There’s no better feeling in the world–perhaps, at this juncture in my life–than giving my McYenta neighbor a fake “happy” wave and driving off with a truck full of my possessions, bound for my new home: Bohemia.
I signed the papers, handed the keys over, and shook the hands.
It’s done.
———————
If you live in the greater Philly area and need to move locally, you have to use these guys for your move. They are fantastic (and cheap!).
My crew yesterday was made up of a painter and two musicians. Two of them were fascinated with all my insane possessions–my oddball, eclectic mix of crap; my World War 1 Enfield .303 rifle (dated 1917; in time to be carried and subsequently dropped at Paschendaele?) complete with foot-long, blood guttered Kraut-poking bayonet; my one hundred and fifty thousand books about everything from U.S. Grant to oceanic sailing (well they weren’t too thrilled moving them, actually); my kitsch, my gimcrack, my shitty art–all of it, all of THAT.
They loved the old newspaper that I found stuck in one of the walls of my new attic. It was from 1943–back when our country was in a tough, uncertain part of World War 2. We read the comics from it during our lunch break (Dick Tracy); we stared in wonder at the advertisements showing dapper, pipe-smoking gentlemen wearing double-breasted suits and Betty Grable-looking, fur coat-clad ladies We agreed when we saw the movie ads for Frankenstein and the Wolfman and noted the wonderfully written articles (using SAT words) in font size 8: Our country has changed.
The American Dream last night at 3 a.m. was shoveling the Scapa Ice Flow: all the sidewalks, driveways, and entryways in McWorld. For some, that dream was doing it while not wearing gloves*. For others, it was all yelling out Spanish phrases at 100mph. For all, it was doing it for $5.00 an hour. I call it a Scapa Ice Flow because it was the most impossible of snow packs: we here in Philabuttball got about four inches of snow and about four hours of ice, then we got us around four more hours of -10-degree wind chill–making an immutable, superglued, strata of bedrock for them there forced labor servants “illegal immigrants” to make clean on this side o’ the border.
The Mexicans had to earn their money this morning–they needed to rub those palms into Elmer’s glue-like calluses, wielding their Home Depot snow shovels. They needed to work mighty hard to buy themselves a few Chinese-made, dollar store treats.
It all started around 7 p.m. when the indentured servant trader dropped them off in our development. I saw the lucky, the favored, the obedient spill out of the passenger cabin and the newbies, the ill-favored, the junior-grade members of the lot, hop out of the truck bed. The guys in the truck beds had gray hoods pulled over their black heads.
They worked on through the night–slamming Dachau’s metal shovels into McWorld’s concrete ice, repeatedly. By the sounds of it (my bedroom is above the front ‘driveway’ where they toiled through the night), they made about five feet an hour. By the morning, they had cleared the sidewalks for the white folk and the occasional Indian yuppies (with their Direct TV satellite dishes that get Indian Thriller videos broadcast on decibel level fiddiemillion…
….and their unintelligible, misogynistic phrases in Hindustani, screamed through my shared wall) to admire: no one walks on them; it’s a movie set remember? This place is a Goddamn facade.
Bank solution to all this: give them all Visas. Let them rack up consumer debt MERICAN STYLE!
Yeeehaw!
*Some young guy neighbor noticed this and gave him a pair of his gloves
I watched no games. I didn’t even draft my team: someone else did.
I won.
Go Eaglez. Chris Berman would be proud (grab hairy MANHOOD and yell like an ape)–I COULD GO ALL THE WAY. I need to work the elliptical handles HARD in the gym of LARD so that I can honor of him and those zany broadcasters: Terry Bradshaw, DEEEEEEEION Sanders etc..
I finally came to the conclusion that Christmas means a lot to an eight year-old and so I reluctantly decided to play the game.
We showed up at the mall at five to get a jump on the insanity, but Santa was out on dinner break until six: We became prisoners.
We wandered around the mall for 40 minutes. Fucking-A I hate the mall–even more so at this time of the year. Half of the disposable income of our country resides in the over-allowanced wallets and purses of spoiled, zit-faced teenagers who wander about from store to store with sacks and sacks of meaningless SHIT. The lads all look like Eurotrash Flock of Seagulls singers–their hair black-dyed n’ blowdried, their pants, safety-pin pegged, their earbud cords, dangling like the avant-garde Apple commercials with the free-spirited ingrates doing the shadowy, lookieme dance. The ladies all look like whored-up Britney Spears’ back-up singers–their asses ridiculously bulbous, their earrings, long and loopy, their morals, loose like their incessantly chit-chatting, gum-flapping lips.
Baby Jesus, make them go away, please–ALL OF THEM.
