oo la la

Early morning reverie, stock experience: picked up from Warehouse 2 on the East Bank of Commonplace, north of What Have You. Coffee, cloud streaks cognizable in the early morning dark that accompanies or elicits the early morning reverie.

Death Dream, idiosyncratic but with generic symbols: a lakehouse scene, with a floating dock on the upper right hand of the frame on which sat a marijuana plant and a Radio Raheem style boombox. Waves lapped against the neighbors’ dock; neighbor in those preppie shoes, sockless, the ones I associate with the East Coast and sailing. This house set back against a hill, looks down on neighbors’ dock and floating dock. My uncle – the one who never wears jeans, only slacks – is discussing the death around which the dream seems to order itself.

Stock photo:

catfish appearing to devour bald guys' head. If you were that catfish, wouldn't you
try to make what seems to be, be?

When the book club got to its epistolary novel

1. Sports

Be advised that the Minnesota Vikings may go 0-7, and the seven babies named
Tavaris in the last six months will soon go by Tavis and/or Smiley and are doomed to multiple Wedgie recesses and a future in which no bras are ever fumbled with and no babies are ever procreated. Nice Gus Frerotte exegesis, stupid Fox North pregame production eggsuckers.

Be advised that another six White Sox players could break their own respective wrists in petulant post-foul ball lapses of judgment and the Minnesota Twins may still not
resurrect themselves into their mid-00s early exit from the postseason form.

I am confused. Does Dan Uggla's All-Star meltdown bear glad or ill tidings vis a vis postseason possibilities?

2. Politics

is not what it used to be. Which may be good. I am not sure - try not to pay attention.

3. Culture

see supra. also, according to a report summarized in a soft news story I read in what passes as a political/cultural magazine, the secret to the Danish levels of happiness, which exceed all other countries' levels of happiness, is having very low expectations on a consistent basis and being pleasantly surprised when they are not met.

Danes pay the highest taxes of any nation in the world (starting at 42 per cent, rising to 68 per cent), enjoy fewer hours of sunshine than Britain, have a higher divorce rate than most Europeans, live only averagely long and smoke and drink far more than is good for them. So what's going on?

In 2006, researchers from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark examined a range of possible factors, from genes to cycling habits to cuisine. In a charming report, they offered two explanations: the Danes have never got over their rapture at winning the European football championships in 1992 (their happiness rose to new peaks that year, and has stayed on a plateau since), and - the main finding - Danes, unlike the woeful Greeks and Italians, have very low expectations of the immediate future. "Year after year," the researchers write, "they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.

So - moment of synthesis - the difference between being a Vikings fan and a Danish national lies in the degree to which pessimistic expectations are realized.

post midnight notions

"In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king."

- D. Brooks, here


See also: David Foster Wallace, American Usage essay, specifically re: "YOU would say that."


Phenomenon: I don't hear you, I see who you are, and predict what you may happen to believe, deep down; my own response to this mishmash is replicative of how I identify, relate to, and pigeonhole you.

Question: Is this new?

Answer: (tentatively) It can't be, can it? Isn't that part of what 12 Angry Men is about? Isn't that part of what (for the last 20-30-40 years) the argument about difference is about? Is there something fundamentally different about niche-driven fragmentation now that the means of controlling one's input of what kind of world we live in comes with a remote control? Or is it kind of quixotic to think, pace Brooks, that the old demarcations of a town or city were incapable or at least less capable of keeping the various identity-defined subgroups from coming into contact with and influencing each other?

Redescribed phenomenon: I don't hear you, I don't see you, but when I imagine you (and my faculties for doing so are severely constrained seeing as I neither hear nor see nor meet you, except in grocery stores) what you are is transparently intelligible to me and what you believe follows the script I have inherited, regardless of who I am or you are or the circumstances of my inheritance really are.

