BULLETIN, BULLETIN, BULLETIN...
SARATOGA, Wyo. -- In a surprise announcement this afternoon, Life in a Northern Town founder and publisher Kate Sherrod announced that she will temporarily suspend publication of new entries on the website.
Sherrod said she is "pretty much putting a halt to everything" until she finishes reading the copy of Samuel Western's Pushed off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming's Search for Its Soul that she finally managed to acquire today.
"I have been eagerly awaiting this book since long before it was published, have fielded innumberable inquiries about what I think about it, and need a break from Edmund "Meister Metaphor" Morris anyway," Sherrod said.
Fortunately for L.I.A.N.T. fans, the text, which purports to analyze the relationship between the mythologies the people and government of Wyoming cherish about the place and the realities of its colonial economy, is only 128 pages long (bibliography included), and Sherrod is known to be a very fast reader, especially when she is motivated.
The website, Sherrod said, may resume publication as early as tomorrow, or even this evening if Western's long-awaited opus is as interesting as she has hoped it to be.
"With all the hoopla, the difficulty my friends and I have experienced in acquiring it, and whatnot, this had better be a damned good book, is all I can say," Sherrod said.
She added praise for Saratoga's local bookstore, Cover to Cover, which suceeded in being the first outlet of any kind to get a copy of the book into her hands.
"I had placed orders for this thing everywhere, and had decided that whoever got it to me first got my money. And just look who had the goods," she said.
"Now my readers are just going to have to wait a bit while I get this thang read," she added.
Sam Western could not be reached for comment on the impact his book was already having on the popular rural weblog by press time.
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
EW... AND YET NOT EW... AND YET, EW
I just read in SALON that Newsweek has published excerpts from Kurt Cobain's
journals, and that a full edition of them is to be published as a book sometime soon.
Do I want to read them?
I do.
Do I feel like a tool for wanting to read them?
I do.
Am I disgusted at this obvious ploy to make more money off the poor guy?
Yes I am.
Am I going to reward this ploy with some of my hard-earned money?
Probably.
Ugh.
I just read in SALON that Newsweek has published excerpts from Kurt Cobain's
journals, and that a full edition of them is to be published as a book sometime soon.
Do I want to read them?
I do.
Do I feel like a tool for wanting to read them?
I do.
Am I disgusted at this obvious ploy to make more money off the poor guy?
Yes I am.
Am I going to reward this ploy with some of my hard-earned money?
Probably.
Ugh.
AIE! AIE! MORE ON THEODORE REX!
My heart goes out anew to biography writers and to writers of popular history. To keep people reading, such writers frequently have to resort to the techniques of other genres, usually to those of the novel, the one kind of book that only the truly illiterate will never pick up.
Sometimes, though, it would really be better for the book overall if the writer resisted the urge so to resort.
Case in point: once again, I'm going to talk a bit about Edmund Morris's Theodore Rex.
I don't mean to thump on this Morris guy, I really don't. But he's produced this imposing and popular doorstop of a biography about a man I truly admire, so in a sense he asked for it, didn't he?
Part of what, I suspect, has made this book seem so "readable" to so many is this novelizing tendency Morris has. But let's be honest; sometimes it leads him to some truly absurd places, two examples being the narratives surrounding the creation of the Panama Canal, and Roosevelt's re-election campaign in 1904.
Morris's amusing attempts to generate suspense on these topics would, I grant, be very effective in each case, but for the unavoidable fact that renders these attempts absurd: everyone, I mean everyone with enough interest to actually heft this tome and endure the cramp it assures one of developing from carrying it around, already knows where the transcontinental canal was built, and whether or not Theodore Roosevelt was re-elected in 1904.
I'll go out on a limb and say that even many who do not have enough interest to actually heft this tome know that no one ever built a Nicaraguan Canal. Am I right?
So doesn't that kind of render all of these ominous forshadowings, these narrative feints, these pale pink herrings Morris has written everywhere more than a little ridiculous? Especially sentences like this (P. 303):
Should either of these confrontations embarrass the Administration, Roosevelt's hopes of another term could crash.
Now I will say this: in and of themselves, were these accounts being read in a complete vaccuum, they would be very effective, I think. I can't make a more definite assertion than that because I read these accounts in full knowledge of how they end and so find it difficult to really imagine the experience of reading them otherwise, but, on those occasions when I can put on my lit crit specs from my college days and remove myself sufficiently from the world I know into the world I have to pretend I don't know to read this book ("suspension of disbelief" is the term that was fashionable in my day; god knows what literary theorists are saying now; I chucked them out even before I'd finished my sophomore year at Bard), I can sort of see where these accounts have been crafted in a matter of which Tom Clancy would be proud. All the good suspense-generating devices are there, from the subtlest to the broadest hints of what is and may be to come.
What a pity they're wasted on this!
As I observed in my last stab at writing about this book, though, Morris does a great job in producing this suspense where it does belong, too, at least. I don't know of too many people who aren't serious Roosevelt scholars or the like who approached this book fully informed on the Germany/Venezuela crisis of 1902. The only hint I had of the outcome of this particular story element was the knowledge I have (scanty at best; history was not a well-taught subject at Saratoga High School, and I was a language/literature/biology/computer science major in college, so only got the bare minimum there) that the United States and Germany did not find themselves at war until the U.S. entered World War I some 12 years later, and some remarks to the effect that Roosevelt avoided a war at this time made in the dust jacket copy of Theodore Rex.
So this crisis is a good test case for whether or not Morris is any good at creating suspense, and for this reader at least, he passed. Bully for him, his subject would possibly say. Bully!
As I said, though, my heart goes out to him and all of his ilk (not only because I might find myself among them someday), because I know from my days as a journalist that it can be damned difficult to make things like dry diplomatic negotiations or delegate manoeuvering interesting enough to keep the reader from skipping over to the funny pages. Were I faced with the same task Morris set himself here, would I have been able to resist the obvious ease of creating this kind of false suspense?
Good question!
Even with that sympathy, though, slogging through page after page of mock suspense over whether or not there would be a Panama Canal is just plain funny. Unintentionally funny, I am sure, but funny.
I'm sure Morris did not intend it to be funny, poor blighter, but there it is.
And by the way, yes, yes indeed, I write this in full knowledge that maybe someday I'll publish something somewhere outside of this here website, and that some snotnosed ass in some equally unheard-of locale will get his or her rocks off picking my work apart and making fun of my own tics and tendencies. I'm sure Morris did this to someone once upon a time, too, maybe even still does. We writers and writer wannabes are a bitchy, kitschy, unforgiving lot, seeing in our own work unforgivable, unforgettable flaws that we naturally expect those who have published before us to have the superhuman power to avoid, so we heap unheard of volumes of contumely upon them just for failing to live up to our own unrealistic expectations.
Yeah, if you ever wanted to know why most aspiring writers are pretty much assholes, there you go. Check me out, baby. Without provocation and for no particularly good reason, I've just ripped this Morris dude to shreds, all because he didn't write this book the way I would have liked to have seen it written.
In my defense, though, I have read probably more biographies than anyone you are likely to know, have taken a stab or two at writing them myself, and so I do have a pretty good idea of the expected standards, the likelihood of achieving veracity they establish, and the temptations to cheat and to take shortcuts and to show off that face every biographer – every writer for that matter. Morris has, in this book, broken a lot of rules that were there for very good reasons, and so he does deserve a bit of abuse, abuse that I, schmuck though I am, may not strike many as being qualified to deliver to him, but abuse that no one else seems to have had the guts to send his way.
Somebody had to do it.
I still think you should read the book, though. Just be sure to read it with a shaker or two of salt handy.
Or just wait for the movie that is so very obviously in the offing.
Don't laugh at me for being such a bitter oddball as to predict a film version of Theodore Rex, by the way. I do not claim to be a psychic (except maybe at Halloween), but I was the very first professional journalist in the United States to go on the record as predicting that Martin Landau would get the best supporting actor Oscar for his role as Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood. And at the time, that was pretty far out, too.
Oh, by the way – add two more books to my ghostly list: 9) Nostromo by Joseph Conrad and 10) Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson.
My heart goes out anew to biography writers and to writers of popular history. To keep people reading, such writers frequently have to resort to the techniques of other genres, usually to those of the novel, the one kind of book that only the truly illiterate will never pick up.
Sometimes, though, it would really be better for the book overall if the writer resisted the urge so to resort.
Case in point: once again, I'm going to talk a bit about Edmund Morris's Theodore Rex.
I don't mean to thump on this Morris guy, I really don't. But he's produced this imposing and popular doorstop of a biography about a man I truly admire, so in a sense he asked for it, didn't he?
Part of what, I suspect, has made this book seem so "readable" to so many is this novelizing tendency Morris has. But let's be honest; sometimes it leads him to some truly absurd places, two examples being the narratives surrounding the creation of the Panama Canal, and Roosevelt's re-election campaign in 1904.
Morris's amusing attempts to generate suspense on these topics would, I grant, be very effective in each case, but for the unavoidable fact that renders these attempts absurd: everyone, I mean everyone with enough interest to actually heft this tome and endure the cramp it assures one of developing from carrying it around, already knows where the transcontinental canal was built, and whether or not Theodore Roosevelt was re-elected in 1904.
I'll go out on a limb and say that even many who do not have enough interest to actually heft this tome know that no one ever built a Nicaraguan Canal. Am I right?
So doesn't that kind of render all of these ominous forshadowings, these narrative feints, these pale pink herrings Morris has written everywhere more than a little ridiculous? Especially sentences like this (P. 303):
Should either of these confrontations embarrass the Administration, Roosevelt's hopes of another term could crash.
Now I will say this: in and of themselves, were these accounts being read in a complete vaccuum, they would be very effective, I think. I can't make a more definite assertion than that because I read these accounts in full knowledge of how they end and so find it difficult to really imagine the experience of reading them otherwise, but, on those occasions when I can put on my lit crit specs from my college days and remove myself sufficiently from the world I know into the world I have to pretend I don't know to read this book ("suspension of disbelief" is the term that was fashionable in my day; god knows what literary theorists are saying now; I chucked them out even before I'd finished my sophomore year at Bard), I can sort of see where these accounts have been crafted in a matter of which Tom Clancy would be proud. All the good suspense-generating devices are there, from the subtlest to the broadest hints of what is and may be to come.
What a pity they're wasted on this!
As I observed in my last stab at writing about this book, though, Morris does a great job in producing this suspense where it does belong, too, at least. I don't know of too many people who aren't serious Roosevelt scholars or the like who approached this book fully informed on the Germany/Venezuela crisis of 1902. The only hint I had of the outcome of this particular story element was the knowledge I have (scanty at best; history was not a well-taught subject at Saratoga High School, and I was a language/literature/biology/computer science major in college, so only got the bare minimum there) that the United States and Germany did not find themselves at war until the U.S. entered World War I some 12 years later, and some remarks to the effect that Roosevelt avoided a war at this time made in the dust jacket copy of Theodore Rex.
So this crisis is a good test case for whether or not Morris is any good at creating suspense, and for this reader at least, he passed. Bully for him, his subject would possibly say. Bully!
As I said, though, my heart goes out to him and all of his ilk (not only because I might find myself among them someday), because I know from my days as a journalist that it can be damned difficult to make things like dry diplomatic negotiations or delegate manoeuvering interesting enough to keep the reader from skipping over to the funny pages. Were I faced with the same task Morris set himself here, would I have been able to resist the obvious ease of creating this kind of false suspense?
Good question!
Even with that sympathy, though, slogging through page after page of mock suspense over whether or not there would be a Panama Canal is just plain funny. Unintentionally funny, I am sure, but funny.
I'm sure Morris did not intend it to be funny, poor blighter, but there it is.
And by the way, yes, yes indeed, I write this in full knowledge that maybe someday I'll publish something somewhere outside of this here website, and that some snotnosed ass in some equally unheard-of locale will get his or her rocks off picking my work apart and making fun of my own tics and tendencies. I'm sure Morris did this to someone once upon a time, too, maybe even still does. We writers and writer wannabes are a bitchy, kitschy, unforgiving lot, seeing in our own work unforgivable, unforgettable flaws that we naturally expect those who have published before us to have the superhuman power to avoid, so we heap unheard of volumes of contumely upon them just for failing to live up to our own unrealistic expectations.
Yeah, if you ever wanted to know why most aspiring writers are pretty much assholes, there you go. Check me out, baby. Without provocation and for no particularly good reason, I've just ripped this Morris dude to shreds, all because he didn't write this book the way I would have liked to have seen it written.
In my defense, though, I have read probably more biographies than anyone you are likely to know, have taken a stab or two at writing them myself, and so I do have a pretty good idea of the expected standards, the likelihood of achieving veracity they establish, and the temptations to cheat and to take shortcuts and to show off that face every biographer – every writer for that matter. Morris has, in this book, broken a lot of rules that were there for very good reasons, and so he does deserve a bit of abuse, abuse that I, schmuck though I am, may not strike many as being qualified to deliver to him, but abuse that no one else seems to have had the guts to send his way.
Somebody had to do it.
I still think you should read the book, though. Just be sure to read it with a shaker or two of salt handy.
Or just wait for the movie that is so very obviously in the offing.
Don't laugh at me for being such a bitter oddball as to predict a film version of Theodore Rex, by the way. I do not claim to be a psychic (except maybe at Halloween), but I was the very first professional journalist in the United States to go on the record as predicting that Martin Landau would get the best supporting actor Oscar for his role as Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood. And at the time, that was pretty far out, too.
Oh, by the way – add two more books to my ghostly list: 9) Nostromo by Joseph Conrad and 10) Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson.
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
PEOPLE KEEP ASKING ME...
If I happened to see Doonesbury yesterday.
A lot.
As in, really very often.
It’s starting to creep me out, actually.
The short answer is, yes, yes I have seen it, thank you.
The long answer is... is...
Well, before I get into that, I suppose I should give those of you who are not regular readers of the perhaps-misnamed “funny pages” in the newspaper (I would have to count myself among that number, actually. My idea of good comics and the idea of what constitutes same held by most newspaper editors is kind of radically different. I like stuff like Tony Millionaire’s Maakies, for instance) an idea of what yesterday’s Doonesbury had to say.
The setting: Some blond surfer dude is standing behind a darker-haired, vaguely hacker-ish looking dude, who is typing away on his hip new Macintosh pod-thing.
Blond surfer dude: What's that?
Dark-haired hacker dude: Today's blog entry (!)
BSD: Get out - you have a web log?
DHHD: Yup. My daily take on what's going on in the world.
BSD: Wow, that's impressive, dude. I had no idea.
Wait? Don't you have to have something to say?
DHHD: A common misconception.
So yes, yes I did see yesterday’s Doonesbury and no, no I didn’t find it funny, not at all, and thank you VERY much for bringing it up, everybody, because... because... it’s not easy coming up with something new to babble about every day, dammit, and... and... sometimes, yes, all right, I do have to turn to things like 800 page presidential biographies or obscure books of stoic philosophy or the lyrics to half-forgotten Dead Milkmen songs for inspiration when my friends, Romans, coffee buddies fail to provide me with sufficient material, but... but... but... well, I’d like to see you try this sometime, pal!
*SNIFF*
*SNUFFLE*
*SOB*
Now I can’t think of anything to say. And I don’t want to perpetuate any misconceptions, so... so... so...
So I’m just going to go off to Kate’s Landing, sit in the corner and pout for a while, I think.
Great, now I’m all choked up and I’m going to be all kinds of no good for choir practice tonight.
*SOB*
But yes, I did see yesterday’s Doonesbury. And I hope you’re happy!
If I happened to see Doonesbury yesterday.
A lot.
As in, really very often.
It’s starting to creep me out, actually.
The short answer is, yes, yes I have seen it, thank you.
The long answer is... is...
Well, before I get into that, I suppose I should give those of you who are not regular readers of the perhaps-misnamed “funny pages” in the newspaper (I would have to count myself among that number, actually. My idea of good comics and the idea of what constitutes same held by most newspaper editors is kind of radically different. I like stuff like Tony Millionaire’s Maakies, for instance) an idea of what yesterday’s Doonesbury had to say.
The setting: Some blond surfer dude is standing behind a darker-haired, vaguely hacker-ish looking dude, who is typing away on his hip new Macintosh pod-thing.
Blond surfer dude: What's that?
Dark-haired hacker dude: Today's blog entry (!)
BSD: Get out - you have a web log?
DHHD: Yup. My daily take on what's going on in the world.
BSD: Wow, that's impressive, dude. I had no idea.
Wait? Don't you have to have something to say?
DHHD: A common misconception.
So yes, yes I did see yesterday’s Doonesbury and no, no I didn’t find it funny, not at all, and thank you VERY much for bringing it up, everybody, because... because... it’s not easy coming up with something new to babble about every day, dammit, and... and... sometimes, yes, all right, I do have to turn to things like 800 page presidential biographies or obscure books of stoic philosophy or the lyrics to half-forgotten Dead Milkmen songs for inspiration when my friends, Romans, coffee buddies fail to provide me with sufficient material, but... but... but... well, I’d like to see you try this sometime, pal!
*SNIFF*
*SNUFFLE*
*SOB*
Now I can’t think of anything to say. And I don’t want to perpetuate any misconceptions, so... so... so...
So I’m just going to go off to Kate’s Landing, sit in the corner and pout for a while, I think.
Great, now I’m all choked up and I’m going to be all kinds of no good for choir practice tonight.
*SOB*
But yes, I did see yesterday’s Doonesbury. And I hope you’re happy!
LIANT BOOK CLUB ENTRY... OF SORTS
Theodore Rex
by Edmund Morris
(New York: Random House Books, 2001)
It is not my habit to start writing about a book before I'm done reading it, and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris's tightly focused second volume of his eventual trilogy examining the life of Theodore Roosevelt, but my experience of reading this so far has been so unusual that it at least as blogworthy as my entire takes on the other selections in the LIANT Book Club.
I.E. While this is the first time I've written about this tome, which has not yet been in my hands for a week, it's probably not going to be my last. There's just too much to this book and to the man whose story it tells, to write about just once, and I already have too much on my mind from my reading to let it wait.
Other reviews of Theodore Rex have focused on its "graceful prose" or its "eerie relevance" to the issues that arose right around the time of its original publication (the autumn of 2001) or its ability to make what Russell Baker described as a remote and uninteresting time lively and immediate. I'm afraid that most of these reviews have been largely balderdash. I shall explain to you why I think they're balderdash, but then, as you might predict, I'm going to go on from there to tell you why this book is remarkable anyway.
First, the graceful prose. Um... no. I think what those reviewers have been swayed by is exactly what I hate about Theodore Rex: its very, very writerly writing. Somewhere along the line, some professor or editor or close friend or cocksucker told Morris that he was a magnificent stylist and he not only did not let his natural modesty convince him otherwise, but agreed with that person or persons and went wild with his tendency to go absolutely banantas with his metaphors and his weird narrative points of view and his poorly attributed editorializing to a degree that somewhat ruins Theodore Rex as the kind of read that I, at least, cherish.
