The Pigskin Pathos

Phases

2011-08-18T20:22:00.003-04:00

First: Wrote a post for TWER comparing two books concerning God and football. Longish but worth a read if you're into that whole God thing.

Second: Chris and I started this blog to write about football in a silly, non-sensical, satirical roundabout way. But time and college kept marching, and I got more interested in writing beyond college football and sports, and Chris realized this writing bullshit wasn't necessarily for him, and so here we are now. This place has gotten weird, and that's all on me.

Some of you may enjoy that. Blog numbers tell me very few of you enjoy that. Which is okay. A little rebranding and sloughing of the past is needed though. I find most everything here both embarrassing and necessary. To get to here, you must go there, etc.

So: So ends The Pigskin Pathos. Now now, don't worry. There are plenty of other vaguely angry early-20 somethings going through their intellectual awakening. They can no doubt tell you all about girls (oh my!) and games and books and being a contrarian and pretending like you don't care what other people think of you. There's got to be dozens and dozens of unread blogs out there.

So ends an era. A very tiny era, an era no one really knew existed, but yet an era all the same.

Never fear though, faithful few. I will return elsewhere. Probably anonymously, because this whole "people know who's writing this" thing is the pits.

If you're interested, feel free to send an email. After a thorough (drug tests, pregnancy screenings, bribes) examination I will determine if you can join whatever it is I'm doing next. The email to your right will remain active for awhile yet.

Till we meet again.

May this dominate the last thought you have concerning The Pigskin Pathos

Granted

2011-07-23T15:59:00.003-04:00

I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life in the twentieth century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it's fashionable, into the dark abyss. If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you've got two main choices as an artist: You can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, “There are the skulls; that's your baby, Mrs. Miller.” Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in.

. . .

The premise of moral art is that life is better than death; art hunts for avenues to life. The book succeeds if we're powerfully persuaded that the focal characters, in their fight for life, have won honestly or, if they lose, are tragic in their loss, not just tiresome or pitiful.
-- John Gardner

The Couple That Prays Together Stays Together or Gas Station Wedding Dress Woman or Shit, Waffles

2011-07-22T17:57:00.002-04:00

No set title and no set ending, but here's something. Not sure if I like the style, still trying to find my "voice" I suppose. I just finished reading The Art of Fiction by John Gardner on recommendation from the older, phlegmy-throated woman who manages Faulkner House Books, which was William Faulkner's 1925 New Orleans apartment located on Pirate's Alley; the bookshop is his old room; it's tiny and he shared a bathroom with an upstairs neighbor, so that's neat.

In The Art of Fiction, Gardner spends a lot of time stumping for the "fictional dream" and "serious literature taken seriously." Fine and good and dandy, these are. But he hates "metafiction," or fiction that acknowledges itself as fiction in whatever form. I enjoy post-modernism and the games and loops involved therein. Having read his book, I think Gardner believes literature stopped with Henry James. (Not a fair critique, but you likely haven't read the book [nor should you], so fuck it.)

Anyway, here's this. More parts probably.

+++

The woman outside the gas station was wearing a white dress. The woman sitting on a gas station bench beside a raised black truck and directly underneath an advertisement for Two Gallons of Milk for $4 was wearing a wedding dress.

“Well,” he said to himself.

“What’s that?” his girlfriend asked.

“Nothing.” He took a last glance at the woman in the wedding dress in his rearview, her head back, the veil a thin cushion.

His girlfriend sat picking at the last remnants of bright pink finger polish on her right middle finger. She held out her hand and, slanting her head, squinted. Satisfied, she closed an air vent, readjusted herself so as to be sitting on her right leg, looked out the window, and sighed.

“I hate my fingers sometimes. They seem so long, unnatural long, like spider fingers,” she said, staring out the window still. “You think we’ll make it?” He looked over and saw her face in profile. Her hair was unkempt, its normal curly orderliness set free. “I blame mother,” she’d said this morning. “She cursed me with these split ends.” He couldn’t tell in the dark, of course. Only when the truck passed a streetlight or gas station or some other light source could he see the fuzziness. She’s so solid in the dark, he thought. One could go for hours and never see the fuzziness.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

“Well you just don’t talk much and it’s hard for me to tell is all. Cosmo was saying the other day that a strong couple is a communicating couple.” She stared at an old woman in a wheelchair with a cigarette in her mouth and a sack of groceries balanced on her lap motoring in front of a grocery store. The wheelchair woman weaved while attempting to light the cigarette. “It also told me I should give you more sudden blowjobs. I think that means dropping your drawers when you’re watching football or drinking beer or scratching yourself and staring at the sunset or some shit.”

