Supple Towel Cuddle http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/ en Copyright 2010 Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:42:24 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss How to Sneeze When You Need to Sneeze taste it, but it just ... won't ... happen? When this happens--and it happens to all of us more often than we'd like--it's instinct to want to tilt your head back and squint your eyes nearly shut and make hang-on-I-need-to-sneeze faces. But hark! I am here today to tell you to resist that instinct! Instead: Try staring into the nearest brightest light source. If you are truly on the very precipice of sneezing, within that tortuous, squeezy-faced region a nostril hair's breadth away from sweet release, then peering open-eyed into the nearest 100W--or out the window up at the sun-- will give you that last extra little twinge you need to get the full-on blast. I don't know why it works, but it works. Something maybe to do with the way our pupilary sphincters are wired to our sinuses. And when looking at a bright light doesn't work, which is to say, occasionally, I find it's only during those near-sneezes that, eh, probably didn't NEED to happen. The light-gazing technique is for squeezing out those particularly moment-ruining sneezes that otherwise get left fizzling and itching in your lower frontal brain space. Hey, it's cool, you're welcome. --Towel]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003904.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003904.html Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:42:24 -0600 Tis the Season to Geek the Fuck Out wanted out of those turdly cash-vacuums: that is, to pilot Gyarados around the arena whilst dragonizing shit, or to hit whatever button makes use of those hydro-cannons in Blastoise's back, or to fuck some shit seriously up with Scyther's and/or Kabutops's fore-blades. In fact, just as a general rule from now on, you should probably quit pooping miserable spin-offs onto our well-meaning store shelves. Your name may be sacred, Nintendo, but your shit still stinks something awful. Now where was I? Oh yeah. Fuck turn-based mechanics, fuck rock-paper-scissor-like (read: leaf-fire-water-like) handicaps, and fuck all that four-attacks-max-per-character RPG bologna you jimmied in for no good reason. No more Miracle Whip. We want the real mayo. RPG mechanics, like level-based or elemental-type handicaps, just throw off character balance in a fighting game and make it so certain characters are just never fun to use. I dream of a game where Sandslash and Dragonite have equal opportunities to kick each other's asses, where it isn't a terrible mistake to evolve Graveler into Golem before he learns Earthquake, and where Beedrill is finally as badass as he looks. You figure out the technicalities. You're Nintendo. If you can make a Kirby that is able to whomp Ganondorf when handled properly, then you can make anything. Which isn't to say I don't want there to be all kinds of certain features from the original Pokemon framework. I'm just saying that real battles don't have menus in them. And, like, I'm fine with having to hunt down and unlock all kinds of rare, higher-order characters--I mean, what would Smash Bros. be without the thousand hours' worth of wonderful crap it gives me to unlock?--but once I do, I don't want these guys to hurl a bunch of characters that came before them into obsolescence. I don't want to unlock, like, Zapdos, and then never need to use Raichu again. Raichu's a pimp, and he should be able to hold is own with just as much finesse as any legendary thunder bird. When all is said and done, I want to have 150+ fighters to choose from, and I want each one to be totally capable of kicking much ass. I don't know, honestly, what it would look like for, say, Diglet to "kick much ass," but lord knows I'd be game to find out. Which is to say: Diglet had *better* be able to kick ass, in his own wormy way. Every Pokemon should be allowed its own manner of handling, its own strengths and weaknesses, but these ought not to cripple/overpower them. Like, I expect that Voltorb would be confined to pretty much rolling around, maybe hopping, and occasionally hurtling himself at opponents; but this shouldn't be a drawback to his character so much as just an aspect of how he dominates. Same goes for Diglet: let him be the pudgy little worm-thing that he is, but don't rob of him of his chutzpa just for being adorable and limbless. Mastering character variety is what makes games like Smash Bros. so brutally and unrelentingly replayable. Trust us to appreciate this sort of plumb-able depth. After all, once upon a time, you got millions of us kids to crawl around through godknowshowmany miles of pixelated grass and water and dirt trying to collect a hundred and fifty different fucking critters, each and every one of which we knew by name and stat and number and could dive into a little a monologue about, if prompted. And these fuckers didn't even move when they fought! They just sat there while impressionistic bleep-bloops flittered about the screen and text scrolled by, one or two heart-pounding lines at a time, and kept us informed as to how the imaginary bloodshed was ensuing. This quenched us, then. Which is to say, you should trust us. We all have a deep-seated OCD for the Pokemon mythos. If you churn out a brawler worthy of our compulsions, we will give you our money for it. And it will bring us joy heretofore unfathomable. And what better time for ineffable merriment than X-mas? May your holidays be bright, Nintendo. May Scyther's fore-blades finally taste the carnage they deserve. May this year see a line-up that doesn't totally fucking underwhelm. Love forever and ever, Towel]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003903.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003903.html Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:21:08 -0600 Diagnosing Writer's Block after being inspired. After all, when you say you're hungry, you aren't implying you want fullness; you are saying you want food. I know you, Me; I know this is what you mean. Food is what causes fullness. It is what is "needed." Likewise, a certain kind of idea--an inspiring one--is what you need to "fill [you] with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence." (What is an exalting influence, anyway?) An inspiring idea is one that results in burgeoning, scintillating thought. This burgeoning, in turn, is what causes causes the obvious outward behaviors listed in the dictionary. Just to give the thing a name that doesn't have the word 'inspire' in it, we'll call an inspiring idea a 'profound' one. A profound idea is--and here I'm just bypassing the dictionary altogether--one which is readily accommodated by some attending schema, whose slight alteration in turn is met with some accommodation by another schema, whose accommodation in turn needs still more accommodating, and so on and so forth; such that the subtle slipping by of just this single simple point sets off a many-forked bolt of mental action through the whole of who one is, along the paths of least resistance, a sharp and purely gratifying debugging of intuitions one didn't know one had. Though these 'profound' cognitive tremors seldom reach bedrock, they nevertheless recalibrate the way one thinks oneself prepared. That's what a profound idea does. What one is, like as in 'what characterizes a profound idea in general,' is actually not as fitful or elusive a question as it sounds. And so with this in mind, it becomes easy to see why the stereotype of an Artist is of a person who--among other things--tends to gravitate toward misunderstood ideas. But so you know where I'm coming from on this: misunderstood ideas are not the same as the ones cherished solely for their anti-majority status. They are not social memes like those that are the intellectual price of admission to that weirdly-knit, like-minded kind of in-group, the Creative Types. They aren't even what an Artist is ultimately after, whatever that is she's after. Really, what makes unloved ideas so alluring is their technical relation to profound ones: a profound idea brings about any number of ideas which, prior to having had the profound, would have been misunderstood--i.e., could not have been accommodated. Misunderstood ideas are just unclaimed territory, in Art. The Artist's idea, then, is to start with misunderstood ideas and work backwards to the profound ones, like a cryptologist's hunt for her cypher. In Art, the ability to do this, to draw connections between unlike concepts and then gainfully entertain them, is called creativity. When it succeeds is when, after god knows how long, the Artist's strange connections finally constellate in such and such a manner as to make obvious the unstated. Or, if not obvious--if all her work should fall just so short--then at least intriguing. An intriguing piece of art is still important, still beautiful. Even if it's never shown around. And yet, still: how badly she simply wants to be obvious. This is why I had to follow my shadow away from Art. Something about it was just too damn trying. Literally: every project just another inexplicable effort. Triple digits of hours poured into--poured into what? I cannot say I ever made a piece that made obvious its profundity. To do that takes so much effort. So much creative effort--effort which has an element of randomness to it that, god just believe me, takes a thousand times more effort than most well-planned kinds of effort. And if you do manage to nail it once--me, I think I came close once, with an idea, but it was just an idea, and it didn't do anything but sit there on the canvas--there is no guarantee you will nail it again. Creativity, because it is a cryptology of sorts, is not a skill measured by one's capacity to unscramble the secret; every secret is different, has its own mixed up way about it; and it's so undetectably easy for just that one little extra level of mixture to render a secret humanly unknowable. Skill, is rather, in one's ability to do what she does with grace. With just plain grace. It's harder than it sounds. But now let me tell you, something, Me. You're going to like this, and then a second later, before I even say anything else, you are going to really love it: there is a shortcut to profundity. Now I'm only going on with explaining what I mean because I trust you to not to blow it out of proportion. I'm not going to say anything devastating. I'm just going to say enough to give you what I mean to give you. See, thing is, it's just, I see you slogging and shivering, smiling with absolutely no conviction, even when you're alone in a room, week by week, through agonizingly unacknowledged writer's block. It's killing me watching you resist the notion that you're unwell. It's time you just acknowledged it. -- Okay, I can see, above, that you made a little diagnostic list. And I'm happy for you for that. That's good that you did that. If you are looking for inspiration, you will find that there is a type of idea that you can go hunting after, and it's even going to be all ready for you to just simply read it and let it in. It's because of what these ideas are, why they can be profound no matter how often you come back to them. I can only try and explain in terms of schematic accommodation again. See, the way these ideas work is that, first of all, they still have all the thought-jostling oomph of a profound idea, they will still rock you, but instead of leaving your cognitive apparatus permanently rattled, what will happen is the cascade of accommodations in your head will sort of slow to almost a halt, like you just won't have anywhere to keep making accommodations, and so you just have to let go and watch all its changes to your brain come undone in reverse. The idea will just sort of poop back out. You'll maybe remember a useless gist of it. You'll remember where to find it if you want to come back to it and try out your brain-changing skills, again. Practice your cryptography on a code you'll never break. I hope you see how this is not entirely grandiose. Now's your last chance to not read any further. The ideas of inexhaustible worth are to be found on the dark side of brute facts. The brute facts as in the brute facts. For instance, the brute fact of time. The brute fact of the experience. The brute fact of solipsistic bankruptcy. Brute facts, particularly ones acknowledged by the global scientific community, are the absolute most popular ideas in the world. You can't claim to know yourself without first basing the bottom-most of your premises on brute fact. And yet don't get me wrong. To reject them is not like logically absurd or anything--brute facts are logical duds to begin with. Which is to say we, humanity, are shooting with blanks, here. You can't get hurt, Me. The Artist, for instance, which you are careful not to call yourself, could do none better than to make obvious, from the ideas opposite brute facts, the one unspoken notion that would allow one to conceive the basis of an entirely additional body of human knowledge--of the universe, of individuality, of life and sentience--for she would have done the heretofore impossible. Profound wouldn't even be the proper word for this caliber of impact. It's not like we'd just merely have an extra fact for every fact. We would have have a novel sort of third fact--that there were two facts for every point of fact--which is practically literally to say that we would have access to a sort of three-dimensional knowledge. I don't even know if it would be fair to call us the same species, after an adaptation like that. You can bet you're dick it'd be adaptive. And the Artist, who made this incomprehensible idea not merely intriguing but obvious, she would be revered for centuries! It sounds absurd, to me; but then who knows with someone like you, Me; you go nuts for this shit, when you go for it at all. Of course, the Artist won't ever uncover some meaning opposed to brute facts. And if she did, who knows what would entail. Maybe we would just have new kinds of brute facts. My honest opinion: the task is impossible. The brute facts are lethally brute, Me, trust me. But then here you go. You know what to do with them. An impossibly difficult challenge. An impossibly worthwhile reward. An erstwhile obligation not to call yourself the Artist and jinx the whole damn thing. Over 'n out, Towel]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003901.