It IS a Small World After All.

I had an interesting moment at my work today.

I work a 9-to-5 at a desk in an accounting department. The details of what I actually do are not really important and I don’t like to talk about them too much because I know my name has gotten googled more than once by some of the people my company works with.

Anywhoo, I share an office with a great guy who is about 55 and has a couple college-age kids and our office connects to my accounting department boss’s office. He’s probably about the same age.

Because of the industry we’re in, sometimes we have outside agents drop by to bring in paperwork/ask for money. Well one of those guys happened to drop by today and he was in talking to my accounting department boss (I also have an Operations boss, which is why I keep making that distinction) and I could hear snippets of their conversation over the Prince that was playing Pandora-style in my ears and I realized that I was the only native born American in this situation.

The guy I share an office with is from the Philippines originally, my accounting department boss is Irish and the outside sales guy is from West Africa.

It gave me a moment of pause and my frantic fingers grew less frantic on the keyboard and I just thought about it for a moment.

I am a big fan of this whole melting pot idea and while I come across as cynical and unimpressed all the time, I really am a sap for the whole idea of America. Not the idea that the founding fathers had (do you wanta live in a loose affiliation of agrarian states with a weak centralized government? ‘cause I sure as hell don’t) and not the idea that the Regan-ites had of America as a gleaming beacon of righteousness and not even the idea that John Winthrop had when he imagined a Puritan city upon a hill.

What I like is the idea that America is a place that was built by the people in it, the people that came here to be part of it. And yeah, one can say that America was stolen (which it was) from the native Americans who were here first, but you know what? I know about that whole land-bridge-from-Asia thing, you guys stumbled ass backward onto this continent just like the rest of us.

But am I straying from the point?
Yes, a bit.

The point is that I felt heartened by the fact that three quarters of us in that office at that moment today were from other places and here we all were going about our lives, trying to get through our day, working together (more or less).

So look, I know that this all is starting to sound a little we-are-the-world at the moment, but stick with me …

I like this place, I like this country that lets people in, that lets people adopt it as their own. I like this place. The guy I share an office with is good at his job, he is thoughtful and genuine and he is a good person (probably a better person than me) and his being in this country has made it better. And the same goes for the others in that little accounting department office today.

What a strange and amazing place this is that we have built, this odd country composed entirely of people from someplace else. And you know what? I have done less than those other guys in the office today. I once moved from the middle of California to the bottom of California. These other guys crossed oceans (literally, crossed oceans) to be in that office this afternoon, and they did it because there existed in them some kind of hope, some kind of faith, that this weird place called America maybe belonged to them too.

We have spent about 230 years telling the world what this country is and it turns out, we never really had to. This isn’t a nation that belongs to its history, at least not in the way that other nations do. This is a country that is constantly renewing its history, constantly writing and rewriting it. And I like that about this place.

And look, I live in a part of town where when I drive to work I drive past the guys waiting on the corner hoping to get picked up to mow somebody’s yard, and I grew up in a place that simply couldn’t function without an off-the-books labor-force of people willing to do excrutiating, backbreaking work (you try picking strawberries for a day) for too low pay. So maybe I’m a little more liberal than a lot of others, but I appreciate this country for what it did for me and what it continues to do for others.

I’m not so naïve that I’m ignoring our faults (of which we have very, very, very many) or our awful, nasty, filthy, unforgivable history (or which we have very, very, very much), but just for a moment today I had this interesting moment that made me love this place very much. And I am banking it. So that the next time I see that Arizona is trying to take away the citizenship of naturally born American citizens (children of illegal immigrants) or the next time I see the latent racism of those Obama-as-Hitler bumper stickers (there are a surprisingly large number in Southern California), I will just go to my happy place from this afternoon.

It was quite a happy place.

With all that said, I will now return to my default position: the nihilistic, hyper-ironic mockery of everything (but thanks for listening).

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Jessica Alba Naked.

I just had a revelation!

So Blogger (the free blog site that this here website is built on top of) has this thing where you can go look at how many people have read your blog and what posts and what countries they are from and other fun (but privacy-protecting) stuff like that.

Well! I just realized that when I click on the “stats” thing, it automatically displays statistics for the current week! ONLY THE CURRENT WEEK! That makes me so happy because in the past when I have clicked on this thing (which I try not to do) I thought that it was readership statistics FOREVER!

I know, right?

So this whole time I have been thinking that this whole damn blog has only been looked at by the world like 12 times or whatever, but it turns out that it has been looked at 12 times this week! I dare not click on the button that displays stats for “All Time”.

This is so exciting.

Not that it justifies – in any way, shape or form – the amount of time I spend bent over this computer working on this blog, but it is nice to know that you care, the world.

Oh!

Also, there is a cute little map of the world that lights up when someone from a given country looks at this blog (I’m talking to you, dude in Saudi Arabia who must have accidentally gotten lost here looking for naked pictures of Jessica Alba) so if any of you are going to like China or Siberia soon, check in with us here at Standardkink so that those countries will light up! Also, Australia or Brazil would be good (I’m trying to get as much acreage as I can)!

Holy shit! Somebody in South Korea is on here RIGHT NOW!
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Christmas Haiku!

Well folks, they can’t all be winners.


Some Christmas (Haiku) Thoughts
by james bezerra


Too much Christmas food
makes me feel like a Hobbit:
short, fat and awkward.

I ate pie and cake,
potatoes, candy, beef and
washed it down with wine.

Perhaps this is why
Santa is such a fatty.
Or is he obese?

No one thinks to ask
what Santa wants for Christmas.
Maybe a Bow-Flex?

The man has the time
to shape up, he only works
the one day each year.

That’s a decent gig,
and obviously he’s got
some magic, that helps.

Have we looked into
the source of Santa’s magic?
Is it hope? Joy? Meth?

I don’t really want
an underemployed meth head
in my house at night.


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SpongeBob Square Pants in China.

Thanks Mr. William B. esquire for showing me this.

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Anarchists: Still Willing to Pay Postage.

I know that I shouldn’t be, but I’m kinda tickled by the fact that Anarchists are bombing stuff. I mean, I know … I know, it is not funny that people are getting body parts blown off, but … come on! Anarchists!

Is there anything more patently, self-servingly silly than grown up anarchists?

(There is, BTW: grown up nihilists)

I just wanta be all like, “Hey anarchists! Good job using the postal system to distribute your bombs! Also, rock on with that whole targeting-the-Swiss thing. THAT will teach everybody a lesson! I can totally hear all world governments beginning to topple!”

Catch up on the latest anarchist developments in letter bombs here.

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Yeah, This is Real.

So do you enjoy having your mind blown open?
I’m not a particularly techie guy, but even I found this to be the coolest little bit of technology since they invented that USB incense burner.





Thanks to Mike the Director for sending this.

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New Short Story!

Below is a new piece of writing. It is just an exercise really. Just some words and some ideas and some characters and not a lot of story, all brewed up together. Dark and sweet, like really good chocolate.

Enjoy.




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Red, And.

Red, And.
by james bezerra


She was wearing something gray.

It was a gray skirt that hung loose around her legs, the way that she had them crossed that way. And a ribbed gray top with three-quarter sleeves, not quite as dark as the loose skirt. And red shoes. Red and with a strap over her foot. And with clunky, squarish heels.

And I wanted to breeze up to her table and say, “We should have an affair.”

And she would maybe run her fingers through her straight golden hair and maybe shake it out so it would catch the light coming through the dirty café window like ripples on a sunset ocean, and she would probably just laugh a little and her thick clunky bracelets would rattle a little and she might say something back like, “Do I know you?” But what she might really mean is, “Why not?”

But I don’t breeze up to her just then and I don’t say that to her and she doesn’t laugh and shake her hair and her hair doesn’t catch fire like dust flakes too close to the sun.

But I do look at her and she does see me looking at her and I don’t look away when she sees me. And neither does she. So there we are. She isn’t flirting and neither am I. So here we are. Looking at each other.

And it isn’t lusty or haughty, the way that she’s looking at me.

Maybe just a little haughty.

And I don’t think that there’s any lust in the way that I’m looking at her. Or, at least not too much lust. A little lust is good. What woman who owns shoes like those doesn’t want to get looked at with at least a little bit of lust – be it respectfully looked at – by an attractive stranger.

Though I’m not that attractive.

Attractive enough I guess.

I dress well.

Or try.

I know who makes her shoes, so there is more than just lust to this long look I’m giving her across this café. There’s admiration in it too. And maybe that’s why she is curious. Not quite sure if I’m gay. Not quite sure if I’m looking at the silky fabric of her billowy skirt because I want it or because I want to take it off of her.

The truth is, both.

Really.

I feel like I’m in drag when I’m dressed as a man. Though I am a man. And though I do dress in drag – just a little - it doesn’t feel that way when I do. Usually.

