pretty dumb things

14, 2, 18 and 99 matters of time

I am woman who is decidedly not a mathlete, yet I am obsessed with counting. This post is about numbers, those theoretically pure empiric indicators of time’s passage and all that goes along with the slow counting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on to inaccurate infinity. Pythagoras and his mystical manipulations might have been misguided in believing that numbers hold an intrinsic magic, but there’s no denying that they carry unassailable power.

On the surface, they’re just figures. 14 years. 2 years. 18 months. 99 days. But as with make-up, linoleum and Potemkin Villages, a pretty façade can hide a Midas load of loss. This final week in April marks a series of anniversaries. Fourteen years since my ex-boyfriend Will placed a significantly dog-eared copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta on the floor, entered his closet, put a needle in his arm, and shot himself up with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Two years since my long-lost biological father sent me that digital bolt from the blue and claimed his stake in my life. Eighteen months since my ex-almost-fiancé Donny and I split. And 99 days since we last spoke.

my new body of smut, now conveniently located othewhere

It began as just a default setting, but as with so many decisions that wear the cloak of circumstance, it has become a clear and conscious choice. I’m not writing about sex here on my pretty dumb things. Or, I should clarify, I’m not writing about the sex I’m having, the sex I’m not having, the sex I had, the sex I want to have, or the sex I dream of having. I do reserve the right to write pretty dumb things about sex as a generalized or ambient concept, a sex divorced from my specific genitals at a specific moment in a specific time with a specific human, machine, or implement. I further reserve the right to write about my sexual history in less KA-BOOM! POW! BLAMO! graphic terms. I reserve the right to break my own rules, in short. I am a despot in the land of my narrative.

This not-choice to not-write about sex seems to have started when I stopped having sex, but in truth, it began well before I started living the lover-free life. It started, really, when I began to realize that I loved my ex-almost-fiance Donny deeply. To trot out the intricacies of our intimacies, however displayed in the laciest of poetic language, felt at odds with my love for him. It began to take on a patina of betrayal, and to pour out to a faceless public the liquid details felt like I was making a product out of precious experience. I stopped enjoying the writing, in short, and it began to feel like a burden rather than a gift.

Then Donny and I broke up and I stopped having sex. I slumped into doldrums; the doldrums grew into a vast depression; and I drowned in that murky black for altogether too many months. I didn’t fucking feel like living, much less did I feel like fucking. Forget fucking writing anything other than what I was paid to write, which was not about fucking.

The lake receded and I’m now high and dry and relatively chipper for an ambient misanthrope raised by a long line of dour people. I have vague and happy notions of perhaps dating in the not-too-distant future, and I have optimism that this potential dating might lead to actual physical friction with another willing, perhaps enthusiastic, partner. But I won’t write about said friction because, as I’ve explored previously, I don’t want to jeopardize a fledgling relationship with my occasional will to overshare the very moist, throbbing and tumescent portions of my life.

Plus, I don’t want to be only a sex writer for the rest of my life. So there’s that. I have too much to say to limit it to things most quintessentially expressed in guttural phonemes.

And yet, I acknowledge that I do like writing about sex. I think it’s important cultural work. I think there’s a power in doing it well, and I have the hubris to believe I do do it well. I just don’t want to do it on my blog. Therefore, you will be able to find all of my new sex writing at the gloriously shiny, newly opened, terrifically sleek and gleefully—if thoughtfully—perverse Filthy Gorgeous Things. In fact, you can go here to read my first piece for the site. It begins with Hegel and ends with Oscar Wilde, and because I’m both thinky and kinky in equal measures, it meanders through strip clubs and deep-throating. I’d love to know what you think here because there are no comments there.

I’m keeping my smut archives here on my pretty dumb things because to jettison them would be untrue to the history of this blog, but the great priapic share of my new sex writing will be now found on FGT. I’m already working on two new pieces on sex and techs. They’ll be really very, if not like totally fetch.

