the vestigiality of male nipples

*I just kind of like the word "vestigiality"







1.

The groundswell


David Letterman played host to Bill Clinton on Wednesday night, and if you missed it, you may have missed the opportunity to appreciate how verbose the man really is. No one is better equipped to locate follow up questions within his own answers, or to make implicit criticism apparent through the selective use of adjectives. I have nothing against Bill Clinton - he's entertaining, informative, authoritative, and unwholesomely needy all at the same time - and I have nothing against blow jobs, and I am not particularly concerned with Bill's wife's campaign's current stasis. That said, I'm sort of sick of dynasties, which feeling is aided, abetted, and exfoliated by the undercurrent of exceptionalism that continues to seep through Miss Hillary's public persona.

It's a bit too easy to follow the pundit crowd and excoriate Hillary for acting as if the others are ganging up on her, not because she's the front-runner and running the most anesthetized campaign imaginable, but b/c she's a she (see, e.g., Maureen Dowd & Peggy Noonan converging into a phalanx, working that left-right, jab-hook combo). Still, I don't think it's altogether easy to sever the people who dislike Hillary b/c of who Hillary is and those who dislike Hillary b/c she's a she, or at the last the kind of she they perceive her to be.

It's not clear where to go from there, as evidence of nepotism and naked, unmitigated ambition do enough, for me at least, to yearn for Obama to make the move that will eventually be made in this election. but the thing is: this election is fucking long, and Newsweek and Time and Fox News and the Spectator and the NYTimes and so on so desperately want to make more of it than it really is, that as a result it seems like we just hear about a shift in momentum to forestall the eventual boredom that's bound to set in eventually. We are habitually conditioned to expect that something interesting is about to happen, and if nothing does, we are habitually conditioned to accept reports suggesting that what appears to be boring is actually a maelstrom of impending tectonic activity.


2.
Abodes

If you build a house, and that house catches on fire when a naturally occurring, swiftly moving fire overtakes the area where that house sits, and it later turns out that where you built the house is also a place where fires happen a lot, it's still sad and all that you lost your house and the pictures documenting different eras of your life that are obviously important and full of almost unimaginable personal significance of the "you don't know it until it's gone" variety, but maybe all the fires that happened before were a good indication that another fire might come again and so, not to belabor the point, maybe it was also not a good idea for you to do what you did. but that's what insurance is for, right?

Old Crow

This feels like last year, because it's 5 am and I'm drinking coffee and I've been up for an hour b/c that is just how today is going to go.

Restlessness tends to perpetuate itself, and that old time feeling for something different has occasionally raised its large spectral presence, asking to be entertained.

Maybe it's not a coincidence that the issue of restlessness and this feels like last year, but the situation is quite different from last year, in the externals, comes up at the same time. liberating radical syntax is.



A calendar with Xs on it; a white folder with symmetrical, overlapping stains from a coffee cup; a glass with crayons in it; a pocket Constitution; a cactus; a three hole punch; two dictionaries; a pile of paper; antagonistic stapler.

First excerpt of a thing I wanted to do before I am no longer young

That sentiment is alien to you. You know “faith” and “redemption” as phrases, not forces, and even where you live, which Mrs. Dunwoody in sophomore geography incessantly urges referred to the Northern Plains – which Mrs. Dunwoody is no one’s favorite but at least she doesn’t make you do the Macarena like Mrs. Wendell, who kids say is a lesbian, does in Spanish II – but anyway, the Northern Plains, the square states that your dad likes to call God’s Country – even here you are not alone in having a hard time believing that faith and redemptive power are anything more than husks that house concepts people rely on to make conjectures about things that elicit a need to talk and dampen the fear that they have nothing to say. Mr. Gordon will seem the exception to you then, in how calm and certain and steady he seems about it.