So perhaps she is holding this look this long because she’s trying to define a curious glint in my eye. The way a chef might pause and linger over a brand new flavor. And maybe I’m that new flavor.

She carefully smoothes down the fabric of her skirt along the tops of her thighs, though she doesn’t look down as she’s doing it. I don’t know if this is some kind of calming, self-securing gesture for her, or if it is something for me. Something for me to see, to witness. Some act of innocent self-touching that is otherwise innocuous here in the café. Some quick, secret-code of eroticism that only she and I have the key to; a coded message on a radio band that only we know to listen for.

And I sip the last from my tiny cup of coffee. Espresso, it actually is. I dislike the taste, but enjoy drinking from the tiny cups, so do.

Just like she must actually hate walking in those red shoes, but does.

Finally she smiles a little smile. Just a white flicker of her teeth beneath a tight-lipped smirk. She looks back at her table, back at her friends, who have been talking to her this whole time, unaware that she and I just had a curious moment.

They’re unaware that I just imagined the person who is her and that she just imagined the person who would be me. Her friends are unaware that we just saw each other and mapped one another and assessed one another. And they’re unaware that so many imagined moments just passed between us. But not between us, they passed separately about us. That she wondered how my voice sounds and what my little bit of stubble feels like. On her cheek. And I wondered how the skin of her shoulders feels, what her hands are like. I wondered about talking to her and what I would say, who I would suddenly be once I spoke to her. If I would be funny, if I would be droll. Or maybe I would be serious, calm. Cool. Maybe I would be the man who can wear this suit and inhabit it without trying to. Without knowing that he’s wearing the very smallest of women’s panties under these slacks. Or maybe I would be the man who could do that without wondering what she would think, what she would say when she unzipped these slacks. Maybe I would be the man who became sexier to her simply because I wear them. And maybe she would make a small noise, pull away from our kissing, from my mouth and from my tongue and she would look down at them – the silky red peeking out of these open slacks - and decide that she liked me this way, “Sure,” she might say, and then return her mouth to my mouth and quickly and simply slide her fingers beneath the flimsy red fabric that covers me. Maybe she would feel me and I would feel harder and bigger and more impressive to her because the coarseness of my skin causes a delicious kind of contrast against the feminine silk I wear.

And perhaps – I had thought this about her – my hand might slide up her calf, up her knee, up along the inside of her thigh, my thumb might hook the hem of her skirt and hitch it up, drag it up as my hand slid up along leg, up along that softest part of her thigh, until my fingers were there pressed between her thighs and she might wiggle a little there in the booth where she sat in this café, might wiggle a little so that she could part her thighs a little so that my fingertips could just brush the breath-thin fabric of her own panties. And I might pull her skirt up higher; that light, loose fabric bunching up around her hips and I would see that hers – small and dainty and delicate – were the same color underwear as mine. And I would look at her and she would laugh a little laugh and shake out her straight golden hair and it would sparkle and I would kiss her softly on her neck and she would feel the coarseness of my little bit of stubble on her cheek.

But of course not. This was just what she imagined of me – or, possibly, what I imagined of her – during that long look, before she turned back to her friends.
Before she turned back to the people she actually knew and the life that she actually lived, and thereby closed off all of the possibilities of all the lives that she didn’t lead. And just like that I passed away, passed out beyond some event horizon of her possibility. But maybe, just maybe, I stuck there, ever-expanding along the rim of the black hole of her forsaken possibilities. Stretching like a beam of light toward that dark center, never really disappearing, just slowing and more slowly and more slowly ceasing to exist in any relevant way.

And part of me liked this. About her. About me. About the fact that that long moment of ours would never really cease to exist because it had never really existed in the first place. And the moment of her unzipping me, of seeing me, of accepting me, of liking it, of liking me, of enjoying the red fabric along the back of her hand while my skin was on her fingertips, that moment when she did better than not caring, that moment when she cared and liked it. That moment doesn’t go away for me. We shared that, whether she ever knows it or not.

I replace my empty little espresso cup on its little saucer. I fold up my paper. I fold it in half and put it under my arm. I leave some bills from my pocket on the table. I look at her in the instant before I move toward the door. She sees me but pretends not to. Her lips press into that tight smirk again.

I have to walk past her table to get to the front door. So I walk past her table. The black linen of my suit makes a very satisfying sound as I walk. I push open the door. I like to think that she looks up to watch as I pass through the doorway and away. I don’t look back to find out. I don’t want to betray what we had.



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I Guess These Are Discoveries.

How long, do you think, until The Discovery Channel just throws in the towel and changes its name to “The Rednecks, Sycophants, and Reprobates with Stupidly Dangerous Jobs Channel”?

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Lame Duck Soup.

Lame Duck Soup
by james Bezerra

So
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
went out with a whimper, not a roar.
Tail between its legs,
off to die alone like all cruel creatures do.
Bested – who woulda thunk it? –
by that magnificent mallard
The Lame Duck.
God bless America! And
her wild ability to always do
what’s right by all of god’s creatures.
Eventually.


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Roommate Writing!

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So my badass roommate Eggplant (still test driving blog names for her) totally got herself published! Click on this link to read up on her good works!

The very cool magazine is available in both print version (please buy a copy and help out some struggling awesome-neers), but also in downloadable PDF version.

Please spend some time on this here website and snoop around. These guys are doing impressively good work: Proxart.

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(my roommate's name is Erin, BTW)



*this image is from the esteemed Mathew Billington

Joke Writing is Hard.

Not that long ago I was goaded into coming up with some accountant jokes. I think that we all knew this would be a regrettable endeavor from the outset, but I gave it a shot anyway.

Oh, and before you get all like, “Oh holy hell those aren’t technically even jokes!”, I would just like to say, you try making up some occupation-specific jokes while you’re busy doing other things and let’s see how you do (and don’t try to half-ass it by chosing a funny profession like a clown or a proctologist either).

Here you go:

Joke #1.
How many accountants does it take to change a light bulb?
None, if accountants could work with their hands then they wouldn’t be accountants in the first place. Also, that’s what Maintenance is for.

Joke #2
ACCOUNTANT 1: Hey, do you think I can write off this burnt out light bulb from joke #1 as depreciated inventory?
ACCOUNTANT 2: Sure, if you like prison food.

Joke #3
What’s the difference between an accountant and an abacus?
The abacus probably doesn’t have a drinking problem.

Joke #4
Q: How many accountants can you fit in a phone booth?
A: Technically that would depend on the internal volume of the phone booth and the average weight and height of the accountants you’re trying to put inside of it.


ZING!!

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Found Music.

Today this band/group/music-making organization (I don’t fucking know) popped up on my Pandora and I was quite taken with them in a little-bit-too-much-like-Yanni-for-me-to-be-entirely-comfortable kind of way.

I couldn’t find a way to load the song I liked here on the blog, so click THIS LINK and scroll down the little list of songs until you get to “The Wolf Peach” and then just press play and close your eyes.

It really is quite beautiful.

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(Please Excuse the Obnoxious Amazon Logos Below)

Lately I have been going to the library a lot and I went tonight because it always feels like a candy store. I don’t go in looking for anything. I just go in with one of those salted caramel hot chocolate drinks (a guilty pleasure and the only time I drink hot chocolate) and a big empty hippy bag, and I spend some time wandering around and looking at, and touching, all the books. For me, this is like yoga or sitting in a mountain meadow or some such inanity.

Anyway, I came home with a pretty good haul tonight and I am so excited that I will share some of it with you.


Darkmans by Nicola Barker
I actually am in the process of reading this one and so checked it out again. I’m eight chapters in and have no earthly idea what it is about, but Ms. Barker is a wonderful writer so I don’t really care.


http://www.amazon.com/Poetry-After-9-11-Anthology-Poets/dp/0971865914/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292307379&sr=8-1-fkmr0
Poetry After 9/11: An Anthogy of New York Poets.
Who likes their urban poetry with a little angst, anger and guilty introspection? This guy!


All the World’s A Grave by John Reed
It is a play and basically he takes the big Shakespeare characters and makes them all hang out together in a sort of crappy mishmash of Shakespearian plots. Gertrude marries Macbeth! Iago manipulates Hamlet! Juliet gets her groove back! I so hope this thing is funny.


On Kissing: Travels in an Intimate Landscape by Adrianne Blue
This is some sort of cultural history of the kiss and of kissing. Who did it when and why and what did it mean and how did it get them in trouble. I love reading books that try to rewrite history around one thing (coffee, tea, apples, etc.) so why not one about the better things that we do with our mouths? I’m game (plus it doesn’t hurt that the author has a name that sounds like a dirty French non-de-plume).



This is a graphic novel that imagines Snow White as Scheherazade in 1,001 Arabian Nights, spinning grim stories to keep herself alive (and it has pretty pictures!).



I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes
A kind of tongue-in-cheek reference book for all the things we don’t say anymore. I think ths book is the bee’s knees!



