Half face-frozen,
as if I've chosen
to be shot up like this.
They said they aimed
with the Novacaine,
but I'm pretty sure they missed.
So when they drilled,
making my tooth filled,
it rather raised my ire.
But my tongue's so heavy
that I cannot levy
the lawsuit I desire.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
A Husband's Duty
When the exo-skeleton splinters
in the space beneath my fingernails
and the entrails seep through the Kleenex to my palm--
When I chase the spider, writhing,
and crush legs off with each frantic blow
(five, three, two maimed stumps, and finally a denuded, clutching torso)--
Then I say, dear wife, that my duty is performed,
and I have fulfilled your urge to murder.
in the space beneath my fingernails
and the entrails seep through the Kleenex to my palm--
When I chase the spider, writhing,
and crush legs off with each frantic blow
(five, three, two maimed stumps, and finally a denuded, clutching torso)--
Then I say, dear wife, that my duty is performed,
and I have fulfilled your urge to murder.
Chemical Dependencies
So there's this organic farmer who walks up to a regular farmer (discernible by his common sense and sturdy practicality), and he says, "Hey, man, didn't Nancy Reagan ever tell you not to fix your problems with a chemical solution?"
Paranoia
I'm also thinking about a book again. Seems to me that most of life is pretty much ringed with fear-- fashioned with fear, even. The welfare state comes to mind, as does the fact that I wear clothes. Moreover, the critical/skeptical epistemological mode seems to me as also a product of fear: Descartes' project, after all, is rooted in a test of his faculties so that he can be sure that no supremely bad devil dude is tricking him out. The fact that modern philosophy won't settle for anything less than 100% certainty is symptomatic of its paranoia--a grim, settled fear that post-modernity wafts out of like a rat from a garbage can.
That's all a rabbit trail, of course, but it dovetails nicely with the whole seatbelt/insurance/retirement/government/metal detector thing that keeps us all freaked out enough to sacrifice liberty for a comfortable death.
My proposal? An aesthetic of trust. Believe me; it's beautiful.
Even though rats don't waft.
That's all a rabbit trail, of course, but it dovetails nicely with the whole seatbelt/insurance/retirement/government/metal detector thing that keeps us all freaked out enough to sacrifice liberty for a comfortable death.
My proposal? An aesthetic of trust. Believe me; it's beautiful.
Even though rats don't waft.
Civilities
Visited Gettysburg last week and started reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" this morning. Tragic works, both. Actually, I'm shocked at how compassionate UTC is to the South and slaveholders. Much less so to the institution of slavery itself and the laws put into place to protect it. Guess she's practicing the old adage: hate the sin, love the sinner.
I'm sure there's a modern moral, here, but I'm not sure at what small crossroads town it'll all explode at.
I'm sure there's a modern moral, here, but I'm not sure at what small crossroads town it'll all explode at.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I'll take "Revolution," for $500
Ever been to Monticello? Yeah, Jefferson was really hurting from that Stamp Tax. I guess it's the principle of the thing, though, eh? Which is why, for Jefferson, that the right of representation extends to everyone except that slave he got to shovel away the hill that was obstructing the view in front of his study.
Nirvana Achieved
I've felt, over the past few weeks, that reading the stark black-white contrast that formerly graced this blog was rather like enduring repeated mosquito bites to the right cornea. Hence the lotus-like transformation. My only hesitation now is whether the Bhagavad-Gita would approve.
Oh, who cares. No one, that's who. That's why I don't even have a question mark there. Do any humans really live by the Hindu holy text like some people pore over the Bible? Even Gandhi drew all his inspiration from the Bible and the poet Shelley (No, really! It's true! See? See?). As far as I can remember, the Gita talks a lot about some dude in a chariot who's battling for his family. Oh, and he has some sort of caste on.
Oh, who cares. No one, that's who. That's why I don't even have a question mark there. Do any humans really live by the Hindu holy text like some people pore over the Bible? Even Gandhi drew all his inspiration from the Bible and the poet Shelley (No, really! It's true! See? See?). As far as I can remember, the Gita talks a lot about some dude in a chariot who's battling for his family. Oh, and he has some sort of caste on.
Idlewild
Here's the thing: jails are just the worst idea ever. What says "recitivism" like "let's put a bunch of one-time burglars in a cage with murderers and bigamists and outright paltroons"? (Bigamists being, of course, the single greatest threat to civilized society since Joseph Smith's golden eyeglasses.)