Answer: Hmmmmmmmmmmm. But so when does the redescription verge on being so precious and self-explanatory as to cast doubt on the upshot of the redescription compared to the description it would seek to supplant?

Non Sequiturs in the form of Declarative Statements

The statute of limitations on sleep has now passed. Pictures of bright beautiful children waiting at bus stops for something significant to begin appeal to the inner after school special producer in all of us. Coffee and curdled milk appeared on the menu. He was a writer who critics sometimes referred to as a superb stylist and he was also the man under the umbrella next to the pool lying in his own vomit. Sometimes painters forget themselves and walk into the pictures they are trying to extend out to you. Usury is not a luxury enjoyed by contemporary Luddite sects. Time has come. Any acts of insistence that dramatize departures from contemporary mores will be lodged as complaints, in fact. He wonders if people who came across monsters in the pre-TV era looked back at the monster as they ran away, or if the looking-back-while-the-monster-is-closing-in is a habit TV foisted on everyone.
Clinical detachment is not a good thing to bring to a marriage, nor is a genetic disposition towards sucking at life.

The epitaph said – He loved the earth but could not stay

“The way I see it now is that you either make a little nation and solve its historical and personal problems within the format of your own household – accepting the mistakes that you’ve made, all the ones your parents made, all that your children make, and all the mistakes your country made – and you win that one or you lose the only war worth fighting. Moreover, as soon as you step out of this personally constructed world and, say, drive into town or stand out on I-90 and watch our nation cycle through these placeless arteries, it’s there that you confront the true horror of the other option.”

- a quotation from a novelist who lives near I-90.


Every once in awhile, remember that George the Bush claimed isolationist turf in his debates with as-wizened-then-as-now John the Pitbull McCain. This was back in 00 (double-ot, before things done changed) when the stars shone red and everyone was doing like Richard Dreyfuss and shaping mashed potatoes into Devil’s Tower facsimiles. George the Bush insinuated that he didn’t want American boys out solving troubles America had no part in making. If we don’t have a dog in the fight, he seemed to say (or I imagine him saying), don’t go buying a damn dog.

Now of course we are in the middle of the historical moment. Our kids may ask about it when they get to be indignantly idealistic (if we have kids and if idealism still exists as valid concept for the young). George the Bush no longer mutters much of anything that sounds isolationist, but the concept may still hold truck in how we relate to the historical moment itself. I am beginning to think that the answer you give your kids will say less about you than it says about the particular constellation of media sources to which you have consciously or unconsciously pledged fealty.

In that regard, are we all isolationists now? Not so much in our willingness to engage the world, either personally or via foreign policy, but in the sense that the stream of empirical data (statistics, polls, death toll numbers) and the narrative threads (amputee soldiers, water works projects, neighborhood “purification”) we encounter tend to be narrow and self-enclosed. Am I wrong about this? I get this feeling that there are a decent amount of people out there who think to themselves, “Well it can’t be going that badly” and who consider themselves to be informed on what’s going on over there. On the other side, there are people who go to go hear speakers on college campuses demonize George the Bush and the gaggle of blue-suited guys who head up his staff and, once enough shit is flung, the crowd starts to cheer. “This is what we came to hear. It really is that bad!” and the clapping goes on and the audience goes home knowing in their bleeding hearts that they had the real skinny on what’s going on over there.

I don’t consider myself to be informed on the issue – I mostly glance at the numbers listed in New York Times headlines and skim on occasional WSJ op-ed that insists good stuff is still going – but it’s seeming that media are only going to accentuate whatever fault lines have formed on basis of political, cultural, ethnic, regional, and economic identity because media are making their home on those fault lines. Make enough niche markets that pander to people’s need to have their basic worldview affirmed, and then market a Reagan as a reconciling force (or flip the coin three decades later and see what an Obama will get you) and see if your net is big enough to capture that minority in the middle that seem (all this seeming is making my brain hurt) to matter the most. Are you in that middle? Do you know where its fault lines lie? Do you care?