We got mixed up with these creatures, making the mother of all calamitous decisions by deciding to enter Spencers for a gander: we were there for five seconds. They openly sell vibrators, g-spot ticklers, anatomically correct dildos and every scatalogical comedic possibility known to these pubescent balls of hormonal secretion. It’s all there–TA-DA!
We left Spencers and walked over to Macys–lots of worry-creased bald men hurriedly buying jewelry and lacy garter belts there. Lots of desperate men throwing dollar sign band-aids over dyspeptic marital dysfunction, there
A sweaty Santa walked past us and so we followed him to his final destination: the fake ‘Santa House’–teeming with ‘me-wanta’ baboons. We stood in line for about twenty minutes. Josie noticed that the gigantic tree was artificial. The kids in front of us, (belonging to the happyland nuclear family taking pictures of everything) started crying because they didn’t get to hear the recording that the disgruntled elf had to say in the plastic telephone that hung precariously from the wall of ‘Santa’s House.’ One of the kids ripped the phone out of Josie’s hands. The mother let it all unfold, saying nothing. I just watched it unfold, UN Blau Helm observer-like–my daughter took the high road and surrendered the germ-infested phone receiver to the grabbing hands: God bless her.
Ahead of that family was a mother of two children. She wore no wedding ring and had that long, drawn, tired look of non-stop, round the clock, single parenting; she had that far-way gaze, that nervous stare that I can spot in those of us who just can’t seem to wedge ourselves any longer into what is expected of gollygeemom+Searscraftsmandad=Godnapplepie America (the football ‘Merica, the Eagles fight song-singing ‘Merica).
There was obviously no father around and she obviously had no money: Her clothes and her kids’ clothes gave that away (all sweatsuits–very Walmart, not very PhillyMcExton-like). The bubbly photo lady asked which package she wanted and she said her kids were, “Just there to visit.”
The photo lady said, “Oh, you are just there to visit.” She then turned to Santa and put one of her hands in front of her face, warning Santa with a wink that, “They are just here to visit.”
Santa acknowledge the secret sign. No official photo was taken. Santa rushed them along. Chop-bloody-chop.
The mom stepped aside and took out a first-generation digital camera from her purse; it was first-generation because it was more faded, scratchy plastic than flashy, digital screen; the photo lady whispered to her, “We frown upon that, you know. Pictures should be paid for.”
The mom nodded her head and proceeded to take pictures, despite the warning: I smiled at the mom’s intransigence–you go girl. The photo lady shook her head at us, looking for grade-A, McPeople sympathy, looking for one empathetic sigh. She then waved her hand to the next family, motioning them onto Santa’s lap, moving the free-riders off. She looked like a church usher at midnight mass; she was there to seat the people who had come there to check the block.
Josie’s turn came eventually and she asked Santa for this:
Santa looked at up at me for approval and I shook my head–east to west. I tried to convey to him that I too am a single parent (One socio-economic rung above Walmart free-rider status, that is: I’m a paying customer, but I buy the 2 x5s–one for the ex-, one for moi) and that an overpriced, animatronic pony wasn’t going to happen this year. Animatronic shit belongs in Disney’s Hall of the Presidents, not in my house.
But there was no time for all this. Santa whispered into Josie’s ear: I don’t know what. He then gave her some rubber Santaman doll. Santa’s arms and legs can contort into all sorts of impossible positions–enough to make the mall teenagers with the sacks and the seeking semen giggle with visions of sexual innuendoes in their head.
Then photo lady yelled, “Next!”
I paid for our picture; I handed my credit card to the disinterested woman who was talking to someone on the phone. She never made eye contact: she handed me a pen, then she said, “Thank you.”
These past two months have been brutal for my eight year-old daughter. A few weeks ago she suffered through pneumonia and today she was diagnosed with strep throat.
Getting through to the nurse was like calling FM106 KMEL in 1984, hungry like the wolf for some free Duran Duran tickets. I had speed dial working and actually heard something I haven’t heard since the advent of the Information Age: a busy signal.
I stayed home from work; Josie summoned me using my Liberty Bell award from last year’s 2:34 at the Philly Marathon: a distant memory that hearkens back to faster times every time that I am summoned with it–its incessant pealing a vivid reminder that I’m not in the shape that I once was and may never be again.
We got lost in the shuffle at the doctor’s office and waited for 30 minutes past our appointment time. I went up to the desk and did my very best Nikita KruschevNikita Khrushchev sans shoe and so we got seen very shorty after that. Sick loved-ones bring out the Soviet dictator in all of us. You need to be a Soviet dictator when dealing with the health care system. I’m convinced of that.
