite the Lip Face: that thing I do when a student says something funny and I want to laugh but I can't because the funny thing is made from words upon which I, as uber-authority, should frown. Cf. when student asks, "Hey, Mr. Hagen - is jism an example of onomatopoeia?"

Exhibit A

Quotes that make up one half of laminated book mark I hastily made as Christmas present for students, after realizing some would get no Christmas presents (bookmark + candy bar = sum total of my gifts, in both senses of the word):

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."--William Butler Yeats


"Knowledge is the food of the soul."-- Plato


"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you."-- B.B. King


"Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse."-- Nigerian Proverb


"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough."-- Kermit the Frog


“Keep on rocking in the free world.”--Neil Young



I am not sure with which quote I most identify. I not sure I am a fan of inspirational quotes in the first place, but . . .

Efficacy is Not My Concern, Soldier

Goldblum
What a ponderous ingrate, but lovable at that.







I am not sure if I could have more antipathy for Howard Stern. Free speech, well, yes OK, “Free speech, rah rah rah!” “Hell no we won’t go, we support this moron’s show” “You can’t chill expression, man – we’ll just turn up the heat” and all the other exercises in fatuous camera-gesturing – Of course John Stuart Mill was right and all – truth is a collective exercise - except it’s not hard to notice that the only time people burn flags is when Congress is about to make it illegal to burn flags and the only time anything gets said is on accident, when the camera’s hot and the speaker doesn’t know it. Symbol, symbol, set me free, teach me to know liberty!

On a lighter note (if I sound jaded, it's more b/c of sleep issues than H. Stern or speech-related issues:

Japanese Get Fat Penguins to Exercise
TOKYO (AP) -- It's wintertime and the king penguins at a zoo in northern Japan are putting on weight. But the keepers there have a solution: exercise.
Authorities at Asahiyama Zoo are taking the penguins on 500-yard walks on the snowy grounds twice a day, said zoo spokesman Tetsuo Yamazaki.
"Just like in humans ... the fat accumulates during the winter months, and the blood-sugar level rises," Yamazaki explained from the zoo, 570 miles northwest of Tokyo.
The zoo's 15 king penguins aren't exactly obese. Penguin winter weight varies from 33 pounds to 40 pounds, said zoo official Kazunobu Maru. So far, only one of the flock is 40 pounds, he said.
The reason for weight gain is natural, zoo officials say.
"In order to withstand the cold, the penguins have a habit of standing very still during winter months," Yamazaki said, while in the summer they can walk around and swim as much as they want.
To fend off obesity, the zoo instituted the winter exercise program in 2003.
The penguins have tender webbed feet and can only walk significant distances on snow, so the program can only take place during the colder months.
The zoo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, takes the penguins on strolls from December until April. The first walk of the season was Thursday.
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Some thoughts –

It’s 8:00 am. First period starts in fifteen minutes. I have been up for three and a half hours. Something is wrong with my cerebral cortex, is my diagnosis, as to why my love affair with sleep has faded like your mother’s old cotton sundress.

Various scenes from Cormac McCarthy book I am reading involve necrophilic acts, which may account for difficulty sleeping. I am at peace with moving and thinking at half speed, but I do not look forward to the inevitable insomnia aftershock that will hit in about two and a half hours.


Read Brokeback Mountain twice last night, and can’t tell if I see what everyone else seems to see. Second time through, the prose came alive a bit more. Dialogue too.

This is mush. Go have a good weekend.

It All Makes Sense Now

Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash.
That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

Snow Day II

You poor schmucks, sitting at work, with present responsibilities, as I sit at work, attending to future responsibilities. I do find it strange that all of my friends get up every day and go to work (excepting grad school Dean, but that is a different subject).

My teeth are resolutely at odds with the shape of my jaw, and this is both perplexing and worrisome.




Picks to click:

1) Michael Lewis’s article on the NY Times Magazine on Texas Tech football and the paradigm shift it seems to intimate. Lewis has quite the eye for mutative trends, and Leach – the coach of Tech – is effusively strange. He rollerblades, likes pirates, has a JD from Pepperdine, and [insert more things that might convince you to check it out]

2) Is it possible that things never really get worse or better, but the bad things and the good things just kind of switch places and transition from place to place, flitting in and out of lives in order to make it all just a bit more interesting? See: Mahler, Gustav. Fifth Symphony.

3) Mom Butt: the most recent insult to be delivered to self-conscious teenage girls by irascible young boys – “She’s got Mom Butt” or, in more inflammatory cases, “You’ve got Mom Butt” delivered in sing-song fashion.

4) Not smoking pot in the bathroom that everyone passes by. This may prevent you from getting caught smoking pot in the bathroom that everyone passes by. Not smoking pot, period, is the pick.

5) The Wire: the show makes me want to go see B-more. HBO provides reason alone to get the DirecTV package, but alas, with no TV the package is but an empty instrument. I wish I had my very own personal assassin who wore bowties and spoke with surpassing elocution. I also wish I could make the McNulty face whenever I wanted.

Extrapolate on this

Why am I still here? "here" as in:

this building, filled with pictures of young fierce-staring Indians and bufallo half-torsos sticking out of the walls as like school pride (They're almost extinct, but nevermind that).

this room, with its calmly fatalistic attempts at decorations I've made, consisting of a Jackie Robinson poster (I dont hate on JR, but picking him for poster-representation was not well-thought out) a poster of Sherman Alexie and a schedule of the year's events. also a purple sign that says, "Mr. Hagen (Hearts) Sophomores" which I jacked from the hall during homecoming week in order to add purple to the congeries of color in my room.

this southeastern Montana sagebrush desert, filled with snow and yards that are graveyards to cars that haven't run for twenty years and wobbly-ass drunks making their way to the bar at 3:30 pm, every single Saturday a large pack of inebriated malcontents.


I am here because, well - fuck who knows? Go learn a new vocabulary to add it the repertoire, Dick Rorty might say.


Go read the news, asshole.