I was talking to my wife about this while doing dishes with her after dinner (an effective antidote, in every manner, to bigamy). She pointed out that the view that everyone just needs some peace and love and grace is a trifle too idyllic for the real world. I know that sounds terrible, but I guess you need to teach high school to really realize that grace isn't grace if people take advantage of it time and time again.
So here's my idea: Maybe we should amend Teddy's famous dictum to "Speak lovingly, and carry a big stick." But even if you keep a big stick somewhere in the justice system (I guess that's what it's supposed to do, anyway--stick it to ya, sucker!), jail sentences are way too overplayed. In other words, the justice system is too monochromatic--it's both too easy and too hard at the same time. Whether you murder someone or steal their lunch money, it's the slammer, all the same. Sure, you get different lengths of sentence, but life in a cage is pretty dehumanizing no matter how long it lasts. I think. So I've been told. It's like a one-size fits all approach to punishment.
And it also seems like it's the worst possible way to combat recitivism and to rehabilitate a "criminal" (gotta love that branding that comes with a criminal record) back into tango with social norms. That's where Colson's "restorative justice" bit comes in. If we can reconnect victims and crime (in certain instances--certainly not all), we might actually be able to treat criminals as human beings. If an errant accountant at Arthur Andersen is forced to pay back all the money he stole from stockholders, it might not only put a human face on the effects of his deeds, but also provide him a meaningful way of paying for his crime in a way that injects him back into community, producing something useful and violable from within society in order to get back on track.
I dunno. Seems like it may be sometimes a lot more effective to get people back into society and making them accountable to it by actually making them work within it to recover their place, instead of just putting them in a box somewhere on Alcatraz and hoping that 20 years' consorting with like-positioned aliens altogether apart from society will make them better able to live within it.
Isn't community the thing we all need, anyway? Why give "criminals" a lousy one on purpose, when we could be injecting them into something so much more human--so constrictive as to be free?
I was talking to my wife about this while doing dishes with her after dinner (an effective antidote, in every manner, to bigamy). She pointed out that the view that everyone just needs some peace and love and grace is a trifle too idyllic for the real world. I know that sounds terrible, but I guess you need to teach high school to really realize that grace isn't grace if people take advantage of it time and time again.
So here's my idea: Maybe we should amend Teddy's famous dictum to "Speak lovingly, and carry a big stick." But even if you keep a big stick somewhere in the justice system (I guess that's what it's supposed to do, anyway--stick it to ya, sucker!), jail sentences are way too overplayed. In other words, the justice system is too monochromatic--it's both too easy and too hard at the same time. Whether you murder someone or steal their lunch money, it's the slammer, all the same. Sure, you get different lengths of sentence, but life in a cage is pretty dehumanizing no matter how long it lasts. I think. So I've been told. It's like a one-size fits all approach to punishment.
And it also seems like it's the worst possible way to combat recitivism and to rehabilitate a "criminal" (gotta love that branding that comes with a criminal record) back into tango with social norms. That's where Colson's "restorative justice" bit comes in. If we can reconnect victims and crime (in certain instances--certainly not all), we might actually be able to treat criminals as human beings. If an errant accountant at Arthur Andersen is forced to pay back all the money he stole from stockholders, it might not only put a human face on the effects of his deeds, but also provide him a meaningful way of paying for his crime in a way that injects him back into community, producing something useful and violable from within society in order to get back on track.
I dunno. Seems like it may be sometimes a lot more effective to get people back into society and making them accountable to it by actually making them work within it to recover their place, instead of just putting them in a box somewhere on Alcatraz and hoping that 20 years' consorting with like-positioned aliens altogether apart from society will make them better able to live within it.
Isn't community the thing we all need, anyway? Why give "criminals" a lousy one on purpose, when we could be injecting them into something so much more human--so constrictive as to be free?
Guess I need a real job
I read most of Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" this afternoon, after a healthy morning of pancakes and packing. It told me that Douglas Miller was right when he said, "Writers don't make anything. We make about a dollar."
Later this afternoon, as I pondered this wisdom, I tried to explode a balloon merely by continuing to inflate it with my lungpower (as opposed to introducing to its latex epidermis the business end of any foreign, sharp object). I didn't think I would succeed, but it turns out that my lungs are, in fact, less likely to explode than is a bulb of elastic. My wife made this discovery at the same time that I did, but, alas! I had failed to inform her about my project, and the very moment that the balloon exploded like Hiroshima and flapped fragments in a welt across my throat, she jumped out of her skin onto the ceiling and clung there to the lamp fixture as the sausages she had been cooking bounced greasily across the kitchen floor.
The upshot of our resulting conflagration was that I probably need to get a real job. Right now, I'm creeping around the living room, looking for shards of bright elastic.