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003901.html Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:10:53 -0600 "O.K. Soda," and The Like. DISCLAIMER: I'm feeling ... like I'm in kind of a mood between bad and neutral, so I will probably end up sounding angry and impassioned, like I'm trying to rally troops for some needless Wandyteeth-type cause; this tone can be off-putting, even on good days, so if you're not in the mood to think I'm the man, please just don't read this until you are. I don't want you to think I'm not the man, and reading this if you do isn't going to help change your mind. But I'm also feeling ... snackish: * O.K. Soda was so, so delicious. Even if it truly, objectively wasn't. * Waffle Crisp, which was abruptly discontinued a couple years ago, is BACK in ACTION. * Capri Sun, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Pringles are all now significantly less perfect than they were in our preteen years, although they are still pleasing. * Nacho Cheesier Doritos taste differently from bag to bag. Some bags taste extremely great, and these bags' chips can be distinguished from lesser bags' by their zesty, red bell peppery aftertaste; this savory subtlety is the first thing to go when the chips' cheese powder is too potent or garlicky. As far as I know, this has mostly to do with the age of the bag. * The science of flavor is obviously in its early stages of development if experts think Splenda is okay to put into food and drinks. * Taste-Alikes you'll go "whoa, weird!" at, or else, more probably, you'll disagree with because they demand too much of a paradigm shift regarding such an unoffending topic for you to feel like you're overestimating your ability to discern flavors in foods with significantly unlike appearance and texture: (1) Trix taste exactly like Fruity Pebbles. (2) Peanuts and raisins, eaten togther, taste exactly like a PB and J. (3)Squirt tastes exactly like Orange Fanta, challenging as this may be to imagine; do a side-by-side sometime, with your eyes closed, and be prepared for disappointment if you're like me and always liked Orange Fanta way more than Squirt. (4) The Italian Night Club (i.e., #9) at Jimmy John's tastes like a bologna sandwich, unless you ask for No Ham (although the ham, by itself, tastes nothing like bologna). (5) Vault is just Surge, renamed with an "energy"-oriented marketing twist. (6) Blue raspberry flavored candies are usually just blueberry flavored. And a few Do-Not-Taste-Alikes: (1) Twizzler Pull 'n Peels do not taste like Twizzler Nibs. The P'nPs are what can only be called "spicier." (2) Off-brand Froot Loops do not taste a thing like real Froot Loops, despite this merely being the result of packaging differences. (3) Diet Dr. Pepper does not taste just like regular Dr. Pepper. Neither does Mr. Pibb, although the resemblance is uncanny. (4) This isn't taste-related, really, but: Orange juice CAN justly be called milky. Because it's milky. It's really seriously opaque. IDK why, but just because it doesn't have milk in it, people seem ready to disagree. No now switching to a more irksome topic, because now I'm feeling a little argumentative. One more taste-alike: (7) When publicly subscribed to, Atheism is almost always just reduced to antideism, i.e., the belief that there is no godlike diety; which is a valid belief, but by itself one that hardly defines Atheism. Atheism literally means "without religion," and it's more of a state of mind than a system of beliefs. That being said, it's really just a term that exists solely for its usefulness in naming that sort of religionless lifestyle choice; in reality, it's definitively impossible to be an athiest, to believe in nothing, since even a belief in nothing requires that you believe in your ability to believe in nothing--which point is the competent, scoff-free version of "a belief in nothing is still a belief in something." Like it or not, we're a species doomed to Agnosticism, i.e., the ultimatum of uncertainty. I suggest you like it, rather than not, since it's more fun that way. Let's put a common, common, common misperception to rest regarding the intent of religion. No offense, but you'd have to be a silly, stupid asshole to believe the original author of Genesis--not its first scribe, but its original conceiver--set out to defy reason and instigate the highest mass-ignorance in human history. He was just storytelling, just trying to make a point in words, and you have to admit God is a really really clever idea for a main character, just overall, even compared to like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. And "God" was just the result of what everyone's been doing since the dawn of interaction: resisting Solipsism. Solipsism. That self-concept to end all self-concepts. That unimaginary philosophical black hole. That question to every answer to every question. That word that probably shouldn't be a word. Solipsism is the necessarily private belief that "I beget the universe begets me," or more commonly and kind of misleadingly, the belief that life is a dream. Unfortunately, this latter definition sort of gets it confused with some kind of meta-schizophrenia, like Truman Show syndrome on an intergalactic scale, and so it's almost always disregarded as a bankrupt philosophy. Obviously life isn't a dream, because there needs be a difference between what we call dreams and what we call waking life, if only just to keep from overgeneralizing in a needlessly confusing manner. But yeah that's what we HAVE to say, since no one wants to be the asshole who admits he believes the universe revolves around him; that's the dreadful, inescapable irony of it. I mean, the fact that there's a word for it is probably the one property of Solipsism most responsible for its unpopularity in the first place. So long as it has to be introduced, whoever learns the word "Solipsism" will obviously be approaching it with a bias toward practical interaction, both the practicality and interactivity of which are mutually exclusive with the lack thereof inherent in Solipsism; in other words, there's no good way to tell you that you're Solipsistic. You just are. Good luck coming to terms with it, is about all I can say. Saying anymore just gets confusing. Why You Shouldn't Worry, It's Okay to be Solipsistic: The Explanatory Gap, i.e., the impossibility of explaining consciousness, assures us that, on top of being doomed to Solipsism, we are doomed to be incapable of expressing the full extent to which we are doomed. But that just means that, logically speaking, you and I can both be Solipsistic at the same time--and even have a conversation about its merits and drawbacks--because even the most friendly, presumptuous dialogue is still a failure to contradict the possibility that "you" and "I" are only illusorily discrete to begin with. Physics would suggest that this is so, anyway. Indeed, Solipsism and science work just fine together. Even the most orthodox Sciencist won't have to feel alienated by his Solipsistic fundamentals, though what he perceives to be his fundamentals might have to adapt in accordance with his ever-changing understanding of the universe. The rules for Solipsism are not written down anywhere worth looking into, as they are highly subject to change; don't let this dissuade you, though, from thinking you know what they are. Solipsism passes even the strictest tests of Well-Then-What-About-[Insert largely undebated fact here], including all of those pertaining to physics and evolution and stuff. It rejects no factual understanding of the universe, but simply assimilates that which it didn't already have; that is, you have to be as clever as the things you know if you want to understand your own Solipsism; and here, I'll finally say it: any deliberate rejection of Solipsism is just a failure of intellect. An Atheist, on the other hand, should have a hard time explaining what he/she believes Physics is without some reference to their being an existent existence, which referent they cannot possibly have any belief in. (Richard Dawkins is just a fucking contrarian riding a wave of popular misunderstanding; I'd say he's a moron, too, the fucking bastard, but he's mostly brilliant and his Selfish Gene theory is one of the profoundest (and most profoundly misunderstood) in its field.) An Agnostic would probably just refer to the ease with which one can simply ignore the very hardest questions everyday and all the time; agnostics are regularly unconcerned with their uncertainty. They are happy being distracted by the seventy or so years they've got going for them. And this is justified. I mean, I get distracted pretty much all the time; when I'm not pondering the nature of my Solipsism and/or existence, I'm more or less just doing the whole non-meta experiential thing: talking to people, talking to myself, thinking to myself, thinking about doing things, doing things, remembering things I've said, or thought, or done, wondering what I've forgotten, wondering what I haven't forgotten but can't remember right now, wondering why, worrying and worrying and worrying, etc. Sorry I haven't been very good about predicting where I was going with this whole blog post. Sorry. It's late and I'm just more interested in getting this all off my chest in whatever order it's caked on than I am in making this neat and cohesive. Seriously, though, I'm sorry. The whole big part not pertaining to snacks can basically be summed up like this: We have two moods: Solipsistic and Agnostic, and while these are mutually exclusive concepts, they are nevertheless both how we are, all the time. Rejection of either of these is just a complicated mistake; faith in God, for instance, is precluded by a belief in your own soul, which belief is an intrinsically Solipsistic one. And to those who would reject Agnosticism, one should just ask "Why?" a few dozen times until the rejector has his/her much-needed epiphany and becomes an acceptor. ... And all of a sudden, I feel like I'm done. I've made the same point enough times. I'm tired of feeling like Solipsism is a secret and/or a mistake. It's neither. It's inescapably logical. I don't welcome you to disagree, because I don't want to be that guy who retorts with "You just aren't thinking big enough." Just know in advance you'd be wrong, and be cool with it. It isn't simple, Solipsism isnt. It really isn't. Because physics isn't simple, nothing as simple as magnetism is simple, nothing where "time" is a dimension comprised of quanta is simple, and nothing as big and as strangely shaped as our entire universe is simple. The fact that we can't personally recall a time when we weren't thinking isn't simple. The fact that we can't do this really really really isn't simple. So don't feel like Solipsism is quaint, like it's cute or clever but not for you. If it isn't for you, it is, all the moreso. If you think it isn't for you, then I beg of you: Just pretend, for real, one time, that see things Solipsistically. See it as a daunting, horrific challenge that awaits you whether you plan to embrace it or evade it. See it as the promise that you will never see another sunrise again, so that it makes you stare at every one you *do* see as hard as you can, and then some, so that it makes you wonder what the promise meant, but at the same time makes you understand what it meant, and makes you wonder why the hell you understand yet still keep on wondering. See it as something you can forget about if you so choose. And then, if you do that, then okay you can bitch about how longwinded this post is. Towel, out. http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003895.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003895.html Tue, 19 May 2009 03:17:01 -0600 Nevermind the Last Post Sorry for the post about the major writing goal. In retrospect, I feel like I was channeling Liz Granger somehow--not that she's a bad writer at all to channel, in fact she's great, but I don't like the schizophrenia that comes with reading myself sounding like I'm writing for the Lance instead of for you. I probably need to come back to the topic of Writing and its Major Goals some time in the future when I'm less sure of myself about all of it. Just ignore the post, meantime. --Towel http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003894.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003894.html Mon, 18 May 2009 22:27:46 -0600 A Major Goal of Writing must defy articulation. It’s not that it's some abstract, quasi-religious entity that I’m just trying to sound smart by talking about. Clearly. It’s just that ‘articulation’ is/requires a sort of mental writing process in itself, so just to begin to describe the goal of writing is like figuring out where to begin untying a Gordian knot. It’s just… nevermind. A goal of writing, a major one, is to sort of improve the usefulness of thought. I mean, if this is not a cliché already, it should be. The harder one is on oneself as a writer, the more often one will find oneself, just in general, making excuses (= Useful Thought, in action (when successful)). Where this comes from is because of the way writers study the behaviors of others and themselves as really and interestingly as they possibly can, in order to like write stories in which folks behave in interestingly natural ways--if anything just for a few You-know-what-I-mean?