His girlfriend had spent four of her last five lunch breaks at the public library. There’d she sit beside Jim Collins, who signed his checks “Jesus Christ Collins,” and Bill Braxton, who would make his daily limp to the library to participate in a freeware roleplaying game in which he was a busty brunette maiden know for “her” willingness to mimic certain sexual practices (hint: he repeatedly “bowed”) for a modest sum of in-game gold, and Tonya Sorros, who would, every Tuesday at noon, perform an illicit webcam show in the furthest computer terminal from the main desk on the second floor, there his girlfriend would sit in a depressed leather chair and search the internet for ways to save their relationship.

Her latest Google searches: cosmo, cosmo relationship advice, fall fashion trends, beetle lifecycle, sarah evans wedding, ingrown toenail cure

“You know I’m just not much of a talker, honey. I’m more of a man of action, a man of the field and the hammer. Me no talk good.” He smiled at that last bit. He liked to think speaking improperly on purpose belied a certain intelligence. He knew he wasn’t Ken Jennings or Wernher von Braun or a genius of any sort; he knew he was blessed with a certain abject averageness, a yoke of mediocrity and lowered ambition that would keep his name out of the history books, out of any books, and keep him toiling for years. This he knew. But he could at least have fun with himself. And he thought that made him plenty smart enough.

His latest Google searches: 1972 mets, warner van braun, college coeds, college coeds big natural tits, appomattox

“I don’t know nothing of the sort. I need you to try is all. Try at least. Try to talk to me. Cosmo says there’s no excuse not to at least try to communicate.”

“All right, honey. I’ll try,” he said as he rubbed her shoulder, gripping her left trapezius with what he thought to be the right amount of firmness. “But right now you get some rest. We got a long road to hoe.”

She was silent for a minute, two minutes, somewhere in there. He didn’t see any reason to clock it. “Sometimes I think you’re of no account and I’m of no account and we ain’t worth a sack of shit together. . . . Sometimes that’s just what I think.”

The headlights let him read the green road sign: Atlanta 45 miles.

Magazines of Everlasting New Orleans Knowledge

2011-07-20T19:26:00.003-04:00

The Auburn Football Preview Kickoff from Maple Street Press is now available at large chain bookstores throughout the Southeast. Go buy a copy, or do what I would do and skim interesting seeming articles in the back of a giant bookstore, making sure to take cellphone pictures of any particularly interesting passages or insights.

+++

What knowledge to seek: knowledge everlasting — Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Roman philosophers, early French existentialist, and the like. Or contemporary knowledge — contemporary novels, internet theorists, flash fiction, experimental fiction, and the like. Contemporary knowledge theoretically incorporates that which came before (influence is inescapable). But that which lasts, the "everlasting," is everlasting because it speaks to some deeper truth. Right?

Think the answer is a mix and mingling. Even if time is finite. To understand now, you must understand then? To understand then, you must understand now? The common thread of human consciousness?

All that to say: Gonna start reading more modern philosophy and books, articles, interesting (if not important in the grand scheme) thinkers dealing with technology and the future. That is to say: Beyond dabbling in science fiction.

+++

Made it to New Orleans. Feeling alive. Feeling the cursory twinge of mixed anxiety and excitement one doesn't get in college or tourist towns. Met some interesting people. Seen some interesting places. Not gonna talk about too much because I'm trying to protect certain parts of my privacy, parts I'm trying to appropriate some "tact" and "couth" about. And if this bothers one of you, there's a good chance you're a miniature rotund blabby-mouthed faggot.

Lizt

2011-07-13T00:35:00.003-04:00

1. New Orleans. I wrote this about it. It's about Hurricane Katrina mostly. No, I don't think it's that depressing. Jokes even! David Simon and rehabilitated child prostitutes disguised as feral cats.

2. I hear you haven't really listened to a song until you've heard it both high and sober. I am but the messenger.

3. New Orleans soon. No blogging. No pithy statements and out-of-context quotations. Survive. Yeah. You be fine.

4. Alabama hot. Make shirt stick to back. Make sweat streams. Make people do craaaaaazy things.

4. Again.

5. Going to be reading and writing in New Orleans I hope.

5. The writing being more important. Would like to have something to show. Am going to finish something longer than 3,000 words.