Later this afternoon, as I pondered this wisdom, I tried to explode a balloon merely by continuing to inflate it with my lungpower (as opposed to introducing to its latex epidermis the business end of any foreign, sharp object). I didn't think I would succeed, but it turns out that my lungs are, in fact, less likely to explode than is a bulb of elastic. My wife made this discovery at the same time that I did, but, alas! I had failed to inform her about my project, and the very moment that the balloon exploded like Hiroshima and flapped fragments in a welt across my throat, she jumped out of her skin onto the ceiling and clung there to the lamp fixture as the sausages she had been cooking bounced greasily across the kitchen floor.
The upshot of our resulting conflagration was that I probably need to get a real job. Right now, I'm creeping around the living room, looking for shards of bright elastic.
Monday, June 18, 2007
From Sea to Shining Cathode: "Turtles Can Fly"
I'm not exactly sure that our TV still uses cathode ray tube technology, but then again, I don't really care. I've decided, instead of cogitating too deeply on the "black box" nature of the black box in front of me, to kayak all day long, everyday, without cease, ad infinitum.
But first, I'm going to give a live-action play-by-play, work-by-work analysis and response of and to a movie I am watching at this very moment. With my eyeballs and ears and various other sensating bodily orifices. Too numerous to count.
The movie is also too numerous to count, although it is only one (1) discrete artifact. This is a ponderous and pondering observation, surely, but hold tight. Let me explain. No, wait--you'll maybe get it by the end of this spiel.
Okay. The title screen flashes. It's an FBI warning and an animated "Don't steal this copyrighted information, or you'll go to the slammer, like this unshaven punk." That's nice. I'm distracted at this point by the infamous thought-experiment entitled, "What would happen if the first track on every CD was a robotically-intoned 'If you're burning this right now, we'll be burning you in eternity.'"
Ooh. There's a rating. PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, and mature thematic. Not sure what "mature thematic" is. Probably something from Hollywo. Unsurprisingly, this is a foreign-language film.
Is there a title here or not? All I see is a bunch of Arabic script on the screen. Something about Kurdistan. Wish I knew more about the rest of the world.
First image: young girl with wind-swept hair. Scary music! Will she jump off the cliff? Into the water? Who is the scary guy? Ominous clouds. Jumps. Ah!
Cut to title: Turtles can fly. Hope that girl was a turtle. I sense this is the optimism that the movie maker wanted me to see. Well, I can see through their gag, so I'm going to go ahead and believe the worst. Turtles can only fly if they don't have a shell, you know.
Iraq. No televisions.
Wait. There's the beautiful girl again. Must be a flashback. I assume, at least, from her wind-sweptness, that she is "the beautiful girl" touted on the back of the DVD.
Ah. The hero, to foil the heroine. A teenage satellite-installer. To bring the Iraqi villages into
touch with the 21st century, the news, the tales of the war.
Bad subtitles on this thing. It only translates the gist of what they're saying. Right now, for instance, they've all been talking and laughing for five minutes, and the only thing on the bottom of the screen is "Let's go." Pretty distilled, I think.
Back to the girl. Her brother (?) just picked up a landmine with his mouth. I think he's armless. Guess that's what he does these days. Collect mines.
Satellite boy is back. Looks like he's in charge of the landmine-collectors, and looks like he's a meany. Hey. The armless boy just beat him up. Not bad.
Liz says it looks they're kind of angry. I'd concur.
Now Satellite-boy set up a satellite so the village can watch the war. Problem is, they only get Fox and no one speaks English. Even if they could, who knows how much they'd learn? I've got a feeling that pretty much the entire populace is manipulated by politicians. Like putty. Sometimes I wonder what they say about things behind closed doors, into the clouds of their cigar smoke, but then I realize that it's not really worth knowing. Profound, eh?
Wow. All these kids wounded, broken. One blind. One without arms. One lame. One a jerk.
Where the heck are these people living? What's with all the random armored junk around here?
Liz says the DVD back says all these kids are orphans. Sure. But where are they?
Ah. the armless guy is some kind of seer, who can make predictions about the future.
Okay, the Wind-swept Wonder seems to have some depression problems. I think what everyone else calls her "brother" is actually her son. Maybe. Every once in a while there's a montage of her jumping off a cliff thrown into the mix, so I'm curious about the subtle foreshadowing there. I'm gonna go ahead and say she dies by her own hand. Will I, too, be a seer?
Okay, so this is the deal: a bunch of orphan kids are hanging around in a refugee camp, right next to a bunch of minefields. So they're plucking 'em from the dirt and selling them to some middlemen in order to get money to survive.