-type yucks (though the potential profundity or/and severity of this practice at its most masterful probably warrants its own more sober caliber of rationale). And it just happens naturally, then, that as writers hone this meta-awareness, they become aware of the opportunities for practice inherent in situations where they are called to make mundane everyday excuses for themselves. The mundaner the better. Rather than do the normal, irresponsible, American thing and say “my bad,” writers attempt to elucidate their situation. They attempt to win by the same strange, untenable logic that one uses when forgiving oneself for private misdeeds. Should they fail to do so, it simply means they need to keep practicing writing until they are so clearly understood, like w/r/t their internal motives, that their excuse-hearer would never again dare misjudge the writer's “excuse” as having stemmed from anything less than an unfortunately-fundamental truth. This may or may not be plain old stubbornness, but I defy you to convince them otherwise. Like for instance. This evening I was on the phone, when my battery, because it was a cell phone that I was talking on, up and died right in the middle of talking. Right when I had just very passionately asked “Why the fuck wouldn’t you want to see Star Trek?” (Which question I only asked so vehemently because I thought I was about to have to defend the honor of a movie whose honor should require no such defense; in the end, though, it was because the girl is waiting to see it with her dad.) I plugged the phone into its charger and turned it back on and redialed my girlfriend’s number and the conversation picked up where it left off. Sure enough, pretty soon, like fifteen minutes in, I had that chemical stress in my bladder that says it's go-time, but I found myself tethered to a spot next to a wall where I couldn’t really reach a toilet. The cord on the charger is, by the way, a kind of terrible not-very-long that keeps my shoulders almost imperceptibly hunched while I'm on the phone, as if there’s a very weak gravity pulling me downward diagonally, so weak in fact that that is what makes it all the more agonizing, if you can see how that would make sense; erstwhile, this needing to pee keeping me focused on my current physical state made both the slightly-agonizing slight-hunching and the needing to pee all the worse. Like a feedback loop of discomfort. Over nothing, I know. But its being over nothing was just another part of what was bad about it! (Don’t be difficult with me, Reader, I always want to say.) Anyway, I almost brought this need-to-pee up to my girlfriend on the phone, but realized I already knew what she would say: put the phone down, Silly, and go pee. To which my automatic, logical retort was and would have been: since it probably has enough charge in it by now to stay alive for a minute or two, I could actually just unplug the phone, carry it with me to the bathroom, go pee, come back, and plug it back in, no interruption needed—presuming she would be okay with my going pee while on the phone with her (N.B. she is cool with it). And this is the choice I should have made. I should have trusted that the phone probably had charged a bit in the fifteen or so tethered minutes that it had taken me to realize I needed to pee, and that this charge was enough to keep the conversation alive until I was able to bring the phone back to its power source. But there was and is still something to resist about this choice of action, just as a human. I know this, because I didn’t do it, even once I‘d thought about the fact that I was thinking about writing about it later; in fact, the moment I'd finished thinking through its perfect logic, my “feeling” about it was a kind of “meh” or “nah” or “no thanks” or “hold on, um, well is it okay if I say no?” So I didn’t do it. I’ve done it before, I know, but this time: Not this time. And why? What, if anything, was my excuse? Well, in no particular order: because it would hurt at least just slightly a little bit to stoop down and plug the phone back in when I came back from peeing; and because talking/listening while peeing kind of sucks at least somewhat more than peeing while free of distraction; and because peeing while one hand is holding the phone or peeing two-handed with the phone tucked between the ear and shoulder are both somewhere between neutral and unpleasant things to do, whereas peeing by itself is intrinsically sort of pleasant; and because realistically I’d rather just come back from peeing and not have to plug the phone back in so that I may live untethered—whether we’ve hung up or not—and though we may be able to keep speaking in such a manner, I mean though the battery may be that enough-charged, we may nevertheless be interrupted again, and this latter chance seems not even worth even finishing sentences about, it’s that vaguely boring and off-putting. … Seeing it all written out, here, this reasoning seems even more ridiculous and hedonistic than it felt at the time, and even then it felt pretty ridiculous and hedonistic. Alas. In the end, the thing is, I wasn’t willing to unplug the phone and go into the bathroom with it, and the thing also is, when I really thought about why, this is all that came up. This “reasoning,” as in all the bullshit following the colon, above. And though this might be a terrible case just by itself, it’s nonetheless a bright and shining exemplar of a needless little effort like the kind surreally better writers than I make all the time when they’re climbing inside the heads of their little epiphanically human characters. It’s patently crazy, and it’s the stuff of like pot-circles the world round, but it’s also utterly worth the risk of failure, of sounding vacuously unnatural, of sounding like you’re trying too hard, of sounding High As Fuck, &c. Because when this crazy-ass kind of excuse succeeds, it’s … well, it’s definitely not called an “excuse” anymore. I don’t even know if there’s a good, non-cliché word for it. I guess “poignant” always gets thrown around in Intro workshops about this type of thing, like when it’s so strikingly present in Raymond Carver and Lorrie Moore and other such heartbreakingly widely-known Postmodernists. It’s the This Author Just ‘Gets’ Me factor. It’s the … what writer-types are putting to the test when they pull this type of crap in their day-to-day; it’s their standard “I shouldn’t make this particular choice” mechanism acting less as a mine detector and more as a divining rod. It’s a major goal, but not THE one. Because if it were THE one, what would be the point? Why know the ins and outs of yourself and others like you? Eventually, if we're going to figure everything out, as like a community of intellects, then whatever writers come up with as THE fundamental truth needs to rhyme with whatever physics comes up with as THE fundamental truth, and with whatever philosophy comes up with, and neuroscience, and so on. All I'm saying is there doesn't seem to be much of a consensus as to the nature of being, just by itself, I mean... or, well, nevermind. BTW: In the end I just held it and went pee when the phonecall was over. ]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003889.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003889.html Fri, 15 May 2009 03:42:13 -0600 And they say "awesome" is a dead descriptor I just farted awesomely, not but two minutes ago. The kind of fart that suddenly escalates about a second and a half in, like the HAAAA at the end of a kamehameHAAAA. Today is a good day. http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003883.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003883.html Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:43:03 -0600 Masturbation & What It Is What are the actual no-bullshit risks of plain old masturbation? This deserves to not be one of those ask-your-doctor types of questions every bit as much as it deserves to not be an ask-your-personal-religious-affiliate type. Because w/r/t the mundane and everyday logic of mundane and everyday life, neither of these authorities really have any, well, authority. Only a tiny handful of physicians have the time to be earnestly concerned with global medical advancement enough to rise above the intellectual-seeming, med-school-induced stupor they otherwise enter when confronted with Western medicine's most unsatisfactory answers, esp. when these are brought forth by doubtful/inquisitive/and insubordinate laymen, doubly esp. when these are brought forth about masturbation. On the other hand, the costs inherent in approaching any religious authority with a question about masturbation (or any question of "Is it okay if I [insert questionable act here]?") can more or less be summed up as the time you wasted plus the effort required to try and glean as-of-yet-ungleaned knowledge from a source that--by the time you reach the intellectual age at which you ponder such dilemmas--you probably already drained of purport, (i.e., presuming most hopefully that you developed the requisite capacity for independent thought prior to pondering moral paradoxes). One should always feel encouraged to just keep it real. As a young and lonely American male who is not atypically well-versed in Masturbation, it is with a sense of duty that I stand up in the faces of Science and Religion and speak that which is true of male gerkin jerkin; i.e., that Masturbation IS: .:1:. Time-consuming: While every sexually autonomous male over the age of spermarche could readily attest to the potential expedience of masturbation, the truth is that we are often--and at the worst times--likely to let ourselves get carried away in moderating how much time is allotted to the span ranging from when we first begin to when we finally release. As sexual mammals, our sympathetic nervous system *needs* to give way to our parasympathetic nervous system in order to procreate meaningfully (N.B. If you ever need an emergency boner cancellation, just focus on the most stressful thoughts you've been having lately; you'll see these work rapidly every time because they change and grow with context, whereas regular "back-up" flaccidators (e.g., think of baseball, grandma naked, necrobestial porn, etc.) tend to pale with use from boner to boner. If you don't want to grow habituated to the thought of your grandmother performing malodorous acts naked, you don't have to; instead, just think about how little time she has left and regret all the ways you could have appreciated her more, but haven't and probably won't.). Your body does this very readily, and this common transition is colloquially called "chilling the fuck out." The higher the stress-level one transitions from, the faster his/her mood-level will be swinging when it passes 0, neutrality, and thus the lower his/her subsequent stress-level will be; i.e., w/r/t your "issues," the bigger they are, the harder they fall. While low stress-levels lubricate one's aptitude for appreciatory thought, extremely low stress-levels (e.g., those attained by taking a "breather" from exam cramming or term paper writer's block) practically propel one toward self-indulgence; masturbation, since it can be started, enjoyed, and ended in about as much time as a coffee break, is thus supremely appealing in times of high stress. What one can easily fail to anticipate, time and time again, however, is the consequence of going directly from high-stress to super-low-stress. The parasympathetic nervous system is terrible at time-management, (i.e., time flies when you're having fun) and the lethal dose of relaxation proffered by masturbating mid cram session/term paper can only too easily rob a good student of an hour or two of important work. The realest risk, then, is the inextinguishable academic regret that follows, which makes the work even more stressful than it was prior to taking the break, and in so doing only increases both the appeal and the lethality of chilling the fuck out again via deceptively "quick 'n easy" masturbation. .:2:. Refractory-period-inducing: Nuff said. Particularly in how it exacerbates the struggle already inherent in returning to (stress-inducing) productivity. .:3:. Mojo-spending: Believe in mojo. See if you can follow the line of reasoning in this story: assume a man chooses not to masturbate for some time; in its continual absence, the man becomes increasingly aware of the fact that orgasm as a physical sensation knows no (legal) neurological equal; the man thus has an increasingly hard time suppressing his instinctive urge to orgasm, which orgasm is known to increase in pleasantness with every passing day since his last release; the man thus becomes increasingly aware of his natural sexuality; because he is presently averse to masturbation, the man becomes increasingly dependent on his ability to distract himself from the notion of his natural sexuality; said ability requires ever stronger attention and energy as the man's sexuality becomes harder and harder for him to ignore; the man continues to improve; the man thus begins to act notably more attentive and energetic in a greater variety of situations; the man is thus made more proactive in the absence of masturbation. It's not that masturbating is directly unhealthy to your existence the same way, say, starving yourself is. But it is detrimental to your being in the sense that doing it means that you're missing out on the benefits of not doing it; i.e., it is detrimental in the same way that never reading important novels, taking Rush Limbaugh at all seriously, and believing in God (or whatnot) without having spent at least a year or two not believing in him are: although they do not necessarily inhibit personal growth, these behaviors do, over the longterm, enable potent and intricately recursive ignorance w/r/t hugely important (= wholly relevant to the pursuit of meaning in life) issues. Your physician won't suggest that you adjust your lifestyle because it's not his/her specifically sworn duty to make sure that his/her patients aren't wasting their time on earth being lazy assholes; i.e., although a preventable death is unacceptable in any and all circumstances, a preventably wasted life is more or less gravy. Due to the immense challenge of overpowering one's increasingly visceral urge to orgasm, withholding jizm is a swift (albeit challenging) route to a proactive lifestyle. Since like fifth grade or thereabouts, the longest I have ever gone without spoogin' was 28 days. A mere four weeks. Seriously. And in fact I would never have done this if it weren't for the the fact that I had agreed to a contest of sheer non-masturbatory wills. But from this month of acute hyper-horniness, I can attest to the social wonder-drug that is the biochemical incapacity for nonsexual thought. Think of the exact opposite of how charming you aren't for the 10ish minute refractory period that follows orgasm. .:4:. Indispensable: Okay, having someone other than you get you off is amazing. I wouldn't really disagree with somebody who insisted that sex, blowjobs, and "etc." are all superior in quality of experience to that of masturbation. However, I would strongly oppose he/she who then went on to say that masturbation is thereby dispensable. Just because it isn't the best. In truth, masturbation has some advantages over its interpersonal counterparts (no pun intended). That is, masturbation is the one thing sex (or whatever) with somebody else can just never be: totally private. Because it's all about you, masturbation: allows for exploratory mistakes--whether physically manifest or psychological--to be made without lethally ego-toxic recourse; permits you to sit back, relax, and take as much time as your mood sees fit (which unique appeal can also be a definitive hazard, as described above in bullet 1); is ready and consenting at a moment’s notice; and I could go on. Or if that bent doesn’t grab you, then let me put it another way: where would the porn industry be without masturbation? Fucking dead, that’s where. And then what would become of all of us who so doggedly pursued across countless nights the image or video that might grant us maximum human arousal, that legendary best-possible-orgasm which only the Holy Grail of Porn could, by definition, invoke? I honestly can’t bring myself to postulate the consequences. A significant smidgen of porn available online is just inarguably amazing in its ability to stimulate both the wiener and the imagination; if masturbation were suddenly outmoded or something, then it would mean the demise of a gargantuan human accomplishment. But masturbation is, fortunately, quite popular. So go for it. Do what you will do, and do it however you want. Hone your favorite fetishes, or maybe explore new ones; they make you who you are in a way that can never be articulated. Come to know yourself. Come to know pleasure. Come to forget the distinction. Then get back to work.]