I do hope you enjoy the full body of FGT. It’s quite beautiful and strange and erotic. Plus, it’s wicked smart, and anyone who doesn’t get the intrinsic sexy value of the grey matter is no friend with benefits of mine. I’ll let you know when I post new material, or you can check out my Twitter feed here.

the weight and the loss

Once more, I have cheekbones. They’ve returned or, to be more factually accurate, they haven’t. They’ve always been there like twin hillocks hidden under the snowy cover of my adipose tissue. The spring has sprung; the snows have melted, and the cheekbones have become visible again.

Which is all a purple way of saying that I have lost weight. I have lost weight and I have done it on purpose. For the past six, almost seven, weeks, I’ve been dieting, a word I hate with passionate abandon. I have also been working out, a term I loathe for its blind punnery. We work out issues, we work out with weights, we undoubtedly work out issues whilst we work out with weights, or on the treadmill, while boxing, when we do yoga, or any number of other dumbly physical activities. But diet I have been and working out too, in several senses of the term.

one lone gunperson aiming from language's grassy knoll

In an interview last March, German magazine De Spiegel queried Secretary Homeland Security Janet Napolitano about her choice to replace the term “terrorist” with “man-caused disasters” when she addressed Congress:

Spiegel: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

This linguistic shift has been termed “Orwellian” by many neoconservatives, while Peggy Noonan archly commented, “Ah. Well this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.” Certainly, whether an adherent of Fox News or a devotee of MSNBC, you might feel the new term seems at the very least to be engaged in a warm and fuzzy obfuscation. We ought not to be fearful of terrorists, Napolitano’s suggests; rather, we should be afraid of men and the disasters they can cause. This linguistic re-habbing by Napolitano—and, by extension, the current administration—longs to place the responsibility on individual people who take destructive actions and to equate their destruction with the seemingly senseless abandon of a natural disaster, a tsunami, a hurricane or an earthquake.

The linguistic prestidigitation that turns “terrorism” into “man-caused disasters” does seem to deflect the looming Code Orange fear. We don’t live in perpetual terror of natural disasters. We watch the weather, we hope for the best, and when the worst is coming, we do our best to plan accordingly (or not, in the case of Hurricane Katrina). In effect, the administration seems to be saying, it’s time to take the same approach in the face of terrorism. It may work, it may not, but what interests me is less the softening, humanizing touch of Napolitano’s phrase and more the thorny issue of the word “man.” Because in this shiny, new phrase, it’s a word that is problematic, political, and just plain wrong.

parts and wholes, frankensex and murk

If, like kids today, I’d gotten my nascent ideas about sex from heat-n-serve, hot-n-cold-streaming Hi-Res porn, my ideas would have been a lot more complete. Which is to say they would have been just as incomplete, but in totally different ways. But in the 1970s, porn was not as easy to come by as it is today, and I had to glean sexual crumbs where I could and then mash them together in my head until they formed some sort of cobbled-together whole.

I sneakingly read my uncles’ nudie mags; I squirreled away pieces of the letters to Penthouse, the better to line my erotic nest. I took sexy scraps and amatory orts from whatever novels or movies would offer them up to me: a scene from Oh, God; a limpid nude scene from a Bertolluci film; the flash of thighs and chests from Dukes of Hazard or Love Boat. I even pilfered the soundscape of my parents’ sex, a recollection that today fills me with thudding horror. When you’re twelve or thirteen, you’ll do whatever you need to do in order to flesh out that mute, yowling need.

I remember being around twelve or thirteen and, having just discovered the secret garden that is masturbation, taking the Frankensteinian erotic monster of my own creation out to play. Often, that monster would take the form of a local boy, this kid I’ll name Lance Irish, because it’s the closes approximation of his name I can come up with.  I remain certain that Lance’s phallic name had as much to do with my picking him as anything else. Lance was a chimera. It was upon his body I projected my inchoate desires.

