You've Sure Had A Time Of It

That's an aardvark. Consider that our dinner and a movie.

1. From the discussion post of a fellow student in my online teacher education class discussion of the pros/cons of same sex education: However, I am not sure this would be the best environment for the girls. This safe zone would be a phasad.

2. From Author Whose Full Name is Alliterative: When I was working on [book] I devised a new method--new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I'd written.

3. From the slightly addled confines of neural circuitry to which I have access 16-18 hours a day: Interpretive dance can mean two things. I prefer it to mean the dance of interpretation, the play-of-surfaces interaction we orchestrate in trying to hook up to the world. Someday I will date a dancer, and her meaning may eventually trump mine.

Instantaneous feedback is not a good unto itself. Every time another teacher talks into my face, the smell of coffee swill washes over me and I want to throw up. But I say nothing.

I am becoming as sentimental as the Newhart Show, which I am only guessing was very sentimental because I remember very little of it. It is something chronic and in need of immediate attention. Where there is little but gush, I shall avoid that place.



4. Fun.

5. Books (new consumed) The Work Of Wolves. A South Dakota book. The local mall even gets a mention. Cowboys talk in clipped dialogue and lurch at the world all dogged like in the manner of a Henry Stamper, say. I like characters that cut to the chase. This is also kind of a feel good novel, despite its tacit themes of cruelty and the absolute inability to truly someone unless you give up who you are in the process. Love-as-transformative-life-fucker-upper is not a new theme, but still . . . I read this book in two days. The first day I sat in my parents' house, nursing a "I'm home again" hangover. The second day was actually more of a night: I had made the long westward passage from eastern South Dakota to eastern Montana. then I stayed up five hours devouring these pages. I passed through, then consumed the literature of, my home state. I'm like the Jack Kerouac of the Northern Plains, except I dont write nor do i do lots of dexedrine (oh those were the days).

6. Speaking of the SoDa - they don't like babykillers. I am at a loss for words. Being at a loss for words is not the same thing as being surprised, note.

7. Books (previously consumed, currently revisited) J Lethem's the Fortress of Solitude. I'm not going to pick up on the race stuff or the comic book hero stuff; I just want to say that the man can craft a sentence, especially when he seemingly works under a self-imposed "only one and two syllable words." I wonder if J Lethem can dance at all.

8. It's Friday. I'm off.

All Extravagant Pretensions Aside

Sometimes sitting on a decision in an incubatory manner is a good thing. You gain clarity and the correct- or incorrectness of what you’re about to do comes at you with the certitude of a sixteen year old who cleaves the world up into yes/no boxes. Which is to say . . . I will attempt to prove Thomas Wolfe wrong and go home again for a few days. I wanted to go West and revisit the mountains, but cooler heads have prevailed and instead I will go check in on a grandmother who seems to be having a rough go of it. When you’re trying to put your feet on solid ground, and the opportunity comes up to immerse yourself in the familiar, choose the familiar that does not involve four-day benders and abdication of certain scholastic responsibilities. The moral-of-the-story seems like a copout, and the glandular system related to my having fun lymph node doth protest, but I figure a change of pace is in order: I have gone balls-to-the-wall in so many of my past incarnations as a human being endowed with average height, beard, monobrow, and a rapier wit. I will break the mold – behavioral, not psycho-physical.
Did I mention I have a two-and-a-half day vacation, paid? Worship at the altar of Education and you will receive precious few material rewards, but here and there a temporal bone will be thrown at your feet.

Cultural Consumption:

Cinderella Man – All indications suggest the Great Depression was indeed depressing. Populism, on the other hand, along with a bit of ethnic pride, seems to hold up well over time as a cinematic antidote to the unnamed and perhaps incapable-of-being-named forces that create situations in which children have no milk for their cereal. There are all kinds of odd ideological subtexts in which this movie traffics, but I can’t trace such subtexts and attempt to enjoy a story at the same time, so . . . .
I had the odd experience of watching this with an audience who was quite worried that Russell Crowe might die at the end, which reminded of the essay on the WTC attacks in Consider the Lobster in which the author comments on a fairly fundamental schism involving innocence/cynicism that is mapped out in geographic and demographic terms. Given my geography, and the demographics of those with whom I watched this movie, I would say that I have cast my life episode’s lot with the old ladies of the story. This can be bewitching and aggravating at the same moment.