A People’s History of American Empire by Howard Zinn
I’m not really certain, but I’m pretty sure that this is a history of the United States as if it were written as by Chinese propagandists. Umm . . . I will let you know more when I figure it out.


Just so that it doesn’t seem like I’m making myself out to be cooler than I really am, I won’t read all of these cover-to-cover. What I will do is spend some time with each of them and, maybe, see how it goes. See if a little relationship develops there or not; see if we enjoy one another’s company long enough to make it to the end.


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Worst Ever Idea for a Crime-Fighting Duo.

So, admittedly, I have been taking a little breather lately from trying to keep on top of everything that is going on in the world (I figure it is a lame duck Congress and so I’m going to zone out a little before tuning in next year to watch the Republicans ramp up into full 5th-grade-bully mode).

However, I could not help but stumble across this tidbit (which you probably already know about because you’re Twitter pals with Sarah Palin [ironically, I hope?]), but apparently TLC forced some sort of crossover episode wherein Kate Gosselin and her brood trekked up to Alaska to go camping with Palin’s clan of white trash Visogoths (I call them that because it is funny and accurate, not because it is mean. But, you know, whatever.).

Apparently Palin - employing the winning subtly and twitchy wink that launched a million vigara-ections at your local gun club - tried to hold up Gosselin as an example of liberal/Hollywood weakness and dysfunction (Really, Sarah? Does you illegitimate grandson dance too?). Well, I will save all the bile and vitriol for another time, but here is a link to a quick article about the whole thing:

Palin & Gosslin Together, Finally; Two Other Horsemen Running Late, Apparently.


You know, Thumper’s mother told us that if you can’t say something nice, then you shouldn’t say anything at all. So I will now commence saying nothing …

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Ways in Which I Am Considerate.

Text message I just sent to my roommate Bouvardia (still test driving blog names for her):

Hey do you want me to drink your red wine for you before it goes bad?

I know, I’m the considerate roommate that you always wished you had.*






*If ever it seems like half the crap on this blog is just me finding myself entertaining, that’s probably because that’s what it really is. I mean, this is A BLOG after all. Anybody who chooses to hemorrhage their psyche all over the internets for fun probably does it because they find themselves fascinating already..
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Fear & Loathing in Cyberspace: New Poems.

What’s scarier than winged monkeys?

What’s worse than a TSA screener with cold hands?

What’s more horrific than the presidency of George W. Bush?

Only one thing: my new poetry.

Below please find poems about the lying nature of numbers, that time Frank Zappa jumped bail, and things that don’t rhyme with TRON.

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Sickness and Resurrection in 102 Syllables.

Sickness and Resurrection in 102 Syllables.
by james bezerra

Afflicted! Sickness!
Head cold: cough, sneezing. No good.
Please help me DayQuill!

Sinus cavities
are painful and disgusting.
Phlegm is my export.

My breathing labored.
My chest wheezy like dying
old accordions.

My energy sapped.
The end of this sickness seems
very far away.

But I know one day
I shall leap and cheer again.
But when will that be?

Perhaps tomorrow
I will wake and breathe freely
My resurrection!

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Never Trust A Number.

Never Trust A Number.
by james bezerra

Oh numbers!
Why do people trust you so?
You’re not so much better than letters!

Though your squiggles tend to be more curvaceous.
And the gentle, sumptuous slopes of all your zeros and eights are positively lascivious.
But why do people trust 3,582,676 to be real,
yet scoff at the words like appendectomy?

Remove the context and the meaning
and all you numbers are just interchangeable broken loops!
Letters at least work together in teams and -
like the Amish raising a barn -
build a whole.

Change a letter and a word may become useless:
No one deposits money in a cank.
Two people never fall in kove.
No one prays to Sod.

This is not so with you cetaceous numbers.
3,582,676 is almost identical to 3,582,675.
Who would even notice the difference?
You devious numbers, you!

You each and always stubbornly retain your own value.
8 is always 8.
800 is just 8 one hundreds.
8,000 is just 8 one thousands.
I am not fooled!

If not for those enabling - but oh so plump - zeros none of you would
ever be good
for anything;
so insistent are you upon your own prideful importance.
Upon your own singular and specific amount.

I don’t trust or like you: the number 360.
Yet without you, we could not have words like
cathedral or circle or globe
and I do like those words.

I don’t like or trust you: the number 0.
And when some
say that you’re not a number at all, but
merely a concept,
I trust you even less.
And I resent that I have to refer to your amount in plural:
I have zero turnips . . .
I have zero lovers . . .
Because it makes me think you’re mocking me.
And it costs me an extra s.

Oh numbers!
Don’t act so high
and mighty just because
you form the fundamental basis of all math and science
and have an intrinsic universal meaning that
exists beyond nature
and time (unlike
words like bright or cold or lieutenant).
You’re not so special!

And I think that
people only accept and trust
your tyranny because
they are afraid of the loss of you.
Afraid that, if you’re angered, there will
be fewer and few of you
in their savings accounts,
in their blood platelet count,
or in their IQ.

I don’t need you! And
I don’t trust you, you wily numbers!
I don’t like you: the number 42.
For my part,
I will make due with forty-two.


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Frustration.

Frustration.
by james bezerra

How come IRON MAIDEN doesn’t rhyme with TRON?
And how could I not have realized that
before spending all of his time
trying to write
a science-fiction-rock-opera-poem?

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Mail Room Poets.

Mail Room Poets.
by james bezerra

Learn-ed men of the 19th Century and prior
were often muli-talented masters of many disciplines.

They were:
naturalists and statesmen,
or
lawyers and inventors
or
barristers and botanists
or
scriveners and astronomers.

Less so today.
With the notable exceptions of
rapper/actors,
writer/directors,
director/producers,
etc.
It seems that now
to be a man of mixed interests, one
must be
entertaining too.

Why have our
modern times driven
to extinction all the pirate/cartographers?
The physicist/patent clerks?
The ambulance driver/novelists?
The savior/carpenters?

Has our understanding of
identity
become this
narrow so
that it can
fit on a business card?
Or so Google
isn’t confused when trying to categorize solider/poets?

Where have they all gone?
The kung fu monks?
The mail room poets?
The furniture-selling mob bosses?
The assassin priests?
The homeless musical savants?
The hookers with hearts of gold?

Have they just gone underground?
Or were they always?
Are they still where they always were?
Only maybe even more so?

They, we, us, them,
are still toiling away. Blogging at:
ninja accountant DOT com
Or maybe
tweeting feverishly as:
Part-time CPA and full-time sex goddess.

Perhaps we are all of many natures.
Perhaps that’s too confusing to make a reality show out of though.
Perhaps we should just make our business cards
BIGGER!

Perhaps they should be
the size of a Publishers Clearing House check!
The size of a cartoon’s winning lotto ticket!

Instead of fitting
inside of our wallets,
they would/could – instead -
hold all the details of our souls;
all the minutia of our minds;
all of the contents of our hearts.

And there for
all to see
would be
the nearly un-bordered scrawl of
our passions,
the unconfined rigor of our minds,
the multiplexity of our interests.

Yours might
read:
music lover, dog catcher, pie baker, speaker of tongues, finder of lost keys, finder of lost souls, lover, ninja, sex goddess, inventor, pirate cartographer, mail room poet.

And all of that would be okay.

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Worst Limerick Ever.

Worst Limerick Ever.
by james bezerra

There once was a band called ABBA
that got in a bar fight with Frank Zappa.
The cops took them all to jail,
but soon after they all jumped bail
and now live happily together in Guatemala.

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Probably an Unhealthy Emotional State.

Probably an Unhealthy Emotional State.
by james bezerra

If you painted your car like a rainbow,
I would still go with you to that death metal concert.

If you filled the house with wild bees,
I would still go naked to bed with you.

If you carved your name into my arm,
I would still just lay here with you, charmed.

If you ate my heart with fava beans,
I would still watch your very worst movies.

If you planted your garden with all the things that I’m allergic to,
I would still help you till the soil.

If you lit my hair on fire,
I would still be happy just to burn for you.

If you called me the worst things that you could think of,
I would still let you to stay.

If you walked away,
I would still let you.

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Am Sick.

So I’m sick.

But not just in the prurient way that you’re thinking right now.

I mean that I’m actually and physically ill. This is no small thing for me to admit. Seldom do I give up a fight that easily. And let me tell you, I fought this one pretty hard. I have felt this phlegmy specter lurking for a while now, yet I refused to concede!

Today however, I just deteriorated into a sick, sneez-y, coughing failure.

So I have given up. I have gotten some meds and had some soup and I see some tea in the near future.

The only reason that any of this is even remotely blog worthy is because I just realized that this is the first time I have been super bad awful sick since I have been single. And let me tell you, it is positively shocking to me that I don’t have anyone who I can force to pretend to care about how awful I feel right now.

