Roads, Mills, Laps

Somehow tonight (the road hitherto, too complex, too boring, too manipulated to detail here), I ended up in the top section of some movieplex’s stadium seating in the middle of suburbia. I got to sit there and stew–watching pairs of moms and daughters (their hands full of $15.00 tubs of popcorn and $6.00 cylinders of fountain drinks) file in two-by-two, Ark-like and plop themselves down to see the latest Walmart-sponsored piece of cinematic shit to hit the theaters: Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour.

The majority of moms–good Catholics to the core–had ashes sprinkled on their heads; for it was time to go from one church to the other. It was time for, SAY IT AGAIN, worshippppuh!

There was an electric density in the air–the ozone-heavy feeling you get before a thunderstorm that causes the calcified fissures of your broken bones to tingle (or the feeling you are artificially given as you see the drama unfold in the old World War 1 movie when the protagonist predicts his demise the day before the major push; bullet between the eyes and all that)

We were given glasses to don; the lights faded, the Disney logo appeared, and then everything became 3 dimensional–an eclectic world of mass consumerism.

Wait!

We got a Walmart commercial first

Wait again!

We got previews: 3-dimensional ones!

Wait! Did I catch that? A preview for the spirit of the marathon movie.

Wait! Was that a split screen shot of Deena Kastor running in Chicago! Wait, wait, wait!

Who are those Kenyans?

What are those Penguins?

Is it over? It is!

Then it came: the shitball movie. We sat for 80 minutes–stuck in our sticky seats–watching vapid song after dopey vapid song unfold; all too close; all oozing out of the screen like the contents of a dyspeptic, bulbous blister lanced precisely at the time when its noxious contents had fermented like the finest of Falernian wines.

There she is coming up from the stage; there she is descending down from the heavens!

Hail Hosanna Montana in the highest!

Her fawning parents, (the rube, Queer-Eye-for-the-Straight-Guy made over father with a pubic-esque soul patch; the high cheekboned ueber controlling mother who reminds Hannah about cheerleading camp when she’s scared to fall into the arms of an emaciated, Justin Timberlake look-alike), they make cameos unfortunately.

Worse, some band called the Jonas Brothers wedge their pubescent elbows in at about the movie’s, slowly-reached mid point. We get to watch them strut around in skin-tight Levis that are reminsicent of Johnny Rotten; one little boy has sideburns that would make General Burnside jealous; the other little boy sings so hard, so out of tune, he takes on a Tiny Tim appearance (cheeks rosy; eyes little pencil dots; entire expression seeking maximum sympathy like that of an organ grinder monkey); the third brother hammers away on a Baldwin piano (his hands never visible)–his curly mophead shaking to his incessant yammering.

Near the end, we get a bit of comedic relief. Ah, the zany fathers of all those screaming girls! Ah, see what they will do to get Hosanna Montana tickets–oh look at the lows they will go; they don their sackcloth and ashes: ladies clothes. They humble themselves for the prize; they cast away their nets and go fishing for the prize.

The run.

They run?

Yes: There’s a scene where the dads race (in high heels) for backstage passes.

A race?

My interest was peaked; I pushed the plastic Walmart-supplied glasses closer to my once worm-ridden temples.

A race?

Indeed a race!

Sadly, it was an instant gratification race: a Marion Jones-on-steroids race; a race reserved for the large audiences on the various high school tracks around the fruited (gimmie-gimmie-now!) plain: a 100-meter sprint.

Yuck.

‘Not a race,’ I thought: a flash in the pan. It was a million heats. In the final, some ripped man wins the prize.

Where’s the marathon?

Too boring–too much tape required for that.

The movie ended rather abruptly. Hosanna Montana first sings on stage with a guitar: her supposedly self-written magnum
opus insipidly entitled, “I Miss You,”; then a racy bit dedicated to the women’s liberation movement (called G.N.O: Girls Night Out); then the Grand Finale, the peroratorical: Best of Both Worlds

No.

The lights came on and we left; the women’s ashes had been wiped off; lardball popcorn boxes were empty; profligate soda pop cylinders rolled across the theater’s cement floor; retarded cleaning men hired at $6.25 an hour (drooling and mumbling in the dark corners with wrists shaking and bent at 90-degree angles) waited for us to leave.

The last of the credits flickered by; the lights came on.

Cars (enormous SUVs) rolled out of the parking lot; all the little spoiled girls fell asleep with visions of blond sugardumbs in their dreams.

Good news!

No razor!

Finnish YMCA! (Is this George A. Custer’s karmic next life?)

The past two days, I’ve been playing Command and Colors: Ancients using the Vassal game engine against my brother.