Awkward. Wind-swept W. just tried to burn herself alive. Doused in kerosene and everything. I think that baby is kind of getting to her guilt complex. Come to think of it, she does carry it around her neck like an albatross. Stands to reason: guess her family was killed, she was raped, and the child is the result. Hard.
Armless boy leaves sister, W-W, on Satellilte boy's bike. He warns everybody that the war will start; the population moves out of the way. Like sheep without a shepherd.
Okay. Leaflet bombs. Wish they'd do that with my blog. Bomb it. Or distribute it wildly. Isn't that the same thing? Every dissemination is a bit of an explosion, rending things apart.
Hey, she didn't jump. Just sat on the edge of the cliff for a while. Who'd have thought? Tied her kid to a tree in the middle of a minefield, though. Satellite, trying to rescue him, loses a leg. Time for redemption through sacrifice? Is that in the Koran somewhere?
Nope. She does. And drowns her son, too. What a wretched movie. Inasmuch as it is inconceivably sad.
Well, this has been a less than enjoyable experience. Probably a terrible movie to comment on "live" like this, since it's too tragic to in any manner mock. This, I suppose, is real life for some--how many? What an eye-opener. See it, if you want to be wounded.
But first, I'm going to give a live-action play-by-play, work-by-work analysis and response of and to a movie I am watching at this very moment. With my eyeballs and ears and various other sensating bodily orifices. Too numerous to count.
The movie is also too numerous to count, although it is only one (1) discrete artifact. This is a ponderous and pondering observation, surely, but hold tight. Let me explain. No, wait--you'll maybe get it by the end of this spiel.
Okay. The title screen flashes. It's an FBI warning and an animated "Don't steal this copyrighted information, or you'll go to the slammer, like this unshaven punk." That's nice. I'm distracted at this point by the infamous thought-experiment entitled, "What would happen if the first track on every CD was a robotically-intoned 'If you're burning this right now, we'll be burning you in eternity.'"
Ooh. There's a rating. PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, and mature thematic. Not sure what "mature thematic" is. Probably something from Hollywo. Unsurprisingly, this is a foreign-language film.
Is there a title here or not? All I see is a bunch of Arabic script on the screen. Something about Kurdistan. Wish I knew more about the rest of the world.
First image: young girl with wind-swept hair. Scary music! Will she jump off the cliff? Into the water? Who is the scary guy? Ominous clouds. Jumps. Ah!
Cut to title: Turtles can fly. Hope that girl was a turtle. I sense this is the optimism that the movie maker wanted me to see. Well, I can see through their gag, so I'm going to go ahead and believe the worst. Turtles can only fly if they don't have a shell, you know.
Iraq. No televisions.
Wait. There's the beautiful girl again. Must be a flashback. I assume, at least, from her wind-sweptness, that she is "the beautiful girl" touted on the back of the DVD.
Ah. The hero, to foil the heroine. A teenage satellite-installer. To bring the Iraqi villages into
touch with the 21st century, the news, the tales of the war.
Bad subtitles on this thing. It only translates the gist of what they're saying. Right now, for instance, they've all been talking and laughing for five minutes, and the only thing on the bottom of the screen is "Let's go." Pretty distilled, I think.
Back to the girl. Her brother (?) just picked up a landmine with his mouth. I think he's armless. Guess that's what he does these days. Collect mines.
Satellite boy is back. Looks like he's in charge of the landmine-collectors, and looks like he's a meany. Hey. The armless boy just beat him up. Not bad.
Liz says it looks they're kind of angry. I'd concur.
Now Satellite-boy set up a satellite so the village can watch the war. Problem is, they only get Fox and no one speaks English. Even if they could, who knows how much they'd learn? I've got a feeling that pretty much the entire populace is manipulated by politicians. Like putty. Sometimes I wonder what they say about things behind closed doors, into the clouds of their cigar smoke, but then I realize that it's not really worth knowing. Profound, eh?
Wow. All these kids wounded, broken. One blind. One without arms. One lame. One a jerk.
Where the heck are these people living? What's with all the random armored junk around here?
Liz says the DVD back says all these kids are orphans. Sure. But where are they?
Ah. the armless guy is some kind of seer, who can make predictions about the future.
Okay, the Wind-swept Wonder seems to have some depression problems. I think what everyone else calls her "brother" is actually her son. Maybe. Every once in a while there's a montage of her jumping off a cliff thrown into the mix, so I'm curious about the subtle foreshadowing there. I'm gonna go ahead and say she dies by her own hand. Will I, too, be a seer?