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003877.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003877.html Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:55:06 -0600 Little Bags of Tostitos Why don't Tostitos come in little $0.99 bags like every other chip? What's so wrong with that? I like eating them. You can't argue they're any more/less flavorful than Sun Chips, Lays, Fritos, etc. I can't argue that, anyway. I googled this and I couldn't find anything about it. You think it has to do with dip sales? Like it's the only chip that rides on dip sales, so if they sold it in little bags that'd start to make people think they didn't need dip with their Tostitos, and so they'd lose that special little market niche? http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003871.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003871.html Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:24:53 -0600 Archaementation 101 him with the great work (i.e., like wanting to be the actor with the most and/or best lines in a great screenplay); this is a truth with consequences oh-so-commonly manifested in the bandwagon-backlash that occurs with the popularization of great indie music or film (i.e., the fundamental reason why no one can outright "like" Pitchfork Media and/or Napoleon Dynamite anymore, at least not until the disliking of these things becomes its own big, bad bandwagon). Someone writing a message with the intention of reaching everyone (for example: a blog) must understand, whether or not he understands, that his words will reach no one, (not in earnest, anyway). The realest benefit of blogging is in assuming the altered perspective one is granted of one's own words upon dispatching them to the web; pretending to be some uninitiated reader is made all the less challenging by the expedient makeover one's writing undergoes when it's "published" to the website (e.g., changes in font, color, text-wrapping, etc.). Masturbatory is the word for this epidemic, if you can will yourself, as a reader, to infer the implications. All that having been stated: everyone, this is a cry for help. Though my Argumentation class is full of kids who will not (and/or possibly cannot) struggle with the course's writing-intensive curriculum, theirs is not the kind of confidence I envy. They almost unanimously appreciate my professor's cryptic condemnations of Those Who Do Not Assert Their Opinions, even when she then goes on to explain how--and I cannot but find this confounding--no opinion is righter than another. If you find her partnering of platforms accommodating to your understanding of logic, then bear with me out of sympathy, please, help me through the labyrinth. My troubles began early with this professor. After class, on day two, she asked me about my style of argument, "So would you call yours a 'philosophical' approach?" Admittedly, I had been contributing quite a bit to in-class discussions, interesting comments, mostly out of frantic defense for all that I have taken to calling Objective Truth (e.g., that questioning any assertion is a healthy practice). However, I didn't know how to answer her inquiry, because I had never heard of "philosophy" being addressed as an "approach" to understanding, or, what I guess I mean is, that there are other approaches. Though I didn't know how to answer, I answered, sort of: "Sure, I guess you could call it that," because I wasn't about to dissatisfy the woman who had, just with that question, evinced how impossible she was going to be to satisfy for the rest of the semester. Let me elucidate this befuddlement by sharing with you the OED entry on "philosophy," which I was (slightly) relieved to find out shares my opinion on the meaning of the word: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, and the basis and limits of human understanding; this considered as an academic discipline. (Now the usual sense.)" Other approaches to understanding include: ... This not a rant, mind you. This is an explanation of why and how I need guidance. I must take this class, inevitably. And don't get me wrong: I am actually rather eager to take part, if not because we are assigned to ramble passionately about issues of our choosing, then because it gives me an excuse to preach David Foster Wallace to like twenty of my DFW-ignorant peers. (To be fair, actually, one of them knows he wrote Infinite Jest, another owns and has not yet begun to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men but intends to, and though my professor hasn't read any of his work, she asked me if "[I'd heard] he's dead now." So I'm only almost entirely alone, in that respect.) The reason I cannot just see myself as immediately correct about my "philosophical approach" is because such an approach does not meet what most could probably agree are the two most basic requirements of any compelling argument, that is, that a compelling argument must be both compelling and argumentative. This is an argumentation class, it's called "Argumentation," and my professor's been teaching it for about forty semesters now, so I have very good reason to comply to the demands of Writing A Compelling Argument. Befuck my philosophical obligation to fundamentals. Unless I can find an exemplar for my cause, an argumentative author with both renown and a tendency to take no side but that of the inquisitor, then I'll finally have to cave. It's at this point when my mind flees in horror to David Foster Wallace and clings to his thick leg, puling into the fabric of his trousers and only sometimes peeking back at Washington University in St. Louis. You tell em' DFW. You make em' see. Please. I need this. DFW proffers his portfolio of non-fiction works. Though nearly all of them address an argument at some point or another, the question then arises as to whether he makes an argument at any point. Take "Consider the Lobster," for instance, the title essay of one of his last collections, which saw publication in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet Magazine. It's DFW covering the Maine Lobster Festival on Gourmet's behalf, journalizing, if you will, at least until he begins to feel disturbed by the world-record-sized lobster boiler, that is, by the near un-face-able question of "Is it okay to boil alive a sentient being for our gustatory pleasure?" A responsible journalist surely cannot write about such a touchy conundrum without also asserting some side, either "Yes, it is okay," or "No, it is not." So what does Wallace do with the problem once he reveals that it exists, that it vexes him? I am in no position of authority to judge his actions in this domain, for myriad reasons, not the least of which is because I can't trust my own worshipful opinions of the man to give me an objective answer about his strategy. And I need objectivity, right now. So I did the excruciating. I dug up a mediocre review of David Foster Wallace's book, Consider The Lobster, an article by Brendan Wolfe of the San Francisco Chronicle entitled "OK, So The Guy Can Write..." and read the whole damn thing. You can't write about this book without writing about its title essay, and Wolfe reserves a couple of paragraphs that I think are worth sharing:
In the title essay, [DFW] travels to coastal Maine for the annual Lobster Festival. What begins as a witty, sometimes snooty point-and-laugh swerves into something altogether more uncomfortable when the author poses the question "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" "Consider the Lobster" originally appeared in Gourmet magazine, and it was controversial for all the obvious reasons. Few carnivores were amused by what they perceived as an attack on their morality. At least one prominent lobsterman, meanwhile, took issue with Wal-lace's facts. He encountered a similar backlash after "Authority and American Usage" was first published in Harper's. Apparently U.S. lexicography does have a seamy underbelly. In the end, though, and to his credit, Wallace doesn't demand we put faith in his facts; he doesn't even demand we stop eating lobster. He asks of us something more difficult -- that we think about our actions. And like the best of his essays, "Consider the Lobster" invites us to participate in a new and fascinating conversation.
The rest of the review aside, this opinion agrees with just about all the other, more-positive reviews. It also agrees with mine, though I think Wolfe's choosing the words "at least one prominent lobsterman (...) took issue with Wal-lace's facts" make evident his antagonism, and I personally feel a little poisoned by that ill-intentioned hyphenation. What Wolfe and I concur on is Wallace's true intent with his "argument," which is in fact not to argue at all, but to engage readers-of-any-opinion in aporia. The essay does not end up making an opinion too far to either side of the should-we-or-shouldn't-we debate, (he makes compelling cases for both sides, in that lobster are delicious delicious beasts, but their blatant suffering is due some complex thought) and instead serves to enter into a more fundamental debate: can two sides of an argument both be correct? The boldest thing I do, not just as a result of Wallace's work, is to say no. No argument has two correct sides, but just two (or more) parties that are in an often-very-slow race to find the evidence that will debunk all opposition (which usually entails an unforeseen degree of compromise, the unpleasantness of which will keep the actual compromise's occurrence dragging out for decades afterward in the form of smaller, fractalized arguments). The truest, philosophic-most approach to one's surroundings is to question everything and take note only of the observable patterns, infinitely avoiding interpolation and extrapolation, (i.e., the whole idea is to emulate omni-disciplinary Savantism). The physical universe is far from completely understood. The cognitive universe, also a black-box. Medicine, chock-full of questions. Political science, a science by only the kindest of standards. So to deviate even slightly from this path and assert some opinion in any field is to fail completely, to become a contemptible Sophist, or, in other words, to live a totally normal life. Every single person is programmed to not want to do this, and, really, it's to our evolutionary advantage not to focus on just how many flaming chainsaws we're juggling, so to speak. But the geniuses try. I'm not saying I'm a genius, but I sure would like to be, and I believe, more than I believe in just about anything else, that opinions are a mark of ignorance, or, more accurately, an impasse on the way to understanding. I don't support collective efforts, because opinions are an inescapably divisive aspect of collectives. But I also believe that opinions are an inescapable aspect of being an individual, that the body is the one fence that can't be torn down, which is why I support collective efforts, (but which, in turn, is why I support individual efforts, because, as anyone who has ever thought more than thought can agree, the mind is a collective effort, but which I then can't support... and so on, ad infinitum). That my professor so cheerily asserts that One Must Earn His Opinion makes me ache and ache and ache. Let me please detail: When I critiqued a nationalistic article written by Lippmann in 1939 called "The Indispensability of Freedom of Speech," I claimed that his argument for calling freedom of speech "indispensable" is based on the only half-true conclusion that free speech is necessary, that is, that it exists because we needed it to exist and chose to make it exist; I found this argument to be human-centric, almost religiously so, and I say that while his point is valid, he needs to acquiesce to how freedom of opinion is not just "indispensable" but literally quite "not dispensable"; regardless of how strictly freedom of speech has been policed throughout time, individuality (i.e., opinion-having) has always been its own self-governing system. My paper goes into a lot of cool, thoughtful details, too. When she handed it back, however, my professor said that Lippmann was not targeting the audience I wanted him to target (and she's right: I wanted him to target the thinking person, not just the 1930s American in need of a pseudo-philosophical pat on the back). In other words, she did not find my argument compelling. I came near implosion. I wanted only to acknowledge, rather than argue, how (literally) Lippmann's thesis statement was only a half-truth, how he made his point seem inarguable, (in every way the opposite of David Foster Wallace) so that only a madman would disagree; I wanted to address what he neglected to address, to encourage dialog, rather than pacification. I wanted to do what DFW would have done in my shoes. I even used footnotes. But that which I feared came to pass: my philosophical approach was not compelling. The questions then arise: Can one make a compelling argument against argumentation? What is compelling? How does one compel? Is it possible to compel via philosophical inquiry, when philosophy mandates inconclusiveness (i.e., Socratic aporia)? If it is not possible, then is "compelling" a productive practice? Is answering any of these questions possible without deploying opinions? I have no answer to these questions, none for any of them, and thusly do I suffer. Making matters worse is the fact that the likeliest person reading this right now, after you, is me.]