Confession time: I am an enthusiastic student of biography, from the work of Plutarch onward. My senior thesis was on Edmund Gosse's influence on the development of English biography as a literary field in its own right (in a nutshell, Gosse introduced the vignette-laden, somewhat gossipy, tightly focused style that Morris himself played with in TR. I won't bother you with the rest of my thesis assertions, since the thing itself was a piece of shite of the nastiest caliber). Rather a large percentage of my personal library is biography in one fashion or another.* I am, in other words, particularly critical on the subject of biographies, and expect rather a lot of them, especially when they get the kind of attention this book has gotten.
I also ask a lot in general of the experience of reading, especially when I'm reading a life of someone that I already admire. What I've loved most about the biographies I've listed at the end of this entry (see the footnote) is the sense of immersion in the subject's word they bring, not just because of the author's evocation of detail or attitudes but because the author is not trying to draw too much attention to how good a writer he or she is. The flow of the read is interrupted only by outside matters, a dog that needs fed or an alarm clock announcing that it's time to go to work, or the telephone ringing, or a visitor at the door. Otherwise, as one settles into the book, one's sense that one is reading a book recedes to the very back of his mind; he is thinking the thoughts of the writer and the subject. Even the kind of necessary connective tissue of attribution, "in a letter to Emil Schnellnock, Miller said..." maintains the smooth flow of ideas and events and of my act of reading, naturally and satisfyingly.
I will venture to say this is what most people want when we pick up a book. We do not, as a rule, read to admire the prose style, do we?
And this is one reason why TR has thus far bugged me immensely. Morris seems to have written the thing with one finger permanently wedged to hold his place in George Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language," with jarring results.
Look, Orwell's essay is an important guide for me, too; I try really hard not to commit the kind of sins in my own writing that Orwell rightly mocks in it (dead metaphors, absurd constructions like "not unlike" [which I try only to use for satirical effect, at least when I'm paying attention], and euphemism, among others). Morris, though, seems to have gotten overly hung up on Orwell's admonition to avoid metaphors unless they are fresh and original.
Morris's metaphors are indeed fresh and original, but so belabored that they completely trash the rhythm of the story he is telling, yanking the reader's attention right away from Roosevelt and all but yelling "Look at me! I made a fresh and original metaphor!" The effect is also to shout out to the reader "I, Edmund Morris, really am a frustrated poet who discovered he could make more money as a presidential biographer!"
Not only that, but at times he seems to be going for some kind of record on how many of these fabulously fresh and original metaphors he can cram onto one page, though to his credit, he doesn't mix them, exactly.
Here are some of my personal favorites, metaphors pounded into my poor reader's head so heavily that I'm sure the figurative lumps actually show:
P. 74 "No matter how raw the data – ore piles of statistics, a rubble of currency regulations – he processed them with the silent efficiency of a kiln."
This is OK so far, and is kind of a nice sentence, but oh god he hasn't stopped there's more of it, thump, thump, thump! Just two paragraphs down, we go from a kiln to this:
"As far as Aldrich was concerned, news was noise, an intrusive bedlam that disturbed the quiet condominium of government and economy."
From kiln to condominium! Algernon Charles Swinburne couldn't have done it better! Aie!
But they get even... is "better" the word?
P. 77 "Aldrich, Allison, Spooner, and Platt emerged from the chamber smiling like Wagnerites after a slow performance of Siegfried.
What? What in the world? I'm a Wagner fan (maybe not a Wagnerite), but let me tell you something: much as I like Siegfried, like the whole Ring cycle, I would never leave a slow performance of any of it smiling at all. Yes, of the four Ring operas this one is the only one with a conceivably happy ending (Siegfried gets to sleep with a Valkyrie, after all) but any real Wagnerite would see it as only temporary and know that these knuckleheads are doomed, doomed, doomed, that not only is he going to cheat on her but he's also going to try to marry her off to the brother of the woman he's ditched her for and Brunnhilde is going to betray him to his death, etc.
This particular metaphor also illustrates another little problem this biography has, that of Morris's odd techniques for attributing statements and his tendency to novelize. This is a very specific image he is creating, and it's not created out of any eyewitness account. The scene described is of these men emerging from the reading of Roosevelt's first message to Congress in 1901, and while since, as Morris says "its caveats and circumlocutions had been dictated by themselves" and while the next sentence in the description, which lists the words of praise Aldrich, Allison, Spooner and Platt had for the president, is attributed to the New York World and New York Herald, there is no attribution for this Wagner wackiness. So I guess we are to take it as Morris' own creation... but this is a very specific image for something that Morris did not himself witness.
But back, for a bit, to the metaphors, because I've made a big assertion that I can't support with just two pages of examples. I'm trying for at least a bit of rigor here, because despite the fun I'm poking at it right now, this book deserves rigor.
On p. 241, Morris does it again talking about William Nelson Cromwell:
"The glossy little lawyer had made himself indispensable in all canal matters, darting with bright-eyed, bumblebee quickness among every possible source of pollen. Cromwell had spies in Bogota, paid agents in Colon and Panama City, political supporters in Washington, and financial backers in Paris and New York. Every infusion of news, every fresh pledge of funds, was more honey in his hive. Roosevelt's stiff petals yielded to his fervor."
Uncle! Uncle! Especially as an entomologist I have to cry, Uncle!
I'm sure Cromwell would, too.
Morris at some point may have noticed that he was doing this, on at least an unconscious level, as this next (and last) bit I'm going to share suggests:
Quoting a newspaper account by Henry Watterson in 1902 ("For the first time these thirty years, it is the Republicans who are at sea") on P. 95, Morris produces for us this stunning paragraph:
"Rival hands were tugging at the wheel of the ship of state. One pair belonged to President Roosevelt, who was responsible for last month's violent tack to port; the other to Senator Hanna, who wanted to resume the course set by President McKinley. 'Both compass and rudder are still intact,' wrote Watterson, enjoying his metaphor, 'But there are two pilots aboard, and rocks ahead." (boldface emphasis mine).
Hoo hoo who's enjoying the metaphors here?
Back, now, to attribution, a necessity in non-fiction. As the third person narrator of a novel might, Morris gives, over and over, the impression of his own omniscience as to his subjects' state of mind, interpretation of facts, motives, and knowledge of given situations. Sometimes this is done through indirect quotations of documentary evidence, yes, but even when that is the case, the fact that it is drawn from a secondary source is not made clear within the text itself, is not even footnoted or end noted (there are extensive notes at the end of the book, but time and time again Morris makes an extraordinary statement that sounds like it must be pulled from a personal letter, a diary entry, a newspaper account, or something of some substance, but, when one flips back to the notes at the end, is not attributed to anything!) (and there is no way of looking at the actual book text and knowing what does and does not have an accompanying note in the back!).
This is especially weird when, at other times, Morris adopts an exceedingly queer narrative perspective, as he does during the presidential conference with George Baer and John Mitchell during the famous anthracite workers strike of 1902, when suddenly we are treated to descriptions of the scene from the extreme outside – from the street looking in on the inadequate windows of the conference room in which the negotiators sat.
Maddeningly, Morris does not simply state, as other biographers or historians might, that "According to onlookers" the scene looked thus and the men going in looked so. He starts it off with "Curious onlookers began congregating outside number 22 Jackson Place" and then drifts into a riff concocted from some newspaper and other reports on the exterior of the conference before shifting into a convincing but back-constructed blow-by-blow of the conference itself.
Something about all of this suggests to me that Morris already had a film script of this whole text in mind while he wrote this, which is a common tic among modern writers who try to jump the gun by writing cinematically instead of just writing. I fully stipulate that this is just a pet peeve of mine, and for all I know, may really be why most people have received this book so very warmly.
But it ain't why I like it, kids.
What I like is probably more to do with the subject matter itself than anything else: this period of American history has always fascinated me, in part because my formal education neglected it completely (my high school and college American History class stopped at the Reconstruction because that's when the textbooks stopped; on everything past that period, I'm pretty much self-educated) and in part because a lot of novels and biographies I happen to enjoy very much take place in or have as their immediate historical background this very period.
Even stipulating that, though, this book has, for all its' "check me out, I went to college" flaws, merits of its very own, quite apart from its choice of subject, that are making my experience of reading it stunning and memorable.
First of all, it is often rip-snortingly FUNNY, partly because Roosevelt himself was such an immensely entertaining man, the sort of man I would definitely want to have around me and whom I would be "dee-lighted" to have as my president (though we'll get more into that in a bit), but also because Morris, when he's not showing off his prose style, has an excellent touch with deadpan humor and the placement of fun anecdotes.
Again, I'm going to present some examples that have not only made me laugh out loud upon reading them, but have kept me chuckling to myself at odd moments like in the middle of board meetings or over lunch with people who care much less than you would appear to do (since you're still reading this minor epic of a blog entry) about what I think about what I'm reading:
P. 99, on TR's vexation with an army general: "Perhaps, after all, he should be allowed to visit the Phillipines. The thought of Miles having to endure a forty-nine-day ocean voyage was pleasing, and with luck his visit would coincide with the mosquito season."
(Again, though, this is presented as some kind of insight into TR's own thoughts, and the student of biography would naturally assume this came from a diary entry or a personal letter or some such thing, but when she turns to the notes for page 99 there is no such thing listed! But it's harmless and funny, so this student, at least, let it slide, apart from this here comment.)
P. 109, after TR has cleared a rail on the back of his leaping horse, Bleistein: "Hay, who as Secretary of State stood next in line to succeed Roosevelt, pretended to be annoyed at Bleistein's easy clearance of the rails. 'Nothing ever happens,' he complained."
OK, so they're not complete thigh-slappers, but somewhat unexpected in what, let's face it, at times seems almost a hagiography.
Two other things that are remarkable about my experience, at least, of reading Theodore Rex are the ghosts of other books that seem to haunt it and the parallels it prevents the intelligent reader from drawing between TR's world and our own.
As I've devoured the first third of TR, not just faint suggestions, references, allusions, but complete, beginning to end memories of at least eight books (and the list tries to grow all the time) dog me as I turn every page. While many books remind one briefly of others, as I've read this one I've almost felt as though I had these others open alongside it, their pages turning along with its pages. So far, along with Theodore Rex, I've also felt like I was reading (in no particular order):
1. The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams
(nota bene: perhaps the least odd book to be thinking of alongside a bio of TR, since Adams and Roosevelt were lifelong pals. Still, making it even weirder for me, and probably for me alone in all the world, is the stuff that THIS connection is dredging up for me during this read, that being:
2. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot
because my junior year at Beaudacious Bard College was largely taken up with a "proseminar" on Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot, in which we studied their lives and works largely in tandem even though the parallels between them... really weren't all that profound. Still these two men are now deeply linked in me widdle head. )
3. The Alienist by Caleb Carr
4. Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
5. Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
6. To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert A. Heinlein
7. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
8. The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
A weird assortment indeed. I'll spare you a big fat excursis on why each of these books is running through my mind as I page through Theodore Rex; those of you who know these books will already probably see it, and those of you who haven't, well, I just don't know what to do with you!
As to any connections or parallels with the kind of things America is dealing with now, I still have to say phooey to those reviewers who tried to call attention to how Roosevelt's initial remarks to Congress and the nation after the assassination of his predecessor, McKinley are in any way applicable to what happened last year on Sept. 11. That's enough of a stretch to stink of marketing gimmickry. What a look at Roosevelt's presidency is best for is to draw attention to how very different our world is from his.
I'm going to look particularly at the brinkmanship of 1902 that could have led to war with Germany over the Monroe Doctrine 12 years before the outbreak of World War I. As I read the amazing account of it in Theodore Rex, I am most stricken by the effect that technology has had on our ways of dealing with each other, to wit, big, big, irrevocable changes.
At times in reading TR I have gotten carried away enjoying the bombastic language and the incredible assurance and the sheer power of this man and the men around him, their ability to be so very direct and confrontational, their unabashed forcefulness. I catch myself comparing TR and Kaiser Wilhelm to their modern, comparatively milquetoast, counterparts and I sigh at the differences I see. Now there is so much more of a cringing politeness, a commitment to never give offense, a fussing over trivialities and a muddy approach to everything.
It would be easy to look at this and to conclude that the difference lies in TR's superiority in every way to the ding-a-ling we currently call our president, but then I remember this: had it come to war in 1902, TR and the Kaiser would have squared off with ships and guns and soldiers and sailors. People would have died, yes, but mostly non-civilians. Bush and Schroeder (or more germanely, Bush and pick your actual scary enemy type person here) would be squaring off with much more terrible things and we'd all be at risk – which, incidentally, is why the old argument that war is a part of man's nature is no longer as acceptable as it once might have been.
(If you can't tell, I'm still not convinced that attacking Iraq is a very good idea).
Another thing to think about: Now that the true nature of the US/German/British conflict over Venezuela's indebtedness is somewhat generally known (it was until recently rather a well-kept secret), we also know important things about how it was avoided, the key issue being TR was able to keep things quiet so the Kaiser and his diplomats could save face and back down easily, something that, in our age of instant communications, internet access, weblogs, satellite uplinks, every man a reporter, every kid an eyewitness or a source, would probably be impossible even if W. were a gentleman of TR's caliber.
Of course, the slower flow of information worldwide and the lack of even the greatest media outlets' ability to watch everything in the world as it happened worked against TR, too, as one can see all over the problem with General Smith in the Philippines, who basically called upon his troops to "kill and burn" even women and children in the native population there without Roosevelt's direct knowledge until well after things had escalated. Certainly that couldn't have gone on nowadays; even if communications between W. and his general was nonexistent, the press or agencies like Amnesty International would have told everyone all over the world about it before the coals were cooled.
As I've emphasized, I'm only 1/3 of my way through this book, but this is what I think so far. As I type this, it is now well past my bedtime, so I shan't get through any more of this tonight, but I will probably, knowing me, finish it in a few days.
And if I have any further insights from it, I will share them here.
You have been warned!
*For those who care, my favorite examples therein are: 1) Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by physicist Richard P. Feynman, 2) The Happiest Man Alive (a bio of Henry Miller) by Mary V. Dearborn, 3) What Mad Pursuit by bio-physicist Francis Crick (co-discoverer with James Watson of the structure of DNA), 4) Don't Look Round, an autobiography by Violet Trefusis, and 5) Father and Son by Edmund Gosse. Quite a hodgepodge, and it's not an accident that two of these are autobiographical works by scientists, who are, when examining their own lives and works, the most honest, original, and entertaining biographers I've found. Incidentally, I've confined myself to five, that being considered a logical, easy, round, magical number because it is the number of fingers on one hand, etc., but a sixth autobiographical work (not in a true sense an autobiography because it is a collection of essays more than a full narrative) that goes on the list is Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe – one of my ten favorite books, period.
Theodore Rex
by Edmund Morris
(New York: Random House Books, 2001)
It is not my habit to start writing about a book before I'm done reading it, and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris's tightly focused second volume of his eventual trilogy examining the life of Theodore Roosevelt, but my experience of reading this so far has been so unusual that it at least as blogworthy as my entire takes on the other selections in the LIANT Book Club.
I.E. While this is the first time I've written about this tome, which has not yet been in my hands for a week, it's probably not going to be my last. There's just too much to this book and to the man whose story it tells, to write about just once, and I already have too much on my mind from my reading to let it wait.
Other reviews of Theodore Rex have focused on its "graceful prose" or its "eerie relevance" to the issues that arose right around the time of its original publication (the autumn of 2001) or its ability to make what Russell Baker described as a remote and uninteresting time lively and immediate. I'm afraid that most of these reviews have been largely balderdash. I shall explain to you why I think they're balderdash, but then, as you might predict, I'm going to go on from there to tell you why this book is remarkable anyway.
First, the graceful prose. Um... no. I think what those reviewers have been swayed by is exactly what I hate about Theodore Rex: its very, very writerly writing. Somewhere along the line, some professor or editor or close friend or cocksucker told Morris that he was a magnificent stylist and he not only did not let his natural modesty convince him otherwise, but agreed with that person or persons and went wild with his tendency to go absolutely banantas with his metaphors and his weird narrative points of view and his poorly attributed editorializing to a degree that somewhat ruins Theodore Rex as the kind of read that I, at least, cherish.
Confession time: I am an enthusiastic student of biography, from the work of Plutarch onward. My senior thesis was on Edmund Gosse's influence on the development of English biography as a literary field in its own right (in a nutshell, Gosse introduced the vignette-laden, somewhat gossipy, tightly focused style that Morris himself played with in TR. I won't bother you with the rest of my thesis assertions, since the thing itself was a piece of shite of the nastiest caliber). Rather a large percentage of my personal library is biography in one fashion or another.* I am, in other words, particularly critical on the subject of biographies, and expect rather a lot of them, especially when they get the kind of attention this book has gotten.
I also ask a lot in general of the experience of reading, especially when I'm reading a life of someone that I already admire. What I've loved most about the biographies I've listed at the end of this entry (see the footnote) is the sense of immersion in the subject's word they bring, not just because of the author's evocation of detail or attitudes but because the author is not trying to draw too much attention to how good a writer he or she is. The flow of the read is interrupted only by outside matters, a dog that needs fed or an alarm clock announcing that it's time to go to work, or the telephone ringing, or a visitor at the door. Otherwise, as one settles into the book, one's sense that one is reading a book recedes to the very back of his mind; he is thinking the thoughts of the writer and the subject. Even the kind of necessary connective tissue of attribution, "in a letter to Emil Schnellnock, Miller said..." maintains the smooth flow of ideas and events and of my act of reading, naturally and satisfyingly.
I will venture to say this is what most people want when we pick up a book. We do not, as a rule, read to admire the prose style, do we?
And this is one reason why TR has thus far bugged me immensely. Morris seems to have written the thing with one finger permanently wedged to hold his place in George Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language," with jarring results.
Look, Orwell's essay is an important guide for me, too; I try really hard not to commit the kind of sins in my own writing that Orwell rightly mocks in it (dead metaphors, absurd constructions like "not unlike" [which I try only to use for satirical effect, at least when I'm paying attention], and euphemism, among others). Morris, though, seems to have gotten overly hung up on Orwell's admonition to avoid metaphors unless they are fresh and original.
Morris's metaphors are indeed fresh and original, but so belabored that they completely trash the rhythm of the story he is telling, yanking the reader's attention right away from Roosevelt and all but yelling "Look at me! I made a fresh and original metaphor!" The effect is also to shout out to the reader "I, Edmund Morris, really am a frustrated poet who discovered he could make more money as a presidential biographer!"
Not only that, but at times he seems to be going for some kind of record on how many of these fabulously fresh and original metaphors he can cram onto one page, though to his credit, he doesn't mix them, exactly.
Here are some of my personal favorites, metaphors pounded into my poor reader's head so heavily that I'm sure the figurative lumps actually show:
P. 74 "No matter how raw the data – ore piles of statistics, a rubble of currency regulations – he processed them with the silent efficiency of a kiln."