Okay, so this is the deal: a bunch of orphan kids are hanging around in a refugee camp, right next to a bunch of minefields. So they're plucking 'em from the dirt and selling them to some middlemen in order to get money to survive.
Awkward. Wind-swept W. just tried to burn herself alive. Doused in kerosene and everything. I think that baby is kind of getting to her guilt complex. Come to think of it, she does carry it around her neck like an albatross. Stands to reason: guess her family was killed, she was raped, and the child is the result. Hard.
Armless boy leaves sister, W-W, on Satellilte boy's bike. He warns everybody that the war will start; the population moves out of the way. Like sheep without a shepherd.
Okay. Leaflet bombs. Wish they'd do that with my blog. Bomb it. Or distribute it wildly. Isn't that the same thing? Every dissemination is a bit of an explosion, rending things apart.
Hey, she didn't jump. Just sat on the edge of the cliff for a while. Who'd have thought? Tied her kid to a tree in the middle of a minefield, though. Satellite, trying to rescue him, loses a leg. Time for redemption through sacrifice? Is that in the Koran somewhere?
Nope. She does. And drowns her son, too. What a wretched movie. Inasmuch as it is inconceivably sad.
Well, this has been a less than enjoyable experience. Probably a terrible movie to comment on "live" like this, since it's too tragic to in any manner mock. This, I suppose, is real life for some--how many? What an eye-opener. See it, if you want to be wounded.
Monday, June 11, 2007
A Squirt Gun to Cleanse My Soul
This morning, when I was deaf, I had no idea that the hollow-bodied medical debris which has been lying in my desk drawer for the past four years would be the door, as it were, of my perceptions, the key to forever transcending my physical limitations. But life has its surprises; and I, thanks to today’s momentous circumstances, now have my squirt gun syringe.
The occasion of my momentous discovery of this powerful tool was my sudden, total, and seemingly irremediable deafness; the time, this morning.
I haven’t always been deaf, you know. Just today. Apparently, I slept on the left side of my head last night, and all the brain juices that were trying to ooze out my ear got stuck inside it like an endangered species in the Hoover Dam. I’ve managed to avoid this happening in the past, because I usually alternate the side I sleep on every couple of hours so that I don’t grow a kidney-stone. One of my friends had a kidney-stone in college, and after that, I’m almost cheery about setting an alarm in the middle of the night to remind me to turn over. But yesterday, I suffered minor abrasions to my right heel when I tried to ride a brakeless bicycle down a flight of stairs, so last night I drank extra cranberry juice, stuck to the left side, and suffered the consequences.
All in all, it was probably a good thing that the expulsions of my ear canal didn’t make it onto the pillowcase. My wife is sort of anal about sheets and pillow-dressings, and the wax probably would have ruined her iron. It was hard for me to take this dispassionate view at the beginning, of course, since it sounded like I had woken up with my head in a coffin. And it was hard to get used to my four-sensed state. Since external sources of sound were cut off from my reposing left ear drum, when I brushed my teeth after breakfast, I thought for a second that someone had turned on a tablesaw in my mouth.
I was all right for most of the morning, since I usually just sit around on the internet all day and clip my toenails, but when I started relying on my tongue to tell me if the toast had popped up yet, I realized I needed to reclaim my hearing, post-haste. Q-tips only compacted the obstruction, tamping it down against my ear-drum like a ramrod in a cannon. A damp Kleenex twisted into a sharp, moist point merely made my neck soggy. I was dismantling a package of ball point pens in order to construct a mouth-operated vacuum tube when I suddenly remembered the syringe tucked away softly in my desk drawer.
See, this secretion problem thing must be genetic, because my mom sometimes has the same problem. Even though it’s been a while since I took her advice, I remembered vaguely her stories about doctors jetting warm water into her ears in order to soak out the auditory impasses lodged within.
She seemed to think it was a good idea, so I tried it on myself, armed with only my three-cent syringe and the modern miracle of running water. Innumerable squirts and a bathroom sink later, consummation and delight! Only ten minutes and a wet orifice in exchange for high-definition surround sound!
My hearing is now hyper-sensitive, and getting more so all the time. At three o’clock, I heard my wife thinking that her iron was getting dirty, and at four, I heard Rudolf Hess chewing a peppermint at the Nuremberg trials. By this evening, I’ll probably be able to hear a blind caveman seeing.
And it’s all because of my syringe. I strongly suggest that you purchase one of your own, and several for your car trunk, in case of a terrorist attack. With such obvious healing powers at its disposal, who knows what a syringe can’t do?