I got the game, spent several days affixing stickers, 40-Year-Old-Virgin-like on little wooden blocks, and now am fighting the battle of Akragas taking on the heavy mantle of the Carthaginian general Himilco (who is hopelessly outnumbered) against his opponent, that conniving Syracusan Daphnaeus.

I’ve launched two heavy chariot charges against the Syracusan light infantry and calvary on the outer flanks; I’ve dispatched bowmen upon bowmen in the center: all with no success.

And I’ve done little running.

But I give you this!

Good News!

A free razor!

Since I can’t run (patellar tendonitis made worse after a post-Pandeylandaventure 15-mile slog up and down Mounts Misery and Joy(less) on Wednesday) I challenged myself to something Herculean yesterday: write a short story (6000 words) in 2:29 or 2:32:31 to enter into this contest.

I did it–mailed today in the manner that all my college essays were done: at the last minute.

Wish me luck.
—————-
In two days, the following three things happened in my house:

1. While I was “cooking” (heating water for pasta), my circa 1950 stove shorted out. The breaker didn’t trip. The burner flared up; the house dimmed; and a hole the size of a quarter was burned through the bottom of my copper cooking (water heating) pot.

2. My kitchen sink clogged; the galvanized steel vent pipe dating back to the term of the 2nd-worst president, Herbert Hoover, broke, causing tens of gallons of water full of corn and miscellaneous molded leftover detritus to spew out onto the floor of my basement.

3. My washing machine broke: a $17-dollar part that cost $170 to repair.
——————–

This was updated recently.
——————
I’m pretty good at sighting African-American celebrities.

Two summers ago, in Sammy Hagar’s bar, Cabo Wabo, in South Lake Tahoe, I shook Cedric the Entertainer’s bejeweled hand (hand extended and somewhat limp; a papal-like show–white fedora, his miter; cane with ivory handle, his staff; white Zoot suit, his chasuble and stole; opposite hand raised indicating he was done with me, his anointing). Then I saw Charles Barkley and before I could approach closer, he threw out his net of bodyguards Japanese trawler-like. Some guy had made it through the net and kept trying to talk to Messr. Barkley. Barkley stared straight ahead and pretended that the man didn’t exist. The man talked; Barkley stared ahead. The man tried moving to the other side of Barkley and talk to him from a different angle (maybe he was deaf in that ear?); the fan’s perseverance yielded to the celebrity’s stoicism and the man finally left, looking off into space just like his lofty hero.

Today, I was in NYC and saw Angela Bassett. She was in some store buying a ton of things. The obsequious attendants waited on her; they held things that hung on their arms (from hand to clavicle!) that she took off the rack and rushed them to the counter to be wanded, dinged, and charged. As I waited, I put my head in my hands and ran my fingers along the sides of my temples–feeling for the last traces of worms that had risen to the surface 5000 miles ago. I haven’t been running much since the race and I wanted to check the gauges.
—————
The city has a uniform–what was once Ugs(TM) is now big black boots tucked into jeans. I saw some women wearing bug shades in the gloaming so that might be part of it too.
—————
Saw Memento again; forgot what it was about originally; at the end, had to Google it to confirm my suspicions: I was right.
—————
Went to the Strand in the Village. Their WW1 section is godawful. The place is too crowded. If you want to find a book, you have to mine for it. Mining for it entails turning your shoulders to the side, saying excuse me as you wedge past the B.O.-smelling silverback, and then searching for it with your nose one inch away from shelves of books three stories high.
—————
Finally saw The Darjeeling Limited. Part One was horrid. Part Two was wunderbar. It was much better than Tenenbaums; it equaled Aquatic and Bottlerocket and was not as good as Rushmore.

I applied some of my India expertise and came to five conclusions:

1. The beginning scene with Murray in the cab is realistic.

2. The quaint village where the dead boy’s family resides is too clean.

3. The airport bathroom is too clean (and the squatter/urinal should have been replaced with a hole in the ground)

4. The third-class cabin aboard the Darjeeling Limited wasn’t third class–too Hollywood, similar to those “working-class Manhattan” apartments in those dopey Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks lovefestivals that are 3000-square feet with hardwood floors and furnished with all things Pottery Barn; all things neat, prim, proper, quaint, and ideal.

5. The kids’ mom’s convent is not located in the Himalayas: That place in the movie looked arid as hell.
———————-
Went to Dumbo.

If you want something to do in Brooklyn one day, go there.

Here are some pictures: (I like how they turned out; I tried to be an artsy photographer.)

