Every high school kid who ever listens to Led Zeppelin has written this phrase on a book cover at least once. It’s a fact.
Every day when I log into my computer at work, my computer plays the Beavis and Butthead theme, and it still makes me laugh my ass off. That’s a fact, too.
Also a fact: It takes fewer muscles to smile than it does to clench up your butt and go “eeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeehhhhhhhh!”
It’ll never stop sounding weird, when I see or hear or read somebody say “Happy Memorial Day!” It’s a bit like saying “Happy Yom Kippur,” isn’t it? I mean, I know that to most Americans, it’s just a barbecue day, and I’m not saying I did anything special in honor of the fallen or anything, unless you consider running scandisk and defrag on the spare computer in the laundry room and bagging up a mess of old magazines for the bin a solemn ritual. It just seems that, while it is true that most Americans use Memorial Day as a day to put meat to fire, well, it just seems like the least we can do is pretend it means something.
You know. Like Christmas.
I for one had a fine Memorial Day weekend. Dad and Little Brother were here. They wore me out. First they dragged me to the new Air and Space deal at Dulles. Then there was dinner at Ruffino’s Pasghetti House, the charm of which unfortunately is starting to wear thin. The food was not the fine spastic comfort food it was, and the fellow who served us just didn’t seem that interested. He was efficient and all, but there was no passion in his work, as if all the magic had just been sucked out of it, as if you could hear him under his breath complain that he had been led to believe this path would be more glamorous somehow. Anyway. The next day, we visited the Spy Museum, which is fun to do but generally requires more time than the 35 minutes a boundless 10-year-old is willing to offer it. Back across the river, and then we indeed put meat to flame, yummy pork tenderloin with yams and corn. My lunch today will consist of those leftovers.
As I noted, yesterday was spent sprucing up a couple of CPUs and doing a bit of redding. It was too hot to do anything outside.
One learns things from listening to the Howard Stern Show. For instance.
The fact of the matter is that Monty Python movies suck. In fact, it is a truth that only about 12 percent of the things Monty Python ever did were actually very funny, and that approximately 38 percent of what they did was actually just downright annoying, and that if someone insists to you that everything Monty Python ever did was funny, you should hand him two Zyprexa and have him call you in the morning.
See, Jessica and I are excellent exchangers of pop culture. She has excellent taste in music and turns me on to some good things. I’m a bit older than she and so I feel obligated to share my obvious and overflowing wisdom with her. So when she said she’d wanted to watch some Monty Python films, I was more than happy to line up the NQ. We’ve watched “The Meaning of Life†and “Life of Brian.†Oy.
I was watching a “Flying Circus†last night, the one with the Upper Class Twits thing. It was all right, I guess, nothing funnier than the fellow what ran himself over with his own car. It’s just not the brilliant genius funny to me that I think it’s cracked up to be. “Yeah, but you listen to Howard Stern, and you think the funniest movie of all time is ‘Jackass: The Movie.’ What do you know?â€
I know “Pearls Before Swine†is friggin’ hillarious. Did you see it today? Damn.
It goes: “You got to bring ass to get ass.”
There’s not a white boy like me alive who can say this without sounding like a genuine African-American. (Almost.) It is beautiful.
Heard on today’s Randi Rhodes Show.
I deliberately left the television OFF last night to save the best television of the week for later, so as not to kick off my first week back post-convention on a lip-doodling, junkie-like vegetation at the hands of the cathode nipple. That’s what Tivo is for. However, thanks to the kind folks at the Stern Fan Network and HuffPost, I already have a pretty good idea what’s going on at The West Wing. The Interweb is EVIL. Evil, I tells you.
I am back in the office today. My plant was dried up because I fergot to aks anyone to tend for her. But she got an extra dose of water and will soon get some plant food. I have already filled the recycle bin nearly to the brim with crap I didn’t have a chance to git rid of because I was too bizy with convention crap. I have begun on one or three top-urgent projects. I have posted a “see you next year” graphic at the convention website and am formulating a new Web strategy for next year’s convention and an off-the-wall marketing campaign involving the New Orleans Zephyrs.
I was definitely feeling the crush about a month out, definitely feeling it hard, as I’m sure a lot of us wuz. But it’s over, and it was a hell of a fuk of a good convention. That is awesome. And it makes you get back to your office full of new ideas and ambitions and excitement and junk. And that lasts about three weeks, tops. But I like convention because of this buzz. It’s pretty cool.
Just stop telling me what happens on The West Wing, and don’t give me ANYTHING on The Sopranos or Grey’s Anatomy, riiiiiight? And, also, comment spammers, ya’ll can give up now. These comments is moderated, riiiight? Riiiiiight?
The desert air isn’t good for people, I think. It really dries a person out. I drink the water and apply the lotion and Chap Stick, but man, one can’t help but feel like a sandpaper-face out here.
It is a good convention, the best, actually, by our most specific measurement of success—attendance is at 4,150-some and counting. I am tired already. It is fun to run the raffle machine, but it is exhausting.
I think I flew in with Paula Poundstone, D.C. to L.A. She was nodding off at the gate and just about didn’t wake up in time, and I told her I was about to nudge her awake. If she wasn’t Paula Poundstone, she was her twin sister.
I look forward to getting home where there is actual moisture in the air and to a point where I am no longer in convention season and can be a reasonable human being again.
Time to go do some more conventioneering.
I am not a prolific writer except on these pages which barely matter. I know this. I should be as prolific a writer as can be because it is what I was supposed to do. I know this, too. I also know that writing should not be done as means to an end, and that the reason it is so difficult is because it is work. It is work, work to spin through every ounce of sense memory and bit of knowledge and experience you have and to, as Gene Fowler said, to “stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
Last night, I got 2.5 good pages out. Took me about an hour. Maybe less. That isn’t easy. But it’s good. It’s a start.
I’ve probably walked by the sign four thousand times. It faces out from the inside of a glass door to a nondescript office, across the way from Whole Foods in Clarendon. It is white letters on red posterboard, perhaps a foot and a half inches high. And I have walked by this sign perhaps four thousand times, and only tonight did this sign’s absurdity pinch my consciousness.
The sign reads: “Emergency Entrance Only.”
I passed the sign, having actually read it this time instead of just looking at it, and then I stopped and went back to it, and immediately began to attempt imagining the urgent emergency that would require my immediate ENTRY to a building.
So, if you saw me standing in front of that glass-paned door screaming “BIRDS! BIRDS! AUGH! IT’S HORRIBLE! AUGH! BIRDS ARE ATTACKING ME! HELP! AUGH! THEY’RE EATING MY EYES! MY EYES! COME ON, MISTER, YOU’VE GOTTA LET ME IN! THERE’S A SIGN! THERE’S A SIGN!”, I apologize.
It just couldn’t be helped.
I opted several years ago to make it a policy never to declare myself to be a “vegetarian,†even if I am at the time practicing non-meat-eating, which I have from time to time. See, when you declare yourself a vegetarian, you have to stay away from eating meat and such, which is a problem, because meat tastes good.
However, I’ve got a renewed interest in the practice of eating lower on the food chain after reading about the slaughter of tens of thousands of chickens in India due to a fear of the “bird flu.†That’s just disgusting. Those birds wouldn’t even be farmed if folks didn’t want to eat them. Now that the farmers have arranged for their existence, they have to kill all of them. That’s a sick situation.
Bean and rice burritos are delicious.