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to strap mine to my kidneys tonight while I’m asleep.
The occasion of my momentous discovery of this powerful tool was my sudden, total, and seemingly irremediable deafness; the time, this morning.
I haven’t always been deaf, you know. Just today. Apparently, I slept on the left side of my head last night, and all the brain juices that were trying to ooze out my ear got stuck inside it like an endangered species in the Hoover Dam. I’ve managed to avoid this happening in the past, because I usually alternate the side I sleep on every couple of hours so that I don’t grow a kidney-stone. One of my friends had a kidney-stone in college, and after that, I’m almost cheery about setting an alarm in the middle of the night to remind me to turn over. But yesterday, I suffered minor abrasions to my right heel when I tried to ride a brakeless bicycle down a flight of stairs, so last night I drank extra cranberry juice, stuck to the left side, and suffered the consequences.
All in all, it was probably a good thing that the expulsions of my ear canal didn’t make it onto the pillowcase. My wife is sort of anal about sheets and pillow-dressings, and the wax probably would have ruined her iron. It was hard for me to take this dispassionate view at the beginning, of course, since it sounded like I had woken up with my head in a coffin. And it was hard to get used to my four-sensed state. Since external sources of sound were cut off from my reposing left ear drum, when I brushed my teeth after breakfast, I thought for a second that someone had turned on a tablesaw in my mouth.
I was all right for most of the morning, since I usually just sit around on the internet all day and clip my toenails, but when I started relying on my tongue to tell me if the toast had popped up yet, I realized I needed to reclaim my hearing, post-haste. Q-tips only compacted the obstruction, tamping it down against my ear-drum like a ramrod in a cannon. A damp Kleenex twisted into a sharp, moist point merely made my neck soggy. I was dismantling a package of ball point pens in order to construct a mouth-operated vacuum tube when I suddenly remembered the syringe tucked away softly in my desk drawer.
See, this secretion problem thing must be genetic, because my mom sometimes has the same problem. Even though it’s been a while since I took her advice, I remembered vaguely her stories about doctors jetting warm water into her ears in order to soak out the auditory impasses lodged within.
She seemed to think it was a good idea, so I tried it on myself, armed with only my three-cent syringe and the modern miracle of running water. Innumerable squirts and a bathroom sink later, consummation and delight! Only ten minutes and a wet orifice in exchange for high-definition surround sound!
My hearing is now hyper-sensitive, and getting more so all the time. At three o’clock, I heard my wife thinking that her iron was getting dirty, and at four, I heard Rudolf Hess chewing a peppermint at the Nuremberg trials. By this evening, I’ll probably be able to hear a blind caveman seeing.
And it’s all because of my syringe. I strongly suggest that you purchase one of your own, and several for your car trunk, in case of a terrorist attack. With such obvious healing powers at its disposal, who knows what a syringe can’t do?
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to strap mine to my kidneys tonight while I’m asleep.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Aha!
Alert reader Jim has pointed out that I say below exactly what I do not mean. It's a clever rhetorical trick of mine, but rather subtle. So, by "everyone" I do, in fact, mean "no one." Barack Obama has a one-liner about that: "No one wants abortion." It's amazing how he can be so slick and simultaneously fuzzily unclear. Study him now, folks. This is your next president speaking, for better or for worse.
Alert woman Liz also pointed out that adoption does no good to solve the 9 months' problem of carrying a kid in your belly. Maybe we should advocate free emigration into test tubes?
Drowsy writer Steve points out that he has a problem with ear wax and will take as much advice as possible about cleaning out his left ear.
Alert woman Liz also pointed out that adoption does no good to solve the 9 months' problem of carrying a kid in your belly. Maybe we should advocate free emigration into test tubes?
Drowsy writer Steve points out that he has a problem with ear wax and will take as much advice as possible about cleaning out his left ear.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Should I adopt a kid?
I've been thinking about the age-old abortion debate again, looking at some vitriole from both sides, and I think it's pretty clear that everyone except Margarate Sanger look-alikes actually want abortions. (Though anyone who is excited by the statistics in Freakonomics which show that more abortions lead to less crime should be saddened at themselves. Can you imagine? Killing off our criminal class? And we don't mean Martha Stewart, of course.) People don't have abortions just for fun; they have them because they can't bear to face the alternative, because they can't afford a kid or because they can't imagine it cutting into their career or social prospects or whatever. All that loud rhetoric about women's choice comes afterwards.
