Strange Days Indeed

More conversing with "Joey Pants" today, who said, "Sometimes I forget I have a brain."

~~~

Post facto, by invitation (that's new), I read the story linked below at "JC Opens Up the Mic 2010 Kickoff Event" this evening as a "featured performer" (one of 12).

("JC" is Jersey City, not Jesus Christ.)

Chicken of the Sea

I had to submit a bio for the program, and wanted to spice it with something a little weird. So I included the fact that I "once had a paying gig writing restaurant reviews for eateries [I] never visited." Which is true - and a long story, perhaps for another time.

~~~

Random: A deleted scene from a Twin Peaks script

Sound barricades itself into rolls of peanut butter when you speak

"Your affluent effluent drives even the most zeal-minded to imbibe."

Everyone needs a compliment now and then, but it's hard to come up with something original. You might try some of the novel extolations below on your friends and rivals. If you deliver them fast enough, they might not even notice the 100-percent inanity content.

"You foment graciously, as ever any dying monster did rot."

"Wheals and boils come forth as testament to your fine sense of haut couture."

"Your cleverness ferments meat without the need of oxygen."

"Woe is me, for I must forever more huddle, unminded, in the dark shadow of your undeserved engine of procreation."

"Come, let me gnaw your fingernails that I may absorb and lose myself in the wise and gritty detritus that is you."

"I find your eye sockets to be a wondrous amusement park filled with neo-plastic pleasures and oncogenic delights."

"Your sweet voice is like the snap of a bra strap upon a sunburnt back."

"The sand runes crossing your divided consciousness do speak of contemptuous cardinals setting a Spanish village ablaze."

"You turn the atmosphere wild with currents of vitriol when you smile at the passing insects."

You can generate more of these at the Surrealist Compliment Generator.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

"Joey Pants", the character who's been wandering around my daily haunts with that accent, does push-ups and yoga on the carpet, wears a pork-pie hat, and addresses me as follows: "You eat healthy. Where'd you get that sandwich?" "Oh, man, you...uh...promote?" "Are you editors?" "Whose bike is this? This is a beautiful bike." "No, it's an autobiography about how my mental illness sublimated itself..." I feel...puzzled (I still don't know who he is) but amused....

~~~

As I walk to the train station every day, I tend to see the same backpack- or messenger-bag-wearing pedestrians hoofing it in the same direction. I often feel like we're in a walking foot-race. The guy (these are mostly guys) who's more inclined that day to ignore the walk/don't walk signs and play toreador with rushing cars (piloted by drivers yacking on cell phones) tends to win. It's not necessarily the guy with the longest legs. Sometimes it's me. But the thrill of victory is rather feeble....

~~~

My wyfe brought home a lot of old-lady costume jewelery from her deceased aunt's house, and some of it is weird and interesting: lots of dragonflies, Asian deities, and...mice. Not sure what we'll do with it, but for now, it all glitters on a tray and makes me feel like there's something numinous here....

~~~

Somebody called me a grammar Nazi today. Not pleasant....

~~~

Postscript: Um, it actually IS him. I've never seen a single episode....

Brain Dump

Translation Uncertain

Hector: Gnik nus eht semoc ereh?
Conseula: Presto obrigado! Tanta mucho!
Hector: Mundo paparazzi mi amore....
Conseula: Chicka ferdy, ha ha!
Hector: Klaatu barada nikto! Hee hee!
Conseula: No es cosa de brujeria...
Hector: Amore de felice corazón.
Conseula: No es cosa de brujería, hmm?
Hector: Gnihgual s'ydobyreve, huh?
Conseula: Niar! Enihsnus!
Hector: Lissum, blussak a mizure, habuts-an-oh'en...
Conseula: Tidja tidja tuplay!
Hector: Pleh!
Conseula: Y ese punto de alegría.
Hector: Ah! Böwakawa, poussé, poussé!
Conseula: Hee hee!
Hector: Ha ha ha!

Word of the Day: neroli

neroli (n)

An essential oil distilled from the flowers of the orange.

"Add 3 to 4 drops of neroli essential oil to 1/2 cup safflower, sweet almond, grapeseed, or sunflower oil. Use this on your scalp for a tantalizing scent before a date. During a date, you can use this same oil as a stimulating massage oil."
--Stephanie Rose Bird, Sticks, Stones, Roots & Bones: Hoodoo, Mojo & Conjuring with Herbs

That would be some date!

Not sure why Wallace circled this word in his dictionary. Probably he just liked the sound of it -- and maybe he also knew that neroli oil is used in aromatherapy as an antidepressant, which is something he definitely needed. It's also said to be a hypnotic, aphrodisiac and a euphoric -- sort of a citrus ecstasy.

(Neroli is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

'Grim Augery': Dark Night of the Soul Photos

After some legal knots were finally untangled, the Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse/David Lynch collaborative album Dark Night of the Soul has now been released, and it's an eclectic pleasure (for me anyway). The album was originally supposed to be released with an accompanying book of Lynch's photographs inspired by the music, but instead the book was released by itself with a blank CD, apparently as a sarcastic comment on the legal roadblock. The new CD includes a few of the photos in a booklet, but more of them can be viewed here. They're funny and disturbing, sometimes simultaneously. Typical Lynch -- and that's peachy keen.