This is OK so far, and is kind of a nice sentence, but oh god he hasn't stopped there's more of it, thump, thump, thump! Just two paragraphs down, we go from a kiln to this:
"As far as Aldrich was concerned, news was noise, an intrusive bedlam that disturbed the quiet condominium of government and economy."
From kiln to condominium! Algernon Charles Swinburne couldn't have done it better! Aie!
But they get even... is "better" the word?
P. 77 "Aldrich, Allison, Spooner, and Platt emerged from the chamber smiling like Wagnerites after a slow performance of Siegfried.
What? What in the world? I'm a Wagner fan (maybe not a Wagnerite), but let me tell you something: much as I like Siegfried, like the whole Ring cycle, I would never leave a slow performance of any of it smiling at all. Yes, of the four Ring operas this one is the only one with a conceivably happy ending (Siegfried gets to sleep with a Valkyrie, after all) but any real Wagnerite would see it as only temporary and know that these knuckleheads are doomed, doomed, doomed, that not only is he going to cheat on her but he's also going to try to marry her off to the brother of the woman he's ditched her for and Brunnhilde is going to betray him to his death, etc.
This particular metaphor also illustrates another little problem this biography has, that of Morris's odd techniques for attributing statements and his tendency to novelize. This is a very specific image he is creating, and it's not created out of any eyewitness account. The scene described is of these men emerging from the reading of Roosevelt's first message to Congress in 1901, and while since, as Morris says "its caveats and circumlocutions had been dictated by themselves" and while the next sentence in the description, which lists the words of praise Aldrich, Allison, Spooner and Platt had for the president, is attributed to the New York World and New York Herald, there is no attribution for this Wagner wackiness. So I guess we are to take it as Morris' own creation... but this is a very specific image for something that Morris did not himself witness.
But back, for a bit, to the metaphors, because I've made a big assertion that I can't support with just two pages of examples. I'm trying for at least a bit of rigor here, because despite the fun I'm poking at it right now, this book deserves rigor.
On p. 241, Morris does it again talking about William Nelson Cromwell:
"The glossy little lawyer had made himself indispensable in all canal matters, darting with bright-eyed, bumblebee quickness among every possible source of pollen. Cromwell had spies in Bogota, paid agents in Colon and Panama City, political supporters in Washington, and financial backers in Paris and New York. Every infusion of news, every fresh pledge of funds, was more honey in his hive. Roosevelt's stiff petals yielded to his fervor."
Uncle! Uncle! Especially as an entomologist I have to cry, Uncle!
I'm sure Cromwell would, too.
Morris at some point may have noticed that he was doing this, on at least an unconscious level, as this next (and last) bit I'm going to share suggests:
Quoting a newspaper account by Henry Watterson in 1902 ("For the first time these thirty years, it is the Republicans who are at sea") on P. 95, Morris produces for us this stunning paragraph:
"Rival hands were tugging at the wheel of the ship of state. One pair belonged to President Roosevelt, who was responsible for last month's violent tack to port; the other to Senator Hanna, who wanted to resume the course set by President McKinley. 'Both compass and rudder are still intact,' wrote Watterson, enjoying his metaphor, 'But there are two pilots aboard, and rocks ahead." (boldface emphasis mine).
Hoo hoo who's enjoying the metaphors here?
Back, now, to attribution, a necessity in non-fiction. As the third person narrator of a novel might, Morris gives, over and over, the impression of his own omniscience as to his subjects' state of mind, interpretation of facts, motives, and knowledge of given situations. Sometimes this is done through indirect quotations of documentary evidence, yes, but even when that is the case, the fact that it is drawn from a secondary source is not made clear within the text itself, is not even footnoted or end noted (there are extensive notes at the end of the book, but time and time again Morris makes an extraordinary statement that sounds like it must be pulled from a personal letter, a diary entry, a newspaper account, or something of some substance, but, when one flips back to the notes at the end, is not attributed to anything!) (and there is no way of looking at the actual book text and knowing what does and does not have an accompanying note in the back!).
This is especially weird when, at other times, Morris adopts an exceedingly queer narrative perspective, as he does during the presidential conference with George Baer and John Mitchell during the famous anthracite workers strike of 1902, when suddenly we are treated to descriptions of the scene from the extreme outside – from the street looking in on the inadequate windows of the conference room in which the negotiators sat.
Maddeningly, Morris does not simply state, as other biographers or historians might, that "According to onlookers" the scene looked thus and the men going in looked so. He starts it off with "Curious onlookers began congregating outside number 22 Jackson Place" and then drifts into a riff concocted from some newspaper and other reports on the exterior of the conference before shifting into a convincing but back-constructed blow-by-blow of the conference itself.
Something about all of this suggests to me that Morris already had a film script of this whole text in mind while he wrote this, which is a common tic among modern writers who try to jump the gun by writing cinematically instead of just writing. I fully stipulate that this is just a pet peeve of mine, and for all I know, may really be why most people have received this book so very warmly.
But it ain't why I like it, kids.
What I like is probably more to do with the subject matter itself than anything else: this period of American history has always fascinated me, in part because my formal education neglected it completely (my high school and college American History class stopped at the Reconstruction because that's when the textbooks stopped; on everything past that period, I'm pretty much self-educated) and in part because a lot of novels and biographies I happen to enjoy very much take place in or have as their immediate historical background this very period.
Even stipulating that, though, this book has, for all its' "check me out, I went to college" flaws, merits of its very own, quite apart from its choice of subject, that are making my experience of reading it stunning and memorable.
First of all, it is often rip-snortingly FUNNY, partly because Roosevelt himself was such an immensely entertaining man, the sort of man I would definitely want to have around me and whom I would be "dee-lighted" to have as my president (though we'll get more into that in a bit), but also because Morris, when he's not showing off his prose style, has an excellent touch with deadpan humor and the placement of fun anecdotes.
Again, I'm going to present some examples that have not only made me laugh out loud upon reading them, but have kept me chuckling to myself at odd moments like in the middle of board meetings or over lunch with people who care much less than you would appear to do (since you're still reading this minor epic of a blog entry) about what I think about what I'm reading:
P. 99, on TR's vexation with an army general: "Perhaps, after all, he should be allowed to visit the Phillipines. The thought of Miles having to endure a forty-nine-day ocean voyage was pleasing, and with luck his visit would coincide with the mosquito season."
(Again, though, this is presented as some kind of insight into TR's own thoughts, and the student of biography would naturally assume this came from a diary entry or a personal letter or some such thing, but when she turns to the notes for page 99 there is no such thing listed! But it's harmless and funny, so this student, at least, let it slide, apart from this here comment.)
P. 109, after TR has cleared a rail on the back of his leaping horse, Bleistein: "Hay, who as Secretary of State stood next in line to succeed Roosevelt, pretended to be annoyed at Bleistein's easy clearance of the rails. 'Nothing ever happens,' he complained."
OK, so they're not complete thigh-slappers, but somewhat unexpected in what, let's face it, at times seems almost a hagiography.
Two other things that are remarkable about my experience, at least, of reading Theodore Rex are the ghosts of other books that seem to haunt it and the parallels it prevents the intelligent reader from drawing between TR's world and our own.
As I've devoured the first third of TR, not just faint suggestions, references, allusions, but complete, beginning to end memories of at least eight books (and the list tries to grow all the time) dog me as I turn every page. While many books remind one briefly of others, as I've read this one I've almost felt as though I had these others open alongside it, their pages turning along with its pages. So far, along with Theodore Rex, I've also felt like I was reading (in no particular order):
1. The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams
(nota bene: perhaps the least odd book to be thinking of alongside a bio of TR, since Adams and Roosevelt were lifelong pals. Still, making it even weirder for me, and probably for me alone in all the world, is the stuff that THIS connection is dredging up for me during this read, that being:
2. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot
because my junior year at Beaudacious Bard College was largely taken up with a "proseminar" on Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot, in which we studied their lives and works largely in tandem even though the parallels between them... really weren't all that profound. Still these two men are now deeply linked in me widdle head. )
3. The Alienist by Caleb Carr
4. Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
5. Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
6. To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert A. Heinlein
7. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
8. The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
A weird assortment indeed. I'll spare you a big fat excursis on why each of these books is running through my mind as I page through Theodore Rex; those of you who know these books will already probably see it, and those of you who haven't, well, I just don't know what to do with you!
As to any connections or parallels with the kind of things America is dealing with now, I still have to say phooey to those reviewers who tried to call attention to how Roosevelt's initial remarks to Congress and the nation after the assassination of his predecessor, McKinley are in any way applicable to what happened last year on Sept. 11. That's enough of a stretch to stink of marketing gimmickry. What a look at Roosevelt's presidency is best for is to draw attention to how very different our world is from his.
I'm going to look particularly at the brinkmanship of 1902 that could have led to war with Germany over the Monroe Doctrine 12 years before the outbreak of World War I. As I read the amazing account of it in Theodore Rex, I am most stricken by the effect that technology has had on our ways of dealing with each other, to wit, big, big, irrevocable changes.
At times in reading TR I have gotten carried away enjoying the bombastic language and the incredible assurance and the sheer power of this man and the men around him, their ability to be so very direct and confrontational, their unabashed forcefulness. I catch myself comparing TR and Kaiser Wilhelm to their modern, comparatively milquetoast, counterparts and I sigh at the differences I see. Now there is so much more of a cringing politeness, a commitment to never give offense, a fussing over trivialities and a muddy approach to everything.
It would be easy to look at this and to conclude that the difference lies in TR's superiority in every way to the ding-a-ling we currently call our president, but then I remember this: had it come to war in 1902, TR and the Kaiser would have squared off with ships and guns and soldiers and sailors. People would have died, yes, but mostly non-civilians. Bush and Schroeder (or more germanely, Bush and pick your actual scary enemy type person here) would be squaring off with much more terrible things and we'd all be at risk – which, incidentally, is why the old argument that war is a part of man's nature is no longer as acceptable as it once might have been.
(If you can't tell, I'm still not convinced that attacking Iraq is a very good idea).
Another thing to think about: Now that the true nature of the US/German/British conflict over Venezuela's indebtedness is somewhat generally known (it was until recently rather a well-kept secret), we also know important things about how it was avoided, the key issue being TR was able to keep things quiet so the Kaiser and his diplomats could save face and back down easily, something that, in our age of instant communications, internet access, weblogs, satellite uplinks, every man a reporter, every kid an eyewitness or a source, would probably be impossible even if W. were a gentleman of TR's caliber.
Of course, the slower flow of information worldwide and the lack of even the greatest media outlets' ability to watch everything in the world as it happened worked against TR, too, as one can see all over the problem with General Smith in the Philippines, who basically called upon his troops to "kill and burn" even women and children in the native population there without Roosevelt's direct knowledge until well after things had escalated. Certainly that couldn't have gone on nowadays; even if communications between W. and his general was nonexistent, the press or agencies like Amnesty International would have told everyone all over the world about it before the coals were cooled.
As I've emphasized, I'm only 1/3 of my way through this book, but this is what I think so far. As I type this, it is now well past my bedtime, so I shan't get through any more of this tonight, but I will probably, knowing me, finish it in a few days.
And if I have any further insights from it, I will share them here.
You have been warned!
*For those who care, my favorite examples therein are: 1) Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by physicist Richard P. Feynman, 2) The Happiest Man Alive (a bio of Henry Miller) by Mary V. Dearborn, 3) What Mad Pursuit by bio-physicist Francis Crick (co-discoverer with James Watson of the structure of DNA), 4) Don't Look Round, an autobiography by Violet Trefusis, and 5) Father and Son by Edmund Gosse. Quite a hodgepodge, and it's not an accident that two of these are autobiographical works by scientists, who are, when examining their own lives and works, the most honest, original, and entertaining biographers I've found. Incidentally, I've confined myself to five, that being considered a logical, easy, round, magical number because it is the number of fingers on one hand, etc., but a sixth autobiographical work (not in a true sense an autobiography because it is a collection of essays more than a full narrative) that goes on the list is Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe – one of my ten favorite books, period.
Monday, October 21, 2002
FALL PLANTING?
It's probably another pie-in-the-sky rumor perpetuated by the lawn and garden industry, but I have a new folk belief to which to cling at least until next spring.
Word going around town is that deer don't eat daffodils, you see.
So this afternoon, begrudging those long-legged rats every morsel of food that keeps them spooking my dog and pooping in my yard all year 'round, I moseyed over to the Empire of Hardware and bought a big bag of daffodil and narcissus bulbs.
I probably should have stuck to daffodils, but the mixture looked so pretty on the packaging. Yes, even I am occasionally a sucker for marketing gimmicks.
I am having to root around through my big box o'outdoor tools and gear to find my trowel (alas, I cannot use the same one with which I lay on these blog entries) before I can plant them, though; they have to be buried at least eight inches deep, and the ground is already trying to freeze.
My own dear personal mom got blisters on her own dear personal hands planting hers the other day. I did my best to feign sympathy for her, but she would keep talking about the whole process during the Bronco game.
Though this odd coincidence just gave me a bit of an idea: was Rod Smith maybe planting daffodils last week?
At any rate, her efforts seemed risible... until I got to thinking about how much time and money I blew at the beginning of this summer, planting up pots and pots of pansies and dahlias and moss roses, ostiospermum, nasturtium (good in salads!), violas, snapdragons... all in the effort to brighten up the drab side of the Unabomber Cabin at Kate's Landing.
What I had really done, of course, was to create the most convenient ungulate smorgasbord in the entire town, outstripping even the efforts of those ninnies up on Country Club heights who put out half-spoiled lettuce and other treats to keep the deer a-comin'.
The death toll was immediate. Within a week, some 20 pots had all been stripped bare of blossoms. Within two weeks, many of same had not a stalk left in them.
But I can't help it, I really can't. Every spring I have this uncontrollable urge to plant something. When I lived back in Maine (which also has lots of deer, but none of the urban variety that are such a plague here) my housemates and I had an entire organic garden flourishing right in our backyard (hardly surprising: to a man we were either ag majors or entomologists and while by some fluke none of us were vegetarians or food freaks of any kind, holding a dinner party without at least one person who insisted, e.g. that the coffee be made with bottled spring water and that the eggs in the omlettes had to come from free-range chickens, etc.), and even when I lived in semi-urban Western Massachusetts, my home was in the middle of a squash field.
Don't get me started on my grandfather and his horseradish crop.
Ever since I returned to Wyoming, however, nothing I plant has a chance. Nothing. Not tomatoes, not garlic plants (garlic! Deer supposedly hate garlic! Oh wait, that's vampires. Then again... to-may-to, to-mot-o...), not broccoli, nothing.
And that is why today when the Minister of Fun, my roommate from across the street, informed me that he did, indeed, bag his elk for the season, I wept tears of real joy. It's perhaps an imperfect connection - elk are related to deer, but no elk has ever gnawed on my nasturtiums - but it's still comforting to know that in some small way I am completing a cycle begun back in May when my mother and I singlehandedly paid Doggett Greenhouse's mortgage for at least six months...
I am bound and determined, though, that this is the last time I'm going to do this. I'll suffer trying to hack my way through semi-frozen soil to bury these little bulbs in the ground tomorrow and then spend the next eight months trying not to think about them so that IF they survive the winter and IF they make it to the surface and IF they grow into viable plants and IF they bloom, maybe, just maybe, the deer will leave them alone and I'll have a bit of color about the place.
If this doesn't work, next year I'm going to take a page out of my father's book and just decorate with antlers.
Maybe I'll paint flowers on them.
Wish me luck!
It's probably another pie-in-the-sky rumor perpetuated by the lawn and garden industry, but I have a new folk belief to which to cling at least until next spring.
Word going around town is that deer don't eat daffodils, you see.
So this afternoon, begrudging those long-legged rats every morsel of food that keeps them spooking my dog and pooping in my yard all year 'round, I moseyed over to the Empire of Hardware and bought a big bag of daffodil and narcissus bulbs.
I probably should have stuck to daffodils, but the mixture looked so pretty on the packaging. Yes, even I am occasionally a sucker for marketing gimmicks.
I am having to root around through my big box o'outdoor tools and gear to find my trowel (alas, I cannot use the same one with which I lay on these blog entries) before I can plant them, though; they have to be buried at least eight inches deep, and the ground is already trying to freeze.
My own dear personal mom got blisters on her own dear personal hands planting hers the other day. I did my best to feign sympathy for her, but she would keep talking about the whole process during the Bronco game.
Though this odd coincidence just gave me a bit of an idea: was Rod Smith maybe planting daffodils last week?
At any rate, her efforts seemed risible... until I got to thinking about how much time and money I blew at the beginning of this summer, planting up pots and pots of pansies and dahlias and moss roses, ostiospermum, nasturtium (good in salads!), violas, snapdragons... all in the effort to brighten up the drab side of the Unabomber Cabin at Kate's Landing.
What I had really done, of course, was to create the most convenient ungulate smorgasbord in the entire town, outstripping even the efforts of those ninnies up on Country Club heights who put out half-spoiled lettuce and other treats to keep the deer a-comin'.
The death toll was immediate. Within a week, some 20 pots had all been stripped bare of blossoms. Within two weeks, many of same had not a stalk left in them.
But I can't help it, I really can't. Every spring I have this uncontrollable urge to plant something. When I lived back in Maine (which also has lots of deer, but none of the urban variety that are such a plague here) my housemates and I had an entire organic garden flourishing right in our backyard (hardly surprising: to a man we were either ag majors or entomologists and while by some fluke none of us were vegetarians or food freaks of any kind, holding a dinner party without at least one person who insisted, e.g. that the coffee be made with bottled spring water and that the eggs in the omlettes had to come from free-range chickens, etc.), and even when I lived in semi-urban Western Massachusetts, my home was in the middle of a squash field.
Don't get me started on my grandfather and his horseradish crop.
Ever since I returned to Wyoming, however, nothing I plant has a chance. Nothing. Not tomatoes, not garlic plants (garlic! Deer supposedly hate garlic! Oh wait, that's vampires. Then again... to-may-to, to-mot-o...), not broccoli, nothing.
And that is why today when the Minister of Fun, my roommate from across the street, informed me that he did, indeed, bag his elk for the season, I wept tears of real joy. It's perhaps an imperfect connection - elk are related to deer, but no elk has ever gnawed on my nasturtiums - but it's still comforting to know that in some small way I am completing a cycle begun back in May when my mother and I singlehandedly paid Doggett Greenhouse's mortgage for at least six months...
I am bound and determined, though, that this is the last time I'm going to do this. I'll suffer trying to hack my way through semi-frozen soil to bury these little bulbs in the ground tomorrow and then spend the next eight months trying not to think about them so that IF they survive the winter and IF they make it to the surface and IF they grow into viable plants and IF they bloom, maybe, just maybe, the deer will leave them alone and I'll have a bit of color about the place.
If this doesn't work, next year I'm going to take a page out of my father's book and just decorate with antlers.
Maybe I'll paint flowers on them.
Wish me luck!