A random piece of art on a brick wall:

———————
If you want to eat at a fantastic, cheap, hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant in the Village then this is it. Go there. My pasta was made by hand and my meal was under $20 (including a glass of house wine and an antipasti). Service was excellent. Waiter was Italian.
———————

The limits of my tabloidesque, populist, wherewithal:

Owen Wilson’s recent suicide attempt made me think about Baumer Tenenbaum’s suicide attempt–played by Owen’s brother, Luke–that occurs in Wes Anderson’s epic The Royal Tenenbaums, while Elliot Smith’s Needle in the Hay plays. Elliot Smith went on to kill himself, suspiciously, by stabbing a knife into his heart.

I like that Elliot Smith song.

——————-

Took the Path train from Jersey City into the WTC last weekend.

“What’s WTC?” I wondered. “W stands for Wall Street. T stands for Tariff. C stands for Complex,’ I noodled over in my head. ‘Dunno,’ I said–giving up.

“What’s WTC stand for?” I asked.

“The World Trade Center,” she responded matter-of-factly, soberly, as if speaking about a dying man with stage 4 cancer.

I forgot. The place has been wiped clean from my head. Maybe it’s my way of being done with the whole damned thing: the vaguely named “war on terror,” the boxes and boxes of jingoistic soaring eagle n’ Lee Greenwood/remember the Maine 9-11 kitsch that sits on the number of Walmart shelves equal to the the tonnage equivalent of the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan; the memorials the buttons, the ribbons, the pins, the dopey country songs, and the poems, the pictures and the repeating footage: the sick, uniquely American desire to be sad and to remember, to remember, to remember our way through this life and to charge admission for the experience.

Maybe it’s those people–those who Rudyard Kipling (himself, the man who penned about and experienced vague wars of jingoistic conquest; the man who lost his son in the “war to end all wars”) called “jelly-bellied flag flappers;” maybe it’s them. I got so fucking tired of them and so I just plain forgot that some murdering goons hijacked planes full of people and babies and flew them into two towers full of lots of people on a crisp, sunny day a few years ago.

I forgot about it until we came around the turn in our rickety little train. Shafts of sunlight appeared, and shined on hundreds of enormous metal supports that looked like rock climbing C-4 cams for King Kong.

“What the hell are those things?” I asked.

The people mover moved a bit more and then we saw the pit. Little hard-hatted Lego men moved hither and yon underneath holes the size of three-story buildings. Steam piped up from the ground; bulldozers dozed; trucks dumped gravel. Foremen pointed; helicopters flew overhead.

And then I realized what we were looking at. I’d never been there before–didn’t want to ever go see it.

We got off the train and went up the escalator. It was quiet. Tourists–lots of them (droves, flocks, colonies and whatever other animal plural you can Google), kids and their hip bag-wearing, Manhattan map-consulting parents from Wichita, Kansas and Dubuque, Iowa–stared down at the pit from behind enormous fences. A little blue sign said that this was a special place. A quiet women–some official–read a paperback book from inside a booth. A few feet from the fence, a man had painted himself gold and was pretending to be a statue. Some kids chucked a few pennies at his hat. The man changed positions. More coins flew.

We stayed there for about two minutes and then we went back down into the bowels of the earth–into to the subway–and took the ‘A’ train to 14th Street. I think I spent more time staring at the subway’s tile work from the early 1900s than I did looking down into that pit.

I’d like for us to collectively move on with this thing. I’m sure this offends someone. For that, I’m sorry.
—————–
Down in the village, down with the Bohemians.

Garlic odors mixed with those of curry and other exotic spices; Thai peanut sauce dripped from sizzling skewers out of open windows. Pizza grease formed in rivulets inside the glistening crust of a folded slice.

Out on the street, collegians wearing ear buds, tight-fitting jeans, large sunglasses blab about me and my and me and my…

We sat in a French cafe and sipped strong coffee. the place was European. We rubbed elbows with a guy, some chiseled rube, trying to impress his date, a Russian model:

“Um, Ya know, ya got Gorby and then ya got Yeltsin and then Putin. Ya got communism and then ya got rampant opportunism.”

The woman sipped her coffee stoically and said, speaking with a thick, Slavic accent, “I don’t understand you.” She was graceful and arrogant at the same time. She held her nose high and batted her eyes–moving nothing else on her genetically gifted head.

“I mean, ya got Putin, right. Look at him. He’s an opportunist. He’s like the Prince in that book by Machiavelli. Ya know that book that I”m talkin’ about?” he said as if reading from some cue card behind the model.

The woman made no gesture and sipped her coffee. She just picked up the cup and drank–letting the stupidity poop itself out of the rube’s mouth.