Lance himself had a kind of annoying greaser patter. He had the affect of an unsuccessful snake oil salesman. Today, I’d grant him the metaphor of selling off-brand Viagra, but Viagra didn’t exist in the mid-1970s, Viagra—like cellphones, personal computers, post-it notes, and Hot Pockets—had yet to be invented. So Lance had the unpleasantly slick manner of a huckster, a mountebank, but he was only fourteen too. He would have been a mini-mountebank. He had black hair and a tender sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of his nose. His lips were wicked red (that’s how we talked then, and there, in mid-70s Vermont), and he had these skinny hips. He had a pervert’s air, and I imagined his body white and whippy, interestingly tufted with that black, black hair, and I even gave myself permission to almost imagine Lance’s lance.

Lying in my bed on dark winter nights, or sunny summer afternoons, anytime, really, I would think of how to get Lance to have sex with me. I’d imagine calling him and being all like, Hi, Lance…so, like, do you want to have sex? Or I’d imagine being somewhere and being all coy and flirtatious, rolling double-entendres like spit balls and lobbing them at him until the idea stuck to his skin. I would imagine us somehow, magically, improbably alone, in the same empty place at the same empty time, with too much time on our hands and too many hormones coursing through our bodies. I imagined nature taking its course, even if I couldn’t quite grasp what nature would do.

Unsurprisingly, that place would sometimes be on the flat moor-like plain cresting the hill behind my house. It might be smack in the middle of the fern patch fed by the crick running down the length of the mini-mountain to the right of the moors. It might sometimes be the high and dry sandy ground of the graveyard; I envisioned Lance leaning casually on the blocky mauve carapace of a grave and somehow being improbably suave, and then I imagined us a tangle of limbs in the strawberry-scented air. Sometimes I even imagined him in my own narrow blue bed.

But while the urge was strong, it was not stronger than sense, and I didn’t follow through with any of my rococo and painfully unlikely scenarios. I mean, obviously. Part of the problem was that while I had the Frankensex shambling about in my head, it was missing bits. I knew how sex worked, and I knew that I seemed to want it, but while I could define the act of copulation in a stunning array of biologically correct terms, and while I had a vague idea that people engaged in a whole bunch of activities between the kissing and the copulation, and while I could even tell you some of the Latinate terms for those activities, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how they worked. And, of course, the other part was that the very concept was absurd. Even at thirteen I knew the value of fantasy.

I’d only kissed my first boy at twelve, and I was stunned to find out that the pink slippage of tongue made it exotically French. The magical genie who could make manifest, even in the privacy of my imagination, those other activities was still locked tight in the bottle. And so I was stuck between the hard place of stampeding libido and the vertiginously swirl of my own incomplete knowledge. The sex need pressed itself upon me with enough weight to conjure Lance Irish naked, tufted and indistinctly assertively male, but I couldn’t make a whole out of the parts, nor could I make anything corporeal out of that murk.

These days, I have to range far and wide in the lecherous fields of my mind to come up with anything as eldritch as those amorphous Lance fantasies. My years of experience have licked the erotic lump into a fully formed baby bear, and that bear has itself grown up and given birth. It’s nostalgic to think of those times when alone in my narrow bed, I gave a long, if borrowed, leash to my sex, and I didn’t know where, out in the darkness, it led.

play out your dead

When I was seven, my mom married my stepfather and we all moved to Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, pop. 700. My mailing address was Chelsea G. Summers, Middle-of-Nowhere, VT O5555. Were you to have sent me a postcard, it would have gone to a post office about the size of my current bedroom. I would have walked the half-mile to the boudoir-sized post office to pick up said postcard, and if you’d sent it to me after the age of nine, I would have done so with a large St. Bernard padding along beside me.