Friday, October 18, 2002
TIME DOESN’T ALWAYS FLY
You know those moments when one suddenly realizes that one has been walking around for days with egg dripping sloppily from one’s face without noticing?
Yeah, those.
I had one a little while before lunch today, when one of my board members, the Queen of Halloween, got me on the phone with her for a routine talk about our chamber’s upcoming haunted house (click HERE to see some of last year’s fun. If the host guy’s server happens to be up today, that is). Usually by this time in the planning/execution stages of this singularly labor- and material-intensive extravaganza she is beyond frantic, her voice nearly hypersonic, her eyes wide and glazed, her hair a wild and curly cloud that looks like it’s already teased into whatever odd style this year’s costume will require, and I have to tell her to slow down and form her streams of consciousness into recognizable sentences so I can keep up.
But she was eerily calm, though a bit confused by some of my remarks.
The conversation went something like this:
Me - So what time do you want to start decorating on Sunday?
QOH - Do we really need to start on Sunday? It doesn’t take us THAT long.
Me - Well, we started on Sunday last year, but I see what you mean, we’ve got all those walls and things already built
QOH - Yeah, and the high school kids are using ‘em for Homecoming
Me - Oh god that’s right, are we going to get them back in time?
QOH - Oh sure, sure, sure, they said they’d get them to us by next Friday
Me (panicking) - But Queenie, Halloween is Thursday!
QOH - Huh?
Me (exasperated now) - We need the wall stuff before next Friday. You know. For Halloween. Which is Thursday.
QOH - Oh, but it doesn’t take us a whole week to set up. We usually don’t start until Sunday.
Me - Aaaaauuuuuuugggggggghhhhhhhh! That’s what I said...
QOH - Yeah, so we have a whole week after they give us back the walls
It was at this point in our chat that I started to realize that one of us was using a much larger frame of reference, looking at a longer time span, from the other’s. She thought there were two weeks until Halloween, while I, savant that I am, she who is consulted on a daily basis about everything from the date upon which 2003’s Christmas parade will be held to which night of the week Alcoholics Anonymous meets, I knew that there was only one. And that we’d damned well better get cracking or this thing was going to suck and all of my friends and neighbors whom I’ve cajoled into being monsters will be standing around tapping their feet while I try at the last minute to fit them into costumes, paint up all their faces without any help because I never got anyone confirmed to help with make-up, and make sure all of the black light bulbs and things were working as the demon hordes of trick-or-treaters, already on the sugar rushes of their lives from all the candy and crap my businesspeople hand out on the downtown Halloween Walk, start all but tearing down the fragile, 103-year-old doors of the Fireman’s Hall to get in... oh god oh god we’re wasting time this very second...
Then two things happened.
One was that I lifted up a page or two of my nifty Lord of the Rings calendar (which is still on August because the photo for August is of Aragorn, a.k.a. Viggo Mortensen. Viggo Mortensen, el fuego of all that is el fuego, hey, if you were me you’d want to keep looking at him too!) so I could look at, well, October.
The other was I realized that the Queen of Halloween was not the one who was deluded about how much time we had left to get this railroad running.
I started laughing the ragged laugh of the nearly hysterical. And I couldn’t stop. I was still laughing through lunch, nearly choking on my “Top Secret” burger and snarfing my iced tea. I wasn’t just laughing at the relief, the reprieve, the sudden luxurious expanse of time that stretched between me and the mad dash to make the Sewer King look like a demonic tree, Tad the Grocer look like he was cutting himself up and serving up his body parts as hors d’oeuvres, the Minister of Fun look like his head had been severed and shoved back onto his neck upside down, several little middle schoolers look like space aliens, the General look like Elsa Lancaster, and my own dear personal mom look like, well, we haven’t decided who she’s going to be yet...
(Another hallmark of Halloween, for me: Halloween is the season when I incur debts of gratitude and the promise of unlimited future personal favors to several of my friends, relatives, coffee buddies and blognags. I have the weirdest job in the universe, with the possible exception of like Edward D. Wood Junior’s or something)
(The line from Tim Burton’s biopic of Wood, uttered by Bunny Breckenridge, “How do you get all your friends to get baptized so that you can make a monster movie?” being strangely apropos of my current effort)
No, I wasn’t just laughing at myself for getting the calendar all bunched up in my head. I was also laughing at my Enabling Assistant, who was brainstorming new and sicker ways to scare the children in twooooo weeeeks. Twooooo weeeeeks, Kate. Say it with me, twooooo weeeeeeks. Really, I wasn’t.
Well, OK, I pretty much was. That and the sick-o ideas the EA kept coming up with, usually while I had food in my mouth. Really, it was like being back at the cafeteria at Beaudacious Bard College, sitting at The Famous Table and being constantly serenaded by the half-wits who had discovered on the very first day of our acquaintance that my name fitted perfectly into a famous Doris Day song and never did get tired of singing “Kate Sherrod, Sherrod...” when I was trying to eat...
So anyway, after several hours’ reflection, I can now see how I managed to lead myself astray. First of all, we never, as a rule, ever specifically mention the date in the course of ordinary conversation, do we? No. We never say “Hi, Suzanne, it’s October 25 today” or “Since it is October 25, I believe I will have toast, Becky” or “Michael, dear, it’s October 25 so don’t go trying to rig the numbers game against me.”
Second of all, I missed nearly two weeks of work while I was down with the Mother of All Sinus Infections and have been somewhat disoriented ever since, and have yet to shake that chronic sense of being behind on absolutely everything that has dogged me lo these eight or nine days that I’ve been back among the living.
Third of all, my reporter friend in town, facing deadline pressure and a big fat empty newshole on page 6, asked me kindly to help him out by cranking out a press release about the chamber’s upcoming Halloween activities – a step in the overall planning process that usually happens, yes, the week before Halloween.
And fourth of all, well, this has been a really rotten week and yesterday in particular was a really rotten day because we buried a little girl I liked a lot and whose little friends are all my particular charges as they are my speech kids and with whom I had to stand with and hug and wipe eyes and noses and generally play mother hen to while we all sat and stood and sang and stuff in the balcony of the Catholic church all afternoon. That’ll mess anybody up, right?
And fifth of all, well, I still don’t keep a date book or anything for reasons I have outlined elsewhere on this website. Maybe someday I’ll learn, but not yet.
I mean, do I ever learn, dear readers? And would this page be at all entertaining if I did?
You know those moments when one suddenly realizes that one has been walking around for days with egg dripping sloppily from one’s face without noticing?
Yeah, those.
I had one a little while before lunch today, when one of my board members, the Queen of Halloween, got me on the phone with her for a routine talk about our chamber’s upcoming haunted house (click HERE to see some of last year’s fun. If the host guy’s server happens to be up today, that is). Usually by this time in the planning/execution stages of this singularly labor- and material-intensive extravaganza she is beyond frantic, her voice nearly hypersonic, her eyes wide and glazed, her hair a wild and curly cloud that looks like it’s already teased into whatever odd style this year’s costume will require, and I have to tell her to slow down and form her streams of consciousness into recognizable sentences so I can keep up.
But she was eerily calm, though a bit confused by some of my remarks.
The conversation went something like this:
Me - So what time do you want to start decorating on Sunday?
QOH - Do we really need to start on Sunday? It doesn’t take us THAT long.
Me - Well, we started on Sunday last year, but I see what you mean, we’ve got all those walls and things already built
QOH - Yeah, and the high school kids are using ‘em for Homecoming
Me - Oh god that’s right, are we going to get them back in time?
QOH - Oh sure, sure, sure, they said they’d get them to us by next Friday
Me (panicking) - But Queenie, Halloween is Thursday!
QOH - Huh?
Me (exasperated now) - We need the wall stuff before next Friday. You know. For Halloween. Which is Thursday.
QOH - Oh, but it doesn’t take us a whole week to set up. We usually don’t start until Sunday.
Me - Aaaaauuuuuuugggggggghhhhhhhh! That’s what I said...
QOH - Yeah, so we have a whole week after they give us back the walls
It was at this point in our chat that I started to realize that one of us was using a much larger frame of reference, looking at a longer time span, from the other’s. She thought there were two weeks until Halloween, while I, savant that I am, she who is consulted on a daily basis about everything from the date upon which 2003’s Christmas parade will be held to which night of the week Alcoholics Anonymous meets, I knew that there was only one. And that we’d damned well better get cracking or this thing was going to suck and all of my friends and neighbors whom I’ve cajoled into being monsters will be standing around tapping their feet while I try at the last minute to fit them into costumes, paint up all their faces without any help because I never got anyone confirmed to help with make-up, and make sure all of the black light bulbs and things were working as the demon hordes of trick-or-treaters, already on the sugar rushes of their lives from all the candy and crap my businesspeople hand out on the downtown Halloween Walk, start all but tearing down the fragile, 103-year-old doors of the Fireman’s Hall to get in... oh god oh god we’re wasting time this very second...
Then two things happened.
One was that I lifted up a page or two of my nifty Lord of the Rings calendar (which is still on August because the photo for August is of Aragorn, a.k.a. Viggo Mortensen. Viggo Mortensen, el fuego of all that is el fuego, hey, if you were me you’d want to keep looking at him too!) so I could look at, well, October.
The other was I realized that the Queen of Halloween was not the one who was deluded about how much time we had left to get this railroad running.
I started laughing the ragged laugh of the nearly hysterical. And I couldn’t stop. I was still laughing through lunch, nearly choking on my “Top Secret” burger and snarfing my iced tea. I wasn’t just laughing at the relief, the reprieve, the sudden luxurious expanse of time that stretched between me and the mad dash to make the Sewer King look like a demonic tree, Tad the Grocer look like he was cutting himself up and serving up his body parts as hors d’oeuvres, the Minister of Fun look like his head had been severed and shoved back onto his neck upside down, several little middle schoolers look like space aliens, the General look like Elsa Lancaster, and my own dear personal mom look like, well, we haven’t decided who she’s going to be yet...
(Another hallmark of Halloween, for me: Halloween is the season when I incur debts of gratitude and the promise of unlimited future personal favors to several of my friends, relatives, coffee buddies and blognags. I have the weirdest job in the universe, with the possible exception of like Edward D. Wood Junior’s or something)
(The line from Tim Burton’s biopic of Wood, uttered by Bunny Breckenridge, “How do you get all your friends to get baptized so that you can make a monster movie?” being strangely apropos of my current effort)
No, I wasn’t just laughing at myself for getting the calendar all bunched up in my head. I was also laughing at my Enabling Assistant, who was brainstorming new and sicker ways to scare the children in twooooo weeeeks. Twooooo weeeeeks, Kate. Say it with me, twooooo weeeeeeks. Really, I wasn’t.
Well, OK, I pretty much was. That and the sick-o ideas the EA kept coming up with, usually while I had food in my mouth. Really, it was like being back at the cafeteria at Beaudacious Bard College, sitting at The Famous Table and being constantly serenaded by the half-wits who had discovered on the very first day of our acquaintance that my name fitted perfectly into a famous Doris Day song and never did get tired of singing “Kate Sherrod, Sherrod...” when I was trying to eat...
So anyway, after several hours’ reflection, I can now see how I managed to lead myself astray. First of all, we never, as a rule, ever specifically mention the date in the course of ordinary conversation, do we? No. We never say “Hi, Suzanne, it’s October 25 today” or “Since it is October 25, I believe I will have toast, Becky” or “Michael, dear, it’s October 25 so don’t go trying to rig the numbers game against me.”
Second of all, I missed nearly two weeks of work while I was down with the Mother of All Sinus Infections and have been somewhat disoriented ever since, and have yet to shake that chronic sense of being behind on absolutely everything that has dogged me lo these eight or nine days that I’ve been back among the living.
Third of all, my reporter friend in town, facing deadline pressure and a big fat empty newshole on page 6, asked me kindly to help him out by cranking out a press release about the chamber’s upcoming Halloween activities – a step in the overall planning process that usually happens, yes, the week before Halloween.
And fourth of all, well, this has been a really rotten week and yesterday in particular was a really rotten day because we buried a little girl I liked a lot and whose little friends are all my particular charges as they are my speech kids and with whom I had to stand with and hug and wipe eyes and noses and generally play mother hen to while we all sat and stood and sang and stuff in the balcony of the Catholic church all afternoon. That’ll mess anybody up, right?
And fifth of all, well, I still don’t keep a date book or anything for reasons I have outlined elsewhere on this website. Maybe someday I’ll learn, but not yet.
I mean, do I ever learn, dear readers? And would this page be at all entertaining if I did?
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
PUBLICATION! WOO HOO...?
It is with a weird mixture of satisfaction, disbelief, revulsion and awe at my own hilarious chutzpah that I contemplate the object I am holding right now in my hands.
It’s the “sophomore” issue of Wyoming NEXT magazine, and I've got three articles in it and a churning, roiling pit in my stomach over them.
This is by no means the first time I've been published, mind you; my first ever bylines were in our local newspaper when I was maybe seven years old and I wrote the Saratoga Elementary School News column every week, and I've been pretty steadily featured in there ever since, sometimes as a paid staffer, sometimes as a freelance contributor. Even today, my stuff makes this paper with stunning frequency, though the powers that be there keep misspelling my name as "Staff Reports."
I wrote for my college newspaper, the Bard Observer for four years, was its production manager for three, at various times also its arts editor, its news editor, etc.
I was the political editor, a.k.a. "Watchman" (as in "who watches the") of the (in?)famous Pit Report, an underground music and politics magazine that covered the Boston music scene as only a do-it-yourself punk 'zine can – snotty, confrontational, biased as all hell... God that was fun...
And nowadays my byline shows up in lots of would-be respectable papers like the Wyoming Business Report and hobby rags like Fishing Wyoming over articles that have won me some awards and lots of nice attention over the last two years or so.
Those, though, are to a one printed on cheap newsprint in ink someone bought by the barrel; meant to be perused over morning coffee or an afternoon smoke on the day of publication and then pitched or used as fish wrap or fire lighters or allowed by cranky old bachelors to pile up precariously into towers that eventually topple and crush the collector, who is then found several days later by the paperboy who came calling to demand his "Two dollars! I want my two dollars!"
Yeah, there's some pride associated with those, and over the years I've built up a gritty, messy folder full of clippings of stories that I'm for one reason or another proud of because they're exceptionally funny or were judged by some people I'll never meet but are honest-to-kibble experts as exceptionally meritorious or because I'm just sentimentally attached to them... but along with publication at this level goes a sense of sic transit gloria mundi, fleeting accomplishment and usually, too, the sinking, Sisyphean feeling that the rock has rolled back down to the bottom again and I have another week of pushing to look forward to.
This magazine I'm holding in my hands is different, though. It's weirdly intimidating.
First of all, it's this immaculate, glossy, incredibly hip thing (maybe not as hip as the Pit Report was. I'll probably never be associated with anything that cool ever again). The production values are absolutely top-hole: I've been paging through it for a few days now and have yet to see a typo or bobbled "jump to" (those little tag lines at the bottom of columns telling the reader to jump to page such-and-such for the rest of the story) or a misplaced or ineffective graphic or visual aid or a photograph that was shoved in to fill space even though it obviously sucked – hallmarks, all, of the daily, weekly or monthly products which which I have heretofore been associated. Deadlines are tyrants that inevitably dictate that errors will happen, will escape the harried proofreaders and typesetters, and will embarrass us all in print... but this thing, published just once a year in its own sweet time, is damned near perfect-looking.
And then there's the ambition of it, its messianic purpose. This magazine wants to save Wyoming by persuading its young people to think about staying here after they graduate instead of forsaking us for the cities and suburbs and prospective prosperity of Colorado, Utah, Nebraska, Montana. And this year it also seeks to prepare them for real life, real finances, real expectations, real problems, to make them better citizens of whichever world they finally choose to inhabit.
Whew!
Now, I'm not at all new to this effort; because of my relatively long association with the Wyoming Business Report, which publishes Wyoming NEXT, and my weird fame as one of those truly rare specimens, a young, educated woman living in Wyoming, I was on the short list to crank out articles to the very first issue. My contributions included a short piece on the financial and social consequences of dropping out of high school, and a longer piece taking a look at how "today's Wyoming teens" cope with all of the demands on their time and energy that part-time jobs, school work, sports, clubs, church groups, etc. make. I was in a particularly good position to write the latter, as I'm an assistant speech coach and full-time dork, making me both accessible and non-threatening to my young interviewees. Good stuff.
I also wound up doing a sidebar on one kid I know here in Saratoga who had been expelled by a principal who was no longer here and who had worked and fought hard to get back into school again a year later. That was probably the best, most original, most provocative of the three, I still think, though there's a nice, ironic coda to it, in that my subject had dropped out of school all over again before the magazine saw print.
Oy!
I never saw that issue, though. No review copy ever reached me, and I've yet to find one anywhere. Who knows how it looked, what else was in it, how I stacked up? Not I.
Now, a year or so later, here's the new one. It's gorgeous. It's well-balanced, loaded with decent advice and teen-appeal in more or less equal measure. And it's got three pieces I wrote right smack in the middle of it: one on "The Price of Privacy" (comparing the costs of living alone to those of having a roommate or two), one on (and this has caused some snickers from people who know me and my disorganized ways personally) how easy and worthwhile it is to create and use a household budget, and the time management rant "Who's In Charge, Here?" that I published on this very website in July.
Ooh, they look so authoritative! So hip! They have rhythm and verve as they're presented, they deliver the style that is really what these people are paying me for.
But also, as I read them... they are flawed, flawed, flawed.
You non-writers out there have no idea how painful it is to see one's own words in print like this, especially months after they were originally spewed out. I remember these articles as being so much better, not so glib, not so dorky, not so pedestrian.
But I still have the originals I sent off back in July, and my editor fixed a typographical error or two, but left them otherwise untouched.
OUCH!
All I can see is things I could have done better, phrased more economically. I could have spilled fewer personal details, not ended one article with the trite, trite, trite "What you do is up to you!", not started a sentence with "Man" (do any real teenagers say "Man" that way? As in "Man, that painting looks great on my wall!)...
There's no end to that kind of self-flagellating if at some point one doesn't just tell him- or herself to knock it the hell off (or find a good, reliable friend to do it for him). And I have done this, I have done this...
But then there is also that possibly Calvinist-inspired shameful awe at the fact that I, hilariously flawed product of a seriously bumbling creator that I am, have put myself forward as an authority (guffaw, guffaw) on budgeting and time management, I who this very day had to do some very quick and sloppy thinking to accommodate my two lunch dates (my own dear personal mom and the poor slob who took my place at the newspaper)! Isn't there some kind of special kind of hell for people who do that? I'll have to fish out my Dante when I get home.
I'll get over all of this, of course. At the end of the day, I'm still a monster of vanity, drooling with ambition to be a Real Writer (whatever the hell that is) and so dazzle the hoi polloi that I somehow manage to set myself free forever from this office, this budget, this goddam phone that keeps ringing and interrupting my train of thought and spoiling my deathless prose!
(Was that a flying pig I just saw going by?)