We got ushered into a room with horrid art work: three or four original paintings of happy mothers holding happy babies (where are the dads on the wall?). The mothers got their mouths open, mimicking the open mouths of their giggling bubbly little progenies. The brush strokes are crude; the colors are all Miami Vice pastels. That world doesn’t exist, especially not in a doctor’s office.
Yuck.
No one is happy in these places so let’s get real.
Doctor’s offices require Edvard Munch:
and:
The biggest disappointment out of all this is that my daughter’s sickness has ruined a planned weekend trip to NYC. I was reading Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice (and three other books simultaneously, located in various dubious sitting places throughout my pied-a-terre) thanks to my aquaintance(sic). I was all geared up to talk to the elves at Macys and then write about it.
Oh well. Maybe I’ll paint something instead and surreptitiously stick it up on the wall when I take Josie back into the doctors for a checkup. I’ll replace the CrockettnTubbs happy moms with something dark, something sinister, something inherently masculine, reminding the room’s occupants that they aren’t there to cuddle and make nice: They are there because they are in pain. I’m closing my eyes. . .I’m seeing Nikita Kruschev Nikita Khrushchev. He’s standing in front of the U.N. General Assembly. The painting is black and white. He’s got a syringe in his hands and a terrified baby lays below him. The painting will be called “We will bury you!” or something like that.
WE WILL BURY YOU!.
———————————
Seeing my daughter in pain today made me think about the most ridiculous movie known to man: Gods and Generals.
I only made it through about the first ten minutes of it. I got to the scene where Stonewall Jackson is doing some cheesy thing with his home slave (read:wife). He’s listening to her play the harpsichord or he’s reading the Bible with her; they are exchanging drippy pleasantries with some nauseating music playing in the background. Whatever. It makes no difference; it was straight up torture to watch and so I shut the DVD off and promptly took it back whence it came. (That night I remember, I got hit by a drunk driver while I was riding my mountain bike back to the video store to return Godsnpoop–yeeehaw!)
It’s all a bunch of flowery malarkey.
There is no ideal.
When the pain train comes to town, it turns even Stonewall Jackson into an ogre. Pain brings out the worst in all of us. It’s very hard to care for someone in pain. There’s no speech, like that attributed to Jackson’s last words, about “crossing over the river and resting under the shade of the trees.” No music plays. No one stands there clad in Robin Hood tights like some Lord Byron holding a long quill, recording it all in some thick, dusty book of legendary lies.
There’s this Jackson upon being dropped in his stretcher, landing on his left arm with two fresh minnie balls lodged in it (fired by skittish Confederate pickets in the gloaming):
“AAAH!!!!!! This fucking hurts! I’m going to kill you! You motherfucker!!!! You drop me again and I will cut your balls off! So sayeth Cain before he puteth Abel under the knife, so I sayeth to you, you nearsighted Georgian ape! You get me some whiskey lickety-split. My left arm fucking hurts and that means that I need to get shit-faced ASAP!”
Naturally my daughter didn’t talk like this, but she’s given me what-for all day and I can’t say that I blame her.
The whole country has become a zoo. People are running everywhere, grabbing at sacks of shit, slapping their slow neighbor’s hand.
I walked into a Kohls the other day. It was on Black Friday: I went there to observe. A line formed from the door to the exit door (approximately half a mile in length). It had the dim lit look and blackened banana smell of some third-world country. I saw a woman in a wheelchair, slumped over with one hand supporting her forlorn head; the other hand held piles of coats and pants, jeans and dresses, across her lap. The stack of clothes reached the top of her bonneted wig.
When the line crept forward, she inched her wheelchair forward with one rickety leg. Sometimes her foot would slip on the brown leg of a wayward pair of slacks that had fallen to the floor. She’d kick and kick with her leg–flailing wildly–and went nowhere until the impatient person behind her in line holding the supermagical Tassimo coffee machine and i-robodog would reluctantly decide to push her forward, onward. The old lady was well on her way to the cash register, with stacks of things for herself cradled in her withered hands; she was going to meet with Christ in his manger.
I saw this happen a couple times and then I got the hell out there.
—————
I’ve seen some other things.
There’s a competition in my neighborhood. I haven’t quite figured it out, but I think it entails not making any of your own decorations: you buy them down the road after driving 100mph to get there; you hand your credit card to the pimply kid with the Santa hat who works in the “Christmas World” shop that once was “Halloween Adventure” just a few months ago.
So in this competition, you have to buy a bunch of light-up shit, not bother to bury any of the cords, and just drop it in all front of your ‘lawn.’ Someone across the street from me has an electric train running next to a white deer with a red nose. Further down the street, someone has the same white deer; they live across the street from someone who has the same train. Some people have trains and others have white deer; some have both trains and deer.