5. Will share if shame is not big like mountain.

6. Bananas are 4/5s of my food pyramid. For this week.

6. The other 1/5 is Wal-Mart wine. For this week.

7. We will meet again. For the first time. Of that I am convinced. You must trust.

8. Parking decks are post-post-post-modern.

8. That's a lot of posts.

9. Sometimes tree houses seem like the only answer.

10. I would like to write poetry but I'm scared people will find it bland and self-involved.

10. Most poetry is bland and self-involved.

10. Fuck most people and their poetry.

11. There was a writer named Olaf Stapledon. He wrote a novel in which humans evolved into winged creatures. He called these winged (wing-ed, the pronunciation) mens the "sixth men."

11. Olaf Stapledon, who was a "philosopher, novelist, educator, and social activist" according to Captain Dipshits, wrote that humans would disappear two billion years from yesterady.

11. Plan accordingly.

12. The library closes in 15 minutes.

12. I kinda want to hide from the closers and stay the night.

12. I won't.

12. But I kinda want to.

13. Don't put a banana peel on your penis.

13. It is slimy. Not good slimy. Bad slimy.

13. So I hear.

14. Yes. The library, it closes.

15. Hope I don't get stabbed in New Orleans.

15. Don't think I will.

15. Still.

16. Till next time.

16. Viewers. That's what I was implying. Till next time, viewers.

16. Close your eyes and pretend this is televisions.

Beyond the Sham

2011-07-08T19:48:00.001-04:00

Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth. The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. We love with our desires — although everything has been done to try and apply a canon even to love.

The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonnades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working, and wanted to express themselves. It's not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cézanne would have never interested me one bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our interest is Cézanne's anxiety — that's Cézanne's lesson; the torments of Van Gogh — that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham.
-- Picasso

Picture Unrelated

2011-07-07T23:34:00.003-04:00

Moving to New Orleans for a bit. A month is the plan now. Might return if I take a liking/find some sort of labor. Still want to travel. Still want to do everything and live everywhere. Trying to temper.

Post at TWER, yet another where people no doubt think, "WTF, why is this guy writing these things here," concerning books I've read in preparation for the move.

Myths Miffed

2011-07-04T01:34:00.002-04:00

How to live and how to make art in a world without fairy tales - without, that is, the animating myths that have kept us going for so long - that is the question.
-- Gabriel Josipovici

Whatever you write it's always a catastrophe. That's the depressing thing about the fate of a writer . . . All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined . . . It's especially hard in the German language, because that language is wooden, clumsy, disgusting. A terrible language that kills anything light and wonderful. The only thing one can do is sublimate that language with a rhythm to give it musicality.
-- Thomas Bernhard

Tree of Life

2011-07-02T15:41:00.003-04:00

Saw this the other day. Huge scope: beginning of history to now-ish. If you like Malick, or if you like brooding pictures that ask The Big Questions (which is to say if you like Terrance Malick), it's worth watching. The man uses sunlight better than any other director I've seen.

Don't Panic

2011-07-01T23:39:00.004-04:00

"If a man cannot forget, he'll never amount to much."
-- Walker Percy

"So how are you adjusting to post-grad life — your increasing inability to write meaningful long-form narratives, the passive aggressive all-encompassing love of your parents which often manifests in talks about God and His all-encompassing love, general ennui, existential sneak attacks concerning your consciousness and humanity, growing self-doubt, and a sense that no one really knows you and probably never will?"

"Well I got blackout drunk last night and punched my best friend in the side of the head. I was found by my father around 4 a.m. in the garage crying and repeating 'I forgot the code. I forgot the code.'

So, yeah, everything's in its proper place. Plans are being followed. Swimmingly. Just swimming along swimmingly."

"Have you no shame?"

"I have all kinds of shame. I'm a regular duffel bag of shame. Think of this as a fictional reimagining.

'All persons and events in the following share no relation to any one person or happening in real life. This shit's all blended and mixed and you can't trust any of these words. Proceed with caution.'

That kind of thing."

"So you're insane."

"Mostly just immature. And confused. And scared sure. Life right now feels like it has no edges. It's just one big long blur. But I'm afraid if I get to the edge I'll fall into some kind of Vietnamese torture hole full of rotting corpses and urine-covered bamboo spikes.

I think I'm afraid of being successful. But it could also be failure. Or it could also be a fear of failing to meet the expectations of others and myself, specifically myself. Such a strange thing being a person."

"You're obviously not right."

"Yeah, this is just a phase. 'Just a phase.' Callous right? There's a hint of pity in there too. 'Oh, poor boy. You'll be real and full and everything ever one day.' Pity strikes me as an emotion that hurts the pitier more than the pitied. A lot of pity is misplaced superiority.