Until then, well, here's this web page of mine, and here you are reading me (but thank god I can't watch you reading me. Even the thought of that gives me the heebie jeebies). Thank you for that.
I'm going to go home and play with my dog now.
It is with a weird mixture of satisfaction, disbelief, revulsion and awe at my own hilarious chutzpah that I contemplate the object I am holding right now in my hands.
It’s the “sophomore” issue of Wyoming NEXT magazine, and I've got three articles in it and a churning, roiling pit in my stomach over them.
This is by no means the first time I've been published, mind you; my first ever bylines were in our local newspaper when I was maybe seven years old and I wrote the Saratoga Elementary School News column every week, and I've been pretty steadily featured in there ever since, sometimes as a paid staffer, sometimes as a freelance contributor. Even today, my stuff makes this paper with stunning frequency, though the powers that be there keep misspelling my name as "Staff Reports."
I wrote for my college newspaper, the Bard Observer for four years, was its production manager for three, at various times also its arts editor, its news editor, etc.
I was the political editor, a.k.a. "Watchman" (as in "who watches the") of the (in?)famous Pit Report, an underground music and politics magazine that covered the Boston music scene as only a do-it-yourself punk 'zine can – snotty, confrontational, biased as all hell... God that was fun...
And nowadays my byline shows up in lots of would-be respectable papers like the Wyoming Business Report and hobby rags like Fishing Wyoming over articles that have won me some awards and lots of nice attention over the last two years or so.
Those, though, are to a one printed on cheap newsprint in ink someone bought by the barrel; meant to be perused over morning coffee or an afternoon smoke on the day of publication and then pitched or used as fish wrap or fire lighters or allowed by cranky old bachelors to pile up precariously into towers that eventually topple and crush the collector, who is then found several days later by the paperboy who came calling to demand his "Two dollars! I want my two dollars!"
Yeah, there's some pride associated with those, and over the years I've built up a gritty, messy folder full of clippings of stories that I'm for one reason or another proud of because they're exceptionally funny or were judged by some people I'll never meet but are honest-to-kibble experts as exceptionally meritorious or because I'm just sentimentally attached to them... but along with publication at this level goes a sense of sic transit gloria mundi, fleeting accomplishment and usually, too, the sinking, Sisyphean feeling that the rock has rolled back down to the bottom again and I have another week of pushing to look forward to.
This magazine I'm holding in my hands is different, though. It's weirdly intimidating.
First of all, it's this immaculate, glossy, incredibly hip thing (maybe not as hip as the Pit Report was. I'll probably never be associated with anything that cool ever again). The production values are absolutely top-hole: I've been paging through it for a few days now and have yet to see a typo or bobbled "jump to" (those little tag lines at the bottom of columns telling the reader to jump to page such-and-such for the rest of the story) or a misplaced or ineffective graphic or visual aid or a photograph that was shoved in to fill space even though it obviously sucked – hallmarks, all, of the daily, weekly or monthly products which which I have heretofore been associated. Deadlines are tyrants that inevitably dictate that errors will happen, will escape the harried proofreaders and typesetters, and will embarrass us all in print... but this thing, published just once a year in its own sweet time, is damned near perfect-looking.
And then there's the ambition of it, its messianic purpose. This magazine wants to save Wyoming by persuading its young people to think about staying here after they graduate instead of forsaking us for the cities and suburbs and prospective prosperity of Colorado, Utah, Nebraska, Montana. And this year it also seeks to prepare them for real life, real finances, real expectations, real problems, to make them better citizens of whichever world they finally choose to inhabit.
Whew!
Now, I'm not at all new to this effort; because of my relatively long association with the Wyoming Business Report, which publishes Wyoming NEXT, and my weird fame as one of those truly rare specimens, a young, educated woman living in Wyoming, I was on the short list to crank out articles to the very first issue. My contributions included a short piece on the financial and social consequences of dropping out of high school, and a longer piece taking a look at how "today's Wyoming teens" cope with all of the demands on their time and energy that part-time jobs, school work, sports, clubs, church groups, etc. make. I was in a particularly good position to write the latter, as I'm an assistant speech coach and full-time dork, making me both accessible and non-threatening to my young interviewees. Good stuff.
I also wound up doing a sidebar on one kid I know here in Saratoga who had been expelled by a principal who was no longer here and who had worked and fought hard to get back into school again a year later. That was probably the best, most original, most provocative of the three, I still think, though there's a nice, ironic coda to it, in that my subject had dropped out of school all over again before the magazine saw print.
Oy!
I never saw that issue, though. No review copy ever reached me, and I've yet to find one anywhere. Who knows how it looked, what else was in it, how I stacked up? Not I.
Now, a year or so later, here's the new one. It's gorgeous. It's well-balanced, loaded with decent advice and teen-appeal in more or less equal measure. And it's got three pieces I wrote right smack in the middle of it: one on "The Price of Privacy" (comparing the costs of living alone to those of having a roommate or two), one on (and this has caused some snickers from people who know me and my disorganized ways personally) how easy and worthwhile it is to create and use a household budget, and the time management rant "Who's In Charge, Here?" that I published on this very website in July.
Ooh, they look so authoritative! So hip! They have rhythm and verve as they're presented, they deliver the style that is really what these people are paying me for.
But also, as I read them... they are flawed, flawed, flawed.
You non-writers out there have no idea how painful it is to see one's own words in print like this, especially months after they were originally spewed out. I remember these articles as being so much better, not so glib, not so dorky, not so pedestrian.
But I still have the originals I sent off back in July, and my editor fixed a typographical error or two, but left them otherwise untouched.
OUCH!
All I can see is things I could have done better, phrased more economically. I could have spilled fewer personal details, not ended one article with the trite, trite, trite "What you do is up to you!", not started a sentence with "Man" (do any real teenagers say "Man" that way? As in "Man, that painting looks great on my wall!)...
There's no end to that kind of self-flagellating if at some point one doesn't just tell him- or herself to knock it the hell off (or find a good, reliable friend to do it for him). And I have done this, I have done this...
But then there is also that possibly Calvinist-inspired shameful awe at the fact that I, hilariously flawed product of a seriously bumbling creator that I am, have put myself forward as an authority (guffaw, guffaw) on budgeting and time management, I who this very day had to do some very quick and sloppy thinking to accommodate my two lunch dates (my own dear personal mom and the poor slob who took my place at the newspaper)! Isn't there some kind of special kind of hell for people who do that? I'll have to fish out my Dante when I get home.
I'll get over all of this, of course. At the end of the day, I'm still a monster of vanity, drooling with ambition to be a Real Writer (whatever the hell that is) and so dazzle the hoi polloi that I somehow manage to set myself free forever from this office, this budget, this goddam phone that keeps ringing and interrupting my train of thought and spoiling my deathless prose!
(Was that a flying pig I just saw going by?)
Until then, well, here's this web page of mine, and here you are reading me (but thank god I can't watch you reading me. Even the thought of that gives me the heebie jeebies). Thank you for that.
I'm going to go home and play with my dog now.
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
VILA-FICATION
WHEREAS the current location of the Saratoga/Platte Valley Chamber of Commerce has been for several years located in the old Black Lantern building that currently also houses the world famous Donut Ranch*; and
WHEREAS said building is on the ass end of that downtown portion of Bridge Street where all of the depressingly empty commercial buildings are; and
WHEREAS said building is also, in the immortal words of my father "darker than the inside of a cat" even in days of summer sunshine, at which time it is also hotter than the Lord Macklebrains' temper, and in wintertime it is even darker yet and cold enough to make an indoor ice arena seem tropical and toasty; and
WHEREAS the chamber staff didn't really have all that much to do this month anyway,
NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the chamber board and assorted other advice givers, relatives, former employees (a bit of overlap there), kibbitzers and the occasional visitor who informs us that our current digs are "uglier than a sackful of assholes" that we will move our offices to a section of the Blackhawk Gallery building sometime soon. Preferably by the end of the month, but we'll wait until the new carpeting is installed because moving all those file cases and stuff is going to be enough of a bitch the first time, thank you very much.
Or words to that effect. We at the chamber don't do much with that degree of formality, or sarcasm, but if we did, that might be one way to convey our decision. Which is also based on the fact that our new digs will have "frontage" (dig that cool commercial term) on the main drag in town and will thus be very easy for even the most unversed believer in the capacity of mule deer to turn into elk to find our offices to ask us at what elevation such startling transformations take place. Which is, after all, a big part of our raison det're, right?
What does this all have to do with "Vila-fication," the curious might ask?
Well, the prior tenant of our new digs made some unusual decorating choices during his occupancy. Choices like painting the window trim an odd salmon-orange, generating a bizzare striping pattern on the front room's walls in perfectly clashing hues of aqua, teal, ocean blue and I don't know what else -- different mixes of blue and green. Stripes. Hideous. Hideous.
The middle room looked like he had not been able to choose between three or four different shades of "off white" and sort of slapped them all on willy-nilly as high up the walls as he could reach (alas, not a tall man).
The back room features wallpaper striped thinly in browns, rusts and yellows in a pattern that even a golfer would be ashamed to sport on his pants. Even if said golfer was Rodney Dangerfield, cavorting in Caddyshack.
So, my enabling assistant and I rounded up a small but loyal cadre of chamber volunteers, one of whom is a professional painter with lots of professional painter equipment, loaded up on gallons and gallons (and gallons and gallons) of Navajo White paint at the Empire of Hardware, and went at it on Sunday. And last night.
Thus, Vila-fication, a neologism of mine defined as "the gradual but thorough and inescable process of being transformed into Bob Vila" or some unreasonable facsimilie thereof.
For I now know how to wield a "spray shield" and why it's so very important to tape new sheets of masking paper on it with great frequency. I know why blue masking tape is allegedly superior to the stuff I've been using if its masking rather than its taping qualities are what are desired (I had assumed, perhaps naively, that blue masking tape was just another 3M marketing gimmick) (I'm still not 100% convinced that this is not the case, though). I now know how to "tape off" electrical outlets and how to run a big industrial paint sprayer and why it would have been wiser to choose a satin rather than an eggshell finish to cover all the stripes and splotches and paint-sucking wallpaper – now that it's too late.
But it's all worth it, right? Because it's going tobe a very bright and pretty place to work when we get all moved in and stuff. Right?
Because I'll still have an assistant at the end of all of this, Right? Since it was her idea? Right?
Right?
*World famous due to the popular Gyrating Bhtch tune of the same name which celebrates the restaurant.
WHEREAS the current location of the Saratoga/Platte Valley Chamber of Commerce has been for several years located in the old Black Lantern building that currently also houses the world famous Donut Ranch*; and
WHEREAS said building is on the ass end of that downtown portion of Bridge Street where all of the depressingly empty commercial buildings are; and
WHEREAS said building is also, in the immortal words of my father "darker than the inside of a cat" even in days of summer sunshine, at which time it is also hotter than the Lord Macklebrains' temper, and in wintertime it is even darker yet and cold enough to make an indoor ice arena seem tropical and toasty; and
WHEREAS the chamber staff didn't really have all that much to do this month anyway,
NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the chamber board and assorted other advice givers, relatives, former employees (a bit of overlap there), kibbitzers and the occasional visitor who informs us that our current digs are "uglier than a sackful of assholes" that we will move our offices to a section of the Blackhawk Gallery building sometime soon. Preferably by the end of the month, but we'll wait until the new carpeting is installed because moving all those file cases and stuff is going to be enough of a bitch the first time, thank you very much.
Or words to that effect. We at the chamber don't do much with that degree of formality, or sarcasm, but if we did, that might be one way to convey our decision. Which is also based on the fact that our new digs will have "frontage" (dig that cool commercial term) on the main drag in town and will thus be very easy for even the most unversed believer in the capacity of mule deer to turn into elk to find our offices to ask us at what elevation such startling transformations take place. Which is, after all, a big part of our raison det're, right?
What does this all have to do with "Vila-fication," the curious might ask?
Well, the prior tenant of our new digs made some unusual decorating choices during his occupancy. Choices like painting the window trim an odd salmon-orange, generating a bizzare striping pattern on the front room's walls in perfectly clashing hues of aqua, teal, ocean blue and I don't know what else -- different mixes of blue and green. Stripes. Hideous. Hideous.
The middle room looked like he had not been able to choose between three or four different shades of "off white" and sort of slapped them all on willy-nilly as high up the walls as he could reach (alas, not a tall man).
The back room features wallpaper striped thinly in browns, rusts and yellows in a pattern that even a golfer would be ashamed to sport on his pants. Even if said golfer was Rodney Dangerfield, cavorting in Caddyshack.
So, my enabling assistant and I rounded up a small but loyal cadre of chamber volunteers, one of whom is a professional painter with lots of professional painter equipment, loaded up on gallons and gallons (and gallons and gallons) of Navajo White paint at the Empire of Hardware, and went at it on Sunday. And last night.
Thus, Vila-fication, a neologism of mine defined as "the gradual but thorough and inescable process of being transformed into Bob Vila" or some unreasonable facsimilie thereof.
For I now know how to wield a "spray shield" and why it's so very important to tape new sheets of masking paper on it with great frequency. I know why blue masking tape is allegedly superior to the stuff I've been using if its masking rather than its taping qualities are what are desired (I had assumed, perhaps naively, that blue masking tape was just another 3M marketing gimmick) (I'm still not 100% convinced that this is not the case, though). I now know how to "tape off" electrical outlets and how to run a big industrial paint sprayer and why it would have been wiser to choose a satin rather than an eggshell finish to cover all the stripes and splotches and paint-sucking wallpaper – now that it's too late.
But it's all worth it, right? Because it's going tobe a very bright and pretty place to work when we get all moved in and stuff. Right?
Because I'll still have an assistant at the end of all of this, Right? Since it was her idea? Right?
Right?
*World famous due to the popular Gyrating Bhtch tune of the same name which celebrates the restaurant.
Monday, October 14, 2002
CIVILIZATION HAS ARRIVED, or Another Reason to Shop at Home
After years of suffering on the part of Saratoga’s womenfolk, who had to make pilgrimages of 42 or 76 or even some 120 miles in order to obtain certain (ahem) unmentionable necessities, at long last our cries de couer have been heard, our aching need satisfied.
It is once again possible to buy panties in downtown Saratoga!
How is this possible? What chain of events has led to this, our deliverance?
We now possess that acme of civilization, that hallmark of high life, that badge of the bon ton, a dollar store.
A dollar store! Here in Saratoga! Why, we’re, like, a real town now.
And panties aren’t even the most exciting thing on offer there (though some of my less high-minded readers might beg to differ with me). All sorts of odd, off-brand items... dental floss, rain ponchos, flashlight batteries, wrapping paper, school supplies (in teenager-preferred neon hues), trouser socks, ground ginger, mylar balloons (how does any household, even here in the hinterlands, get by without a ready supply of mylar balloons?), scented candles, toy pistols, stinky lipsticks, outré kitchen gadgets... all sorts of odd items indeed are on offer here, for just a dollar each.
This place has got to be fixin'’ to piss off pretty much every other retail outlet in the valley, with the possible exception of the lumber yard, in other words. But never fear: I may now walk over to the dollar store to stock up on, e.g. curry powder, but if I want meat to go with it I still have to go to Tad’s Grocery. I can get, e.g. very cheap panty hose at the dollar store, but I still have to go to -- oops! bad example -- Laramie to get dress shoes to wear with them. I am likely to turn to the dollar store for e.g., cheap and ugly giftwrap and accessories, but I’m still probably going to mosey over to Laura M (for mom) or Empire Of Hardware (for dad) for the birthday/anniversary/whatever presents which said giftwrap will adorn. Maybe. I’m still a shitty gift-wrapper and tend to rely on the lovely ladies at EOH to festoon the latest skilsaw or whatever with risible, rippable paper.
In other words, I think there’s still plenty of custom to go around, as my friends in retail probably already know (most of my friends in retail have been here long enough to know better than to gnash their teeth at a little cut-rate competition. Far better to focus that free-floating ill will with much greater ultimate purpose and impact on Wal Mart and its ilk. Far better.
(Oh, and by the way – yes, this store has in fact joined the chamber of commerce, putting up no fight at all when my Enabling Assistant and I crashed the gates there on Friday to extort the protection money/finder’s fee commonly known as chamber dues)
I, for one, am happy to see the thing here, if for no other reason than there’s one fewer commercial building standing empty downtown. The fact that the joint is become quite a magnet for teenagers with time on their hands, and that the proprietor thereof (wife of a former high school principal) knows how to deal with such creatures, is an added plus.
As is the fact that the place does, indeed, stock panties, panties, panties in all shapes, sizes and colors, right here in Saratoga.
Now if only someone will start selling bras...
(Nota bene: There has, in fact, been another establishment in Saratoga who for several years has in fact offered a small selection of women’s underwear for sale, that being the feed store up on the hill. However, they’re a) somewhat off the beaten path, being located in what amounts to a spot zone of commercial land right in the middle of a big residential district at the end of a dead-end street and b) not someplace that tourists and newcomers readily think of when the thought is of women’s underthings. Plus, c) even when such a thought occurs, it occasionally proves difficult to convince tourists and newcomers that the underthings on offer consist of neither full-body red Union suits nor something hacked out of burlap and tied on with a leather thong [tourists do entertain quaint notions about our little town, o yes]. But of course d) this web page is occasionally given, despite its author’s best efforts to the contrary, to flights of fancy that, occasionally, amount to outright exaggeration, if not lies for recreational effect, and this may well have been the case here. The author does not often combat her very natural storyteller’s impulse towards recreational stretching of the truth when a magnificent rhetorical effect is the desired aim, and if a slavish adherence to the facts and just the facts is what you’re seeking, well, what are you wasting your time on this website for? Go find something productive to do, like washing your windows? Or washing my windows? Or fixing my leaky faucet, the drip, drip, dripping of which causes subtle but warping effects on my personality, thus driving me to escape into my vivid and weird imagination and thus into exaggeration and fabrication of a caliber not seen anywhere except, well, here at LIANT? What was my point again? There probably wasn’t one anyway).
After years of suffering on the part of Saratoga’s womenfolk, who had to make pilgrimages of 42 or 76 or even some 120 miles in order to obtain certain (ahem) unmentionable necessities, at long last our cries de couer have been heard, our aching need satisfied.
It is once again possible to buy panties in downtown Saratoga!
How is this possible? What chain of events has led to this, our deliverance?
We now possess that acme of civilization, that hallmark of high life, that badge of the bon ton, a dollar store.
A dollar store! Here in Saratoga! Why, we’re, like, a real town now.
And panties aren’t even the most exciting thing on offer there (though some of my less high-minded readers might beg to differ with me). All sorts of odd, off-brand items... dental floss, rain ponchos, flashlight batteries, wrapping paper, school supplies (in teenager-preferred neon hues), trouser socks, ground ginger, mylar balloons (how does any household, even here in the hinterlands, get by without a ready supply of mylar balloons?), scented candles, toy pistols, stinky lipsticks, outré kitchen gadgets... all sorts of odd items indeed are on offer here, for just a dollar each.