I stopped my eavesdropping. I turned away and looked out, catching the characters on the street:

Women–Grade ‘A’ narcissistic women, Sexandacity women, walked past. They wore their uniforms proudly: black leggings, baby doll dresses, and Cro-Magnon-era woman’s boots (looking like those worn by Daryl Hannah in Clan of the Cave Bear).
—————-
Up near Rockefeller Plaza

Jesus Christ, get me out of here. Moo. Moo. There’s the Today show studios. Lookie over there and stand in line for that there tour. Fan yourself with a free Legally Blond ™ musical fan. Get scammed with a free hat; step out of the bus–out of the Midwest–and waddle yerself up to the NBC Store. Buy yerself a tee shirt; snap yerself a picture of Matt Lauer’s hemorrhoidal donut. Buy yerself sum memerees from da big apple. Let’s go to Times Square and see da charlatan runnin’ on da treadmill. Time to eat yet, darlin’? Mmm. This here lard tastes good. I’ll take sum more and gimme one of them “WE REMEMBER; WE R UNITED” buttons too.
—————-
Back down to Union Square

Look up at those facades. Amazing: lots of work chiseled away by long-dead craftsmen now buried in mass graves somewhere underneath all this insanity.

Taste the Tapas; squeeze the pits out of the little olives and scrape them clean to get your money’s worth; savor the red wine, cleanse the pallet with bread and start again.

Gulp; pinch; drink; bite–another one!

Cheers!

Camarera! Another glass! Por Favor!

Cars honking; brakes squealing; hammers pounding; steam flowing.

Sandaled men hailing

Cops radioing. Wild people on on bright streets singing; clubs pumping; bouncers checking.

Ancient churches standing; tombstones falling

Dogs walking; led by immaculately dressed beau mondes gesturing–articulating, pontificating, lecturing.

Minivan loads of Hasidic Jews driving; Ukrainians selling, saying “Verry Naise? U like? Verry Naice?” Pleading and imploring.

Path train arriving.

Us, finally, sadly–leaving.

Everhart Park is across the street from my house. If it were a big stage, then the following cast would be up on it every day, doing their very best to entertain me.

The woman in a fat suit: She walks down to the park daily–appearing on stage from the West. She wears one of those rubber suits that you can buy in the back of Dick’s Sporting Goods. She sits on the bench by the playground and talks for a very long time on her cell phone. From a distance, it looks like she’s wearing two trash bags held together by a piece of parachute cord.

The K-9 policeman: He walks his trusty German Shepard in the mornings–about the same time that I walk Tippet. His dog–trained to do things like run down shady crack dealers–has large teeth and dark eyes. The policeman barks more than his dog–constantly yelling Germanic commands pathetically pronounced in an Americanized accent. Tippet and I keep our distance. I wave jazz hands and say things like, “Good morning officer.”

Various camp kids and their pubescent, sex-starved counselors: They litter–everywhere. They toss their Chinese-made, time-killing crafts off the gazebo into the stream. I get down there with a dog shit bag and rolled up work trousers. Yeah, I pick it up.

Ingrates: They drink from big, tubular beer cans and smoke Newport Lights. I know this because they throw these items onto the ground–as if it were their feculent, welfare-provided living room. They do this daily. I’m their mom: I pick up after them–daily.

The baseball-throwing college guys: They toss baseballs back and forth.

The 100-meter-running college guys: They do wind sprints. I respect them more than the baseball-throwing college guys.

The Mexicans: Ubiquitous. Nice. Before 6p.m., it’s women with swaddled babes. After 6 p.m., it’s
women, swaddled babes, and their men who have McMansion yard waste-stained hands and finger their wispy mustaches.

Ultra lady: She chats on a cell phone to someone while doing at least 50 circuits. I have no idea what the hell is going on: I observe her from my porch. She’s exercising: It’s none of my damn business.

My girlfriend, romantic person, partner has, on but a few occasions, delicately talked about her first cousin. She knew him well. Tonight, she handed me his first novel, Lord of the Barnyard:Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt.

I’m going to read it now.

The first and last sentences of his biography here are tragic reminders that life is one big roller coaster ride. I wish he lived still; I wish I could have met him–driving up to Lancaster County to ask him how he did it, how he persevered with 70 publishers; diligently sending out of his query letters; refusing to take their rejections too personally. I wish, selfishly, that he lived to read my manuscript, giving me pointers, leading my paragraphs towards the promised land. But he won’t and can’t. It’s up to me, I suppose.

More importantly, I wish that he had found a reason to live in order to father his daughter, Orla.

This is the closest thing to an advertisement that you will get on this blog: Buying his books helps his family.
————–
This, from the Boston Globe about him.