So hard to say these things in day-to-day life. You know? You can't just pop off like that to someone you see all the time. A stranger maybe. Some guy on the bus reading philosophy or an English professor or a neon angel."

"Have you ever considered electroconvulsive therapy?"

"Mostly I just want to create something that someone somewhere finds meaningful. Something that has weight. You know? I just want to leave something or a few somethings that I can be proud of, that I can think, 'Hey, all right. I did something hard. Not because I had too. Not because someone made me. But because I wanted to. Because maybe even I needed to.'

It doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

Perhaps that's a child or children. We're all looking for some kind of immortality right? For some it's lavish choreographed funeral parades. For some it's a building or a beloved car or having slept with a couple hundred women.

Consumerism plays off our fear of death. Duh. Gonna have to blame the burden of consciousness."

"Psychoanalysis perhaps?"

"I'm always struck (an odd verb, struck, the thought struck me, an appropriate level of violence for this . . . whatever this is) by how other people move through the world. And when I watch I feel like I know something they don't. Some secret. My decoder ring is strong.

But most of the time I realize that's shit, total shit. I don't know more than they do. I'm 20. They're not. They're old and wizened. Leathery, dexterous. All their experience points went into Awareness. Some even seem like they've been power-leveling for a couple decades.

But most don't. You have to be careful here. You can't condemn an entire portion of the population just because you don't believe them to be as smart as you perceive yourself to be. Empathy needed. But not too much empathy. Because then walking around Wal-Mart becomes fucking Auschwitz.

Do you see what I'm saying? I'm saying we've got to bring the troops home."

"Do you think I'll be liable if you harm yourself or others in any way?"

"I'm too hard on my closest friends. I hold them to unreal standards, my own standards that I daily fail to meet. It's not fair. I hate it. They don't deserve that shit. People will fail you. Always. Just by being human. But you have to give them the same breaks you give yourself.

I have to give myself more breaks. I bloody myself daily. I'm like that albino serial killer in The Da Vinci Code. Always whipping my brain. Scaring children. Helping perpetuate the dumbing-down of moviegoers the world over.

It's all gooky and gross."

"Now you're just being racist."

"The only ethos you need to live a happy life can be found by listening to and believing Mainstream Country. Follow Kenny Chesney. For he is The One.

Did you know Big Boi is only 5'6"? I always thought he was much taller.

Can I smoke in here?"

"No. You cannot."

"All right thanks. I like you. You're all right. I think I'll be back here soon. Maybe we can play some chess or something next time. You know? How about that? Chess?"

"Yes . . . next time maybe. I said you couldn't smoke."

"I'll leave you with this Johann. Jo-hann. Bro-hann. I hope you don't mind. It's something I do. Keeps the mood light. Limber, nimble, thimble. Hahaha. Yes.

You think I'm insane? Yes? Maybe you say that to be comical. The juxtaposition was pretty comical. Wasn't it? Don't shake your head. I saw that smiling glint in your soulless eyes.

But, but maybe there's not much difference between insanely sane and insane. Maybe it's the width of this here cigarette in my right hand. I know, I know no smoking. Couple more puffs.

I love you Johann. I do. With all my shriveled lion heart. You're the best around and no one's ever gonna keep you down.

I'm not a very articulate man Johann. My tongue is thick. My speech gets jarbled easily. So thanks for sticking with me. Means the room to me.

Maybe the only difference between me and you — why you're on that side of the table and I'm on this side — is because I was born in the Year of the Goat. That's my power animal: the goat. I'm sure you can connect the dots from there."

Don't read too much into this

2011-06-24T00:27:00.002-04:00

He would be surprised if he were to feel well now. Read a newspaper? How would that be? Conduct an idiotic political or generally useful debate with some respected half-wit or other? Yes? He is not unhappy. Secretly he considers happy alone the man who is inconsolable: naturally and powerfully inconsolable. With him the position is one small faint shade worse. He is too sensitive to be happy, too haunted by all his irresolute, cautious, mistrusted feelings. He would like to scream aloud, to weep. God in heaven, what is wrong with me, and he rushes down the darkening hill. Night soothes him. Back in his room he sits down, determined to work till frenzy comes, at his writing table. The light of the lamp eliminates his image of his whereabouts, and clears his brain, and he writes now.
-- Robert Walser

Walser wrote in German, so his words are filtered through a translator. I never thought much of translation before. I guess I knew not every writer wrote in English, but I never considered the process of translation itself until recently, more recently than I'd like to admit. Not all translations are created equal. Something to consider.