My family lived in a converted two-room schoolhouse. Initially, we only rented the right half, but then the grandmother of my mom’s high school friend sold the house to my parents, and we had the whole drafty, poorly renovated hydra-house, and sometimes rented out the left half. To the exact right of us lived an old German couple in an old American farmhouse. To the left and behind us rolled out a carpet of farmland, a sometime home to a herd of Holsteins, and in the spring, many frogs who sang their guttural songs about eggs and flies and the pain of pollywogs and other chthonic frog songs. Beyond the field was a bilious green house owned by a family named Moody. They shared our party phone line. Mrs. Moody drew on her eyebrows. The Moodys had gun racks made out of deer hooves, the deers’ little hooves pointed eternally up, ironically bearing the method of their own destruction.That house always smelled like the bottom of a grease can.

In front of us was a wide ribbon of field. White in the winter, green in the summer and brown the rest of the year, the field unfurled to a river. On the other side of the river were more hills, a string of houses that at night lit up like Christmas lights, and a big red barn where square dances were held. Women went to there dressed in poufy little skirts held aloft by crinolines ethereal as mounds of egg whites. Men wore string ties. I imagine that on Sunday nights these people watched Hee-Haw and enjoyed it.

To the far right, beyond the German couple’s home, beyond the sliver of woods behind and the evanescent pond before, a pond that sometimes froze in the winter and the local boys would play hockey, and I would skate alone thinking of Dorothy Hamill, beyond all that lay our local graveyard.

on Amazon's sudden, senseless and cruel breaking of my heart

I spent my first five years in Illinois with my single-parent mom, her parents and her three brothers. There were always lots of people milling around that big castle-like house, but when my mom left to go to her job serving pizza or out on a date, I grew immediately lonely and sad. Often I'd run away next door to the artsy couple who had this fantastic house sprinkled with magical things--a purple shag rug, split geodes studding the walls, water taps shaped like swans. I loved them and this quiet, magical home they had.

When I was twenty, my parents and I returned to that place and unexpectedly knocked on the door of the old neighbors. They and the house seemed the same, but the walls were now dotted with countless paintings of churches. Old churches, new churches, churches with white steeples, churches with steel spires. Everywhere churches. The couple, it turned out, had been born again, cheerfully, assertively, self-congratulatorily, evangelically born again.

I was crushed.

Which is precisely the feeling I had yesterday upon hearing about the recent and much descried changes on Amazon. Over the past few days--or, according to other sources, over the past couple of months--Amazon has quietly been making software programming changes. These changes were brought to light by author Mark R. Probst who noticed that his books had lost their Amazon ranking (the numbers that indicate the book's sales relative to other books and thus show the popularity of a book and whether a book is a best-seller). The numbers were simply gone. Writing to the company, Probst received this reply from an Amazon representative:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Much has been made of this Amazon debacle. (It was the hottest topic on Twitter yesterday, gaining its own organizing battle cry #amazonfail. Jezebel has a fairly comprehensive thumbnail of the issue, a listing of books both losing and keeping their rankings, and a roundup of stories on the matter, if you want more information.) Much has been made and for good reason. There is no logic to this restructuring at Amazon. In fact, not only is there no logic, there is a great logic suck and that void is carrying with it books good and bad, books high and low, books classic and pop-tart, books of a stunning range of topics, interests,  readership and quality.

Amazon ranking does more than simply tell a reader, or an author, how well the book is selling. It also tells the Amazon search feature how to function. Screen out "adult" books--and adult here means  books dealing with GLBTQ issues, erotica, sex manuals (gay, straight and, I might add at first, Christian, but those rankings have mysteriously returned), books by GLBTQ authors, and sexual memoirs--and you're going to get a funky-ass crazy quilt of results. Perhaps the best example is this one, which gives four results for books searched under "homosexual," all centering on the topic of how to "cure" gayness. This is a problem of mind-imploding proportions.

The problems here are myriad. On a purely pragmatic level, you can't set up a search feature to "exclude 'adult' material" because most literature is "adult." You set up a search feature like this and you exclude not merely erotica, but you exclude Jeanette Winterson's memoir Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Betty Dodson's Sex for One. You don't, however, screen out Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho or Tucker Max's frat-boy memoir I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Set up this kind of screen, search for "Lady Chatterly" and you get four pages of results before you get to one in-print copy of the book. It's fucked up and it's just mouth-breathingly dumb.