This place has got to be fixin'’ to piss off pretty much every other retail outlet in the valley, with the possible exception of the lumber yard, in other words. But never fear: I may now walk over to the dollar store to stock up on, e.g. curry powder, but if I want meat to go with it I still have to go to Tad’s Grocery. I can get, e.g. very cheap panty hose at the dollar store, but I still have to go to -- oops! bad example -- Laramie to get dress shoes to wear with them. I am likely to turn to the dollar store for e.g., cheap and ugly giftwrap and accessories, but I’m still probably going to mosey over to Laura M (for mom) or Empire Of Hardware (for dad) for the birthday/anniversary/whatever presents which said giftwrap will adorn. Maybe. I’m still a shitty gift-wrapper and tend to rely on the lovely ladies at EOH to festoon the latest skilsaw or whatever with risible, rippable paper.
In other words, I think there’s still plenty of custom to go around, as my friends in retail probably already know (most of my friends in retail have been here long enough to know better than to gnash their teeth at a little cut-rate competition. Far better to focus that free-floating ill will with much greater ultimate purpose and impact on Wal Mart and its ilk. Far better.
(Oh, and by the way – yes, this store has in fact joined the chamber of commerce, putting up no fight at all when my Enabling Assistant and I crashed the gates there on Friday to extort the protection money/finder’s fee commonly known as chamber dues)
I, for one, am happy to see the thing here, if for no other reason than there’s one fewer commercial building standing empty downtown. The fact that the joint is become quite a magnet for teenagers with time on their hands, and that the proprietor thereof (wife of a former high school principal) knows how to deal with such creatures, is an added plus.
As is the fact that the place does, indeed, stock panties, panties, panties in all shapes, sizes and colors, right here in Saratoga.
Now if only someone will start selling bras...
(Nota bene: There has, in fact, been another establishment in Saratoga who for several years has in fact offered a small selection of women’s underwear for sale, that being the feed store up on the hill. However, they’re a) somewhat off the beaten path, being located in what amounts to a spot zone of commercial land right in the middle of a big residential district at the end of a dead-end street and b) not someplace that tourists and newcomers readily think of when the thought is of women’s underthings. Plus, c) even when such a thought occurs, it occasionally proves difficult to convince tourists and newcomers that the underthings on offer consist of neither full-body red Union suits nor something hacked out of burlap and tied on with a leather thong [tourists do entertain quaint notions about our little town, o yes]. But of course d) this web page is occasionally given, despite its author’s best efforts to the contrary, to flights of fancy that, occasionally, amount to outright exaggeration, if not lies for recreational effect, and this may well have been the case here. The author does not often combat her very natural storyteller’s impulse towards recreational stretching of the truth when a magnificent rhetorical effect is the desired aim, and if a slavish adherence to the facts and just the facts is what you’re seeking, well, what are you wasting your time on this website for? Go find something productive to do, like washing your windows? Or washing my windows? Or fixing my leaky faucet, the drip, drip, dripping of which causes subtle but warping effects on my personality, thus driving me to escape into my vivid and weird imagination and thus into exaggeration and fabrication of a caliber not seen anywhere except, well, here at LIANT? What was my point again? There probably wasn’t one anyway).
Thursday, October 10, 2002
AT TIMES LIKE THESE...
...I envy those of you out there in the world who live in big, impersonal cities where every detail of the lives of your neighbors isn’t immediately circulated, where news of tragedy only comes in the morning paper or on Tom Brokaw in the evening.
Where a person can get through an ordinary, stupid day at work without getting a shattering phone call from a friend with news that another friend just went home for lunch to find his 19-year-old daughter dead in her bed.
What do you do when you get news like that? I have tried to call my friend, the man whose assistant coach I am, a man who preserved my sanity when I was his student and continues, when we have time to get together and dish, to do so, but of course his phone is tied up with callers who are closer to his family than I. I e-mailed him to say I’m sorry, which felt like pretty much the lamest thing a person can do, but what is there to do, what is there to do?
I don’t even know for certain that it is true. Cause, circumstances, story – all is still a mystery. And I’m still in utter shock. Even as I type these words, I don’t feel anything. I’ve known this kid for her entire life, I babysat her when I was in high school – pretty much everyone who grew up with me babysat her at some point; not only is her dad the speech and debate coach, but he’s also an English/speech teacher at the high school, and her mom taught us all grade school P.E. Parachute game, square dancing, lummi sticks, gymnastics... gymnastics. Jesus. This kid was little miss baton twirler, dancer... we all watched her performing as a precocious toddler... it’s totally inconceivable that this kid isn’t running around and little like that still, let alone that she’s 19... or maybe she’s 20 now. Jesus).
I keep hoping it’s just a rumor, but how would a rumor like that get started? Who would start it? What kind of ass would start it? No kind, no kind.
It’s a cowardly thing to admit, but I wish I didn’t know. I wish I was just sitting here in my office having an ordinary, slightly boring day. I was doing some routine bookkeeping, wrapping up a final report for a grant, giving directions to hunters, playing doggie soccer with the Collie of Folly... now I’m sitting here writing this because I don’t know what else to do.
I’m thinking about this great kid and about her great parents and how everything in their lives has just turned to complete shit. I’m remembering all the other times this has happened in the world and that life has always gone on and all that other bullshit but as always, this time is different. This time it’s this kid and she isn’t like anybody else.
I never knew her that well; you maybe never really know your friends’ kids that well, because those kids look at you, even if you’re closer to their ages than to their parents’, and see you as part of the parents’ world, not theirs, so there is distance, and an acknowledgement that your love for them is mostly an offshoot of your love for their parents. It’s rare when there’s a more direct connection, in other words. I had watched this girl grow up and winced along with her parents, teachers, etc. when I saw her making mistakes that she needed to make in order to learn. I listened to her stories, bought her raffle tickets when she came by my office to sell them, watched her play volleyball, worked with her on her speeches (she did an oral interp of a Holocaust poem that should have won her a state title her senior year, but didn’t. Not fashionable that year, the Holocaust), cheered at her graduation from high school... never dreamed I wouldn’t know her as an adult, that I wouldn’t legally buy her a margarita or something someday like I have with other, older kids I knew and babysat and whatnot when they turned 21.
So what do I do now? I think good thoughts for her parents, who are probably overwhelmed with having to break the news to their parents, siblings, cousins, to their daughter’s friends. And I write in this here blog. And I wish I didn’t know yet.
But that’s one of the prices I pay for living here, and knowing people, and being in the loop.
...I envy those of you out there in the world who live in big, impersonal cities where every detail of the lives of your neighbors isn’t immediately circulated, where news of tragedy only comes in the morning paper or on Tom Brokaw in the evening.
Where a person can get through an ordinary, stupid day at work without getting a shattering phone call from a friend with news that another friend just went home for lunch to find his 19-year-old daughter dead in her bed.
What do you do when you get news like that? I have tried to call my friend, the man whose assistant coach I am, a man who preserved my sanity when I was his student and continues, when we have time to get together and dish, to do so, but of course his phone is tied up with callers who are closer to his family than I. I e-mailed him to say I’m sorry, which felt like pretty much the lamest thing a person can do, but what is there to do, what is there to do?
I don’t even know for certain that it is true. Cause, circumstances, story – all is still a mystery. And I’m still in utter shock. Even as I type these words, I don’t feel anything. I’ve known this kid for her entire life, I babysat her when I was in high school – pretty much everyone who grew up with me babysat her at some point; not only is her dad the speech and debate coach, but he’s also an English/speech teacher at the high school, and her mom taught us all grade school P.E. Parachute game, square dancing, lummi sticks, gymnastics... gymnastics. Jesus. This kid was little miss baton twirler, dancer... we all watched her performing as a precocious toddler... it’s totally inconceivable that this kid isn’t running around and little like that still, let alone that she’s 19... or maybe she’s 20 now. Jesus).
I keep hoping it’s just a rumor, but how would a rumor like that get started? Who would start it? What kind of ass would start it? No kind, no kind.
It’s a cowardly thing to admit, but I wish I didn’t know. I wish I was just sitting here in my office having an ordinary, slightly boring day. I was doing some routine bookkeeping, wrapping up a final report for a grant, giving directions to hunters, playing doggie soccer with the Collie of Folly... now I’m sitting here writing this because I don’t know what else to do.
I’m thinking about this great kid and about her great parents and how everything in their lives has just turned to complete shit. I’m remembering all the other times this has happened in the world and that life has always gone on and all that other bullshit but as always, this time is different. This time it’s this kid and she isn’t like anybody else.
I never knew her that well; you maybe never really know your friends’ kids that well, because those kids look at you, even if you’re closer to their ages than to their parents’, and see you as part of the parents’ world, not theirs, so there is distance, and an acknowledgement that your love for them is mostly an offshoot of your love for their parents. It’s rare when there’s a more direct connection, in other words. I had watched this girl grow up and winced along with her parents, teachers, etc. when I saw her making mistakes that she needed to make in order to learn. I listened to her stories, bought her raffle tickets when she came by my office to sell them, watched her play volleyball, worked with her on her speeches (she did an oral interp of a Holocaust poem that should have won her a state title her senior year, but didn’t. Not fashionable that year, the Holocaust), cheered at her graduation from high school... never dreamed I wouldn’t know her as an adult, that I wouldn’t legally buy her a margarita or something someday like I have with other, older kids I knew and babysat and whatnot when they turned 21.
So what do I do now? I think good thoughts for her parents, who are probably overwhelmed with having to break the news to their parents, siblings, cousins, to their daughter’s friends. And I write in this here blog. And I wish I didn’t know yet.
But that’s one of the prices I pay for living here, and knowing people, and being in the loop.
IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH...
Even while still in the womb, unborn, man is burdened with the potentialities of every disease, and is subject to them. And because all diseases are inherent in his nature, he could not be born alive and healthy if an inner physician were not hidden in him... Each natural disease bears its own remedy within itself. Man has received from nature both the destroyer and the preserver of health.
- Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus
It's common, isn't it, when a person is sick, for him to ask as I did, over and over and over again while he stares at the ceiling and thrashes around and wonders what is going on in the world that he is missing in his illness, "Why, oh why has this happened to me?"
Depending on the ailing one's background and temperament, the answers he concocts may range from punishment for misdeeds or sins to bad luck to a Darwinian turn of the wheel to a dumb mistake on his part to negligence on the part of some caregiver, safety supervisor, enforcer of sanitation standards to... oh, I'm sure the reasons we've all posited over time are as many and varied as we are.
Though as I tended to forget while I myself slogged through my recent days of fighting the mother of all sinus infections, there is another, maybe more productive way of thinking about illness and injury that is probably heretical especially to my doctor and lawyer and clerical friends: that these seeming misfortunes have a constructive purpose – and one far beyond the delivery of a moral lesson or a reminder of one's humanity and limitations, though yes, there are present elements of those, too.
A good tube-clogging, head-raking, eye-popping illness is also a way in which the body pretty much forces one to take a vacation, isn't it? Such a thought certainly goes a long way towards explaining my 13 days of solitude, at least.
Life in a small town isn't all the "getting away from it all," back to basics existence that is dreamed about by city dwellers who rush here at the merest hint of free time or an excuse for a business or personal retreat, after all, at least not if a person really lives it, as no one can deny I do. By virtue of the roles in civic and commercial life I have agreed to play here, I'm in the public eye pretty much all of the time; little that I do escapes notice or comment, and there isn't a dweller or visitor here who doesn't feel perfectly within his or her rights to demand a second or minute or hour or day of my time, in person, on the phone, by mail, by e-mail, to express his opinions, whether or not said opinions are based in anything resembling fact, whether or not his ideas are practicable or even worth considering as such, whether or not I might have been doing something at the time that was important or would suffer greatly for being interrupted.
This goes with the territory of being me, and most of the time I do what I can to bear it all with grace; however, yes, I do have a few companions who don't see the grace too often; they either know me too well and can read me or they inspire in me a confidence that leads to perhaps overwhelming outpourings of discontent or exasperation or helplessness in the face of it all. They're easy to spot for those who know me in real life; they're the ones to whose faults I probably appear completely blind because I will brook no criticism of them in my presence and will defend them to a ridiculous degree, heaping heaps of contumely on the heretic heads of those who dare gainsay my assertions that these people are saints walking among us (and yes, I'm fully aware that it's quite a stretch to call dirty old men and river scum and people who refuse to apologize for markups on merchandise and folks who cling stubbornly to obviously flawed and foolish heroes "saints").
Almost to a man, these confidantes' advice to me is to get the hell away once in a while, to "get a life", to get myself together and get some perspective. And I don't argue with them (much); I make my plans to, say, run away with an intriguing stranger to Lander for a weekend or treat myself to a road trip to somewhere I've never been in Montana or just go get a fucking massage for the love of all that's good and holy! I make my plans, and then circumstances prove the adage that "life is what happens when you have made other plans."
Meetings are scheduled with little warning; people suddenly can't keep obligations and convince me to fill in for them; problems that supposedly I alone can solve (usually because I alone know the system in which the problem has occurred, because, usually, the system is my own invention – all you computer programmer types know what I'm talking about here. It's a 24/7 world now, and the end user isn't in the least bit interested in what pursuits you were pursuing when his need of you arose, neh?) crop up; transportation systems fail; the intriguing stranger turns out to be a seriously damaged flakeroo who makes less and less actual sense with each conversation... and the sanity-saving trip or diversion gets put off.
A wise man reminded me yesterday, though, that "the world is littered with the corpses of the indispensable."
And so, my body being ever so much wiser than I am, maybe even as wise as the aforementioned man, I got sick. And since my body and I rarely do anything we truly believe is worth doing in a half-assed fashion, I got really sick. And all my "fun tickets" – even reading, which I usually don't consider so much a fun little lark or diversion so much as an integral part of the way my entire mind and soul function at their most basic levels – got yanked from my grasp.
But as good old Paracelsus said (remember him? I know this has been another long ramble, but you can scroll up to the epigraph), in every disease is contained in part its own cure.
My illness removed me completely from the world of people, even to what they've written on paper.
That really throws one back on oneself.
So what I had was 12 or 13 days of enforced meditation, enduring my own company night and day except for those rare hours when the Darvocet stopped making me vomit and rave and actually conquered my consciousness.
It wasn't fun – I don't think really serious introspection ever is – but I'm already pretty glad it happened. I faced a lot of stuff – big, universal things like mortality and possible permanent impairment and smaller, less cosmic things like my hilariously awful schedule and the stupid standards I set for myself and then rage over when I don't live up to them. I have yet to sort out all my conclusions or decisions, but it's coming, and I'm determined to learn this time (since my bout with mono I shrugged off not long after strength returned to my limbs and I moved to Kate's Landing) to take what came to me in this illness seriously and make the changes that need to be made.
Why am I sharing all of this admittedly very personal stuff with you guys? Well, I think there are probably better ways of coming to where I am now. And yeah, I'm probably the real blockhead here yet for preaching to all of you (many of whom were the very ones who said "Jesus, Kate, will you fucking license your car and get out of town for a while before I chase you out myself with a red hot pitchfork?"), but dammit, people, learn from my horrible example. Don't wait to get sick to spend some time away and alone. When things get freaky, get out of your head or get out of Dodge and don't rely on your old crutches, whatever they may be.
As for me, to keep me mindful of what really is and isn't important, I shall:
1. Only go to meetings at which my presence is really, demonstrably and unmistakably required. Or which are very likely to be amusing (and yes, I'm still enough of a nerd to count as amusing those meetings in which far-out techno solutions to ammonia discharge problems are discussed. I've clarified, not metamorphosed, dammit!).
2. Never apologize for telling someone to buzz off if he or she has interrupted me writing or otherwise diverting myself on my own time. That includes if someone stops me in the post office while I'm seeing if I can correctly mutter all of the lyrics to "I Am the Very Model of Modern Major General" under my breath or if my cell phone rings with an urgent call from someone who wants to complain about the professional conduct of one of my police officers while I'm kissing a sexy man under the trees at midnight. Not that this is likely to happen. The cell phone gets left behind if I'm going under the trees with a sexy man if any planning at all is part of the equation. But it isn't always, is it?
3. Demonstrate my commitment to timely and appropriate frivolousness by always appearing at town council and other big shot important meetings in some form of beer t-shirt. I can get away with this. It's a small town, and a) everybody knows I'm a bit of a sot but b) never make important decisions that affect others when I'm being a sot, and c) we aren't that into "dressing up" around these here parts anyway. Actual shit is frequently seen on actual boots behind the dais and whatnot here. It's good stuff.
4. The chamber office is no longer to be spoken of, thought of, or in any way treated as "town hall west." Town hall is town hall, and my office is where we plan microbrew festivals, haunted houses, Christmas parades, and dizzyingly complex economic development projects, thank you.
5. There is no rule 5.
6. Developing some sort of paper management system would probably be a good idea. I have a filing cabinet in my home office, and it's not just meant as a plant stand, right?
Cuz man oh man oh man... I don't ever want to feel like that again.
(By the way: a rumor has reached my ears that that lazy slut of a Prairie Pornographer has finally added something new to her website, but that shall go unsubstantiated here as of course your humble blogger is not quite so humble as to deign to read such trash. But some of you out there might have more prurient interests than she, and as always, she is looking out for your best interests!)
Even while still in the womb, unborn, man is burdened with the potentialities of every disease, and is subject to them. And because all diseases are inherent in his nature, he could not be born alive and healthy if an inner physician were not hidden in him... Each natural disease bears its own remedy within itself. Man has received from nature both the destroyer and the preserver of health.
- Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus
It's common, isn't it, when a person is sick, for him to ask as I did, over and over and over again while he stares at the ceiling and thrashes around and wonders what is going on in the world that he is missing in his illness, "Why, oh why has this happened to me?"
Depending on the ailing one's background and temperament, the answers he concocts may range from punishment for misdeeds or sins to bad luck to a Darwinian turn of the wheel to a dumb mistake on his part to negligence on the part of some caregiver, safety supervisor, enforcer of sanitation standards to... oh, I'm sure the reasons we've all posited over time are as many and varied as we are.
Though as I tended to forget while I myself slogged through my recent days of fighting the mother of all sinus infections, there is another, maybe more productive way of thinking about illness and injury that is probably heretical especially to my doctor and lawyer and clerical friends: that these seeming misfortunes have a constructive purpose – and one far beyond the delivery of a moral lesson or a reminder of one's humanity and limitations, though yes, there are present elements of those, too.
A good tube-clogging, head-raking, eye-popping illness is also a way in which the body pretty much forces one to take a vacation, isn't it? Such a thought certainly goes a long way towards explaining my 13 days of solitude, at least.