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003867.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003867.html Sun, 25 Jan 2009 13:18:05 -0600 Strobe not forget Biga's strobelight demonstration, nor specifically the small red contraption, which he set up beside the sink so that it (i.e., the sink) could catch all the water that the thing (i.e., the contraption) was about to send noodling through the air. However, I have forgotten exactly how the strobelight itself was positioned, with respect to the aforementioned apparatus; the part of me that hopes science is bitching enough to have invented a water-noodler-with-built-in-strobelight seems to remember that the bulb was somehow built into the small red contraption. Perhaps you remember better. In fact, let me insist that you try to remember at least as well as I do. For to aid in the recovery of your memory of this particular class period, I proffer "the scene": A classroom of thirty or so Westside seniors, including some juniors; suffice it to say, thirty (i.e., thirty or so Westside students) is enough to safely assert that at least one of your classmates is consistently and distractingly attractive, particularly in contrast with the banal, banal, banality that is Biga's Chemistry classroom atmosphere; ideally, that special stimulus helps you to summon a face and in so doing grants you a visual foothold in the memory, but if not, it (i.e., the stimulus) at least informs your internal state (e.g., idle and/or unrequited horniness) from said lost hour. In a droning sforzando, Mr. Biga--who may or may not have had an under-flesh gristle-cyst the size of a small potato on the back of his hand, depending on which academic year, pre-autumn 2005 or post, you were enrolled in his class--probably tells a specific someone, whomever it was amid your classmates that he most frequently and/or comically picked on, to turn the classroom lights off, just before or after he (i.e., Biga) summons everybody to the sink at the front of the classroom--the sink that has its own counter against the wall and hides from the daylight behind a bulky supply cabinet so that, when said most-frequent-victim-of-mildly-well-meaning-verbal-abuse turns off the overhead fluorescents, the sink basin is but an empty metal blackness and the apparatus but hard shadows until your eyes adjust to the sudden midday-indoor-half-dark--with something like "Come on, everyone over here," followed by a comment regarding the quality of the impending at-sink demonstration, probably "This is kinda' neat," or a subtle variation (e.g., "This is neat," "This is kinda' cool," "You're going to like this," etc.). The ordering of the rows in the huddle that gathers around Biga at the sink is based predominantly on a consistent three-(ish)-stage system; first, filling the "best spots" (= a three- or four-person wide arc roughly a yard to one side of wherever Mr. Biga is standing at the moment of huddle) are the three or four students from the first two rows of the right-hand column of tables (i.e., the first two rows of Mr. Biga's left-hand column of tables); second, scattering behind the best-spot arc, and causing the best-spot arc to tighten and/or segment, are the students whom then huddle with also-presently-huddling and/or priorly-huddled in-class friends, clusters of whom stand together but loosely so, according to how much room will be needed for any mutual in-class friends who have yet to reach the huddle at the sink; third come those remaining mutual in-class friends unfortunately seated in the back rows and/or toward the left side of the classroom, and these students squeeze in where they can, typically forming a vaguely "third" row; last but sometimes not least, one must mention the few students that are friendlessly alone amidst the huddle (e.g., the savant-like juniors, or the kids with long white socks and weird laughs, or the otherwise regular joes whose friends exist but are for whatever reason absent, etc.), or whose friends neglected to reserve them enough elbow room, or who are too detached from the aforementioned banal, banal, banality to invest the effort required in cluster formation, these are students (i.e., any of the loners above) that either arrive early and set anchor, arms folded, at the awkward-most spots within the huddle or arrive late and sidle into whatever view-offering gaps have been least-slightly left open. Meanwhile, Biga turns on the faucet and activates his small red contraption--which actually might be orange, now that you're up close to it--and then, presuming just for now that my hopeful side of me is right about Biga's contraption's capabilities, a strobelight sets an arching thread of water to blinking, there, by itself, bent and flicker-glistening in the dark above the murmuring metal sink basin. There is a cool part of Biga’s strobelight experiment, so let’s talk about it. It starts when he (i.e., Biga) says, “And if I do,” and then drags out the “oo” in “do” while adjusting the strobelight frequency dial to just the right place before saying “this," and with “this,” the whole huddle goes quiet, and audible from anywhere in the moment there is only the falling water and the gurgling drain gulps and, from watching the strobelight, there is also the fluttering sound of blinking black in the tiny muscles behind your eyes, and it’s in the soundlessness of so many whom always in your nightmares always are noisemaking always, the breathing quiet of thirty or so adolescents that are physiologically programmed to be unquiet, plus the silence of one who is literally paid to make utterances, that the noise-on-mute becomes how you know--or becomes how you come to know--that the thing everyone is looking at is beautiful somehow, like a good new thing, and that you are right now in the type of moment that is afterward its own prototype. Then the swift, personal grunts of “Huh,” popcorn throughout the huddle and give way to chatter and to Biga’s telling everyone to shut up. Go back. Sit down. The thing he did was very nearly match the strobelight’s base blink frequency to the water’s base helical-ripple frequency, so that your inept human eye could only see the water where light shone on it in segments like tiny knuckles, and because the blinks' and ripples' frequencies were about equal, every time the light blinked, it lit the same-looking ripples at stationary places in space, (i.e., what you knew to be a continuous stream of flowing water actually looked like a motionless dotted line of not-flowing water). And then Biga turned the dial just slightly further, and, yes oh yes oh yes, that dotted line began to retreat, as though the water were suddenly flowing the impossible direction, UP out of the sink, UP through the air, UP and into, rather than out of, the small red contraption. I have for three years prized this vision like a crush on someone who I refuse to see as merely human, and only just now, today, right now, am I opting instead to bring it forward into the light. See the fragility of the thing. About the bringing of the thing into the light: I once mistook for a shadowy threat a simple sidewalk-guided drunk who caught my sidelong gaze as he passed me on the way to being somewhere behind me. There is a slow slow steady rhythm, now, in my memory, that might have been there in the actual event, with which he caught me seeing him look at me, scuffled past so that I too scuffled past, stopped on the gravel so that I stopped, and with which he turned and I turned. From fifty yards away he half-yelled, “Bring them to the light.” And I asked, “What?” So he repeated, “Bring them to the light,” and then he paused--or I paused--before he said, “Whatever you do in life, whoever you go on to help, the best you can you have to bring them to the light,” and I didn’t have time to think because of the rhythm, because of the rhythm I said, “I will try, I mean I do try, but they don’t want to come, a lot of them.” Then, rather than feed me more homeless-man insight, he just turned and went on walking, so I just turned and went on walking, too, and the rest of the memory can’t be accessed because it can’t be parsed from all the other nights I walked home on that same section of sidewalk thinking about how much better my response should have been. I probably immediately came up with lots I wish I had said in addition to or instead of what I did, something to get the guy to respond with sort of mutual affirmation, and anymore each clause of the piddle I did project is just a back and forth in my verbal memory, a dialog, so to speak: “I will try," I said. "I mean I do try," Dana replied. "But they don’t want to come, a lot of them." I'm not going for pathos here, Reader, just logos. Though I don’t know the truth, I nonetheless feel like I’m lying to myself in imagining that the man believed and/or wanted to believe that I know what he meant and how he meant it. I said I would bring out the underlying mystery of the strobelight and put it in "the light," and I do this because all, including myself, need to set aside a paragraph-long moment to praise and/or to pity and/or to ponder it in some other opinion-forming matter. The conundrum lies in the demonstrable and at-this-point-in-our-intellectual-development-not-very-thought-provoking disconnect between what the brain perceives as happening and what is actually happening to the beads of light in the water. That is, the exactly similar problem I have with, say, watching an airplane propeller that is spinning so rapidly clockwise as to appear to be slowly turning counter-clockwise is not that I feel powerless to perceive the true direction of the propeller’s spin, but rather that such a vision reminds me, (i.e., makes me have to use the long-near-dead words “I know,") that I know the universe bristles and bustles at speeds exponentially greater than that of the propeller and so I must question my perception of time itself, (N.B., One of Alfred Einstein's lesser-known mindblowing proofs surmised, correctly, that time flows at the speed of light). In other words, the strobe effect does not bring any new philosophical inquiries to light, but, far worse, presents a beautiful venue for intuiting an inquiry that until now has been--and probably still ought to be--so dull as to repel intuition. Or, in more other words, the strobe effect demonstrates how continuous motion--not necessarily limited to three dimensions--is an illusion, albeit a salient one, arising from the juxtaposition of two or more discordant frequencies. Although the laymen ideation of “frequency” is more or less that of a measure of time, “frequency” can be sternly spatial, that is, not at all temporal, such as the frequency with which sexiness occurs in a random sample of thirty Westside High School students. The finite nature of the speed of light in a vacuum, its inflexible constancy, predicates the rate at which time appears to flow, and that time need not be a continuum, but rather just a consistent frequency with respect to entropy (i.e., cause and effect as a result of fundamental forces acting, or more accurately reacting, at all scales). The frightful result of this light-speed time is that the spatial resolution of matter need not be delimited to the finite and integral (i.e., the quantum), because the “path” in which light travels is a messy waveform (i.e., still a perfectly, mathematically continuous vector, but whereupon light is plotted as discrete points, the interpolative black-box nature of which is due a share of wonderment, not as to the mechanisms at work, but as to the what-the-fuck), and as waves create waves, on down to the infinitesimal, it is entropy rather than time that is continuous. In my opinion. You are welcome to forget this, as long as you ponder it, first. The implications of this writing experience are: Nothing that will affect my day to day nor let me fight the fire inside my head. There is still no explanation as to why the flexible fuck anything bothers to happen at all, with specific respect to anything I can think of anytime. If I don’t believe in a higher power of some kind and/or another, I should, the fop that I am, particularly since the whatever-it-is pilots my subconscious, too. I am at any given moment only responding to my responses to my responses, and though the control I think I exert is real, it is not whole and cannot be and I thusly just need to learn to share. The most enjoyable part of this writing experience was: briefly remembering the hot chicks in my Chemistry class and picturing them naked. I didn’t write the remembrance down, explicitly, but it is there, between the lines. ...Man, I’ve been wasting so much time. (Speaking of which [WARNING: This is self-centric babbling, from here on out]: Gina Murante, you are smiley and serene but you will not know you are alive until you’ve had the chance to know and still not known it so many times that the letters of the words of your thoughts reclose into the same abstract corners and holes and habitable nooks they used to be when you understood nothing at all except the universe and you, and you become from head to toe so weightily muddied with nostalgia for the many many lost and uncenterable moments that you cannot clean your way back to normal no matter how wet and naked you get... only then can you rejoin the living. And/or if you remain wet and naked, you are also welcome to come hang out with me and my girlfriend. I have X-Box and only the good flavors of vitamin water. And my bed may be dinky standard-issue dormatory junk, but my comforter is the stuff of legends.)]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003861.