On a political level, it's hard not to get irate at a company who feels it needs to parent its many, many consumers. I'm fully confident that if I search for books on anal sex, books by Quentin Crisp, or books on anal sex by Quentin Crisp, I can stomach the results. A search result never hurt anyone, as Susie Bright pointed out. Moreover, there's more than one way to incense a cat. Search for "helium balloons" and you get a string of suggestions for books on suicide. There's no way for Amazon to police for people's tender sensibilities. It's futile, offensive and stupid even to try.

On a purely capitalist level, Amazon is a company. It sells things. That's what it does--and does well. To set up strange, ineffective and pointless barriers to bringing people the things they want to buy is counter-intuitive. It's like a McDonald's turning out the lights, erecting a maze of curtains and making its customers grope in the dark to reach the kiosk. Your average web-savvy customer isn't stupid. We're going to toddle down the Internet highway and find that copy of Anaïs Nin's Spy in the House of Love somewhere else.

And on a personal level, I am sad, confused and angry. I love Amazon. I love it so much I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. I want to make sweet, drippy, sloppy, sweaty, unprotected love to Amazon. That's how I feel about Amazon. I spend thousands of dollars I can ill afford at Amazon. I am a book/DVD/music glutton and Amazon is my 24-hour Quickie Mart. I can't believe Amazon is making these gigantic mistakes, kowtowing to this shadowy and invisible "customer base" who is mortally offended at the idea of adults doing what adults do with other adults (but only in book form--it's not a problem to buy any one of the four really bad DVD versions of Fanny Hill, only the original, excellent novel), and making it hard for me to buy what I want to buy.

Or anything at all, really, because if Amazon doesn't fix this egregious error, this "glitch" that they are calling it, I'm done. I'm gone. And I'm taking my money and my love with me.

(If you're as angry as I am, take twenty minutes and call the Amazon customer help line, 800-201-7575, and ask to speak to the customer representative manager. Explain to him or her your reasons for your anger and tell him or her you'll boycott Amazon. You can also join Twitter and send messages to Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. There's also a petition, but I don't have a lot of faith in it. And for the most fun form of protest, join Smart Bitches in their Googlebombing of Amazon.) 

UPDATE:

This afternoon I received the following email from Amazon's customer service. I kind of like the use of the adjective "ham-fisted." Here you go:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.


Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com

what is a man? read this, print it, staple it to your forehead and thank me later

In response to Esquire's essay of the same title published in its instructional May 2009 "How to Be a Man" issue.

A man carries cash, or at least a debit card. Maybe a handful of loose change, which he puts into a bowl of assorted change at the end of the day. Or perhaps the man just throws it on the coffee table. Because a man owns a coffee table. Also coffee mugs. But not demitasse spoons. A man wouldn’t be caught dead with a demitasse spoon. Unless he is Jonathan Adler, in which case he proudly carries his demitasse spoons with him.

A real man fears Jonathan Adler. He knows that Jonathan Adler will cut you, motherfucker.

A man builds things. Bookcases out of bricks and 2x4s. A coffee table out of a deer crossing sign. A fort out of his mashed potatoes. A mountain out of a molehill. This is his way of escaping mortality. Also of escaping Alcatraz. A man knows how to tunnel out of a maximum security prison using only a toothbrush and the cardboard from the center of a toilet paper roll. Steve McQueen was a man. So is SpongeBob Squarepants. You can tell because they both wear pants. That’s where they carry their cash and maybe their demitasse spoons.

A man can look you up and down and tell whether you’re wearing pants. Before you say a word, he’s figured out the pants situation. That’s because a man is fearless about scoping the crotch every once in a while. Even if he gets busted. From your shins, from your loins, from your button fly, a man infers.