Life in a small town isn't all the "getting away from it all," back to basics existence that is dreamed about by city dwellers who rush here at the merest hint of free time or an excuse for a business or personal retreat, after all, at least not if a person really lives it, as no one can deny I do. By virtue of the roles in civic and commercial life I have agreed to play here, I'm in the public eye pretty much all of the time; little that I do escapes notice or comment, and there isn't a dweller or visitor here who doesn't feel perfectly within his or her rights to demand a second or minute or hour or day of my time, in person, on the phone, by mail, by e-mail, to express his opinions, whether or not said opinions are based in anything resembling fact, whether or not his ideas are practicable or even worth considering as such, whether or not I might have been doing something at the time that was important or would suffer greatly for being interrupted.
This goes with the territory of being me, and most of the time I do what I can to bear it all with grace; however, yes, I do have a few companions who don't see the grace too often; they either know me too well and can read me or they inspire in me a confidence that leads to perhaps overwhelming outpourings of discontent or exasperation or helplessness in the face of it all. They're easy to spot for those who know me in real life; they're the ones to whose faults I probably appear completely blind because I will brook no criticism of them in my presence and will defend them to a ridiculous degree, heaping heaps of contumely on the heretic heads of those who dare gainsay my assertions that these people are saints walking among us (and yes, I'm fully aware that it's quite a stretch to call dirty old men and river scum and people who refuse to apologize for markups on merchandise and folks who cling stubbornly to obviously flawed and foolish heroes "saints").
Almost to a man, these confidantes' advice to me is to get the hell away once in a while, to "get a life", to get myself together and get some perspective. And I don't argue with them (much); I make my plans to, say, run away with an intriguing stranger to Lander for a weekend or treat myself to a road trip to somewhere I've never been in Montana or just go get a fucking massage for the love of all that's good and holy! I make my plans, and then circumstances prove the adage that "life is what happens when you have made other plans."
Meetings are scheduled with little warning; people suddenly can't keep obligations and convince me to fill in for them; problems that supposedly I alone can solve (usually because I alone know the system in which the problem has occurred, because, usually, the system is my own invention – all you computer programmer types know what I'm talking about here. It's a 24/7 world now, and the end user isn't in the least bit interested in what pursuits you were pursuing when his need of you arose, neh?) crop up; transportation systems fail; the intriguing stranger turns out to be a seriously damaged flakeroo who makes less and less actual sense with each conversation... and the sanity-saving trip or diversion gets put off.
A wise man reminded me yesterday, though, that "the world is littered with the corpses of the indispensable."
And so, my body being ever so much wiser than I am, maybe even as wise as the aforementioned man, I got sick. And since my body and I rarely do anything we truly believe is worth doing in a half-assed fashion, I got really sick. And all my "fun tickets" – even reading, which I usually don't consider so much a fun little lark or diversion so much as an integral part of the way my entire mind and soul function at their most basic levels – got yanked from my grasp.
But as good old Paracelsus said (remember him? I know this has been another long ramble, but you can scroll up to the epigraph), in every disease is contained in part its own cure.
My illness removed me completely from the world of people, even to what they've written on paper.
That really throws one back on oneself.
So what I had was 12 or 13 days of enforced meditation, enduring my own company night and day except for those rare hours when the Darvocet stopped making me vomit and rave and actually conquered my consciousness.
It wasn't fun – I don't think really serious introspection ever is – but I'm already pretty glad it happened. I faced a lot of stuff – big, universal things like mortality and possible permanent impairment and smaller, less cosmic things like my hilariously awful schedule and the stupid standards I set for myself and then rage over when I don't live up to them. I have yet to sort out all my conclusions or decisions, but it's coming, and I'm determined to learn this time (since my bout with mono I shrugged off not long after strength returned to my limbs and I moved to Kate's Landing) to take what came to me in this illness seriously and make the changes that need to be made.
Why am I sharing all of this admittedly very personal stuff with you guys? Well, I think there are probably better ways of coming to where I am now. And yeah, I'm probably the real blockhead here yet for preaching to all of you (many of whom were the very ones who said "Jesus, Kate, will you fucking license your car and get out of town for a while before I chase you out myself with a red hot pitchfork?"), but dammit, people, learn from my horrible example. Don't wait to get sick to spend some time away and alone. When things get freaky, get out of your head or get out of Dodge and don't rely on your old crutches, whatever they may be.
As for me, to keep me mindful of what really is and isn't important, I shall:
1. Only go to meetings at which my presence is really, demonstrably and unmistakably required. Or which are very likely to be amusing (and yes, I'm still enough of a nerd to count as amusing those meetings in which far-out techno solutions to ammonia discharge problems are discussed. I've clarified, not metamorphosed, dammit!).
2. Never apologize for telling someone to buzz off if he or she has interrupted me writing or otherwise diverting myself on my own time. That includes if someone stops me in the post office while I'm seeing if I can correctly mutter all of the lyrics to "I Am the Very Model of Modern Major General" under my breath or if my cell phone rings with an urgent call from someone who wants to complain about the professional conduct of one of my police officers while I'm kissing a sexy man under the trees at midnight. Not that this is likely to happen. The cell phone gets left behind if I'm going under the trees with a sexy man if any planning at all is part of the equation. But it isn't always, is it?
3. Demonstrate my commitment to timely and appropriate frivolousness by always appearing at town council and other big shot important meetings in some form of beer t-shirt. I can get away with this. It's a small town, and a) everybody knows I'm a bit of a sot but b) never make important decisions that affect others when I'm being a sot, and c) we aren't that into "dressing up" around these here parts anyway. Actual shit is frequently seen on actual boots behind the dais and whatnot here. It's good stuff.
4. The chamber office is no longer to be spoken of, thought of, or in any way treated as "town hall west." Town hall is town hall, and my office is where we plan microbrew festivals, haunted houses, Christmas parades, and dizzyingly complex economic development projects, thank you.
5. There is no rule 5.
6. Developing some sort of paper management system would probably be a good idea. I have a filing cabinet in my home office, and it's not just meant as a plant stand, right?
Cuz man oh man oh man... I don't ever want to feel like that again.
(By the way: a rumor has reached my ears that that lazy slut of a Prairie Pornographer has finally added something new to her website, but that shall go unsubstantiated here as of course your humble blogger is not quite so humble as to deign to read such trash. But some of you out there might have more prurient interests than she, and as always, she is looking out for your best interests!)
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
APOLOGIES AGAIN
...But I'm still re-adjusting to life among the living. Last night was my first drug-free night for sleeping, which meant not much sleeping happened at all as I gritted my teeth and forged on through a wakeful night. I wrote a lot, but the material is incohate, much like my mushy brain is right now at 3:30 p.m.
Maybe matters will improve after tonight's super-exciting, thrilling, spilling and chilling, raring to go and real good water and sewer joint powers board meeting (my first public meeting since I was felled by nasty germs and nastier medications) and I'll be inspired to post properly later but... probably not.
Bear with your slackful blogger girl one more day, dear readers.
Please?
...But I'm still re-adjusting to life among the living. Last night was my first drug-free night for sleeping, which meant not much sleeping happened at all as I gritted my teeth and forged on through a wakeful night. I wrote a lot, but the material is incohate, much like my mushy brain is right now at 3:30 p.m.
Maybe matters will improve after tonight's super-exciting, thrilling, spilling and chilling, raring to go and real good water and sewer joint powers board meeting (my first public meeting since I was felled by nasty germs and nastier medications) and I'll be inspired to post properly later but... probably not.
Bear with your slackful blogger girl one more day, dear readers.
Please?
Tuesday, October 08, 2002
TRULY THESE ARE THE DAYS OF MIRACLE AND WONDER...
...If the cosmic messages I received at Tad the Grocer’s store today are any indication. And for once, I have a large base of people whom I can query for confirmation: pretty much everybody who’s anybody in this town, it would appear, does his or her grocery shopping on Tuesdays at the lunch hour. Who knew?
So anyway, after I finished wandering around doing my small shopping – like so many of my friends, my grocery shopping is indeed small because my main meal every day is lunch, usually undertaken at either the Hotel Wolf or the Lazy River Cantina or Bubba’s Bar-B-Que and is thus nourishing and filling enough to last me the rest of the day, hence dinner usually being something like a can of soup and a carrot stick or something – I went, as cannot be avoided, to the checkout line, there to be hit with, as always, a disturbingly high number (now slightly more frightening because occasionally I have to buy giant sacks of dog food. Small price to pay for the company and amusement that the Collie of Folly affords me, yes, but it still took a bit of getting used to) (and she never, ever says thank you, dammit) (but on the other hand she never complains about the lack of variety the way a human companion would if he got lamb and rice, lamb and rice, lamb and rice every single day) and a number of astonishing revelations.
There are now purple M&Ms and if you buy a bag that contains nothing but purple ones you can win 100 million Japanese Yen ($804,760 at current exchange rates). Why? Why on earth?
And, big news! Lisa Marie Presley, who has apparently married H.I. McDonough, I mean Nicolas Cage, is going to close down Graceland so she and Hi can live in it themselves! This has dealt me something of a crushing blow, as no longer will I be able to sing the Dead Milkmen’s classic ditty “Going to Graceland” with the same degree of hopefulness and poignancy.
“Going to Graceland/It’s going to be great/I’m so happy I just can’t wait/Going to see the bucket that Elvis Presley kicked!”
Wonder what Lisa and Nick will do with that bucket?
So with this news in mind, I was not surprised to learn that a statue of Elivis Presley has been observed to shed real tears. At last a fitting consort for the Virgin Mary, it would seem. Truly portentous.
And if that’s not enough, some janitor somewhere has managed to impregnate a 3000 year old mummy in his spare time. Maybe he was mopping with Elivis’s bucket. Maybe the child will be the second coming.
And what rough beast, its hour come at last/Slouches its way toward Graceland to be born?”
Going to Graceland/We’ll stand in line/We’ll get to have a wild time/Going to get to buy Love Me Tender shampoo
Oh that’s right – I’m out of shampoo! Better get some! Thank goodness I remembered! I used it all up taking upwards of six showers a day during the 12 day headache. I would have showered more often, but the water heater at Kate’s Landing is as weak as a twelve-legged kitten.
Speaking of headaches, the cover of Time Magazine this week is all about preventing headaches. Goodness me! Where were they two weeks ago? Stupid Time Magazine. From now on it’s Weekly World News for me and nuthin’ else. They have so much more to offer, even online, where I can play the Batboy Game, while Time is nothing but a shill for the plastic surgeons who want to shoot up more people with botulinium toxins! Ha ha ha!
And anyway, as you might guess from the new and improved tone of my writing, I’m sort of cured. I talked to my drinking buddy/physician yesterday and she said maybe it was the Darvocet that was making me want to end my life in a spectacularly messy and inconvenient fashion – it’s apparently famous for causing vomiting and other unpleasant experiences – so I chucked what was left of the bottle (rather than upchucking it) (oh, sometimes I really do kill myself!) and started sucking down some Tylenol. I still have a headache, but it’s relatively manageable and I even made it to coffee today, which brings me to my next fabulous portent...
...I totally nailed the Sewer King at coffee today. It was epic, it was heartbreaking and staggering and genius, it was one for the history books.
In the absence of our traditionally presiding Lord Macklebrains (not his real name), the Sewer King is in charge of “running the numbers,” i.e. choosing the supposedly random “winning” number and corresponding letter that will determine who among our number will pay for coffee on a particular day. Historically, the King (actually not just the King; Mackebrains likes to do it too, but he doesn’t make such a theatrical production of it) likes to take advantage of a unique opportunity this affords him, that of slightly rigging the game in my “favor” by picking a number he feels certain I will be certain to pick when it comes my turn to guess, and today was no exception.
“Gaze fondly into my eyes and choose today’s number,” he began.
We stared at each other for a few minutes, locked in a contest of wills. Sweat appeared on both our brows. The strain was incredible. Veins popped out at our temples. Teeth were gritted. I could feel the ghost of my 12-day headache beginning again to rattle its chains in the far off dungeon into which St. Tylenol had stuffed it fighting nobly on my behalf.
Then at last, the tension broke.
“Nice try,” I smirked.
And indeed, as the drama built and my companions narrowed the numbers down, my turn came up. I saw my opportunity and I struck. The trick is to stick the next guy by choosing a number that is just two away from either the top or the bottom, which works sometimes anyway, and today it did! And the guy to my left was the King! So I got to pick the letter to send around the table to see upon whose head the Fatal Letter would land. And it landed on the King! So I had to choose another letter! And I got him again! Second time’s the charm, on the letter, so the King bought the whole thing!
As I said, nice try.
Surely the ducks even now are preparing to spell out equally portentous messages on the surface of what is left of the river. Surely. I shall find out soon enough.
“What are we waitin’ for?/Let’s leave right now/We’re going to Graceland/And I don’t care how/E Pluribus Elvis/That’s what I say/We’re going to Graceland today.”
...If the cosmic messages I received at Tad the Grocer’s store today are any indication. And for once, I have a large base of people whom I can query for confirmation: pretty much everybody who’s anybody in this town, it would appear, does his or her grocery shopping on Tuesdays at the lunch hour. Who knew?
So anyway, after I finished wandering around doing my small shopping – like so many of my friends, my grocery shopping is indeed small because my main meal every day is lunch, usually undertaken at either the Hotel Wolf or the Lazy River Cantina or Bubba’s Bar-B-Que and is thus nourishing and filling enough to last me the rest of the day, hence dinner usually being something like a can of soup and a carrot stick or something – I went, as cannot be avoided, to the checkout line, there to be hit with, as always, a disturbingly high number (now slightly more frightening because occasionally I have to buy giant sacks of dog food. Small price to pay for the company and amusement that the Collie of Folly affords me, yes, but it still took a bit of getting used to) (and she never, ever says thank you, dammit) (but on the other hand she never complains about the lack of variety the way a human companion would if he got lamb and rice, lamb and rice, lamb and rice every single day) and a number of astonishing revelations.
There are now purple M&Ms and if you buy a bag that contains nothing but purple ones you can win 100 million Japanese Yen ($804,760 at current exchange rates). Why? Why on earth?
And, big news! Lisa Marie Presley, who has apparently married H.I. McDonough, I mean Nicolas Cage, is going to close down Graceland so she and Hi can live in it themselves! This has dealt me something of a crushing blow, as no longer will I be able to sing the Dead Milkmen’s classic ditty “Going to Graceland” with the same degree of hopefulness and poignancy.
“Going to Graceland/It’s going to be great/I’m so happy I just can’t wait/Going to see the bucket that Elvis Presley kicked!”
Wonder what Lisa and Nick will do with that bucket?
So with this news in mind, I was not surprised to learn that a statue of Elivis Presley has been observed to shed real tears. At last a fitting consort for the Virgin Mary, it would seem. Truly portentous.
And if that’s not enough, some janitor somewhere has managed to impregnate a 3000 year old mummy in his spare time. Maybe he was mopping with Elivis’s bucket. Maybe the child will be the second coming.
And what rough beast, its hour come at last/Slouches its way toward Graceland to be born?”
Going to Graceland/We’ll stand in line/We’ll get to have a wild time/Going to get to buy Love Me Tender shampoo
Oh that’s right – I’m out of shampoo! Better get some! Thank goodness I remembered! I used it all up taking upwards of six showers a day during the 12 day headache. I would have showered more often, but the water heater at Kate’s Landing is as weak as a twelve-legged kitten.
Speaking of headaches, the cover of Time Magazine this week is all about preventing headaches. Goodness me! Where were they two weeks ago? Stupid Time Magazine. From now on it’s Weekly World News for me and nuthin’ else. They have so much more to offer, even online, where I can play the Batboy Game, while Time is nothing but a shill for the plastic surgeons who want to shoot up more people with botulinium toxins! Ha ha ha!
And anyway, as you might guess from the new and improved tone of my writing, I’m sort of cured. I talked to my drinking buddy/physician yesterday and she said maybe it was the Darvocet that was making me want to end my life in a spectacularly messy and inconvenient fashion – it’s apparently famous for causing vomiting and other unpleasant experiences – so I chucked what was left of the bottle (rather than upchucking it) (oh, sometimes I really do kill myself!) and started sucking down some Tylenol. I still have a headache, but it’s relatively manageable and I even made it to coffee today, which brings me to my next fabulous portent...
...I totally nailed the Sewer King at coffee today. It was epic, it was heartbreaking and staggering and genius, it was one for the history books.
In the absence of our traditionally presiding Lord Macklebrains (not his real name), the Sewer King is in charge of “running the numbers,” i.e. choosing the supposedly random “winning” number and corresponding letter that will determine who among our number will pay for coffee on a particular day. Historically, the King (actually not just the King; Mackebrains likes to do it too, but he doesn’t make such a theatrical production of it) likes to take advantage of a unique opportunity this affords him, that of slightly rigging the game in my “favor” by picking a number he feels certain I will be certain to pick when it comes my turn to guess, and today was no exception.
“Gaze fondly into my eyes and choose today’s number,” he began.
We stared at each other for a few minutes, locked in a contest of wills. Sweat appeared on both our brows. The strain was incredible. Veins popped out at our temples. Teeth were gritted. I could feel the ghost of my 12-day headache beginning again to rattle its chains in the far off dungeon into which St. Tylenol had stuffed it fighting nobly on my behalf.
Then at last, the tension broke.
“Nice try,” I smirked.
And indeed, as the drama built and my companions narrowed the numbers down, my turn came up. I saw my opportunity and I struck. The trick is to stick the next guy by choosing a number that is just two away from either the top or the bottom, which works sometimes anyway, and today it did! And the guy to my left was the King! So I got to pick the letter to send around the table to see upon whose head the Fatal Letter would land. And it landed on the King! So I had to choose another letter! And I got him again! Second time’s the charm, on the letter, so the King bought the whole thing!
As I said, nice try.
Surely the ducks even now are preparing to spell out equally portentous messages on the surface of what is left of the river. Surely. I shall find out soon enough.
“What are we waitin’ for?/Let’s leave right now/We’re going to Graceland/And I don’t care how/E Pluribus Elvis/That’s what I say/We’re going to Graceland today.”
Monday, October 07, 2002
WHAT TO DO?
I want to write some more, I do. I feel an obligation to those of you out there who, as Angie Warhol does, click over to this page ‘most every day just on the off chance that I’ve put up something, anything, new for you to read. I know the feeling; there are web pages of which I have become a fan (the rabbit blog, for instance, or Will Leitch’s “Life as a Loser” column at The Simon, which is published on a weekly basis only but I often find myself checking a few times a week just on the off chance he’s been inspired to throw up a bonus column or something) and which continually let me down. I hate surfing over to these places or to magazines like Salon, which I try to read daily, and see nothing there new to read or nothing that sounds interesting. It lets all the air out of my day when that happens.
But the truth is, I’m kind of fresh out of things to write about right now, folks. I’ve been out sick for 12 days now and seeing little improvement, so I have no idea what’s going on in the world. I am playing through the pain right now and actually sitting in my office for the first time since my abortive, premature attempt to return to work last Wednesday, but my Enabling Assistant has no news for me; she’s merely been sitting here giving directions to hunters and rounding up businesses to participate in the Halloween Walk at the end of the month. I haven’t made it to coffee. I have tried to read the newspaper, but such concentration is beyond me – I’ve had to stop reading books, even, truly a drastic step for me. My contact with the outside world has been limited to conversations with my parents, who are mostly inquiring after my health, do I need any groceries, would I like to come watch the Bronco game, have I eaten, and the occasional visit from Officer Aimee, telling me she’s set aside some corn and zucchini from her boyfriend’s garden for me, and would I like the heart out of the elk she shot over the weekend?