HOLY, AMERICA!

non-cheery, not-wholly-articulate contempation

soldier student

There are numerous things to say about this, but the primary thing, to me, is this:
Ever since we were told that going shopping was a proper response to an unprecedented crises, the easiest course of action has been our (read: non-soldiers) insistence on going on with day-to-day affairs as if life was normal. That is a disservice. I am not sure if it's accurate to say that reminding yourself that others are sacrificing or being sacrificed (others means soldiers and regular schmucks in Iraq who can't live with any semblance of normalcy) every day may make you more cognizant of your own personal situation and the general situation Over There, but it certainly seems that way, just as it certainly seems that 99% of the cues we come across in our daily lives encourage us to continue on w/o so much as a thought about what we may owe to that larger thing to which we belong.

he is not the kind whose shield wounds others

Self-belief at 19 is a proposition altogether different than self-belief at 25, just as optimism at 11 is a proposition altogether different than optimism at pimple-laden, broken-voiced 15. Maybe it's the case that the same words at different intervals of time are like the same species incarnated in different individual instances: this "justice" differs from that "justice" like the lion who licks his chops in the Serengeti differs from the lion who sits in a concrete enclosure, licking his balls and waiting for another piece of meat to be slid down the chute. So but maybe the operative term here is concepts, not words: a single concept deployed in a given context is an instantiation of the general class to which it belongs, but whose specific properties both abide by and diverge from that class so as to belong in different degrees. Just think of individuals you know who bastardize a familiar concept like love or goodness or accountability, or who embody it so thoroughly and uncompromisingly that your understanding of what the idea could possibly be dilates in this person's wake. Goodness gracious me, it's complicated.

Mitt Romney's first name is Mitt - I shit you not

The Wall Street Journal's weekend edition contains a story about Barack Obama and the unbearable lightness of being black enough but not too black, but not too conscious about being black enough or not too black either. It also contains an interview with the resident Mormon, who promulgates the idea that data is what grounds any decision-making process worthy of the name and is described as a man "who refers to what some would call their 'core beliefs' as 'concepts.'"




I am not one to advert for the return of Hunter S. Thompson, mostly because I believe a suicide is evidence enough of the need for an era to run its course. That said, and adding the caveat that anyone of any political stripe who sincerely hopes that one of these people will rise to the occasion is likely to encounter the bleak vicissitudes of misplaced sincerity, I do believe that the general election will be a battle of attrition conducted during a relatively catastrophic economic decline and a thoroughly depressing media-fixation for a savior.




But (pause for effect) this is not to say that something along the lines of an Obama 04 convention speech or a Goldwater incursion won't emerge as the next proximate cause of a return to an interesting, relevant conversation about what can be done to bring some smelling salts to old sad sack America and restore some semblance of a coherent version of civic life that is neither self-defeating nor self-delusional.

Genus: hipster

From that bastion of collectivist wisdom, Wikipedia:

"In current parlance it can refer to the way one is dressed and may have connotations involving the circumstances of one's class and identity -- and the glaring contradictions of those circumstances."

Derogatorily:

"identifying that a person may be superficially following recently mass produced, homogeneous, urban fashion trends, overly concerned with their image and the contradictions of their identity, potentially anorexic, disingenuously appropriating a pseudo-artistic image or "a collage of other urban identies" from the past, or simply an elitist. Similar to other social groups, hipsters have been accused of exercising peer pressure to persuade other members of the group to adopt certain attitudes and ideas (e.g., that the music of Steely Dan lacks soul)."
supra.

I kind of like Steely Dan, and I don't not eat, and I don't have an urban domicile, but I do like Pavement, so . . .

"11 Clues You Are a Hipster
1. You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration.
2. You frequently use the term 'postmodern' (or its commonly used variation 'PoMo') as an adjective, noun, and verb.
3. You carry a shoulder-strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn a pair of horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-style glasses.
4. You have refined taste and consider yourself exceptionally cultured, but have one pop vice (ElimiDATE, Quiet Riot, and Entertainment Weekly are popular ones) that helps to define you as well-rounded.
5.You have kissed someone of the same gender and often bring this up in casual conversation.
6. You spend much of your leisure time in bars and restaurants with monosyllabic names like Plant, Bound, and Shine.
7. You bought your dishes and a checkered tablecloth at a thrift shop to be kitschy, and often throw vegetarian dinner parties.
8. You have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your 'one Republican friend.'
9. You enjoy complaining about gentrification even though you are responsible for it yourself.
10. Your hair looks best unwashed and you position your head on your pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks.
11. You own records put out by Matador, DFA, Dischord, Warp, Thrill Jockey, Smells Like Records, Saddle Creek, and Drag City."
12. You have downloaded R. Stevie Moore videos and have attempted to enjoy them.