So if we're going to try to stop abortion by hanging out with signs in front of clinics, maybe we should write on them: "If you can't keep your child, can I have her?" Maybe charity should start at home, in other words: maybe we just need to be willing to adopt the loveless and the lost, ourselves.
Not now, though. I mean, I can't afford to adopt anyone right now. Not to mention that it would wreck my career and social life.
[I think www.therose.ca does something along these lines, though not exactly. Worth looking into.]
So if we're going to try to stop abortion by hanging out with signs in front of clinics, maybe we should write on them: "If you can't keep your child, can I have her?" Maybe charity should start at home, in other words: maybe we just need to be willing to adopt the loveless and the lost, ourselves.
Not now, though. I mean, I can't afford to adopt anyone right now. Not to mention that it would wreck my career and social life.
[I think www.therose.ca does something along these lines, though not exactly. Worth looking into.]
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
I know you're shopping for PDA
That's a lie: no one does it. I know of not one person who wants, while searching for Yonkman's Hyper-Active Dry Yeast in the local grocery, to turn the aisle and be assailed with some ghastly vision of lip-grappling among the rolled oats and flour.
I want to be generous to these (seemingly foolhardy) couples. Maybe it's just the case that they don't know how to manage time very well. Quite possible. Maybe they need some help with scheduling.
Now, it is no coincidence that personal planners and loathsome public clutchings share the same acronym: they're both evil. But I figure that if we can pit two evils against each other, they can mutually counteract their evilness and end up all cancelled out.
So here's my great plan: to make a PDA PDA; that is, a PDA to eliminate PDA. It could have all sorts of bells and alarms and would only be able to schedule activities between the hours of 3 and 4 in the morning.
You don't even have to buy one. I'm giving them out free, at the grocery store.
I want to be generous to these (seemingly foolhardy) couples. Maybe it's just the case that they don't know how to manage time very well. Quite possible. Maybe they need some help with scheduling.
Now, it is no coincidence that personal planners and loathsome public clutchings share the same acronym: they're both evil. But I figure that if we can pit two evils against each other, they can mutually counteract their evilness and end up all cancelled out.
So here's my great plan: to make a PDA PDA; that is, a PDA to eliminate PDA. It could have all sorts of bells and alarms and would only be able to schedule activities between the hours of 3 and 4 in the morning.
You don't even have to buy one. I'm giving them out free, at the grocery store.
So, it's been a while...
For the most part, I chalk up (down?) to the Amish my recalcitrance to emote electronically. I mean, when you're riding around like a lump of flour (a sack would be too well-defined for my freneticisms) strapped to a saddle for a while, the ol' laptop starts to lose its gnarliness.
Those of you who haven't heard me discourse about the Amish, well, it's just too bad. I wrote something about it the other day, but I can't find a common thread to really make it all work together, so it's currently just sort of a laundry list of my thoughts on being unelectrified. Hey! Maybe that's a good title. I'm always on the lookout for those things.
Here's another title: Leggo my Lego!
My wife dragged me to Wal-Mart the other day, so I thought that, as long as we were supporting slavery anyway, I'd take a look at the Legos. I was distressed, to say the least. In fact, having mulled it over for at least fifteen minutes, I'd be fairly comfortable asserting that Legos are directly responsible for the growing idiocy of our children (I say this loosely, and mostly for rhetorical effect; I in no way intend to slight the next generation, of whom many discrete individuals are undoubtedly already much more fair than my own sick, pale, moon [or whatever Romeo is talking about in the bushes beneath the balcony]).
Call me crazy, but I have been operating for 23 years under the (apparently fallacious) conceit that Legos were actually building blocks. When I was a littler kid than I am now, we had a big box of the primary-colored, brick-like blocks, and we supplemented it at Christmas and birthdays with the three-dollar sets of "a Lego man driving a very small car." We would salivate over the $100 pirate ship sets that we could see in the flyer that the Lego company in the sky somehow managed to cram into the tight constraints of our Lego man auto fiend racer's box, and we would tell each other stories about what we would do if we were ever rich enough to buy the 6-cannon pirate ship (sail it to Venezuela, I think, was the most common dream). Then we would use our 3.5 zillion blocks and one steering wheel and one Lego man, and we would construct multi-level space ships and smash them against each other to test whose was built more sturdily.
So that's what I was looking for in the Lego aisle--something repurposable, something unique enough to provide direction, but bland enough to be torn down and reconstructed into something else. But it turns out that Legos nowadays are actually made for a bunch of brainless dweebs who do nothing except watch horrible sequels to action movies. The only Lego sets in the toy aisle looked like miniature movie sets from Spiderman 3, Batman Forever, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Star Wars. Worse yet, all the sets were constructed of approximately two and a half large, plastic-modeled pieces. Whereas a pirate ship when I was a kid would take four days, a seventeen-page instruction booklet, and forty-five hundred tiny plastic pieces to put together, the pirate ship of today looks like it's one solid piece with an attachable mast.