Truth be told, I’m getting a little scared. I am the most pathetic sick person I know; most of the time I take my extraordinary good health for granted; I rarely get ill except for my yearly bout of bronchitis in February (though that got much, much worse than usual this year, didn’t it?), I am physically very strong and robust, have no cholesterol or blood pressure problems despite my rather portly physique, and I have boundless energy that I expend in lots of enjoyable ways to the frequent astonishment of my partners and pals, whom I routinely wear out. When I get laid up, therefore, I freak out and turn into a complete baby, crying in the doctor’s office, saying truly unkind and horrible things to the few people who try to be nice to me, succumbing with frightening ease to despair and flights of abominable fancy, and giving up on myself and my existence far too quickly. I terrify myself with my inability to see my way out of whatever illness has gripped me; become convinced that I’ll never walk/regain my voice/be able to think clearly again. So of course last night when I again could not sleep for the pain in my head and neck and could not resort to my typical time-filler when insomnia hits, that being reading a book, any book, I wound up (quietly) (gently) (but nonetheless) crying from fear that I’ll never be able to read again.
Intellectually I know that sooner or later I’ll recover from this, too, as I did from mono and pneumonia and all of that other crap. Intellectually. Emotionally, I’m still a wreck. I try as I’ve said to play through it – I came to work today, directed some hunters, went to lunch with the E.A., stopped by the hardware store to order paint for the chamber’s new office space (well, actually the E.A. did all that; I finally again resorted to the Darvocet despite its wildly emetic and mind-fogging properties and so was pretty much out of it, standing in the middle of the store and sort of watching the people bustling around me like they were on TV. That’s the shitty thing about these meds; nothing seems real and everything is sort of out of focus; not in a visual sense exactly, though sometimes I do see double for a moment, but things... things take a bit to register and it takes a bit longer for me to come up with a response. When someone says “hello, Kate” they’ve usually wandered off sort of baffled by the time I pull it together enough to say hello back, and it’s usually half a minute or more later still that I realize I’ve probably seemed pretty rude). Now, a scant hour or so later, the headache is coming back and all I’ll be able to do is go home and sit in the shower, the hot water pouring over my head and giving me relief for as long as the hot water supply holds out (my gas bill this month is going to be ungodly).
Wow, have I ever whined like this on my web page? I don’t think I have. Sorry about that. But at least you’ve got something new to read, right?
I want to write some more, I do. I feel an obligation to those of you out there who, as Angie Warhol does, click over to this page ‘most every day just on the off chance that I’ve put up something, anything, new for you to read. I know the feeling; there are web pages of which I have become a fan (the rabbit blog, for instance, or Will Leitch’s “Life as a Loser” column at The Simon, which is published on a weekly basis only but I often find myself checking a few times a week just on the off chance he’s been inspired to throw up a bonus column or something) and which continually let me down. I hate surfing over to these places or to magazines like Salon, which I try to read daily, and see nothing there new to read or nothing that sounds interesting. It lets all the air out of my day when that happens.
But the truth is, I’m kind of fresh out of things to write about right now, folks. I’ve been out sick for 12 days now and seeing little improvement, so I have no idea what’s going on in the world. I am playing through the pain right now and actually sitting in my office for the first time since my abortive, premature attempt to return to work last Wednesday, but my Enabling Assistant has no news for me; she’s merely been sitting here giving directions to hunters and rounding up businesses to participate in the Halloween Walk at the end of the month. I haven’t made it to coffee. I have tried to read the newspaper, but such concentration is beyond me – I’ve had to stop reading books, even, truly a drastic step for me. My contact with the outside world has been limited to conversations with my parents, who are mostly inquiring after my health, do I need any groceries, would I like to come watch the Bronco game, have I eaten, and the occasional visit from Officer Aimee, telling me she’s set aside some corn and zucchini from her boyfriend’s garden for me, and would I like the heart out of the elk she shot over the weekend?
Truth be told, I’m getting a little scared. I am the most pathetic sick person I know; most of the time I take my extraordinary good health for granted; I rarely get ill except for my yearly bout of bronchitis in February (though that got much, much worse than usual this year, didn’t it?), I am physically very strong and robust, have no cholesterol or blood pressure problems despite my rather portly physique, and I have boundless energy that I expend in lots of enjoyable ways to the frequent astonishment of my partners and pals, whom I routinely wear out. When I get laid up, therefore, I freak out and turn into a complete baby, crying in the doctor’s office, saying truly unkind and horrible things to the few people who try to be nice to me, succumbing with frightening ease to despair and flights of abominable fancy, and giving up on myself and my existence far too quickly. I terrify myself with my inability to see my way out of whatever illness has gripped me; become convinced that I’ll never walk/regain my voice/be able to think clearly again. So of course last night when I again could not sleep for the pain in my head and neck and could not resort to my typical time-filler when insomnia hits, that being reading a book, any book, I wound up (quietly) (gently) (but nonetheless) crying from fear that I’ll never be able to read again.
Intellectually I know that sooner or later I’ll recover from this, too, as I did from mono and pneumonia and all of that other crap. Intellectually. Emotionally, I’m still a wreck. I try as I’ve said to play through it – I came to work today, directed some hunters, went to lunch with the E.A., stopped by the hardware store to order paint for the chamber’s new office space (well, actually the E.A. did all that; I finally again resorted to the Darvocet despite its wildly emetic and mind-fogging properties and so was pretty much out of it, standing in the middle of the store and sort of watching the people bustling around me like they were on TV. That’s the shitty thing about these meds; nothing seems real and everything is sort of out of focus; not in a visual sense exactly, though sometimes I do see double for a moment, but things... things take a bit to register and it takes a bit longer for me to come up with a response. When someone says “hello, Kate” they’ve usually wandered off sort of baffled by the time I pull it together enough to say hello back, and it’s usually half a minute or more later still that I realize I’ve probably seemed pretty rude). Now, a scant hour or so later, the headache is coming back and all I’ll be able to do is go home and sit in the shower, the hot water pouring over my head and giving me relief for as long as the hot water supply holds out (my gas bill this month is going to be ungodly).
Wow, have I ever whined like this on my web page? I don’t think I have. Sorry about that. But at least you’ve got something new to read, right?
Thursday, October 03, 2002
NOTE: The following was composed at Kate’s Landing early Thursday morning - at 3:34 a.m. to be exact. Caveat lector.
DARVOCET DIARIES
Gabby’s on drugs,
Gabby’s on drugs,
Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby’s on drugs
Oh yeah – I went to the doctor today to shut up friends and family who had convinced themselves – and me too, nearly – that I had somehow contracted West Nile Virus (hey, I do live on the river and in normal years I’m sure my yard is a Mosquito Disneyland). As of today officially that is not the case, though the blood work won’t be in until Friday. Another fine benefit of nearly rural life.
No, it’s a sinus infection, a really really bad one, and strange for the lack of congestion and snot in my head but nonetheless just a really, really bad sinus infection that has my entire head enclosed in a vise two sizes too small and tightening and my neck stiff as it was lo these eight? NINE years ago when it whiplashed after an idiot came barreling around a long curve in his car in Groton, Mass., a curve he as a native and resident must surely have known ended at a stop sign but must surely have temporarily forgotten because he plowed into the rear end of the UMass entomology department’s Ford Escort station wagon that was stopped at said stop sign while traffic thundered through the cross street – plowed into it at about 25 miles an hour over the speed limit, the police estimated (I missed a week of work – hard to look down into the eyepiece of a microscope in a C-collar – and was sentenced to a week’s use of Northampton’s sybaritic East Heaven Pool & Spa. The workman’s comp money came a gratifyingly rapid 15 months later, but I digress because the drugs are kicking in) (indeed, in the original longhand manuscript of this account, I first called what I have now a “science” infection). Yeah, my neck feels like that and my whole body aches like when I had mono and my hands shake a lot and even undrugged it takes me four or five iterations at times to comprehend a page of English, though maybe that’s because I’m noodling around with Hofstadter again.
So anyway, because it’s a sinus infection, I now have two weeks of amoxicillin to choke down – and I do mean choke – the modules (calling them pills would be like calling those big fat WWII era grenades BBs) are 3/4 of an inch long, chalky and a shocking pink hue.
And because it’s really, really bad, I also get Darvocet, a welcome change from the usual codeine cough syrup in that it’s no an emetically malodorous syrup that tastes even worse than it smells and causes big time vomiting if the dose is even a little bit off (to prevent abuse, one assumes; it is an opiate. I can’t believe my man Mark Ames, of eXile fame, sucks down whole bottles of the stuff when heroin gets scarce over in Russia) and also in that I get maybe an hour before the coma sets in instead of 15 minutes. BUT it doesn’t really kill the pain, the Darvocet, it just makes me space out and sort of not notice it as much... so I can actually write a bit before passing out, too.
Oh yeah, Gabby’s on drugs.
By the way, apologies to Mojo Nixon for the ripoff of lines from his fabulous, immortal ditty “Elvis is Everywhere” that forms the epigraph to this entry. Bermuda Triangle – “Elvis needs boats, Elvis needs boats...”
Maybe half my readership got that. That’s okay, though, cuz that half is wondering, as they read and wait for some kind of trippy Lucy in the Skying like I did in college on Percodan after my wisdom teeth were removed in an Olympian feat of oral surgery for which the guy who took them out should have gotten a Nobel Prize or something, they’re wondering...
Who the hell is Gabby?
And of course the other half of my readership who missed my carpet crawling collegiate antics (I am SO susceptible to oral narcotics), is still getting a laugh at the Lucy-Mojo faction’s expense, because they know (to paraphrase Flaubert) Gabby... c’est moi!
See, back in the day when my own dear personal mom was the newslady in the family and my job was confined to hiding atop the garage reading C.S. Lewis, confusing my kindergarten teacher and other such irritating precocities for which I am still fondly remembered, she had this newspaper column. In which, as all writers wind up doing, she mostly wound up writing about her nearest and dearest, i.e. her own dear personal husband and her two fascinatingly weird children, i.e. my dad, my sister, and your humble blogger.
Knowing the fame this would bring us, perhaps before we were ready for it, she called her daughters by code names, Gabby and Gus (my father could not be so easily hidden, alas, but he was a big boy, she reasoned. I think).
And I, of course, because of my astonishing resemblance in mien, in manner, in character and achievement and megalomania to the Emperor Augustus Caesar who found Rome in clay and left her in marble, I was Gus.
No, really, I was.
Go ahead and ask my mom! Her e-mail is... Aw, heck, there I go with my recreational lying again. Blame it on the Darvocet. Or don’t. I really don’t care because the stuff is kicking in! At least, I think so! Maybe! My neck and head still hurt a lot and I’m too twitchy to sleep (obviously) but I just tried to convince you that my childhood nickname was not Gabby.
OK, wow. Every single muscle in my body just relaxed (good thing I went to the bathroom before I started writing). Well, except my neck. Maybe I’ll finally sleep now. Can I, please?
I was just going to tell you why my name was Gabby. Not a big deal. You can probably guess on your own. Yup, you got it right! I was named for Argentine soccer hero and Serie A superstar Gabriel Batistuta! No, really! I know he was born a few months after me – everyone does, sheesh. But what do you think fortune cookies are for?
OK, not fortune cookies. It was a ouija board.
No, OK, it was really a time machine they used to see his future and mine.
Oh, all right. I was actually named for Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Happy now?
Good. Now back to bed. This pen is starting to look funny.
POSTSCRIPT: You should see the handwriting!
DARVOCET DIARIES
Gabby’s on drugs,
Gabby’s on drugs,
Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby Gabby’s on drugs
Oh yeah – I went to the doctor today to shut up friends and family who had convinced themselves – and me too, nearly – that I had somehow contracted West Nile Virus (hey, I do live on the river and in normal years I’m sure my yard is a Mosquito Disneyland). As of today officially that is not the case, though the blood work won’t be in until Friday. Another fine benefit of nearly rural life.
No, it’s a sinus infection, a really really bad one, and strange for the lack of congestion and snot in my head but nonetheless just a really, really bad sinus infection that has my entire head enclosed in a vise two sizes too small and tightening and my neck stiff as it was lo these eight? NINE years ago when it whiplashed after an idiot came barreling around a long curve in his car in Groton, Mass., a curve he as a native and resident must surely have known ended at a stop sign but must surely have temporarily forgotten because he plowed into the rear end of the UMass entomology department’s Ford Escort station wagon that was stopped at said stop sign while traffic thundered through the cross street – plowed into it at about 25 miles an hour over the speed limit, the police estimated (I missed a week of work – hard to look down into the eyepiece of a microscope in a C-collar – and was sentenced to a week’s use of Northampton’s sybaritic East Heaven Pool & Spa. The workman’s comp money came a gratifyingly rapid 15 months later, but I digress because the drugs are kicking in) (indeed, in the original longhand manuscript of this account, I first called what I have now a “science” infection). Yeah, my neck feels like that and my whole body aches like when I had mono and my hands shake a lot and even undrugged it takes me four or five iterations at times to comprehend a page of English, though maybe that’s because I’m noodling around with Hofstadter again.
So anyway, because it’s a sinus infection, I now have two weeks of amoxicillin to choke down – and I do mean choke – the modules (calling them pills would be like calling those big fat WWII era grenades BBs) are 3/4 of an inch long, chalky and a shocking pink hue.
And because it’s really, really bad, I also get Darvocet, a welcome change from the usual codeine cough syrup in that it’s no an emetically malodorous syrup that tastes even worse than it smells and causes big time vomiting if the dose is even a little bit off (to prevent abuse, one assumes; it is an opiate. I can’t believe my man Mark Ames, of eXile fame, sucks down whole bottles of the stuff when heroin gets scarce over in Russia) and also in that I get maybe an hour before the coma sets in instead of 15 minutes. BUT it doesn’t really kill the pain, the Darvocet, it just makes me space out and sort of not notice it as much... so I can actually write a bit before passing out, too.
Oh yeah, Gabby’s on drugs.
By the way, apologies to Mojo Nixon for the ripoff of lines from his fabulous, immortal ditty “Elvis is Everywhere” that forms the epigraph to this entry. Bermuda Triangle – “Elvis needs boats, Elvis needs boats...”
Maybe half my readership got that. That’s okay, though, cuz that half is wondering, as they read and wait for some kind of trippy Lucy in the Skying like I did in college on Percodan after my wisdom teeth were removed in an Olympian feat of oral surgery for which the guy who took them out should have gotten a Nobel Prize or something, they’re wondering...
Who the hell is Gabby?
And of course the other half of my readership who missed my carpet crawling collegiate antics (I am SO susceptible to oral narcotics), is still getting a laugh at the Lucy-Mojo faction’s expense, because they know (to paraphrase Flaubert) Gabby... c’est moi!
See, back in the day when my own dear personal mom was the newslady in the family and my job was confined to hiding atop the garage reading C.S. Lewis, confusing my kindergarten teacher and other such irritating precocities for which I am still fondly remembered, she had this newspaper column. In which, as all writers wind up doing, she mostly wound up writing about her nearest and dearest, i.e. her own dear personal husband and her two fascinatingly weird children, i.e. my dad, my sister, and your humble blogger.
Knowing the fame this would bring us, perhaps before we were ready for it, she called her daughters by code names, Gabby and Gus (my father could not be so easily hidden, alas, but he was a big boy, she reasoned. I think).
And I, of course, because of my astonishing resemblance in mien, in manner, in character and achievement and megalomania to the Emperor Augustus Caesar who found Rome in clay and left her in marble, I was Gus.
No, really, I was.
Go ahead and ask my mom! Her e-mail is... Aw, heck, there I go with my recreational lying again. Blame it on the Darvocet. Or don’t. I really don’t care because the stuff is kicking in! At least, I think so! Maybe! My neck and head still hurt a lot and I’m too twitchy to sleep (obviously) but I just tried to convince you that my childhood nickname was not Gabby.
OK, wow. Every single muscle in my body just relaxed (good thing I went to the bathroom before I started writing). Well, except my neck. Maybe I’ll finally sleep now. Can I, please?
I was just going to tell you why my name was Gabby. Not a big deal. You can probably guess on your own. Yup, you got it right! I was named for Argentine soccer hero and Serie A superstar Gabriel Batistuta! No, really! I know he was born a few months after me – everyone does, sheesh. But what do you think fortune cookies are for?
OK, not fortune cookies. It was a ouija board.
No, OK, it was really a time machine they used to see his future and mine.
Oh, all right. I was actually named for Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Happy now?
Good. Now back to bed. This pen is starting to look funny.
POSTSCRIPT: You should see the handwriting!
Monday, September 30, 2002
FLU-HOO-HOOOOOO
My apologies, dear readers, but I am currently laid up with some kind of flu-like something that has kept me flat on my back in pain for four or five days. I still feel like roadkill, am only upright at this moment because I have been kidnapped by demented but well-meaning parents who persist in a quaint folk belief in the curative powers of the Denver Broncos (who tonight will play the Baltimore Ravens in Baltimore. Wouldn't care to be Shannon Sharpe tonight, nope, nope -- though I'm sure he'll give as good as he gets) and so have brought me to their home to watch the game, Kate's Landing being a designated NO TV zone.
I will resume posting here as soon as I have something worthwhile to say. Since I got many alarmed, disturbed and generally less than complimentary comments on my migraine post, I will spare you descriptions of my cranial and corporeal pains, nausea, fever, etc. that so far have defied all remedy save lying flat on my back in a semi-delerious state. Had I a working tape recorder at home I might later have something amusing to share with you, transcripted from my ravings, but alas.
They probably wouldn't make sense to anyone not residing in my head anyway.
Until later...
- Your humble blogger
My apologies, dear readers, but I am currently laid up with some kind of flu-like something that has kept me flat on my back in pain for four or five days. I still feel like roadkill, am only upright at this moment because I have been kidnapped by demented but well-meaning parents who persist in a quaint folk belief in the curative powers of the Denver Broncos (who tonight will play the Baltimore Ravens in Baltimore. Wouldn't care to be Shannon Sharpe tonight, nope, nope -- though I'm sure he'll give as good as he gets) and so have brought me to their home to watch the game, Kate's Landing being a designated NO TV zone.
I will resume posting here as soon as I have something worthwhile to say. Since I got many alarmed, disturbed and generally less than complimentary comments on my migraine post, I will spare you descriptions of my cranial and corporeal pains, nausea, fever, etc. that so far have defied all remedy save lying flat on my back in a semi-delerious state. Had I a working tape recorder at home I might later have something amusing to share with you, transcripted from my ravings, but alas.
They probably wouldn't make sense to anyone not residing in my head anyway.
Until later...
- Your humble blogger
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