I know that sounds all whiney and everything, but please believe that that isn’t the point of this. I’m just thinking out loud right now and I’m realizing that I don’t know if I have ever actually been single and sick all at the same time.

This totally blows!

How the hell do all you people go through life like this? It’s miserable.

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*** Breaking Roommate News ***

My roommate Fancy Star Fairy (still test driving blog names for her) has started doing a mocking impression of me that basically involves a deep voice that sounds nothing like me.

Also, she made a big deal about how Mark Walberg totally gets it on with Amy Adams in some new movie and she watched the trailer 14 times because she knows that:

1) I adore Amy Adams, and

2) I detest Mark Walberg

Also, she just put my glass of wine on the top of a bookshelf that I am barely tall enough to get it down from.

I’m not complaining or anything, I guess.


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Postsecret.

Postsecret.com, still the very best place on the whole internets.




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Some 100% True-ish Facts.

All of these things are either 100% true, or less than 100% true.

1. When Sputnik was launched in 1957 it contained a single vial of Joseph Stalin’s semen. It is still circling the Earth, Sputnik and the semen.

2. While filming the film “Accepted”, Justin Long and Blake Lively had a tryst that is the basis for the screenplay “Gossip Boy” currently being shopped by Jonah Hill.

3. General Douglas MacArthur practiced yoga.

4. The modern necktie derives from neckerchiefs worn by Croatian mercenaries.

5. Robert F. Kennedy spoke German very, very poorly. His German friends made fun of him behind his back, and then felt bad about it later.

6. The baseball card of Moe Berg is displayed at the CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia because in addition to being a major league shortstop in the 1930s, he also spoke ten languages and spied for the OSS.

7. Fans and advocates of the textile pattern Hounds Tooth generally and vehemently deny that it is derived from Glen Urquhart plaid.

8. I once accidently bumped elbows with Amanda Bynes at the Arclight in Hollywood.

9. Until the age of 14 author Sir Terry Pratchett was raised as a girl.

10. There has never actually been 400,000 of anything. There has been more and there has been less, but there has never been exactly 400,000 of anything (I learned this at the secret bi-monthly meeting of bad-ass accountants, a members only club).

11. At the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, racist epithets are shouted at you (via recording) as you walk through the entryway. This is actually a prank and not officially part of the museum experience.

12. Standard Memory Foam absorbs particles of your dreams.

13. 40% of the porn viewed online every day is accessed by women.

14. Steve Jobs once met Osama bin Laden in Dubai.

15. Conan O’Brien was once stalked by a priest from the Archdiocese of Boston.

16. American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Don DeLillo occasionally writes commercials for Chivas 18. He refuses to be credited for this.

17. Director Steven Soderbergh is a practicing Episcopalian.

18. SCUBA is an acronym that stands for Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array.

19. As a teenager, Harrison Ford dated his best friend’s sister.

20. Three different men have been married to Whoopi Goldberg.

21. William Shakespeare invented the word ‘submerge’.



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Oddly Enough: Even Odder Than Normal.

One of my favorite places to troll of the Internet is the Oddly Enough section of Reuters. Normally I post links to a couple of stories, but today the good folks over at Reuters have totally outdone themselves! I have never seen a collection of stories this awesome and random. SO here is the link to the whole page.

Headlines include:

Vending machine recommends drinks to buyers

Exorcists wanted: apply to Catholic Church

Amazon pulls book on pedophilia after complaints

So fetch.

NaNoWriMo: Notes.

So I have been doing this NaNoWriMo thing (the goal of which is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month). I am failing at it pretty miserably because I just haven’t been able to write every single day, but I keep plugging away at it.

Below is a snippet that I wrote the other day. One of the characters is a bit self-destructive, but he has rationalized it into a philosophy rather than dealing with it. He is a fun character to write and so sometimes he gets to speak in first person.


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NaNoWriMo: A Brief Excerpt.

8. Inherent
The thing that you gotta know is that I don’t go looking for trouble.
Although, that’s not true. I totally go looking for it. This nose has been broken more than once. I don’t particularly like the violence-y parts of trouble, but they seem to come with the territory. I feel about them the way that Lewis and Clark must have felt about trees.

It just seems to me that life doesn’t quite sizzle right unless something is a little bit off.

You need to remember that everything that makes the world go is inherently dangerous. Cooking – with its heat and knives and meat – is always an inherently violent act. The electricity that powers your coffee pot is also some of the most dangerous rage that the entire universe has to offer. Given the chance, your cats will eat you when you die.

The world we live in and the lives we lead exist on the very fringe of chaos all the time. We do everything that we possibly can do to conceal and control it, we invents gods and religions and rules and laws and street signs. We require you to wear your seatbelt, and while that may save you from the giant, crunching, glass-spattering, calamitous chaos when it comes; it doesn’t stop the chaos from coming. So I just make due without the seatbelt.
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Loneliness, and Other SAT Questions.

I have felt like crap lately. I have been hovering near the edge of sick for over a week, but I never quite seem to get there, plus I have not been living very healthy (or healthily) lately, plus I felt really and truly lonely the other day for the first time in a really long time. Like massively and tragically ALONE, like in a write-a-poem-about-it-and-then-stick-your-head-in-the-oven kind of way.

Now that’s hyperbole, of course, but … holy shit! Loneliness totally blows.

Now I have some great friends and a super awesome roommate and there are people in my life whom I adore, so I’m not trying to botch and whine about how awful things are. I am just taking a little stock of things. And so I am saying: I felt really lonely the other day.

And if you’re familiar with this sort of thing, then you probably know what I felt. For those of you who aren’t, we will restate it like an old school SAT (because nothing is more fun than the SATs!):

If boredom is being cold, then loneliness if hypothermia.

Or, maybe, that doesn’t really work.

How about:

Disneyland is to happiness as the dark side of the moon is to loneliness.

Does that one even make sense?

How about:

Writing blog posts about loneliness is to blog readership as ants are to a picnic.

Yeah, that one kinda works.

I got so bored and lonely I was reading old emails from my Ex (from the happier times, obviously) but that lead inexorably to the more recent and unpleasant emails and so I just went on this weird bender of reliving a whole lot of emotions I could have done without in the first place.

BTW, NEVER READ OLD EMAILS. Ever. It is worse than going through old pictures.

Anywhoo, I know that my life is not all that bad. In fact, it isn’t bad at all. Sure, I don’t have enough money and I don’t have any of the professional success I had hoped to have by this point in my life, but I do have good days. In fact, sometimes I have really good days. Recently I spent hours and hours talking to a charming and delightful friend of mine and we just talked, about all kinds of things. And if you know me at all (or have learned a little about me by reading this blog) you know that I LOVE TALKING and I am interested in everything. So sometimes just getting to cut out all of the background chatter of the world and just talk is quite nice.

Also, I have been and done all sorts of awesomeness lately. I went to an art show/bar/folk band concert and I got to look like a dirty hipster. If you ever have the chance, check out
The Airliner in Lincoln Heights.

I also went to one of the coolest/weirdest events of my life recently: a big LA thrift store opens up their warehouse once a month and for a $10 cover, there’s an open bar and bands and you get to rummage through bins of clothes and then buy them BY THE POUND! Yes, buy clothes by the pound. (That was at a place called The Boogie Den. I would give you the link, but their site always crashes my computer.) I am now the owner of a strange red leather jacket that is so cool I’m a little afraid of it.

I finally went to this thing called First Friday that they do down in Abbot Kinney in Venice. On the first Friday of the month the street are lines with some of LA’s finest gourmet food truck and you get to spend hours and hours wandering from one to the other and eating. I had some cheeseburger sushi, among other delicacies.

The point of this post – in so far as these things ever really have a point – is just to step back and take a look at life and size it up and down and make it clear to myself that I should stop complaining so much, which I now realize, I should.

Now I just feel sort of silly about having written this whole thing.

Well, whatever, it is really hard to generate content!

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Only Betty White Can Stop Forest Fires.

So you’re cool and hip and with it, so you probably already know about this, but apparently Betty White is now a park ranger?



Is there anyone who doesn't just love her?


Read all about it: Betty White Honorary Forest Ranger.


P.S. I stop reading the news for like two days and everything awesome happens!

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The Botany of Desire.

If you like having your socks blown off by unadulterated fascination, then have I got a movie for you!

The Botany of Desire.

It is probably the most interesting documentary I have seen in ages. Basically it explores the relationship between plants and animals by concentrating on the various ways that people and plants have influenced one another throughout history.

It concentrates specifically on potatoes, tulips, marijuana and apples.

I know that you’re thinking, “Um, Jamie, why do you want me to watch a movie about plants?”

I get it, but just watch the first ten minutes; if you can turn it off after that I will personally mail you a potato.


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Most Boring and Sorry.

Wow! It has been almost a week since I posted anything.

I’m sorry dear blog.

I have been a little out of sorts lately. Plus I have bee doing a lot of NaNoWriMo writing, so that pulls me away from you.