1. Yes
2. Not outside of a classroom
3. No, though I did inherit J. Jowers's black Gap sholder-strap bag
4. No, unless the MLB counts.
5. Um, no. I absolutely understand lesbianism is how attractive I find woman qua woman.
6. I go to a bar called Carey's but it's named after a family. Does that count?
7. I took my dishes from a garage sale, after being told I could, after offering $.50 for them.
8. On many planes, I am a Republican.
9. I don't live in a state where gentrification is more than a term people who have lived in Minneapolis toss around.
10. Sometimes I don't shower, yes.
11. Yes, not sure, yes, yes, yes, yes, not sure, yes, yes.
12. No. Am i missing something?

I guess this is all to say if you occupy any kind of social position within a state with less than a million people you can't be a hipster. But that's not true, right? If you own a gun and/or belong to a bowling league can you be a hipster? What if you own smallish t-shirts that fit your smallish frame and once had body piercings but now prefer the bar on the edge of town that sells bait to fish for walleye and don't see anything ironic about that? Contrapositive: last Ipod albums purchased: the National, Les Savy Fav, the Clipse, Sparklehorse, Eddie Vedder soundtrack (very very drunk), Aesop Rock, Low, EPMD, Beirut, the Mountain Goats? Where is Chuck Klostermann when you need him?

End of expectation is death of hope

go ahead and kiss babies, go ahead and make a connection with that person you think may have something to do with what you want and may help you either get what you want or or make it easier to do what you need to do to get what you want b/c this is AMERICA says Denzel says Andrew Jackson says Capone's consigliare says Tony Robbins says the girl whose aunt owns the corner store where all the heads go to make survival all that much easier, says the NW small town barttender with all the curves and the knowhow about the loggers and their champagne dreams and welfare check incomes with a sink full of dirty dishes and a freezer full of bean and cheese burritos, says the NJ gas staion attendant with the drawn in eyebrows and the high school beauty school dreams but with two kids and an overlong lawn and a Ford Tempo that smokes up the freeway until the local EPA bumper sticker activists call the po you know po - what does she care if the dog pisses on the small grass space between the street and the neighbors - it's a mutt OK, the dog - and but so do you have more sympathy for the insurance salesman in Austin MN who has lost a bunch of white customers in the last five years but who has a subsitute in "slightly" illegal immigrants who have made it to shift managers - what does the Statue of Liberty say about them, much less the statute of limitations - all in all it's about a holistic vision which i dont which powers and pynchon and all thsoe boys do - so i want to go back to CK williams and Wenderoth and the boys b/c those are names i somehow know and I believe in the idea that a person huddled in some corner attached to a desk that's not even made of wood can compose something - a story, an argument trailed by logic, a sentiment even - that makes sit up from my humdrum life and take notice. But that's all. That's as far as i go. And I admit I'd love to go farther - or further, if degree is your bag.

USB ports are not the end all be all of computing

"He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance."

- the Declaration



The boys of the brigades knew enough to use descriptive language in delineating their complaints, did they not? Redcoats-as-heinous-swarm, sucking out the substance of a people (indeed, a freedom-loving people) at the behest of a King.

One way to stage a revolution: Turn the King into the middleman, and then cut him out of the action.


Proposition #1, made after a long, sleepless, slightly tripped out antibiotic-fueled night perusing the Declaration and its eventual companion, the Constitution:


It's easy to grow complacent in the belief that you actually remember what's in something you've read before. Complacency, in many cases, simply prolongs misapprehension.

Sub-Proposition #1a) Every time you read something you haven't read in five years or more, it means something different, b/c you are something different.


Proposition #2: There are endless opportunities to be surprised by "classic" literature, including political treatises and so on. They are never as dull or airy or limpid as you (if you are me), in your self-regarding manner, had supposed them to be.

Fever dreams

8:20 - 101.3
8:50 - 102.0
9:30 - 102.1
9:40 - 101.5
10:53 (just now) - 101.1


hard rock radio station temperatures always give me the shivers, and in recent years I've moved away from chicken noodle soup to ice cream despite the palsy that comes shortly after. i had to wait awhile after the ice cream so as to not tarnish the results - that's some scientific method going on there. about once a year - hopefully never more - i come down with some medical condition during which fever dreams come. ever since i was five or six, i have tended to have the same dream before the fever breaks. i am told it involves eyes rolling back in my head, but cannot verify. Tonight is going to be a chore; tomorrow shall be glorious.