A man owns things. That is why Buddha is not a man. Maybe he was when he was alive, because he probably owned that sheet thing he wore, but let’s face it. Buddha didn’t have pants. So he had no place to carry his cash, his keys or his demitasse spoons. What kind of man is that. Not much of a man. He would have been stuck in nursery school, never mind Alcatraz.

A real man loves the human body. All of it, but especially the delicate skin at the base of a throat, the swoop and curve of the left instep, the ineffable squishiness of the medulla oblangata, and the entire lymph system. A man, a true man, appreciates the glorious beauty of lymphocytes. When his woman, or his man, or, hell, even his dog, bends over, a man sees the beauty of the initial lymphatics, the prelymphatics or lymph capillaries that specialize in collection of the lymph from the ISF, and the larger lymph vessels that propel the lymph forward. Seeing this, he feels a thrum that only a man can feel.

A man doesn’t point out that he has a pimple.

A man looks out for children. Makes them stand behind him. Especially at parades. Because a real man loves a parade and doesn’t want any goddamn children blocking his view.

A man has had liquor enough in his life that he can order a drink without sounding breathless, clueless, or obtuse. Also without sounding obsequious, purple or clairvoyant. When in doubt, a man panics and orders a Slo Gin Fizz. Because they’re yummy, dammit.

A man welcomes the coming of the apocalypse. It frees him. It allows him to use the Lord’s name in vain because, fuck it, after that thing with that underage stripper that one time and the cheating at Russian roulette he was never going to make it to heaven anyway.

A man writes in short declarative sentences. A man knows that dependent clauses are for pussies. Only the weak need more punctuation than a period. Fuckers.

A man owns tools and knows how to use them. But a real man always abides by common safety precautions including the use of safety goggles. A man puts the tools back where he found them. A man also puts the lotion on its skin. Or else it gets the hose again.

A reciprocating saw, incidentally, doesn’t quite do what its name implies. Still, it’s a very good saw if you’re fitting windows, cutting down saplings or dismembering a body.

A man knows how to eat frisee without it sticking out of his mouth like he’s some kind of latter-day Apatosaurus. Speaking of which, a man enjoys the oeuvre of Judd Apatow. A real man would like to share a turkey sandwich with Judd Apatow. And then maybe a cuddle.

A real man knows the emotional value of some man-on-man spooning. Also possibly man-on-man forking.

A real man is flexible. He can touch his toes and those of others.

A real man will dance, but only to Huey Lewis and the News. Or Zeppelin.

A man shapes his opinions as carefully as he shapes his pubes. A man puts the “man” in “craftsman.” A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition.

Quiet and introspective, boisterous and extroverted, crenulated and caespitose, a man likes to watch stuff. Stuff is what he likes to watch. All kinds of stuff. Anything, really. A real man just really, really likes stuff. This is not so much collection or meditation as obliviation. Men watch stuff and imagine that it’s blowing up. Because if there’s anything a man likes more than the creation of stuff, it’s the destruction. Also the deduction, especially if the man is a tax accountant. Men also enjoy the construction. A man also likes paper. A man refracts vision and gains acuity. But if he’s a Battlestar Galactica fan, the man re-fraks. A man is not ashamed of his Cylon fantasies. In this way, a man is like the Terminator, both captive and free, both man and machine, both artificial and intelligent. You cannot take your eyes off a man when he is like that. You shouldn’t. The hell if you know what he’s thinking, who he is, or if he has his demitasse spoons.

the dearth of cool

Music may indeed soothe the savage beast, but what it does best is separate the cool from the dorks. We judge humans first on their clothing and their hair; our costumes provide a map for what we do, where we live, how much money we make and what we value. But nothing tells us whether someone has that ineffable waft of hip or that damning fug of square like the music that person loves.