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003861.html Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:13:40 -0600 Election Day Facebook Statuses! It's not even three hours into Obama's victory, so I'm sure this list is subject to enlargement, but here's a quick review of all the fun Facebook statuses I could gather: "Travis: is having a great day. Just voted for McCain, got the new Hinder CD (raw as fuck) and Columbus football is #2 in the state. Yeee." "Nathan: is eff this I'm moving to Kenya... haha jk good run McCain you had my vote but Obama I know you'll do what you can for this country." "Spencer: is going abroad for 4 years..." "Sabrina: America--FAIL" "Allison: is not feeling well... physically, mentally, or emotionally." "Adriana: is yayyy for socialism!!!!" "Jordan: wonders what November storms will bring." "Wyatt: shudders to think of what will happen to the usa, do you realize what you've done?" "Shawn: is done voting." "Matthew: is ...okay, honestly, the SCREAMING for the past 20 minutes in my dorm is getting really old." "Kalen: is moving to europe." "Kyle: is well, we've made our bed, now we have to lie in it." "Aubrey: oh well i guess i can adjust to communism..." "Cody: is o well." "Ryan: wonders if it will still be called the white house." "Andy: is Good Game America, we had some fun." "Lindee: is so glad all this political stuff is over... and wants to go shoping!" "Wyatt [some time later]: is proud of the plains states and the south, can't say much for the rest of the country." "Jackson: is omg seriously." "John: is at least we know Nebraska was for McCain. I can live knowing that..." "Nate: is praying for Barack Obama. If he sticks to his self-proclaimed Christian ideals, then our country will be alright." "Kia: is thank you mccain for being an american hero, and for putting his hand over his heart during the national anthem." "John: is about to call the police about the people outside my window." "Travis [same Travis as before, now after the announcement]: is Change: That's all you'll have left when he's done. Hitler gave great speeches too." "Ashley: is happy for change :)" I'll leave it at that, cause I need to get some homeworks done and maybe squeeze in some shut-eye before sunrise. Good evening, America. Good future. (I'm allowed to say that, right, cause isn't it impossible to be over sentimental? Isn't this actual history-being-made kind of news? I actually didn't mind when the dramatic Lifetime Original symphony music kicked in tonight after Obama's acceptance speech, and I almost didn't roll my eyes at the holy-cheese pseudo-country-alt-bland-rock song that followed it. ...Really, couldn't we have all used a moment of silence instead? Wouldn't that have just kicked all ass? Like Obama says 'God Bless the United States of America,' and then it's just thirty seconds of quiet contemplation. It works, right? Anybody? But whatever. It's history. Literally.) http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003847.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003847.html Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:43:10 -0600 Please read this entry after the one before it I provided my classmates this explanation of my story and my style. It's kind of haughty, but at the same time it touches on some points that really do piss me right off when they aren't treated with the considerable concern they deserve. It's actually an addendum (as you'll soon see) because I really quick wrote down a letter of intent right before class, because it was required along with the story. This one's better than that one. You don't need to see that one. Letter of Intention: Addendum I’ve had a chance to reread my own story a handful of times now, and first let me just apologize for the typos. Second, let me apologize for adding an addendum to my initial letter. The first one came too soon after the completion of the story, and I hadn’t had time to really think about what it was my story was trying to wring out of me. Now here goes. When I approach any sort of task involving creativity, I find I accomplish it best when I am able to forget the medium I am using and just focus on [insert Unknowable All-Encompassing Truth here]. Let me give you a few examples: when I play Guitar Hero, I do great, but start to mess up if I think too hard about what my fingers are doing or whether or not I should strum down and/or up; when create visual art, I truly stand out when I use a pencil and paper, whereas my creations suffer greatly under less familiar media like watercolor, pastel, torn-paper, or other sadistic things art teachers demand; finally—and this is the relevant part—when I write, I feel my ideas come out most cleanly when I can just forget about the pages themselves. Liken a keyboard to buttons on a Guitar Hero controller. Liken writing styles to artistic media. I’ve taken a stab at lots of styles—I mean I’ve gone neck-deep into full on poeticism fairly recently, and I spent half my nerdy upbringing trying to write in High Style English—and now, for the first time in a long time, I seem to have come to a plateau of sorts. I don’t mean that in a quantitative way, but more just that I feel really comfortable with where I’m at, stylistically. If I had tried to write this story in my self-conscious Joycian style, (e.g. “… ‘I’ll be king and you’ll be queen,’ she sang, her blonde hair a mess with backyard sharkleaf weeds; we are alone in the world and eight years old,”) then I think I would have lost both the subtlety and, in video game terms, the replay value that are more in place with “How He Got Home” as it is. I’ll say it again because it never stops hurting: I seem to be stuck in Raymond Carver dialect. I think it’s popular in much the same way drawing with pencils is popular. BUT there are artists who dominate the realm of the imagination via pencil, and there are artists who simply prefer to get their art homework done faster by using pencil. Carver didn’t just introduce his minimalism, he justified it. I keep working with pencil because my heart is in it, not because pencils are easy to come by. Of course, I am not anything but a hopeful student at this point, and I adamantly apologize for constantly relating myself to Carver. See, look at how ugly that sentence is. Shakespeare had to write about every inner pondering he could think of. He wouldn’t just say that an important character tugged his old shirt down from under a pile of sweaters and pillowcases, no, he would ruminate on the symbolism of that gesture. He would go into iambic pentameter on behalf of each sweater, on the drool stains of each pillowcase as they related to the themes of death and despondence prevalent in the tale. Proust probably would have, too, and might have even taken the opportunity to make a novel about closets. Borges… not as likely. My theory is that, ever since Shakespeare made literature more than just storytelling, the literary world has gradually gained popularity with a readership that, back in his day, was in the vast minority: the imaginative. You can feel Shakespeare trying to reach out to the common man with his writing, his all-too-familiar desperation to inspire. But these days, imagination and creativity are taught in Kindergarten, (with mixed degrees of success, but then you don’t often hear the Engineering-type students discussing philosophy, anyway). These days, movies literally ‘cue dramatic music’ to let you (and Engineering-types) know when you are being inspired. Carvery—that is, Carver’s writing style—would have been another fork in the road for literary progress back in Shakespeare’s day. Now, it’s an important retaliation, a compensation of sorts for modern man’s lowered responsibility, a deliberate removal of dramatic music cues. The result is something ponderous. The result is, ideally, that the reader will take the time to ponder—whether while reading or, later, when a passage idly returns to mind—why and how and where the author chose to mention the sweaters and the pillowcases amidst a tale of death and despondence. Shakespeare would have done all the thinking for you across fifty lines so that you wouldn’t have to do it yourself, later. Today’s readers are practiced imaginers, because Spielberg and Howard and Kubrick have given us hours and hours of rehearsal time. Once upon a time, dramatic music was actually dramatic. Language is metaphors. It is a constant attempt to shorten and further shorten the short-cuts between one meaning and another. The phrase “justice is universal” would have required immense amounts of explanation once upon a time. Today, we understand it and even find it a little boring, by itself, if not somewhat controversial. Cliches aren’t the death of a symbol, just like dying is not the total erasure of a person from existence. The longer language has been around, the higher and higher the ideas it implies have escalated, the more great ideas become clichés or, that is, understood. Shakespeare’s work was like the introduction of electricity to language, the beginning of an industrial revolution in the field of literature. He gave life to things we never would have thought possible. But that’s old hat now. Electricity is old hat. Now we have touch-screen iPhones—now you can find out your wife’s water has broken and download bestial child porn all with one device that fits in your pocket. Amazing! It’s easy to say we’ve lost our way, but it’s only that beauty is ever changing and ever climbing. Elegance, like language, never looks the same from one generation to the next. Carver is no less brilliant than any of his predecessors. Read “A Small Good Thing” and tell me you didn’t cry harder than when you read Romeo and Juliet. It’s just that our tastes of changed. And yes, thanks for not asking, that IS a cliché. The reason I’m creating this addendum, as I said, is because I wrote my first letter too soon after finishing “How He Got Home.” While I’m the first to admit I’m stuck in a rut, stylistically, I also have an overwhelming urge to explain that I created this rut, myself, and its Carvery is not just the result of idol worship, but of the many many many times I’ve caught myself humming ‘dramatic music’ during my own personal moments of eureka and stopped myself. I am Anti-Hollywood at a spiritual level. I wrote this story because one time I went out on a job and had to clean up an apartment where an old man, a recently retired trucker, had died a couple of days before. Everything was just how he’d left it. There were quarters laid out and counted on a piece of paper in his kitchen. There was a pile of dirty whitey-tighties in the bathroom, some pairs with massive amounts of stainage. There was the chair that he had died in that had to be wrapped up and taken out, and it smelled like HELL. But none of this got to me. None of it. The one thing I remember most is his calendar, how I went up to it and looked at the next month and read the dates he’d written down for the upcoming weeks. He hadn’t planned on dying when he did. He died of old age, sure, but he had meant to be there, come July. The money we count and the underwear we stain and the chairs we fall asleep in, all of these things play a part in our death, but it is the death itself, the verb, that haunts us from our future graves. All of those other things are just adverbs. Fuck adverbs. The only way the job could have been any worse that day was if it had been my mess that we were cleaning up. So I wrote that story down and gave it to you guys. Tremendously yours, <3 Dana <3 http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003845.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003845.html Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:04:30 -0600 Death and Pot and Transformers HOW HE GOT HOME. Kris called up Tom and asked for his old summer job back. Tom’s voice was exactly as it had always been. Yeah, he could have his job back. After hanging up, Kris tried to think about how his own voice had sounded. Some moments later he found his keys and left for the neighborhood across the interstate. He parked at a chain link fence down a hill from the highway and smoked bowl after bowl until there was nothing left in his crinkled baggie.Then he unbuckled his seat belt, bent around into the backseat, and grabbed his CD binder from the floor. He unzipped it in his lap, flipped through its plastic pages unhurriedly, and listened to each CD in his mind’s ear. He fed one into his CD player. Then he zipped up the binder and set it on the floor behind the passenger’s seat. When the first track was over some minutes later, he rolled down his windows to let the smell out and the breeze in. Highway litter was strewn about the weedy hillside beyond his window. Dusty plastic bottles with caramelized soda in them, a rain stained purple sock adorned with orange jack-o-lanterns, a complex constellation of scrapped paper and plastic and aluminum half-buried in the dry mud or else entangled in the overgrowth, and, up at the peak of the slope, a bright white sack from McDonald’s. Mixed in with the waste were the sanctuary sounds of vehicles coming, vehicles going by, and vehicles having passed. The sun drifted beyond the horizon, lighting up like neon the underbellies of a couple passing clouds. Dripping in eye drops was an intense relief. Kris blinked repeatedly, wiping his cheeks on his wrist. He looked at his wet eyes in the closeness of the mirror. Then he drove home, ate dinner with his mother and father, and went up to his room where he fell asleep early. On the desk across the carpet, the digital numbers of a stereo alarm clock blinked thirty-seven times per minute, turning his room green, and then black, and then green again. -=- The next morning, he tugged his old work shirt down from under a pile of sweaters and pillowcases in his closet. The shirt was orange and smelled like nothing. After pulling it on, Kris reconsidered its awkward enormity in the bathroom mirror, how it swallowed his elbows and billowed out from where he had tucked it in. He took it off, folded it up, and then returned it to the closet. He got out a plain shirt that he knew he would sweat in. The low yellow angle of the early morning cast his driveway into leafy shadows that he hadn’t seen since high school. He backed slowly through speckles of light, rolling down the windows as if to let them in. At the edge of his neighborhood Kris joined the rhythmic log-jam of morning commuters, and when in wafted the sharp smell of exhaust, he put his windows back up. He arrived early for work and, after all the how-the-hell-are-yous and the