You know, one time my friend The Director and I were trying to come up with funny things to say about the hypothetical Most Boring Man Alive and one of the things we came up with was: he has a blog, with three posts on it. And two of them are aplologies for not posting more.

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Whole New Kinds of Bad Poetry!

So I got tired of haikus today and tried my hand at writing some limericks. I couldn’t exactly remember what a limerick is, but I have two of them memorized, so I typed them out and discovered it is just an A-A-B-B-A rhyme scheme. And I was all like, “That’s not hard at all!”

So below are my first three attempts ever at the writing of limericks.

Enjoy!

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Limericks 1,2 and 3!

I met a guy who was no fun.
He was mugging me with a gun.
He said he’d fill me up with lead,
so much so that I would simply be dead.
I gave him my cash and off he went in a run.


Billy went to New York,
hoping to hit it big as a finance dork,
but along came The Recession
and down went his profession,
so now he can’t even find work.


If California had legalized Weed
our lives would have all changed speed.
Because a man who is high relaxes
and the State would’ve made bank on the taxes,
but the voters decided that’s not what we need.

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New Haiku.

That secret feeling
that prevents you from crying.
That is happiness.

It is quite sad that
your happiness is only
the lack of sadness.

However, that can
be altered, fixed, corrected
one day at a time.




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NaNoWriMo, Days 2 & 3: 4,469 Words.

3. Kinetic

These are things about Theroux that are true.

His girlfriend did leave him.
His cat did die. More on those things later.
He once had a beard in college, until he discovered that college girls don’t actually like that sort of thing.
He used to love taking apart telephones, not to better understand how they worked, but just because he liked doing it.
These are words and phrases that people have used to describe him: kinetic, frantic, tilt-a-whirl, annoying, asshole, selfish, brilliant, wonderful, muppet-like, ergotic, awful, fearsome, lame, dynamic. Odd.
Even when his life was on the rails they used to say that he was strange. This is an actual conversation about him that took place once:
PERSON 1: Have you met that Theroux guy?
PERSON 2: Throw? What?
PERSON 1: Theroux.PERSON 2: I don’t know what you’re saying right now.
PERSON 1: Thuuuur – oh.
PERSON2: Oh that guy. He’s fucking weird.
There are a few people who know him well and they say to each other – when the subject comes up – that it is not so much that he suffered some sort of nervous breakdown when Olivia – that was her name – left, but rather that he was finally given the perfect excuse to have a nervous breakdown. It was as if he had always been waiting for the perfect convergence of events that would allow him to shake off life and embrace some sort of chaos. “He’s a pistol,” his mother used to say to people.
This is something about him that is true. He is, in fact, a pistol.



4. Preamble
The 1,784 words that preceded this sentence were entirely preamble.

The story is about to begin.

It is kinda of love story (because every story really is). It is kinda the story about the assassination of a president. It is also kinda a dirty, sweaty story about sex and the things that people really want.

This is how it will probably end:

Theroux clutched his hands against the hole in his chest, looking down to see that the blood – his blood – was forcing its way out between his fingers, that it was coating his hands, that it was flowing down the once-white tuxedo shirt, that it was covering his pants as he slumped against the hard concrete of the wall. He looked around him and saw that the blood – his blood – was forming a red puddle on the floor and that he was exactly at the center of it. He watched the blood – his blood – as it spread with the mindless insistence of a rising tide across the floor.

Somewhere, it seemed distantly, he heard footsteps nearing him, and then he saw – he couldn’t raise his head up – he saw just her shoes. Black, sexy, sharp-heeled, she always had the best shoes. He saw just her shoes.

She didn’t say anything to him.

Next, he only heard the first half of the gunshot.

But it might also end like this:

He leaned in close to Olivia’s perfectly shaped ear. He was behind her and his skin remembered hers and a wickly perfect sort of recognition occurred between their bodies. Flesh drawn to flesh by some physical memory of past fucks. The curves and edges of their bodies fitted into on another while his arms wrapped around her and his fingers slipped ghostly and barely touching, down the whole length of her, parting her. Touching her just there.

And he leaned in close to her perfectly shaped ear and he whispered to her, into her, just barely letting the words leave his mouth, barely allowing them to ripple in the air, he whispered to her, “This is where I belong” and it was true.

But it is impossible to know right now how it will end. Everything – right now - is possibility and there is nothing which isn’t.
There will, however, most certainly be an assassinated president and something kinda like a love story.

Here is how those things start.

5. Resolute
A copy of the President’s dreams hit the internet and went viral in less than ten minutes. At first, no one knew if they were legit, but everyone wanted them to be.

The images were cloudy, like watching television through the rain. That was to be expected - the tech-dorks of the internet said on their forums - because whoever did it was sourcing them out of the air. If the dreams had been recorded by a deck hooked up to a direct tap pressed against the President’s head, the resolution and general quality would have been much high.

No, the tech dorks said, someone did this from a distance, with a tap that was professionally calibrated to the level of sub-atomic particles. Probably - they said - it was fitted with an IR laser and it picked up the fizz of the President’s dreams as vibrations against a window. They said that who ever did it would have had to spend weeks editing down through all the ambient clutter - people hundreds of yards away breathing, a bug fidgeting, carpet fibers expanding and contracting with temperature variations - in order to isolate the particles of free energy that leaked out of the President’s brain. They said that it was a project of startling ambition and stellar execution. They were correct about that. They were not correct about anything else.

But no one knew who had done it.

The FBI went looking though. The Department of Homeland Security threw a quiet, shadowy net over the whole dream tapping industry. People got questioned at night. Websites got shut down, server banks got raided, but even the bulk and power of the government of the United States of America was unable to stop the viral outbreak of dreams along the digital synapses of the internet. So the President’s dreams were out there, in the world, for everyone to see, view, and comment on. Whole strange wikis were dedicated to analyzing them, scores of thesis would be dedicated to the unfolding cultural episode; to its meaning. Discussions permeated the very fabric of American life. Every friend and coworker and acquaintance had a theory about the images, the point of hacking dreams, the political motivation behind it. Hundreds of parodies and recreations were uploaded to Youtube, Youporn, Funnyordie.

The President said little publicly about it.

At first his Press Secretary, Elliot Pail Bayles, denied that the dreams were real. An adversarial press pool reporter from the Boston Herald lured him into a lengthy discussion or whether or not dreams are real at all, or can be. It ramped up into a semantic debate on the meaning of the word ‘dream’. The discussion ranged from the metaphor of dreams to the metaphor of the word ‘dream’ and what it this Presidental dream stealing might mean about the relationships that Americans have to their ‘dreams’. Bayles a former communications and media professor at the University of Chicago and then Pepperdine – waxed poetic and almost convulsively heartfelt for fifteen minutes about the role of dreams in American life and how foundational they have always been to fundamental American identity.

When he was done, there was an eerie quite in the White House Press Room. A strange and almost embarrassed sense of quiet was heavy in the room. Bayles seemed to return to earth and he cleared his throat self-consciously. The press pool reporters – being journalists – were not inclided to believe in anything, least of all things that other people believed in. They looked at him. A few sighed and clicked their pens.

Bayles smoothed his tie down, adjusted his rimless eye glasses. He smoothed down his tie again. “Yes, well. The point is that what is circulating on the internet is not real.”

Later that very same day, Bayles was called into the Oval Office. Other members of the senior staff her present, including Kefauver the White House Chief of Staff. Kefauver was forty-one, but had always looked forty-one, so in a way he was in the prime of his life. His widow’s peaks were high, his hair shaved down ultra-short. It was said that he had the sexiest of any White House Chief of staff in all of American history. Secretly, he always knew that this was true. He was respected and liked by many. Respected and hated by some. Women wanted him, men wanted to be him, that sort of thing, which was impressive because he was less than six feet tall and had looked forty-one his entire life.

He was sitting on the front corner of the President’s desk. The President was sitting behind the desk. The others were arrayed around the room. Kefauver was drinking bourbon on the rocks. An extra one was sitting on the President’s desk. Kefauver picked it up and held it out to Bayles, who took it and nodded solemnly.

Kefauver said, “Today, that was the strangest fucking press conference that I have ever seen in my life. And I have had a very interesting life.”

“I let it get away from me,” Bayles said.

“I think that you got away from it, but that’s not the problem. In fact, it might even be the opposite of a problem . . . “

“A good thing? Bayles asked.

“Yes,” Kefauver said, “that would, in fact, be the opposite of a problem.”

“How?”

Kefauver took a big pull off his glass and stood up so that he could pace. He paced a lot. He was very active when he thought. “I have been talking to the President,” he was addressing the entire collected senior staff in the room now, “and he feels that we should take ownership of this. The smokescreen of denial is eventually going to dissipate and they will be able to see a lie for a lie and call it a lie, or we just own up to it, Yes that is a copy of one of the President’s dream. No, we don’t know who stole it and we don’t know why. And yes, we are actively treating it as an issue of national security. The President wants us to be clear and concise from now on . . . want you to pay special attention to that one word Professor Bayles. Concise. I want nothing but artful concision to come out of your mouth from now on. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

Kefauver looked to the President, who just nodded.

