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 Originally made in Denmark, home of passive aggressive bigoted free speech cartoonists.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.