A LOT OF WHAT I LIKE TO LEARN CORRELATES WITH THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT GETS YOU LAID

1) Thing that happened
Earlier today a kid suffered one of those super-intense sneezes where covering one’s mouth with a hand doesn’t quite offset the force of the sneeze. We’ve all been there. Except he sat in the front row and had sneeze gunk on his hand and upper lip, which was semi-disgusting, yes, but I’m an adult and have little trouble looking semi-disgusting things with a slightly averted gaze. The heartbreaker was the panic that immediately came over him, and I became the object of that panicked look which morphed into terrified/pleading at the same time. If I was quicker on my feet I would have created a giant distraction by acting like I had tourette’s or throwing a book across the room, but I stood stock still and sort of tried to channel the feeling of resignation and send it to him via my semi-averted look. It didn’t go over that well.

2) album

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Show Your Bones. This is most likely of the album species, Grows on You With Each Listen. There is no discernible departure between this one and the one that got all the youngsters’ hearts a-fluttering, but sometimes sticking with what you brought the first time has its charms.

3) book

Spring and All. I like William Carlos Williams. I like that his first and last name are almost the same. I like that he was a doctor, and I like the picture on his selected poems which seems both completely unmannered and innately orthinologist-like.

#2 blessed are the days

“I've often tried to tell people that I think the NBA is a game of presence; points are rarely produced by accident or through the simplistic bellowings of logic, and prevention occurs through an equally decisive act. Fatalism, loping dread, and qualified wistfulness are not really things I get from this cherished sport of ours. It's also a totally different situation than say, watching the Blazers and then putting on Xiu Xiu. There, the two worlds are kept far separate, with the latter even functioning as a de facto high culture. Indie snobbery and sports are like oil and water everywhere but here, and that's because most snobbery is purposefully immune to the charms of organized leaping and running.”

Things about this I wonder:
decisive acts
two worlds
fatalism as an extension of the Happiness Writes White school
loping dread as an idea is sort of terrifying

#1 It seems to me that many things we’re asked to call 8 hours of sleep are actually another big sea in which you swim.

"it seems to me that many of the things we're asked to call the blessings of progress are actually deforming diseases"

Here today, still here tomorrow, but maybe not, if you don't watch it . . .

Sometimes the kids who are trying out for varsity have to puke, and they run-run-run to the side of the gym where the big trashcans are. And a few have figured out that if they look like they’re puking, they might not have to keep running, which means they might not actually puke. My proscribed role is to go over and catch the shirkers, and then they have to run until they actually puke. Skinner would have things to say about this I suppose.

In other parts of practice, I show how to box out, yell things like “good hustle” and “spacing – SPACING – SPACING!!!” and so on. The “take a charge” drill is hard to watch, and hard not to watch at the same time. It’s not as bad as driving past a wreck on the side of the road, but the preponderant inability to accept a blow leads to various sidesteps and so on that tend to make the collision worse. I have been asked to help “rub out” a cramp and declined, insisting it was better for the person suffering the cramp to do his own rubbing.

“Doing boards” is the only new wrinkle this particular head coach likes to throw in. he had two by fours wrapped in towels, and the players have to bend over and run with the board on the ground, head down, arms out, legs churning. From viewing five to ten sessions of “doing boards,” I can say that it looks like not that much fun.

Witnessing massive cardiovascular workouts coincides with the onset of blood loogies, a particular nasty species that besets smokers during certain sicknesses or if they are just not that healthy. Always keeping things interesting, yes we are yes we are.

Attention Followed by A Tension, Liquid Milk.