Bayles took a delicate sip of his bourbon.

Kefauver looked over his assembled staff the way that a shepherd surveys his flock, with tenderness and concern, but also with the knowledge that they are his work. “Anything else?”

Bayles smoothed down his tie, “Sir,” he said toward the President, “what would you like me to say when I am asked about the . . . nature of the dream?”

Kefauver didn’t look at the President, not directly, and neither did anyone else. Just Bayles.

The President inhaled through his nose, more than a little tired. He leaned back in his chair, away from the desk, which was made from timbers recovered from the sunken HMS Resolute and given to the White House as a gift by Queen Elizabeth II. Many Presidents had used that desk. Many Presidents had leaned back away from it in exactly this way.

“Hmmmm,” the President said.

6. Confabulation

The President was an unlikely in many ways.

He spoke well but seldom.

He voice was low, almost on the decibel of a whisper, but he never whispered.

During the campaign, he was often called ‘joyless’.

That is not precisely true.

But it is true enough.

He is not a man given to joy. He is not a man who gives himself over to joy.

He is not a man who gives himself over to much of anything.

However, he is not without feeling. He is not without emotion or empathy. He is just not a man who expresses these things often.

Historians were saying on the very night of the election that he would never have gotten close to the White House had not been for a perfect storm of random and unlikely events.

Though, in truth, the events were not the least bit random or unlikely.

He was a thin, narrow, wire figure of a man, but did not ever seem that way to the people who had been in his presence. Strangely - when polled - American men consistently estimated his weight to be 15 to 20 pounds more than it actually was. His face was thin to the point of being gaunt. Days after his election, the Iranian state-run newspaper The Kayhan Daily ran a caricature of him as a Holocaust survivor, in striped outfit, standing near barbed wire. The point of the cartoon was only to poke fun at his weight. It literally did not even imply that he was a Zionist provocateur. Incidentally, it still stands as the only time that any Iranian state-run newspaper has ever been allowed to even tacitly acknowledge that the Holocaust may have actually occurred.

This is not unusual for him.

In some preternatural way he consistently conflates ideology by forcing it
to bend its orbit around him.

Additionally, he had never wanted to be President any more than any other American does. All Americans want to be president a little bit. His degree from Brown was in Political Science, but as a young man he had worked as a music industry A & R man. In four years, the bands he scouted collected 28 Grammys. At the formerly small and formerly unknown Confabulation Records, they took to adoringly calling him The Mint, because of all the money he made them.

He found and rep-ed the new vanguard of bands. Bands like Sonic Death Monkey, Hypothetical Apostrophe, Kathleen Turner Overdrive, The Invisible Band and The Gutters.

These were to become seminal bands.

These were to become legends.

A writer for Rolling Stone once said of him, ‘… he is an unlikely, but none the less, mad phonic prophet. A man who has nearly singlehandedly altered the course of twenty-first century music without ever playing an instrument or writing a single lyric.’

Always a subtle man, he didn’t spend his money on much of anything - except for the simple, slim, understated three-piece black suits that would later become his public signature – so he began donating it. To this cause, to that one; whales, gays, illegals, justice, fairness. In this way he was still fulfilling the ideological proclivities that had pushed him toward political science in the first place.

As time went on, his donations became more and more specific, until finally he was giving directly to individual candidates and his money bought him serious face time with them, and though he did not say much, what he did say often proved valuable. And so those very same candidates tended to accept him as a confidant. And soon he was a political consiliere on both coasts and numerous places in between.

Those who knew or noticed things slowly became aware of the gravity of his presence, and it was always there: a Congressional race in Idaho, a governor’s race in Pennsylvania, a school board election in New Hampshire, a mayor’s race in Fresno. Not yet a kingmaker, but a puppet master of some kind.

In an editorial for NEWSWEEK magazine, Fareed Zakaria – widely accepted as one of the smartest Americans ever to have lived – compared his quiet and ghostly influence to that of the infamous but phantasmal arms dealer Viktor Bout, “Both wield a sort of nebulous power and authority over the events of their particular spheres. There was a time when no government on the entire continent of Africa existed outside of Bout’s violent orbit. And there is a time – it is now – when there’s no political moment or movement which is not somehow actively absorbed in, or at least passively and cautiously aware of, him.”

In his autobiography, five star general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Thomas Carlyle wrote of him, “Not being particularly political – as I had spent most of my life on a boat of one size or another - I had never heard of the man until I was told one day that I had an appointment with him, on a Tuesday no less. I remember that I called an old friend at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to ask who the hell this guy was. My friend told me - and I will never forget this – my friend told me, ‘He’s a civilian operator. He is known for getting exactly what he wants by saying exactly nothing. He waits for you to talk until you agree with him. He’s frightening, but you won’t realize it at the time.’

Carlyle went on to write, “When I met him he was wearing one of those black suits, with a white shirt and a black tie. The kind of thing that he always wears, but I didn’t know that then. We shook hands and he was very polite. He thanked me for taking the meeting. I asked him how he got onto my schedule and I don’t think that he ever actually answered that question, but about ninety minutes later I left that meeting with the germ of an idea and that idea would later grow into our revamped defense policy toward East Asia.”

( . . . more tomorrow . . .)

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Sad/True.

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Not on My Watch.

Iranian Newspaper makes fun of Carla Bruni!

(Actually they call her a prostitute.)

Nobody makes fun of Carla Bruni on my watch. No body.



Read it up: State-run Iranian newspaper heaps more scorn on French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.



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NaNoWriMo: Day One.

So we will begin this month with a small bit of failure. I started my NaNoWriMo novel today. The goal is 50,000 words in a month and that breaks down to 1,667 a day. Well, I am 151 words short, but I need desperately to go to sleep. So please enjoy my first 1,516 words. And please remember that the purpose of this month-long exercise is not quality, but only quantity.

Please enjoy making fun of this undiluted, raw bit of writing.


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NaNoWriMo: 1,516 words.

Luxuriate.
It is the word that hits his cell.

He gets a new word everyday. Pops up on his email and the cell titters off a pleasant, ping ping.

Some days it’s like the words are psychic. Other times they are smirkingly gloating, as if to say, look what we got you into.

Today, right now, this morning, the word is just descriptive.

He’s in bed.

A bed.
It isn’t his bed, but it is luxurious and he is luxuriating in it.

Egyptian cotton sheets with a threat count higher than he can count and that feeling of everything right now if just fine and dandy and don’t you dare think about getting up coming up from every little bit of his body.

His body, under the sheets, is thin, naked and purged of all intensity.

He is still on his back, holding the cell over him and looking at the word:

lux•u•ri•ate
intr.v. lux•u•ri•at•ed, lux•u•ri•at•ing, lux•u•ri•ates
1. To take luxurious pleasure; indulge oneself.
2. To proliferate.
3. To grow profusely; thrive.

He grins a little, with just the corners of his mouth.

Then there is a knock at the door. Sudden, hard, demanding, accusatory.

He’s up, out of bed, naked, leaping off the bed – startled – through the air just a little, landing near his pants, which he is one leg into by the time the second shuttering of knocking comes. It is only knock-knock-knock but sounds like THUNDER!-BOOM!-TERROR!

This is not his room. Not technically. Technically it belongs to the guy whose credit card’s magnetic strip slipped gracefully and inoffensively through the card reader at the front desk the night before. That guy’s name is Connor Bright and his credit score is impeccable, better than an anal retentive’s bathroom. Cleaner than the cafeteria at the CDC.

The guy sticking his other leg into his black slacks right and shoving his boxers in his pocket, this is not Connor Bright. This is Theroux.

More knocking, sounds like CLANG-SHATTER-DEATH.

“Just a MINUTE!” He hollers back, his voice an octave too high.

Theroux is usually much cooler than this.

He looks straight down at the coffee table and the gun setting on it. Cool, deliberate plastic and porcelain. Squareish and always a bit too reserved. He sighs and picks it up with his hand; his fingers always feel like they’re trespassing, like it’s the skin of a sleeping woman who doesn’t like him.

Steps to the hotel phone on the nightstand. He carefully unclips the cord from the backside of it. Sets the phone on the bed. Tucks the pistol into his pocket.

More knocking, angry now FIRE! BRIMSTONE! DAMNATION!

Theroux grabs the desk chair. It is made of something like wood. He picks it up by the back, steps back and then charges forward with a wide swing at the window. The square legs collide with the glass and there’s a shattering and a crack. The legs splinter and explode and a wide spider web of broken blooms out across the thick glass.

He drops the shattered chair and looks at the only-partially-shattered window.