paperwork, told Tom he wasn’t able to find his shirt from last year. Tom looked at him for a second before saying alright. Kris’ new shirt fit him. And this year it was green. The entire day was unexceptional, which was a good thing, a forgettable day. A purple house’s basement was re-carpeted, all the weight-lifting equipment relocated to the laundry room. An empty dental office, which had been sanitized last Thursday, still smelled and needed a second steam-cleaning, so Kris did that, dragging the heavy chrome wand and its orange accordion tube from room to room, bringing noise to the painted walls and the stillness. Just before the end of the day, another job was called in, but Tom said not to worry about it. “Fuck. You go on home.” And he went alone to the site. -=- There were no jobs for a couple days. So Tom walked Kris over to the stacks of boxes in one corner of the warehouse, each with the name Riemann scrawled across the side, and told him to take them down, one by one, and scrub all the contents clean with a toothbrush. “Then dry them off, ozone them, and put them in new boxes. I don’t care what size box you use.” He went to the nearby folding table, turned off the radio, and grabbed Kris a toothbrush with brown bristles. Kris thumbed the bristles with his gloved hand as Jeff filled a plastic tub with hot water and a dollop of industrial cleaner. Kris asked what happened. A few of the boxes were marked Toys. Tom told him, “Kid and his mom went out of town for a soccer meet. Come back after the weekend, and see Dad made a fucking mess of himself in the bedroom. In the kid’s bedroom. Body sat in there over the whole weekend while they were gone.” Kris said damn and asked how he did it. Just then the clamorous shriek of a train whistle filled the garage, sending a jolt through Kris’ skull. Tom spit and shook his head, then went away, leaving him alone with the boxes and the ruckus of the train. Tom’s spittle looked like molasses on the concrete floor. After the train had passed and left the quiet of the shop ringing, Kris said fuck. -=- Tom called later that night and asked Kris if he could come down to the shop. Kris was playing a video game, but he said no. “Really,” said Tom. “Damn it. Alright.” And then Tom hung up. A couple minutes later Kris turned off his game, sat for a moment, and then called Tom and told him he was on his way. He pulled his work shirt out of the dryer and put on his work jeans, which still had his car keys in the pocket. The intersection at the entrance to his neighborhood blinked yellow as he turned onto the major road. The sky was all cloud, illuminated by the city a dull orange mauve. In an empty parking lot, near where the railroad cut through the yard, stood Tom’s shop, an unremarkable concrete box with a square orange light on its garage-door side that shone against a nearby huddle of trees. The door was locked, the front office, dark, and Kris could barely see past his reflection through the Plexiglas. He went around to the side, his shadow purple beneath the orange light, and tugged at the garage door. It was locked, but there was light seeping out between the boards and at its base. The radio inside was playing the alt-rock station that it always did. “I hear you, just a second!” Tom’s giant shape blotted out the shop lights through the cracks of the garage door, and he began struggling with the lock. “Fucking thing, just a second.” It was a coarse iron hook shoved into a rusty hoop in the wall, and Kris had never gotten it in or out on his own. Tom gave it a powerful grunt and then pulled up the door. He had already loaded up the van. Kris asked what the job entailed. Tom went looking for something on the shelves. They were two stories tall, and on the top shelf, big boxes of what, Kris didn’t know, almost touched the roof of the warehouse. Tom carried the shop ladder over to where he was searching, set it down with a clatter that echoed across the tall walls, and then clambered up as hastily as if no one had ever had a ladder slip out from under him before. He spoke at Kris, who was still standing by the van. “Carpet blades. I know there are some extras lying around up here. Fucking I was supposed to go out and buy some more last week. Goddamn it. There they are.” He climbed down, moved the ladder over a few yards, and then went back up. He stood on the ladder looking at the shelf for a moment, having forgotten where had just seen them. “Goddamn, there you are,” he said. Kris said they must be going to take out some carpet. Tom told him it was nothing big, that he just needed an extra hand. He told him he’d get paid for fours even if the job took two. “Some asshole cuts himself up in his bathroom, right, so I’m not thinking it’s going to be a big fucking deal, like some industrial cleaner and a couple nights with the air-scrubber on.” They each climbed into the van and Tom drove out into the dark before switching on the headlights. “Turns out they have carpet in there, in the bathroom. Fucking, how stupid do you get? Putting carpet in your bathroom.” The job took all of an hour from hello to goodbye. Tom carved out the carpet, and Kris rolled it up into a blue plastic bag, tied the top of the bag in a double knot, and threw it into the back of the van. The victim’s cousin stayed in the kitchen the whole time, preparing stew. She didn’t offer any of it to them, like they sometimes do. It smelled delicious, like tomatoes and onions and steaks. Kris sprayed the plywood bathroom floor with a sweet-smelling disinfectant, and Tom laid out the new carpet, working swiftly around the corners of the vanity and the base of the toilet with his utility knife. Kris leaned against the doorjamb, holding the disinfectant pump, and watched. When Tom spoke, where most people would put the word ‘um’ or ‘like,’ he would say ‘fucking.’ It was also his adjective. “Never, fucking, put carpet in your bathroom.” Kris said yeah, I won’t. “You know who puts carpet in their bathrooms?” Kris said morons. “Fucking, morons is right.” When they got back, Tom went into his office and Kris took the van behind the shop to a large open dumpster and threw away the bag. It landed heavily on a torn blue foam couch. -=- Toward the end of June, a job was called in with Kris’ last name and address on the file, and that morning Tom asked him if he could load up the van and do it himself, because he was going to be busy at a site from the week before, seeing about some possible mold growth. Kris told Tom his name was on the file. Tom said, “I see that. I don’t care. Go do it. I need to be in Blair by nine o’ clock.” Kris said it was his address on the file, and Tom asked if he’d loaded up the van yet. Kris went into the office and called home but no one answered. Tom bit his cheek and told him to quit jacking off. “Get to work. You’re on Tom time.” He took the file from Kris and put it in a dark brown to-do box on the wall beside the door into the shop. After Tom left, Kris called several more times. Then he went into the shop and sat down in a metal folding chair. The radio in the back was a fuzzy symphony of shouting and sound bites and ad time. He sat for several moments before getting up to walk over to the shelves. He stood before them, looking at the equipment it had said he needed on the file. Then he loaded up the van, grabbed the file from the to-do box, and left. He stopped the van just outside the shop and got out for a moment to close the garage door behind him. He tried to lock it, but he just hurt the meat of his palms pressing against it. When he turned at a railroad crossing, something in the back of the van fell over. It slid around every time he turned, banging into the cleaning buckets or the truck-mounted vacuum or the giant hose reel. Finally, a few blocks from his house, it stuck somewhere and was quiet. Kris parked on the street in front of his house and walked up the driveway, then the sidewalk, to his front door. He rang the doorbell and inside his dogs began barking giddily from the front room. He heard the backdoor open and shut, and the barking transferred outside. A gangly daddy-long leg was perched motionless a few inches above the doorbell button. He couldn’t tell right at first if its tiny body was looking up toward the roof or down toward his hand. He rang the bell again and a moment later his father came to the window next to the door. He peered blankly at Kris and at the van in the street, then unlocked the door and opened it. “You’re Tom,” he said, his voice sounding like a customer’s. Kris said he was not Tom. He was Kris. He expressed his condolences and told his father he was there to clean up. His posture was calm and semi-professional. “The bedroom’s upstairs,” his father told him. “There’s two doors on the left when you get up there, and it’s the door on the left. The left one on the left. I’m Red, by the way.” His dad smiled for a second and looked at him, and Kris almost thought he had made a joke. He moved out of the way to let Kris in, and then closed the door behind him, adjusting the rug on the tiled entryway floor with his foot. Kris said he would take a look and then be in and out with some equipment. He said if there were any pets that it would be a good idea to keep an eye on them. His father said his two dogs were out in the backyard. “They can stay out there till you’re done.” His dad turned and took a few steps toward the back of the house. Kris nodded. Through the sliding glass door in the kitchen, Kris could see his dogs looking in at him and his father, panting with their ears perked and their tails wagging in slow unison. “You know, they’ll probably bark their heads off at you when you’re out there, but if you want to go up to the fence and introduce yourself, they’ll quiet down. If you’re careful with them, you’ll see they’re sweethearts. Mosquito and Pepsi. That’s Pepsi on the right.” His father would have kept on talking about the dogs, about how Pepsi is the smart one and Mosquito is the affectionate one, but Kris put on his gloves and respirator and made his way upstairs. His bedroom was as he had left it that morning in the dark, except that on the floor of the closet there was a wet mess like someone had hanged himself. Kris went back outside and crossed the yard to the van. He opened the back doors and the disinfectant pump fell out onto the pavement. He picked it up and set it in the lawn, and then he started unraveling the hose into the street, letting it bundle up around his legs as he pulled it off the coil, arm over arm. The carpet wand was hooked onto the wall inside the van, and he climbed up inside to get it down. It was the old wand, the one that leaked scalding water while it steamed, and Kris grunted at it. He drew the hose out across the yard, untangling it, and then hooked up both ends, one to the truck-mount engine and the other to the carpet wand. The truck-mount was straight out of a B-grade sci-fi movie. It was a big green box, in a cage bolted to the corrugated floor of the van, scalding hot to the touch, with a flat metal face that was pocked with dials and switches and gauges and little bulbs that lit up when certain things were on or overheating. At the bottom of it was a large round hole where Kris had shoved in the half-melted plastic end of the vacuum hose. A key turned it on, and a lever opened the water valve. When this machine was emptied of its liquid contents, the entire block around Tom’s shop was near uninhabitable for the stench. Kris found himself stalling, just standing with his back to the house and sweating inside his Tyvek suit. He put the barrel of disinfectant under his arm and lugged the carpet wand with both hands over the yard, through the front door, and upstairs to his room. His closet was small, so the cleaning took little time. The wand stuck to the floor as he dragged it across the pooled waste, leaving a clear blue stripe of carpet. He went over it all twice, and then left and put the wand back on its hooks in the van. He turned off the truck-mount engine, rolled up the hose and grabbed a blue biohazard bag and some boxes before going back inside. Squatting down on his heels, he dragged a carpet knife across the closet doorway, waddling as he moved. Then he yanked the carpet up from the tack-strip around the base of the wall, careful not to prick his knuckles, which were scarred with reminders. When it was completely loose, he rolled it up with the padding and put it into the blue bag. He pumped the disinfectant bottle a few times and then sprayed it across the bare floor, applying a few extra coats to the big black spot in the plywood. All the clothes in his closet, including the sweaters and the pillowcases and his old work shirt, went into a couple boxes that he taped up and marked with his last name. He went to his computer and erased the porn from his internet history. He took his pipe out from underneath the incense in the top drawer of his dresser and put it with the carpet in the blue bag. Then he grabbed the bag, tied it up, and returned everything to the van two at a time. When he stepped back inside with the air-scrubber in tow, he smelled a roast in the oven. His father wasn’t in the kitchen, so he went and looked. A small touch-pad button turned on the oven light, and Kris had to stoop a little to peer inside. In a white casserole dish sat a large blood brown hunk of meat and some golf ball sized red potatoes. There was a metal meat thermometer poking into the roast, its glass face, steamy and browned at the rim. The seasoned smell was intoxicating, and Kris decided he was hungry. He hurried up with the air-scrubber, leaving it on the floor of the closet and closing his bedroom door when left. His father was on the computer in the basement, and he yelled down to him that he had finished. The wheels of his father’s office chair clacked as they reeled backwards over the tiles, out from under the desk, and soon his father was standing at the bottom of the stairs with a pen in his hand. “Alright. Let’s get this paperwork out of the way,” he told his son. Red took the clipboard from Kris’s hands and then began filling out the blue form on top of it, reading the name of each blank out loud before filling it in. Kris fiddled with his cell phone. He reread old text messages in his in-box from weeks earlier and tried not to hear his dad’s voice. “Okay. I sign here.” His wrist twitched as his signature knotted its way onto the