I have a colleague who yells as if yelling will save starving children. She and I get into it occasionally when she yells at my students to get to class when I have repeatedly told them so long as they are in the door before the bell stops ringing I have no qualms. It does not help that this woman is poster for morbid obesity, and little specks of saliva gather at the corner of her mouth and on her chin when she rears back and hollers. I say that not to judge, but to indicate a certain grotesque estrangement from normalcy that goes with the thing.
Anyway, she just accused me of ignoring a “public display of affection,” which would make sense if a) I was really into watching teenagers neck, b) I hadn't spent my head buried in a pile of papers for the past 20 minutes. Evidently The PDA amounted to two students hugging for an extended period of time. I don’t want to acknowledge this. She wants to fight about it. I have given her the sigh treatment, followed by the dubious eyebrow raise, and let it all come out with the “if you feel you need to speak to the supervisor, then I guess that’s what you’ll have to do.” I have to go now. To church, for an inservice. This job demands swallowing a bunch of turgid crap. Luckily I listened to Smoky Robinson today, and am as cool as a cucumber.

Eric Clipperton Strikes Again

1)
Happy marriage, newly married people. It is strange to think about how you and yours will celebrate out here in all this open space, but the Budweiser can you just threw out the window is probably one indication of how.


2)
I forgot how thoroughly depressing it is to be sick. And enraging – I want to spit fire at people in the aisles of the little grocery store I enter to buy Kleenex and the little bottle of stuff you shove up a nostril and squeeze to stop the tortuous, but also at the same time pretty innocuous drip that has taken over thought patterns. Anyway.


3)
New York Times Magazine is devoted to comedy this week, which devotion may or may not have been necessary. I listened to Blondie last night for the first time and once again discovered how much there is to discover. I’m ready to leave, and the world continues to thwart my desires. Yesterday I went to see the amish, who got a kick out of my current vehicular situation, which involves the driver’s side door being broken and me climbing in and out of the passenger door and vaulting over into the driver’s seat. They made good bread, the Amish, for which I paid $2. for some reason, when I think of Gore Vidal, who has a new book out, I think of a prostate exam. I’ve only read the one book about the Roman emperor. I have read these books since the Sickness (but not unto death) arrived: Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear, Blue Blood by [first name] Conlon and Bucking the Sun by Ivan Doig. The Village Voice informs me that the book Infinite jest came out a decade ago. And no, I don’t think jack johnson is anything to worry about.

4)
Call me sentimental, but I want Amare Stoudamire to succeed. And I want Barack Obama to sponsor a damn bill. i want another bucket of self-conflicted, sonically luxuriant not-averse-to-humor music with which to bathe myself.

the wave, the wake, the resignation, oh my.

The good people of my home state have acquitted themselves well.



The trouble with tolerance


Rumsfeldian square jaw. Scarboroughian tongue-swallowing.

On Tina Fey's hotness

But first a quatrain plus one:

Librium and Diazepam, sitting in a tree,
Gotta keep the pressure of your blood where it needs to be.
First come the shakes, then come the terrors,
then comes the funeral and the coffin bearers.


(I picked up the Million Little Pieces book while surreptitiously rummaging through a colleague’s bookshelf. Is there something magnetic/glamorous about addiction as metaphor? Did Oprah identify? I don't get much from the writing so far - detached narrative style meant to signify narrator's detachment from the world, the way in which his life lacks "heat" and fails to mean much. Anyway, I guess Librium and Diazepam are two drugs you take when you Come In.)


I’m not going to write about Tina Fey’s hotness, or even about Tina Fey. I’d rather write about Ian Mackaye, lead singer of Minor Threat, Fugazi, and the Evens and co-founder of D.C.-based label Dischord. There’s a cordial discussion about Mackaye’s newest project over at the Onion AV Club, which project is defined as “a war on volume.” The larger narrative arch of the piece involves the tendency of musicians’ performance level to diminish over time. Like the writers of the piece, I have a kind of awestruck art-crush on Mackaye. I’ve listened to his music for almost half of my life, to the point that I buy whatever album Fugazi puts out. But I haven’t heard the Evens, and I’m not surprised that there is an idea behind whatever direction that band takes.

You don't need to know anything about this band though - you just need to know that I'm trying to remember what they meant, because I'm trying to have them mean something like that again, and even if you don't need to know it, it's probably necessary for me to say it. For reasons that confound me. And that's not enigmatic, it's just one of those things that you intuit as something that needs doing but you're never really sure why. If I was you, in that example, anyway.

