I’ll look to like, if looking liking move

Yes, that is Scott Bakula.


1)
Setting the scene
Injuries: I have a half-inch long scrape on the lower joint of my thumb (changing a flat), an oozing self-inflicted burn on my left bicep about the size of a two-dimensional marble (ill-conceived notion that burning myself with a cigarette would be a good reminder not to smoke cigarettes), overactive salivary glands (combination nicotine gum and unscorched epiglottis). Chewing nicotine-enhanced gum has given me a solid 46 hours without a cigarette. My fingernails are as ragged as the shorelines of isthmuses. The official title: Nicotine Polacrilex gum. Originally made in Denmark, home of passive aggressive bigoted free speech cartoonists.
Upside: I found a stash of CDs while extracting the tire iron from its hidden spot, and I now have some Modest Mouse, Thelonius Monk, Typical Cats, and Television with which to become reacquainted. I know I won’t be able to sleep until at least midnight tonight, so I’m not wasting that time tossing and turning.
Status: It’s a strange thing, signing a contract. I am back here for another year. I authenticated it by drawing up my own contract with myself and signed it in blood. So I have that whole “taking things too far” going for me. With the employer, the consideration I’ve offered is accepting that I will earn bad reputation and an inability to get a good rec if I break the contract. The consideration the employer’s offered is continued insurance and pay for services rendered. Wait. You didn’t really believe I signed a contract in blood, did you? ‘Cause burning yourself with a cigarette while intoxicated and with other people, which I did in fact do, is qualitatively different than slitting your thumb open and using it to sign a non-binding document, which I did not in fact do. This isn’t Dungeons and Dragons after all. You probably should buy that part about me drawing up a contract with myself, ‘cause that part is more or less true. – What do you mean more or less? – There’s no actual, extant contract with enumerated terms and what not, and there’s certainly no blood signature, but there are a few conditions to which I hope I hold myself. – And if you don’t hold yourself to the conditions? – I’ll leave. Cross my heart and hope to die.

2)
Reviews:

Train by Pete Dexter

The rape scene where the woman has her nipple sliced off - not necessary. Otherwise, a good neo-noir California story with lots of violence, head-scratching plot sequences, and a strange thematic involving helplessness and human-canine relationships. Plus there’s an entire subplot devoted to golf hustlers, which really rings my bell.
I like Pete Dexter. His characters live on in my head long after I’ve put his books down. I met him in Deadwood, SD once – he is a good person to spectate upon. His deadpan is incisive and he limps like he’s some things and had some things done to him because he took ill-advised steps to get a story. If this book was an animal, it would be a cross between a rez dog and the spider who fastidiously builds a web in my shower every day while I’m gone.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

A baseball book in late April is perhaps unnecessary. I read this in a day, too fast. I have had my fix though and my general indifference to Brooklyn Dodgers remains steadfast, so I guess as an animal it’s a cross between something I don’t really need anymore and something I don’t have strong feelings about either way: call it a Brontosaurus. This book is an egg-laying brontosaurus.


Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul

A screed against fetishized rationality and the self-perpetuating behemoths to which it gave birth (political parties, bureaucratic bodies, other institutionally entrenched apparatchik-laden hovels of knee-jerk conventionalism and technocratic expertise). Saul comes off like a polymath who likes cynicism and champagne in equal doses. I don’t know about this one yet. I’m about one hundred and fifty pages deep. I have yet to see reason defined in a satisfactory way, but reason (like God, Plato, and a hidden hand economy) seems to work according to an illusion/reality dichotomy: even though it seems to be a tool for problem solving, it’s really not. Even though it seems to be a liberating force let loose to reduce the walls of economic and political hierarchies to rubble, it’s really not. And so on. This book is a remora cleaning out all the parasites in the gills of a big hammerhead shark named modernity, the better may it immiserate those who feed from the chum line of post-Hegelian, small “h” history.

Parents who do drugs have kids who do drugs.

1) I learned it from watching you, Dad.
"People are always trying to convince themselves that their times are really important," she said. "But if you really, truly understood that you are going to die, and how many people there are now and how many people there have ever been, just beads in this never-ending string, how, then, do we live? How can you take yourself seriously? "

2) I learned it by watching you, Dad.
What if the dad just up and bitchslapped the kid, took all his coke, and said seventeen things that destroyed his son's self-esteem in seventeen million ways, before returning to his living room to watch reruns of All in the Family, snort the coke, and sit their sweating in his white t-shirt palpating his man boobs (if you don't recall the commercial, the man had a moustache and a hint of manboobs)? Wouldn't that have been equally effective message: don't let your parents know you are on drugs, or they might take what you have, beat you, and shove it in your face by smearing coke boogers all over the sink you share in your crappy, mold-ceilinged apartment.

3) But if you don't yourself at least a little seriously, what then?
Like, for instance, if I didn't take myself a little seriously, there would be two people in the world who did, and I would probably fall into habits (not showering, nocturnalism, chain smoking, occasional forays into delusional narcosis) that have proven to have limited staying power. Maybe not taking things seriously allows those who are wound a bit tight the opportunity to enjoy life for a change, but those who are wound a bit loose need to take some shit seriously or else they'll end up talking about cokehead dads and delineating unfunny narrative threads about what they're really like.

4) Is it time to take Iran seriously?
Is our foreign policy based on Chicago School of Economics? 'Cause if we pigeonhole Iran into some "rational actor" type shit, there's going to ramifications that obese people in Peoria won't be able to wrap their loose-skinned, chubby arms around. The revolution was televised, remember, and it involved Jimmy Carter nodding his head absent-mindedly and a bunch of hostages held up as the living embodiment of our national embarassment, which embarassment gave birth to reactionary politics and exceptionally theoretical NYC art. So stop it with the "the leaders of this country have intelligible goals which we overly patriotic bigoted politicians can understand" and the "Pre-emption does not always mean war every time because there is a way to do it diplomatically, in theory at least, there is, or so I'm told" qualifications. Disclosure: I haven't yet read the Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker, but I did see him once on the Daily Show and I'm about to leave work to go eat buffalo and read that mess. Also expect an uptick in vehemence and randomness. Papa's got a bone to pick.

Yeah Yeah

The long weekend presents an opportunity to travel. I head west, back towards mountains. I will see old friends and mustachioed leftist Forest Service workers who drink Busch Light and keep a spit cup handy. By Monday I will have decided if I want to live this life or try my hand at a different one. Wish me, you know, luck or what have you.