Weather Channel website – The fronts are moving in.

The man in the back of mag said you can't have settle without seattle

Women of the world, unite. Your cleavage and my scar tissue are not indivisible, and my suggestion to the contrary was duplicitous at best, and disdain-cultivating at worst. I cannot claim to be unfettered. Your novels and novelty are more than becoming, they’re being. I am not immune to their potency. My monkeys sit at their typewriters in envy, green as can be. Amateurs at best, they sift through their ungulate ontology to make mince meat of amalgamated idioms and linguistic games. Your opposable thumbs and intricate sexual plumbing makes me blush, not to mention my monkeys, who are left lying in your wake with metacarpals suspended over keys, having everything to say but nothing to say it with. With which to say it. Indeed. A thousand monkeys perched over typewriters, wondering where to find the next banana.
I certainly don’t want to talk about it. Foucault taught us that the urge to talk is itself constitutive of the disciplinary matrix of which talk is the purported solution. I am being unduly facetious. But you women – you girls – you ladies – leave me flummoxed. I am not through banging my head up against the wall, but I sure wish I was. Wish I were, as it were.
Of course this has nothing to do with females, nothing to do with the constitutive gaze. It is simply a struggle to articulate the sense in which I wish I didn’t see preemptive strikes as honorable, in view of my propensity to drag you through the proverbial quagmire. You not being you but she. Of course of course of a horse.
Am I going bald? No. Do I need Cialis? No. Am I grasping at straws? Perhaps, if metaphors are anything to blanch at. Rather than pontificate on the overarching constellation around which I group my monkeys, I would prefer to sit here with one beer all ponderous-like. I would prefer to take it off the first hop, check the runner, and snap it over to first – softballs of course carry within them a different density, and therefore a different chronology, so the time I have to meditate on the prohibitive effects of having time to make decisions dissolves like sugar in water – SAFE! Which makes one want to swear loudly. Stegner, here, is the apposite source:

Words are not obscene: naming things is a legitimate verbal act. And “frank” does not mean “vulgar,” any more than “improper” means “dirty.” Under the right circumstances, any word is proper. But when any sort of word, especially a word hitherto taboo and therefore noticeable, is scattered across a page like chocolate chips through a tollhouse cookie, a real impropriety occurs. The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but a literary lapse, related to sentimentality.

Are you like me? Did you like the “hitherto taboo” combination, and cringe at the cookie simile? Anyway, I stand accused.
I should call in sick tomorrow. My work can wait. My blue shirt is clean, my white shirt is clean, I don’t have a tie and don’t need one [this being written when I was elsewhere employed, although the tie is still thoroughly optional]. My gray sweatshirt with grease stains will be called upon to serve if service is the correct analogy upon which to build some kind of something.
Back to you girl, you who has no chance of ever hearing what I have to say, for I work behind the scenes, in veiled nudges like most of us who are too interested in being articulate to be understood. I am as a balloon past the inflation point armed with a sixteen year old’s belief in inveterate invincibility, and I’m sorry I made you cry. Truly I am. I wish the mirrors cast shadows, not verity. I apologize so much I hope to bludgeon myself into good graces. This comes with the caveat that I am having a conversation with my historical self, and not anyone whose heart is still palpating with emotions related to softball.

*****
In other news, is tomorrow really only Wednesday? Big speculation on the future and another ill-slept night await me. I leave you with the empirically supported assertion that the gods of wishes are trying to tell me something. Last night, I came awake from an almost-sleep state to stare at a clock which read – 11:11. This is, by conservative estimate, the fifth time in the past month I have come awake at this time and felt the need to make penance by conjuring up an ideal future state. I will not reveal my wishes for obvious reasons; hopefully, revealing the circumstances that have occasioned wish-making will not adversely affect the chance that past wishes will eventually come true. Then again, how many times have you found yourself unable to countenance a situation that you spent innumerable moments trying to bring to fruition? I promise the speciousness will not last.