The problem is, of course, that as Maxïmo Park tells us, the coastline is always changing. (This sentence was, of course, a multi-part test, like one of those grade school standardized reading comprehension exams. If you know who Maxïmo Park is, you sail past bubble A; if you don’t, you’re screwed. Bubble B then tests how you understand Maxïmo Park. Being British and marginally on trend with post-punk music, you’ll feel one way; being similarly American, you’ll feel another. If you love, love, love Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a kindred cool spirit; if you hate, hate, hate Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a tarnished poseur. And even if you don’t know the band at all just their gratuitous use of umlauts could make you see me as a reborn idiot.) Where you are along the musical vista makes you hear the song differently. It’s a Pavlovian Doppler effect, but with rhythm and harmony and bass. Or, you know, if you’re listening to ambient, not.

odds, no ends

Life has a way of being funny in the way that Benny Hill is funny. Which is to say that it’s less the loopy urbanity of Eddie Izzard, the ironic cultural club sandwich of 30 Rock, the loony absurdity of Monty Python, or even the generic one-size-fits-all misogynist chumminess of any Judd Apatow venture. Life is more funny in the kind of way that makes your head do the befuddled dog tilt at anyone who finds it actually amusing. And recently my life has been a tad on the rotund British dude being chased by a bunch of nubile clothing-reduced lasses, only without the dude, the lasses or the chasing.

A couple of weeks ago, I got rejected from Stanford (once) and the New York Times (twice) and threw myself a pity party to celebrate my blog’s four-year anniversary. The next day I get an email from the agent for that book of corporate erotica I walked away from last year (and I thought I wrote a post on it, but apparently it's apocryphal, the writing that is, not the thought). It looks like I’m going to do it, or it seems like I’m considering it, or at any rate I’m getting a contract for a contract for writing it next week. Which is to say that a contract for a contract is better than no contract at all.

Money is, I’ve discovered through some trials by financial fire, quite nice. Last week I wrote a post about my lamentable finances, and thanks to the several very lovely and terribly generous readers who contributed to my tip jar, I ran flush on the fees and I’m going to be able to groom my dog for the first time in a year. It’s a good thing because his fur is starting to grow algae, like a sloth. He has yet to develop a prehensile digit, but I check his paws regularly. So I thank you, Boswell thanks you, and the groomers thank you. If you were one of the lovely handful who donated, you have been part of this micro stimulus package.

But every in every happy lucre shower a little hobgoblin must fall, and mine is in the form of an unplayable Season 1 Battlestar Galactica DVD set. Apparently, I bought a Hi-Def DVD. I have a Reg-Def DVD player. If you or anyone you know wants a Hi-Def Battlestar Galactica DVD set, unwatched, you’re welcome to it. Email me. It’s free, but laved in shame. I’m sure it’ll play despite the shame.

I’m doubly disappointed about the DVD because I recently decided to relinquish my highly expensive gym membership. I neither could afford it nor could I be bothered to go. The combination of wasted money and wasted opportunity caused me to feel great megatons of guilt, which I treated by sitting on my couch, watching DVDs and eating cookies. About three weeks ago, I took stock of my waste and my waist and started to diet and work out. I’ve lost some weight, which is swell, but I’ve also regained my love of the non-sexual physical activity. Which is a shame because, see above, relinquished membership. My last day is 10 April. I am sad.

The additional byproduct of the working out and the eating right (parenthetically, there is nothing more boring than listening to people recount their diets and physical regimens. I actually feel the inside of my head coalescing like concrete when people do so) is that I have become phenomenally frisky. It’s a problem because I continue to be utterly dateless. I was asked out for drinks by a reader who kindly included the address of his blog. I read parts of the blog, and after feeling my interest noodle into the piqued range, discovered that he has been happily partnered with the only woman whom he could ever imagine spending his life with in this world or in the next and so on to eternity. Which then made me cock my head in the aforementioned confused dog manner. A friend pointed out that men are horny. I rebutted that women were too. It was a conversation ending in impasse.

Which is to say that my life of late has not been bad, just a bit on the odd. Perhaps it’s the vernal equinox. Or perhaps it’s just the ghost of Benny Hill conniving me into dropping my clothes followed by my chasing him around park benches until I look splendid in my panties. As long as he’s laughing, it is not in vain.