I have to go now.

If it's gonna be that kind of party, I'm going . . . in the mashed potatoes

1) Slightly upwards of 44 years ago, the Cuban Missile Crisis began. Still photos of President Kennedy on the phone in the Oval Office come to mind, as do images of from the U-2 spy plane of medium-range missiles carried on the beds of military trucks on a runway. That’s pretty much it. Making light of serious things is a pastime that never grows old, but I guess the idea of nuclear holocaust is so absurd, and so historic, that I would rather just ignore the impulse. Did kids in junior high really undergo drills for a nuclear attack that involved hiding under one’s desk? Is that a fictive figment, an example of memory-playing-tricks, or does Hollywood – my unimpeachable source on this issue – play it straight?
I don’t suppose that history is anymore intelligible than other people are. Intelligible. Remember when I said that one thing to you, and you thought it meant x, and I thought it meant x – 1, and all the others in earshot mangled my morphemes into things otherwise indivisible? That’s what I mean by not having any idea what the hell happened back then. And obviously I am still struggling with the idea that George W. Bush has that many lives in his clammy little hand. That is not a partisan sentiment – the idea of Al Gore endowed with that power (power isn’t even really the right word) is equally shiversome. (shiversome not being a word, but meaning something all the same.)
Two years after the CMC, in 1964 the year of Our Lord*, the Soviets ousted Nikita Kruschev from power. I know that Nikita once wielded a shoe in the UN. Everything else I know about the USSR and nuclear holocaust-related issues comes from Spies Like Us, which gave humanity the following:

Doctor, doctor; Doctor, doctor; Doctor, doctor; Doctor, doctor; Doctor, doctor; . . . . Doctor, and – doctor.

2) Speaking of Russia, and other stuff, the library at school has a little cart to which is affixed a sign that reads: FREE BOOKS. Being the kind of person I am, I took advantage, and culled from the rows The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Some time in the next three years I will read this book. A sticker on the front cover confirms that the book has been “Withdrawn from the school library.” Underneath the sticker, the following statement is printed in attractive font:

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

For years I have with
reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my
obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But
now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative to
publish it immediately.
THE AUTHOR

I opened the book to a random page a second before transcribing its front-cover announcement. The page is 292. The passage reads:

Here is one straightforward and typical case that was brought before a military tribunal. In 1941, the Security operations branch of our inactive army stationed in Mongolia was called on to show its activity and vigilance. The military medical assistant Lozosky, who was jealous of Lieutenant Pavel Chulpenyev because of some woman, realized this. He addressed three questions to Chulpenyev when they were alone: 1. “Why, in your opinion, are we retreating from the Germans?” (Chulpenyev’s reply: “They have more equipment and they were mobilized earlier.”) 2. “Do you believe the Allies will help?” (Chulpenyev: “I’ll believe they’ll help, but not from unselfish motives.” Lozovsky’s reply: “They are deceiving us. They won’t help us at all.”) 3. Why was Voroshilov sent to command the Northwest Front?” [no answer given]
The text goes on to explain that Chulpenyev was arrested and given a sentence of ten years plus thee years’ disenfranchisement. God Bless America, huh?

3) I am the new basketball coach. Not the varsity, but an assistant responsible for coaching either JV or Frosh. We shall see.

candy

1) Avoiding pain, and the consequences that stem from our willingness to take extreme measures to avoid pain, are two of the unassailable problems of our time.

2) I’ve paid thousands of dollars to lose my sense of smell and bask in shortened breath. How did I agree to that? Not “why?,” a question that invites an inevitable lie, but how?
I suppose when you can’t sleep you scrawl. I know I can’t smell b/c I smoke. I’m going to go smoke b/c I can’t sleep.

3) Brad Childress is telling his squad, Let’s not go peeing down both legs. His mustache and sideline demeanor bespeak a previous life spent as a guy who sells insurance exclusively to other members of his country club.


4) “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”