Photo of the Week

I joined the local Existentialist Club (that's the Club's sign, above), which meets on the third Thursday of every other month (except June and December) to discuss classic philosophical tomes, such as Time, Essence, and Reality: A Systematic Reevaluation of Nothingness and Semantic Modes of Non-Essential Functioning. Occasionally, we also read self-help books, like Non-Existence: What to Do if It Suddenly Strikes You. Everybody wears black, and refreshments are served (Olestra chips and non-alcoholic beer). An ambivalently good time is had by all.

Actually, I just made that up. This is a sign frame I saw on Central Avenue that caught my eye and put me in a pensive mood.

Random Sequence

Scenario 19 (excerpt 2)

Malcolm and Harold, two gray-haired business men, stand behind a table covered with miscellaneous objects.

"It's all in the terminology," says Malcolm, demonstrating once again his grasp of strategic brand-name development.

Harold looks skeptical. "I'm an inventor, not a marketeer," he says. "But it's just a more efficiently shaped flyswatter. And you want to call it a...a...."

"Slap Wanker!" Malcolm says emphatically. "You'll sell scads more."

"Sounds a bit, uh, sordid, if you ask me," says Harold.

"Piffle," Malcolm says. "You have to get people's attention. That's why I want you to rename your website. You should call it 'Spooge Equipment to Go' or something very similar. Something eye-catching. You have to compete with the likes of Harriet Carter and Carol Wright -- boring names, but superstars in the 'I love widgets' retail arena."

"But calling a thermos-blender combination a....what was it?"

"Speedboat Margarita Cooler."

"And my first-aid fanny pack?"

"Boo-boo Mommy Kit."

Harold sighs. "Okay. But this..." -- he picks up his ladybug yo-yo -- "is a simple child's toy."

"No! It's a Bug Wrangler."

Harold rolls his eyes. "It's just a yo-yo!"

"Ha! And the Ultra SonicCare is just a toothbrush."

"And my garden-hose sprayer attachment -- how can you call it a..."

"....Back Yard Baster. Gotta be."

"And this, this little shovel with the telescoping handle...."

"It's a Lazyman Pooperscooper," says Malcolm. "Of course it is. What would you call it? An extendable shovel? Zzzzzz."

Harold picks up his flyswatter and slaps Malcolm on the top of the head. "Wanker!" he says.

Coffee Kills

I love coffee, but not as much as French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), who had a genuine coffee addiction. According to Lapham's Quarterly, "He would consume up to fifty cups a day...and when desperate, would chew on the beans themselves." Before dying at age 51 from "the effects of caffeine poisoning" (now there's a way to go), he wrote an essay entitled "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee". For those of you too sleepy to click on that, I offer this brief quotation from Monsieur de Balzac, author of La Comédie humaine:

"The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like....[S]parks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."

Today, he would have been a crack addict, I fear.

(via Popular Coffee News)

Word of the Day: mendacious

mendacious (adj)

False, dishonest, lying, or untruthful.

"And then she would say quite simply, without taking (as she would once have taken) the precaution of covering herself, just in case, with a little fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had at that very moment arrived by the morning train. These words were mendacious; at least for Odette they were mendacious, insubstantial, lacking (what they would have if true) a basis of support in her memory of her actual arrival at the station; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of whatever quite different thing she had been doing at the moment she pretended to have been alighting from the train."
--Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove

I ride the PATH train back and forth every day, but never think of myself as "alighting" from it -- more like charging out of it with the rest of the herd. My life is not very "Proustian" I guess, though I have a pretty good memory of "things past", including the time I tried to actually read Marcel's book. I thought his long and winding sentences were elegant, but I found the endless accumulation of thousands of them to be...what's the word...soporific. (Note to self: use "soporific" in conversation tomorrow. Resist temptation to be mendacious and say "grinchy" if someone asks what you mean.)

(Mendacious, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

The local Wheelchair Wonder wizzed by me while I was wandering home today. His tricked-out electric wheelchair has several unusual items (especially for a wheelchair) on the back: a couple of fake skulls, several American flags, a "U.S.A." logo, and three Hawaiian hula-dancer figurines. The elderly occupant of this vehicle wears a shiny metallic vest, sort of like chain mail. I estimate he was rolling by at about 15 mph. He waved at one of my neighbors who was talking on a cell phone in her front yard and continued to zip down the sidewalk. Felt like I had just experienced a Lynchian moment....

In other neighborhood news: according to the local paper, a trash-filled "house of horrors" has been discovered on my block, complete with cats, dogs, birds, human and animal feces, an elderly occupant and a not-quite elderly occupant, both now carted off to a hospital. Ewww!....

I've been reading some Woody Allen paperbacks that fell into my temporary possession. (It would never have occurred to me to buy them.) Side Effects is hilarious; Getting Even not so much (so far). But still, take a break from making fey films and put pen to paper, WA....

In the "You Thought You Had Problems?" department, here's a book I won't be reading, but its title brightened my day today: Defiance: How to Succeed in Business Despite Being Hounded by the FBI, the KGB, the INS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, Interpol, and Mafia Hit Men. (That's a real, non-fiction book. Google if you don't believe it....)

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