paper. “That it?” Kris said yep. That’s it. Then he shook his father’s hand. “Did you meet the dogs?” Kris said he would introduce himself before he left. And he did. He drove to a diner near his house where he ran into a friend from his elementary school days, the stocky one that had introduced him to Pokemon and Earthbound once. The two young men stood in line together, glancing strangely at each other’s hair or face or shirt if the other was gazing up at the menu. Kris had taken off his sweat-soaked work shirt in the parking lot and put on a spare undershirt that he kept in the front of the van, but he knew he still smelled awful, and his hair stuck salty to his forehead. He got his double cheeseburger to go and parted ways with his friend at the soda fountain. His friend was still filling up his root beer when Kris stepped back out into the sun baked parking lot. Tom never came back from what turned out to be a long list of errands, but called Kris and told him to scrub contents until four. At four he could go home. Before Kris started working again, he turned the radio dial to the classical music station, stood listening for awhile, and then turned the music off. When one of the Riemann boxes held a wide array of Transformers, he spent the rest of his shift in silence, playing with them, and only sometimes stopping to scrub a spot off a tire or an arm. They were mostly clean, anyway. -=- Kris got home a little before five and his dogs greeted him at the door. His dad told him not to eat anything, there was a roast in the oven. His mom had called and she was on her way home. When she arrived, the dogs barked. The smell of her perfume followed her into the kitchen where she sat down at the table across from Kris, took off her shoes, and asked her husband for a glass of wine. Kris got up and went to the calendar on the refrigerator. He flipped up the page and looked for a moment at the illustration on the month of July, and then went up to his room. -=- The claws of paws clicked up the wooden staircase to the landing outside his room, and a tail whacked against the open bedroom door as Mosquito came into where Kris lay on the floor, next to his closet. The dog’s coat smelled revolting, so Kris breathed through his mouth. The dog poked his cold slick nostrils into Kris’ stubbly cheek. Kris wiped his cheek dry on his shoulder, then he scratched Mosquito behind the ears and told him to sit. The dog did sit, and he looked down at the boy’s face and waited. Eventually he lied down alongside him, scooting his paws forward and grunting as he eased his weight down to the ground. And not long after that, Pepsi came up quietly and joined them. July was going to be a red-haired woman at the window of some pleasant-looking house, looking out over her leafy bushes and her expansive green lawn, toward a wall of tall pines. A gust of wind was making its invisible way across the blanched summer sky, and high treetops all bent to the right, away from the woman. There were some clouds, but they were forgettable. http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003844.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003844.html Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:45:45 -0600 My Own KGOR A Small Good Thing." You're so, so, so welcome, dear reader. Now if you listen to this album without crying, you know you don't have a soul. 9. Coldplay's "Parachutes." Scrumptious. I hope when the music world is looking back on the 2000s, they don't overlook beautiful masterpieces like Coldplay's first outing. When I think about tragic downfalls as a result of becoming popular, this is the second band that comes to mind. God this album has so many favorites. "Yellow," "Shiver," "Trouble," and so on. The whole damn thing. 10. Weezer's "The Blue Album." Speaking of which, this is the *first* band that comes to mind when I think about pop music tragedies. There's nothing I can say about this album that hasn't been said. But I'll try: It's summer in a box, it's a total knock-out, and "Only In Dreams" remains one of the best album-closers in rock music. 11. The Weakerthans' "Reconstruction Site." Katelyn Anderson, you beautiful son of a bitch, thank you thank you for this CD. I remember I put it on, feeling obliged to at least give it one listen-through since you recommended it and I trusted you, and just started vacuuming my house per my dad's orders. That was the greatest vacuuming experience of my whole life. By the time it gets to "Time's Arrow" (my favorite track), I'm so lost in the singer's world I don't want to go back to mine. Their follow-up, Reunion Tour, was terrible, but Left & Leaving was almost as valiant as Reconstruction Site, and that's saying something. 12. Pedro the Lion's "It's Hard To Find A Friend." I'll leave this one short: When my parents found out I smoked pot and practically broke down right there in front of me, this was the first music I turned to, for some reason (specifically, the track "Bells"). Weeks later, somewhere deep in the Caribbean, I watched a sun set completely, from can't look directly at it up in the sky to scarlet on the horizon to hey where'd it go, while listening to this album on loop. Sadcore's greatest achievement. 13. Of Montreal's "The Sunlandic Twins." Why don't critics recognize how fucking amazing this album is?! NO other band sounds like this, provides the crystal-clear, dance-you-the-fuck-away beats that "So Begins Our Alabee" and "Party's Crashing Us" so swiftly and succinctly does. It probably helps to watch the band perform these masterpieces in person, high, at Lollapalooza, with your good friends nearby losing their minds along with you. If parties played this music more often, then I would actually dance. Am I wrong for only dancing to music I enjoy? 14. Of Montreal's "Skeletal Lamping." Yes, they get two. Yes, this album isn't even out yet. I've had this playing over and over in my iPod for like two weeks now and instead of getting tired of it, I feel like I'm becoming one with it. If you guys are anti-pirates or whatever, then let me assure you, your wait is totally worthwhile. PLEASE see this band live. Few bands provide the understated talent and overstated spectacle of Of Montreal. 15. The Notwist's "Neon Golden." Not to be confused with "Neon Bible," the somewhat monotonous but still rather awesome Arcade Fire church-rock. This is The Notwist's weird little album that is rather unlike most of their other stuff. It hit me in much the same way Postal Service's "Give Up" did, even though I have to admit they're pretty different. Jon Natvig just put their noises in my ears one day in the fishbowl at the back of the SSIMC, and I forgot I hadn't ever heard them before because it took me like three songs to remember to stop listening and demand that the album be transferred to my thumb drive. If you haven't entreated yourself to "Pick Up The Phone," "One With The Freaks," or "Pilot" yet, well, do. 16. Now It's Overhead's "Now It's Overhead." The only Omaha band that will make it onto this list. Now It's Overhead's immediately lovable album opener, "Blackout Curtain," was indirectly introduced to me by Ryan's childhood crush. I am haunted by many songs on this album. Admittedly, it hits a lowpoint towards the middle of the album, but then picks up again. "Skeleton On Display" is a haunting groove that anchors me to bittersweet memories I wish I could forget and relive at the same time. Sorry if I'm getting sentimental, now. This painkiller was some heavy shit. I should go to bed soon, but I won't, because lord knows sleeplessness produces the best wandyteeth posts. 17. Moot's "Point Pointer Outer." I know, I know, it's my own album. But it's not hubris that keeps me coming back. It's... this sturdy knowledge that I really poured my entire heart and soul into every lyric and hook on this album. I'm not tooting my own horn (bah-dump-tshhh). Sometimes in life you really fucking TRY hard to do something right, and this is the type of thing that comes out of it. In this instance, it's this audible expression of self. Lyrics I wrote before I had my break with the world still resonate, because I let my heart wield my brain. I welcome you to get dangerously close to me by listening to this album with a scathing ear. 18. Mates of State's "Team Boo." Go to iTunes and read the review I wrote for this as Mr. Burger. 11 out of 11 users found it helpful. ;-) 19. Yann Tiersen's "Amelie." Wonky bombast hardly begins to describe how perfect this soundtrack is. I can hum my way from the beginning to the end completely from memory. Also, see the goddamn movie if you haven't yet for some reason. It's France at its best. 20. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin's "Broom." WOO-HOO!! Still the record-holder for consecutive listens all the way through. One night (and morning) in the architecture school, I worked on a hideous paper sculpture with this thing in my ears and listened to each song 14 times. Do you understand me? That's a lot of times. The dudes in this band are not much older than I am, and they are already signed to Polyvinyl and kicking ass. Well, okay, except that "Pershing" is a pile of shit. But whatever. As long as "I Am Warm & Powerful" still exists, I love this band. 21. Pinback's "Anything." I couldn't narrow it down to an album. Rob Crow is so consistent. ANY album is worth a hundred listens. More bands should aim to be like Pinback. Enough said. 22. Tally Hall's "Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum." Tally Hall are the new Beatles. I stand by that statement in full confidence, having seen them live and seen what a fucking handful of virtuosos they already are. Keep your ear out for these guys. They are going to get famous. They have to. They are too good not to. They're also funny. This is my favorite band of 2008, hands down, and the best live show I've seen since Of Montreal. 23. Dispatch's "Bang Bang." Of course. 23. Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." One of the greatest albums ever written. Put it in. Don't stop listening to it until it's done. And you'll understand. It's staggering genius. The band's most important work. Choppy sentences. Oogly boogly. Drugs. But I don't mean to undercut just how smooth and watery this record is; you don't play it, it plays you. "Jesus, etc." is a good song on its own, but in the context of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" it's a fucking door to nirvana. 24. Fleet Foxes' "Fleet Foxes." Just a couple of months ago, iTunes wouldn't turn up results for Fleet Foxes. I had to search deep within, like, Spanish-speaking websites to pirate their albums. Oh the saintly sweet harmonies they proffer. Oh my god. I get shivers every time that "White Winter Hymnal" suddenly explodes after the opening verse. 25. Annuals' "Be He Me." Why don't more people talk about this? Why? This album was so cool. "Carry Around" remains one of the most played songs in my library, and I can't imagine ever getting sick of it. I remember my suitemate listened to this band a lot more than I did at first, though he was playing it off my shared iTunes folder freshman year; I pretended like I already knew Annuals really well because I wanted to seem cool to him, and then the summer after that I actually did get really into them. Annuals are way better than their scene-stealing genre-brethren Arcade Fire and Animal Collective, but whatever, they're all worth hearing. Peace. 26. Gorillaz's "Demon Days." I don't draw a line between their two albums, "Demon Days" and "Gorillaz," because they're so equal in caliber. But my heart puts Demon Days first in order of, well, you always remember the first album you heard high. My favorite song, however, is "Slow Country," which makes my brain sizzle. 27. Incubus' "Morning View." The third band I think of when I think about tragic musical downfalls. Brandon Boyd was so fuckin hot once upon a time, and he totally deserved that reputation after this FLAWLESS VICTORY. "Aqueous Transmission." "Echoes." We've all heard this album. We've all secretly hated it for its immense middle school popularity. But we keep it close, anyway. I miss Incubus. 28. The Shins' "Chutes Too Narrow." Indie rock blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah James Mercer blah blah blah blah blah "Saint Simon" is so fucking great blah blah blah blah blah. The Shins did not get inside my heart right away. It took hearing this album through the wall at my brother's old house, not really being able to hear James' somewhat annoying voice clearly, not really knowing it was The Shins, for me to grasp how cool their ditties are. I am forever a fan. Fuck you guys who think The Shins are overrated. Anyone who's been to Pitchfork knows that they are far from overrated in most circles. They are despised. They are *called* overrated. But I have yet to come face-to-face with these over-ratings, anywhere. The Shins are fantastic. Let them rock their rock. Live your life in peace you hate-monger. 29. Iron & Wine's "Our Endless Numbered Days." This is a personal choice, and I have all but given up on trying to recommend Sam Beam to folks. Sure, "Shepherd's Dog" is instantly likable, but it's on those first two outings that he really gets... i don't know... intimate. You have to be in the right state of mind or lighting condition or something to suddenly buckle under the weight of his intent. If "Aeroplane" is the peanut butter sandwich, and "Return to the Sea" is the ice-cold Coke, then this is the sky way overhead and deep inside you watching you eat and drink and think. And I think that's about it. Once again, these are the albums I can fall back on always, like my own personal oldies station. They aren't necessarily my favorites. I know that's what it sounds like, reading some of what I said, cause I sort of get caught up in how affectionate I am for underappreciated bands like The Weakerthans and Tally Hall. But please understand me. I, too, have a permanent place in my brain for Radiohead and A Tribe Called Quest and all those greats you guys are probably mad at me for omitting, but their place is not my fall-back place. I can't explain. I'm sorry. I know they don't taste like apples. We eat what we like. <3 Towel <3]]> http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003841.html http://www.wandyteeth.com/suppletowelcuddle/003841.html Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:15:00 -0600