“Well fuck me,” he says.

There is no knocking on the door anymore, because the security suits have given up and plugged a master key card into the slot. The door bangs open against the wishbone-shaped bar lock

“Security . . !” One of them bellows and you can tell that he always wanted to be a SWAT cop and bellow SWAT! into the air just before battering ramming a door to splinters.

Theroux grabs the unhooked phone and hops up on the bed. He clutches the phone to his chest. “You’ll never take me alive!” he shouts for fun. He levels the gun at the window, thumbs the safety and pulls the trigger, three times BLAST! BLAST! BLAST!
The window glass blows outward, a million tiny shards of shimmering sharp danger flittering out and then down.

The security suits get to do what they have always wanted to do, and burst through the door, ripping the lock off of the frame. The three suits barrel into the room in one solid mass, their tazers and telescoping truncheons at the ready. They charge first at the window to peer out, and only then do they turn to see him on the bed above them, gun staring them down like an angry Old Testament god.

“Gentleman,” Theroux says, “I will simply and plainly murder each of you. So right now toss your weapons and walkies and cell phones out the window. Right now please.”

They are big and begrudging but not bulletproof.

Theroux knods toward the window and they huff and puff but step toward it.

“Yes yes, right out the window.”

Out go the truncheons and tazers and radios and earpieces and cell phones.

Theroux is pleased with how well this is going. “Now your pants please. All of you. Followed by your jackets and then everything else that you’re wearing.”

The security suits look at each other.

“Yes yes,” Theroux says, “now now.”

The three of them simply do not want to, so Theroux tilts the gun down and fires one into the coffee table, which cracks and shakes.

Belt buckles are quickly undone. Out the window go jackets, pants, shoes, shirts, socks, regrettable underwear, until there are three totally nude men in Connor Bright’s hotel room.

“Good work!” Theroux yells. He hops down off the bed, still holding the phone to his body and holding the gun level at them and holding his elbow against his chest like a noir gangster. “Now if you try to follow me I will blast you, you hear?”

Part of his brain is telling him that he isn’t supposed to enjoy this quite so much. He calls that part of his brain Winston. Winston is all, what the fuck are you doing? Winston is his internal guardian angel, Winston gets like that a lot.

Theroux takes a moment to survey the scene:

- 3 naked, hairy, embarrassed men covering their junk with their hands
- A bullet blown-out window
- A cracked and aching coffee table
- A delicious bed that he will never sleep in again

And then Theroux is gone. Pivoting. Through the broken door. Into the hall. Down the hallway. Yanking the fire alarm as he tears by. The siren starts to wail all shrill and the elevators start returning to the lobby automatically. He hits the stairwell, running and skipping.



Florid.
My name is Theroux and we are meeting during a very strange time in my life. You should know that. I want to be honest about it upfront. Winston thinks I’m on a self-destructive bender. I really don’t have any idea. Or plan.

My cat died, my girlfriend left me, the collections agents are blowing up my phone. I’m running low on everything that a person can have: nickels, dimes, dollars, quarters, hope. I have literally and simply run out of the desire to live any of the lives that are available to me, preprogrammed, planned, comfortable, anticipated, fulfilling or otherwise. So let’s find a new one, a new life, a new option, a new way. Let’s burn a new path. Let’s clear-cut a vast and bleak and smoky horizon across this florid jungle of bullshit. And yes, ‘florid’ is a word that was emailed to me and no, I’m not entirely sure what exactly it means, but I like the way it sounds.

I am angry. And I am tired of being self-hating and self-deferring and selfless. I’m tired of being good. I’m tired of being decent. I want to be a disease. I wanta be a tragedy. I am white phosphorus on skin. I am gangrene in the heart. I am Agent Orange. I am motherfucking Shiva wearing a black hole. I am making bad decisions – and I know it - but I am making them on my own and for myself and with virtually no respect for consequences. So this should be fun. Or at the very least, interesting.


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Logic is Good For You.

This point was just made to me:

A vodka/orange juice has Vitamin C in it.

And Vitamin C is good for you.

Ergo, a vodka/orange juice is good for you.

Long live (accommodating) logic!


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NaNoWriMo!

Tomorrow is the 1st of November and some of you know what that means (because I have been droning on about it incessantly to anyone who will listen). That’s right; it is NaNoWriMo time once again.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writering Month. What does that mean? Is there some holiday or special Presidential declaration?

No.

There is nothing.

Except for the arduous and difficult and stressful and thankless (and did I say arduous already?) endeavor of writing a 50,000 word novel in a month.

That’s right, an entire novel in one month.

I have attempted it every year for years now and only actually succeeded once (though a second time I hit the word count in the allotted time but didn’t complete the novel appropriately).

There is no prize at the end and no real recognition and really no reason to subject one’s self to something like this other than blatant masochism. Well, there is also the love of the writing. The point of the entire thing is simply to stimulate writing.

The 50,000 words breaks down to 1,667 words each day. That is difficult. More difficult still to make all 1,667 of those words matter each day (though the general idea is that if you end up producing writing of any real quality, that is just an accident).

So tomorrow it will begin. I have no hope of being able to finish a whole novel in November, but I will give it my best. Also, I barely even have an idea what I’m going to be writing about. I have ideas, nebulous and blurry ideas.

I may not be doing a lot of blogging over the next month, but what I might try to do is post some of each day’s writing here.

I’m unreasonably excited about this. Wish me luck.


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All Kinds of Awesome.

Do you like hilariousness? If so, please read this from The Borowitz Report.

(Thanks to NYDana for this article!)


Fox News Estimates Jon Stewart’s Crowd at Seven People
Disappointing Turnout, News Channel Says



WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – The Fox News Channel reported today that the turnout for Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” was underwhelming at best, with Fox sources estimating the total turnout at seven people.

“Our total count includes Stewart, [Stephen] Colbert, and what appear to be a few of their friends and relatives,” said Fox anchor Shepard Smith. “This has to be a smaller crowd than they were expecting.”

But immediately after Fox broadcast what it described as “live coverage” of the rally showing a nearly-deserted National Mall, viewers began to point out irregularities in the images being shown.

First of all, one viewer noticed that the live coverage of the rally was actually being broadcast a full twelve hours before the rally began.

Second, an expert identified the supposedly “live footage” of today’s rally as file footage from a Sunday in 1997 when the Mall was completely shut down for reseeding.
Even in the face of such evidence, Fox stood by its story, with Fox host Glenn Beck pointing out that the seven people in attendance were “largely elitists.”

“I was struck by how many correctly spelled signs there were,” Mr. Beck said. “That’s not my America.”




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Halloween Haiku.

Halloween is so
frightening. Sixty bucks for
a costume? Eegad!

Everyone complains,
“The outfits are too sexy.”
I just disagree.

Let’s dress up tonight!
Sexy bunny? Slutty witch?
Totally okay.

Am I suddenly
a Halloween-o-phile?
Not actually.

But candy is good,
dressing like an idiot
is also okay.

Mostly I just want
to have an awesome séance;
invite ghosts over.


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Wanderlust.

I recently bought a pretty awesome backpack. You should know about me, I love bags. I love their sizes and shapes, I love the potential of them. When you have a good bag and some good stuff to put in it, you can handle anything.

So I have this really cool backpack and I haven’t gotten to use it yet. And that makes me sad. It is the perfect bag for a couple of days away from home. It is roomy; it has a lot of convenient and well-thought-out pockets. It seems durable, trustworthy. So I would like to use it.

You should come with me while I do. Let’s go somewhere. What are you doing this weekend? Or next?

I don’t have much money right now, so I can’t hop a flight to Senegal, but I do have a car and this badass backpack and more than a little bit of wanderlust (that is one of my favorite words BTW because it is made up of other words that I like yet has a distinct meaning that I also like).

So where do you want to go? We can be in Vegas in just a few hours, or San Diego, Mexico, or up the coast to anyplace that you want. I want to see the Salton Sea and lately I’ve been in the mood to hike up the side of something, or down into something. Or we can lay out a map on my kitchen table and I’ll let you stick a pin in it anywhere you want and that is where we will point the car and along the way we’ll order the chalkboard daily special at every dinner that we pass.

Or maybe we should hop a train, there are still trains you know. And I love trains. I love the world rolling by at a soothing speed and the constant low frequency rumble of the journey. And a few hours in, when you get sleepy and tired of the magazines that you brought, I will even let you lean your head on my shoulder while that train-rumble, that ever-present steel-on-steel vibration lulls you off to sleep.

So let’s go. I have this bag and the desire to use it. So let’s use it.




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Get a Room.

Do you remember that part in 500 Days of Summer when Joseph Gordon Levitt is just post-break-up and living on whiskey and Twinkies? And on the street he sees a couple innocently holding hands? And he screams at them, “GET A ROOM!”

That’s what I feel like lately.


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Dark Side Astrology.