————————
And others yet have blow-up Mickey Mouses or Harley Santas. These blights come with giant air compressors that use electricity which is generated by consuming the nation’s petroleum reserves. The compressors’ rattling rings forth in my little development at all hours of the night. I get to hear it when I’m all tucked in my little bed, dreaming of my little sugarplums, planning my little Tyler Durden missions to stick the Harley in my neighbor’s sacred parking space, to throw the rest of the million decorations into the streets, like some Paris Commune barricade, forcing the yentas to dwell on the complete absurdity of it all as they clear the streets to drive to the stores.
I was with my aquaintance(sic) and got to observe the jolly good times. Come, join me. Sit down, let me tell you all about this place.
Luckily the cavern was right next door, so I got to leave through the turnstile, buy the Captain Morgan vials, and then sneak them back into the place hidden in my pockets, flashing my empty hands at the pubescent security girl at the gate–the one holding the condensed version of Hamlet–as if I was trying to move through a metal detector at the Beirut International Airport circa 1985.
As I walked back to my seat, I caught sight of my surroundings: kids throwing hands and feet akimbo; kids flailing about, sitting in flashing helicopters that move up and down; kids shoving tokens into metal machines that blink, beep, and then poop out little gray tickets. The kids love those tickets; they are like adults’ pay raises, adult trips to the mall, serving the purpose to satiate the desire to stick things into things and get stuff–lotsa stuff; they are Scooby Snacks. Hot damn, do humans love Scooby Snacks, or what? There’s no real difference between theirs and ours: ours have pictures of dead presidents: theirs have a picture of a mouse.
Nope, no difference at all. Fucking paper.
I poured my vial into my plastic container of Coke and then settled into a buzz; I related to the kids and eased back down in my seat; I got to talk to my aquaintance(sic) and relax. I handed my daughter coins when she came back; I took it all in.
We are waited on by kids; the kids make the pizza and then run it out to us; some of them are trying really hard, some of them get mad because they can’t find the right table. Why do they care so much? Just put the pizza down wherever. The adults are just kids; the adults are jacked up on smuggled rum or coke or rum and coke so who cares? Their kids are off getting their Scooby Snacks, over in flashing-ticket-land. They are away and so the adults are happy: kids are sometimes best away, since most adults just want to do their own thing, be it sticking things into things or, perhaps, reading. Some read from the Bible, getting their high envisioning ancient, Heston-like men in a Cecil B. DeMille set waving fake wooden rods at the sky; a large black father with gray suspenders reads Steven King; he mumbles the words as he reads them.
We drink our rum and read each other.
Time passes and the kids come back with tickets. They cash hundreds of them in for two pieces of plastic shit. My daughter gets a plastic spider and a fake foam gun. We shove more money into another machine and get them popsicles.
Good times; everyone’s happy. The car is full of sated humans as we round McWorld’s manicured turns perhaps a bit too fast. The wheels screech causing the brakes to squeal. Pizza sits in everyone’s stomachs. We drive the circuit and take in everyone’s cheesy holiday decorations. The kids believe: not us. They admire: We laugh. We are all the same, but the adults have the age advantage. Us adults have the wisdom to know what can’t be, what won’t be.
The night ends with a curtain falling over my daughter holding a found token. She looks up to me and smiles as I pull out a cap from an empty vial.
A while ago, I linked to Harvard and called it something like the happy land of the embellishing overachievers or some such malarkey.
I linked to it, like this and today I’m going to link here, because these fuckers have a corner on the overachiever/embellisher market.
Well it appears they checked their stats and then didn’t do a good job at anonymous surfing.
This is hilarious if you can follow it (boldface is me):
dhcp-187-63.harvard.edu (Harvard University)
Massachusetts, Boston, United States, 0 returning visits Date Time WebPage
22nd November 2006 10:28:13 AM www.duncanlarkin.com/ www.goldstats.net/find/goplaces.cgi?cfg=config&url=www.duncanlarkin.com
(Hmm… Who’s this Duncan Larkin guy? What did he link to us using!?)
22nd November 2006 10:56:17 AM www.the-cloak.com/Cloaked/ cfg=32/http://duncanlarkin.com/
No referring link
(Ok. Let’s read up on him; we will try and use an ‘anonymous’ web surfing site, because we are smart people.)
22nd November 2006 10:59:41 AM www.the-cloak.com/Cloaked/ cfg=32/http%3A//www.duncanlarkin.com/roads/
www.the-cloak.com/Cloaked/ cfg=32/http://duncanlarkin.com/