How this makes kids dumb is obvious. For one thing, they don't have to figure out the complicated directions, nor are they walked through the realization that an end product is the summation of a process via an accomplishment of constitutive steps. In the good old days, it took three days before you could play with a Lego set; nowadays, you don't need that kind of patience.
And, maybe more importantly, the fact that they're all sold out to corporate interests means that it's really hard to use Legos to create story-lines that have not already been conceived by some puerile brain in Hollywood. There are only so many things you can do with Spiderman or Jack Sparrow or the Batmobile. As a result, the sell-off to the movie industry sets up kids to mindlessly reenact whatever they've seen on the silver screen, instead of taking "Lego man in a car" and creating worlds for him out of nothing, out of the kid's own imagination. It won't be any surprise to me if we experience a sudden dearth of architects and animators in thirty years.
Except for in my family, of course. I've kept all my old Legos in a box in my parents' basement, just to make sure that my posterity is super brainy and fun. I'm pretty sure that's all that it will take.
Those of you who haven't heard me discourse about the Amish, well, it's just too bad. I wrote something about it the other day, but I can't find a common thread to really make it all work together, so it's currently just sort of a laundry list of my thoughts on being unelectrified. Hey! Maybe that's a good title. I'm always on the lookout for those things.
Here's another title: Leggo my Lego!
My wife dragged me to Wal-Mart the other day, so I thought that, as long as we were supporting slavery anyway, I'd take a look at the Legos. I was distressed, to say the least. In fact, having mulled it over for at least fifteen minutes, I'd be fairly comfortable asserting that Legos are directly responsible for the growing idiocy of our children (I say this loosely, and mostly for rhetorical effect; I in no way intend to slight the next generation, of whom many discrete individuals are undoubtedly already much more fair than my own sick, pale, moon [or whatever Romeo is talking about in the bushes beneath the balcony]).
Call me crazy, but I have been operating for 23 years under the (apparently fallacious) conceit that Legos were actually building blocks. When I was a littler kid than I am now, we had a big box of the primary-colored, brick-like blocks, and we supplemented it at Christmas and birthdays with the three-dollar sets of "a Lego man driving a very small car." We would salivate over the $100 pirate ship sets that we could see in the flyer that the Lego company in the sky somehow managed to cram into the tight constraints of our Lego man auto fiend racer's box, and we would tell each other stories about what we would do if we were ever rich enough to buy the 6-cannon pirate ship (sail it to Venezuela, I think, was the most common dream). Then we would use our 3.5 zillion blocks and one steering wheel and one Lego man, and we would construct multi-level space ships and smash them against each other to test whose was built more sturdily.
So that's what I was looking for in the Lego aisle--something repurposable, something unique enough to provide direction, but bland enough to be torn down and reconstructed into something else. But it turns out that Legos nowadays are actually made for a bunch of brainless dweebs who do nothing except watch horrible sequels to action movies. The only Lego sets in the toy aisle looked like miniature movie sets from Spiderman 3, Batman Forever, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Star Wars. Worse yet, all the sets were constructed of approximately two and a half large, plastic-modeled pieces. Whereas a pirate ship when I was a kid would take four days, a seventeen-page instruction booklet, and forty-five hundred tiny plastic pieces to put together, the pirate ship of today looks like it's one solid piece with an attachable mast.
How this makes kids dumb is obvious. For one thing, they don't have to figure out the complicated directions, nor are they walked through the realization that an end product is the summation of a process via an accomplishment of constitutive steps. In the good old days, it took three days before you could play with a Lego set; nowadays, you don't need that kind of patience.
And, maybe more importantly, the fact that they're all sold out to corporate interests means that it's really hard to use Legos to create story-lines that have not already been conceived by some puerile brain in Hollywood. There are only so many things you can do with Spiderman or Jack Sparrow or the Batmobile. As a result, the sell-off to the movie industry sets up kids to mindlessly reenact whatever they've seen on the silver screen, instead of taking "Lego man in a car" and creating worlds for him out of nothing, out of the kid's own imagination. It won't be any surprise to me if we experience a sudden dearth of architects and animators in thirty years.
Except for in my family, of course. I've kept all my old Legos in a box in my parents' basement, just to make sure that my posterity is super brainy and fun. I'm pretty sure that's all that it will take.
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