So I’m not given to astrology, but you know how it is with the internet, you start out reading about the history of trigonometry and then you click a link and click a link and click a link and before you know it you’re watching Amish porn.

Well something kinda like that just happened and I came across a page about the dark side of astrological signs. This is nothing new (we have all seen the book about this on that table at Urban Outfitters), but what struck me is how the dark side of Libras (which I am) reads exactly like some of the emails that I’ve gotten from my Ex.

Here, read this and enjoy my humiliation:

Libra
If passive-aggressive behavior, condescension and bottled up anger that results in poorly-timed barbs and fickle infidelity doesn't sound appealing to you, than look out for a Libra in their lesser form. The balanced one - in anything less than top shape - is actually completely unbalanced, and without even realizing it will mine the depths of your tolerance as they take stabs at you (verbal and gestural) for merely being yourself. This is because Libra has a tendency to idealize their partners - and as soon as mates fall short in any way (which they inevitably do), they'll become disillusioned. To deal with Libra (and their unfair expectations) is to call them out on their crap and don't stand for their outside flirtations. While infidelity is appealing to these airy creatures, partnership is their preferred state - particularly if you're the one who may leave or stray.

You can read about whatever the hell is wrong with you here.


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Take On Me.

In case you were curious, my day was bad in just about every way that it could be. So I am sitting on the couch drinking crap wine and reading Tom Robbins while my roommate Eggplant Parmesan (still test driving blog names for her) and dearest Jennica learn “Take Me On” on ukuleles.

Don’t ever tell them that I said so, but they are actually getting quite good and the soft uke sounds actually help to rub down the nasty edges of my day.

If I were to step out of my head for just a moment (fat chance of that) I might actually realize that life is okay at this very moment.


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Something That I Actually Just Said:

Psha yeah, Gossip Girl is so much better than 90210.


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New Short Story!

Below is a new short story. I am quite please with it.

Believe it or not, this idea has been in the back, dusty, cobwebby part of my brain for like ten years. I didn’t know until tonight that it was supposed to be a short story.

You probably won’t enjoy it as much as I do, but that’s just because you hate ducks.

Enjoy!

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Gravity Duck by james bezerra

Gravity Duck
by james bezerra


THE ASSHOLE
If we had known how well-connected he was, we probably would have been nicer to that duck.

But at the time, we just thought that he was a duck, so we said stuff like, Come ‘ere ducky ducky ducky, c’mere and you can have some of this bread . . . Ha! Fucker, no bread for you! We used to kinda be assholes like that.

THE DUCK
I had just landed. Due to logistical constraints I’d been placed inside of a duck for the trip. It was a regrettable inconvenience but an unavoidable one. I was to meet The Contact in the Park of Earth’s New York City. A band of natives in leather jackets offered me bread, I approached them to thank them but decline. Then one of them kicked me.

THE ASSHOLE
In retrospect, if we had known that he was packing a piece, we probably would have behaved better.

THE CONTACT
I had just been let in on The Gravity Situation a few days before. That’s what we called it, ‘The Gravity Situation’. I asked at the time why we didn’t give it a more obscure name, given that the situation actually was about gravity, but then my boss on the American delegation to the United Nations – his name was Feltzwater – said, “It’s not like we’re calling it ‘The Holy Shit, We’re About To Run Out Of Gravity Situation!’

That was a valid point.

The day of, they sent a bunch of us to comb Central Park because we’d gotten a communiqué – actually just a message from a normal-looking gmail account – saying that their emissary would be arriving in the afternoon. And that he would be a duck.

I had long since given up being surprised by things, so I was dutifully walking around The Ramble kicking stones and looking for any unusual ducks. That’s when I saw it happen; a teenager in a faux-greaser leather-and-pomade getup kicked this little duck with his boot. The duck went a foot in the air and landed with a gravely thud. The greaser kid and his buddies yucked it up, until the duck got his balance back, pivoted toward them, lifted one of his wings and then … well, I guess – to put it plainly – vaporized the kid. This white and blue beam shot out from under the duck’s wing and then that was it. The kid just ceased to be there anymore.

THE ASSHOLE
Yeah, so that fucking duck murdered Ralphie.

THE COP
We’d been having problems with the Greasers in the Park. They were kids from the West Side with too much of mommy and daddy’s money and big old chips on their shoulders. I always thought that they looked kinda queer and I used to holler at’em, “Hey fucking Ponyboy! Stop running or I’m gonna shoot you to death.” But they never stopped running. We worked so hard to clean up this city and then wouldn’t ya know it, the fuck’en white kids start causing problems.

Anyway, I was riding my horse, Coffee, along the edge of The Ramble when I heard them cackling and when I looked, I saw one of them fucken’ boot this duck right in the ass. Well I yanked out my sidearm and I was about to gallop up on their asses when the fucking duck whips around and just like that! ZAP! Fucking nukes the kid. So I spurred Coffee and charged toward the whole scene.

THE DUCK
A horse-mounted authority figure approached me at high speed at that point and, being in a fragile duck body and threatened by the large, hard hooves, I had no choice but to act preemptively.

THE CONTACT
At that point I was a little concerned about the ramifications of an interstellar gravity-dealer killing a teenager, but I’m not really given to running, so I started walking over toward them at a pretty good clip, when this horse cop comes charging down on the kids and the duck. I would have been frightened too, so I don’t blame the duck.

THE ASSHOLE
Then this cop shows up, he’s riding a horse and the duck fucking kills the horse too.

THE COP
I saw the duck turn toward me and Coffee and before I knew it there was a bright light and a wave of heat and then I landed hard, face-first in the dirt with my mouth open and my nose broke and I slid. My thighs were fucken’ burning up and I could hear my own skin sizzling. I was groanin’ into the ground and, at first, I didn’t realize that I’d lost hold of my sidearm.

THE ASSHOLE
The cop’s gun flew through the air when the horse got hit with the duck’s heater. The cop ate shit and the gun landed almost at my feet, so I bent down and grabbed it and I was picking it up and thinking of something to say, like, Eat lead Daffy! or Fuck you, you duck!, when this dude – a total square in a jerk-suit – comes walking up like he was out for a Sunday stroll and said, If you shoot that duck the entire world is going to die.

THE CONTACT
Technically it violated protocol to tell that kid anything about The Gravity Situation, but I figured that under the circumstances it might be worth the risk.

THE DUCK
Luckily The Contact arrived just then. He was in a human body and a well-tailored - if cheap – three piece suit. The suit was a soothing shade of brown not unlike my feathers and it made me trust him immediately.

THE COP
When I rolled myself onto my back, I could feel layers of skin sticking to the ground and peeling off my thighs. I mashed my teeth hard and thought of Coffee. Poor fucken’ Coffee. Most of my pants were melted off, but I still had my holdout piece - a pretty little .38 special - strapped to my ankle. I leaned down to it and it felt like fire, but I yanked it out and pointed it at the fuckin’ duck. “Put your fucken’ hands in the air!” I yelled at him.

THE DUCK
I had only been in the duck body a very brief amount of time, but was certain that I did not have what the humans refer to as ‘hands’, so I turned, ready to atomize the authority figure, when The Contact stepped past me to engage in conversation.

THE ASSHOLE
The square in the suit stepped right up in front of the cop’s gun and said, “Excuse me, but I work for the United Nations and I’m here to save your ass.” It was simply the coolest thing that I had ever seen up until that point in my life and I think of him now every time I put on a blazer.

THE CONTACT
I don’t ordinarily raise my voice, and almost never to the police, but sometimes these things have to be done. The fate of the world was at stake after all, so I felt it was warranted.

THE COP
“Who the fuck are you?” I yelled at the guy and – I’ll never forget – he said, “I’m just the guy who is here to make sure that this duck gets over to the UN and renews our gravity lease. So could you stop pointing that at me?” So I lowered my weapon. I mean, who can argue with that?

THE ASSHOLE
Then the square in the suit scooped up the duck under his arm and started walking off toward Fifth Avenue, I guess to catch a cab. So it was just me and the Cop and his legs were still kinda smoking and he smelled like burnt hair. He looked at me and I looked at him and then I offered him his gun back. He took it and said, thanks.

THE CONTACT
I carried the duck across the Park and we caught a cab at 76th and Fifth. The cabbie said that he wasn’t going to be getaway driver for a duck-heist, so I showed him my UN badge and told him that the duck was a gift for the Canadian ambassador. The cabbie seemed to find this reasonable and drove us up to the United Nations building at 46th and First. I delivered the duck directly onto the floor of the General Assembly, which was in emergency session.

THE DUCK
I explained to the human leaders that in the future, they should not wait so long to pay their gravity bill, as we nearly had to turn it off. They seemed appropriately embarrassed. We were able to work out a payment plan for their past due balance.

THE CONTACT
My boss Feltzwater let me take the rest of the day off, seeing as how I had basically saved the entire planet.


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