Repost for General Betterment

2011-06-24T00:22:00.003-04:00

Or at least repost for continued thinking. Fight the structure! (Unless you need the structure. In that case stay away from books, art, and intelligent people. More on this at some point. Been causing me imaginary stress lately.)

Thanks to French for the original showing and the the recent reminder.

Extras

2011-06-20T15:36:00.006-04:00

New post over at TWER. Kinda meandering, kinda myopic, but also kinda interesting. The idea was to have three separate sections of tenuous relation interspersed with the "what I want to be when I grow up" section and the partly tongue-and-cheek "advice to myself" section. Can't say how well it worked.

The deleted scenes (go easy, they were deleted for a reason):

I was thinking the other day. Thinking real hard. Thinking about my last five years in Auburn. And I thought a thought often thought by people of a medium to old age who’ve just wrapped a chapter of their life. I thought: Hey Ben, sweet, innocent, nubile Ben, if you could go back in time and tell yourself some things, what things would you tell yourself? And then I thought: Wait, that sounds like a solipsistic student column likely found in a college newspaper near the end of semester. You’re better than that Ben. And then I remembered: Wait, you’re the guy who wrote an editorial labeling Breast Cancer Awareness Month a scam perpetrated by a giant drug company based off information you found on Wikipedia at 3 a.m. You didn’t even listen during the editorial board meetings. You just sat there and dreamed about taking naps. How dare you judge. You don’t even recycle because you find the whole process tedious and of minimal impact. You’ve technically never voted in any local, state, or national election. And you frequently turn right on red at the corner of Gay and Glenn, totally ignoring the sign that reads “No right turn on red.” You’re a man of disrepute, Ben Bartley.

Obviously any advice I would have for my former self, and therefore you, the current college student, would be of dubious merit. (Though I get the sense dedicated TWER readers are of the older variety. Come one, come all. A few faithful readers under the age of 40, yes?) But here it is all the same. Maybe you can find the general in my specifics.

Dear Pre-College Ben,

I know you feel your Tennessee public high school education in no way prepared you for the challenge of college. After all, you spent the majority of your four year Pigeon Forge High career playing baseball, mastering the intricacies of Halo 2 (you did pwn mountains of noobs), and copying Trigonometry homework from the kid who went to Vanderbilt on scholarship. The only class I distinctly remember is Bible History, and that’s only because you (I? We?) played Mario Kart on the Nintendo DS with your friend in the adjacent room who was supposedly studying Spanish. PFHS was not a bastion of higher education. Your primary paper in junior English was a poorly-constructed retelling of the time you and numerous teammates rolled the sophomore English teacher’s house.

Best I can remember, you think college will suddenly instill the proper study technique and strategy you failed to learn in high school. It won’t. You will spend four semesters baffled by various study groups. Your primary goal in these study groups will be to meet women. You will fail. Sometime during your sophomore year you will meet Billy. Billy looks to be anywhere between 25 and 45. He has the nose of a Who, a thick Southern drawl, and pre-aged tan, leathery skin. He will tell you he is going to be a petroleum engineer because that’s where the money’s at. Your sole connection will be an interest in collecting and abusing previous tests for various COSAM classes. Your reliance on old tests and your refusal to study will lead to you dropping Chemistry 2 one semester and failing it the next.

Grades Don’t Matter (Unless They Do)

I thought of a handy metaphor to explain the shared social experience of grades in college, but I know it would lead to all sorts of value judgments and character considerations, and I like being liked, generally, so I’ll just type this:

It’s like every student has a monster in the closet. And every day for years the monster must be fed. But the monster is a picky eater, and its eating habits change every couple months. A lot of people are proud of their monster. That’s all they talk about all day. They talk about how often they feed it and what kind of food it likes and what time of day it likes to be fed and how hard it is to be a caretaker for this big dumb monster in their closet. Then they go out and drink to excess to forget the shape and size of that stupid closet monster.

Some people forget or refuse to feed their monsters, either because of laziness, inability, or fear. The monster is, after all, big and scary. But a large vocal majority read their monster feeding handbooks and check their daily monster updates and practice their monster feeding technique, all in the hopes that one day their monster will be big and strong. Or at least bigger and stronger and more impressive than their friends’ and peers’ monsters.

But one day the astute (or the foolish, or the naïve, all depending on your viewpoint) monster caretaker realizes the monster in the closet is just that — a monster in the closet. And when they drag the monster into the light it reveals itself to be puny and shivering. They think, This is the scary monster that’s been in my closet? All my years of feeding and watering and this is what it looks like in the light?

Free from the closet monster their priorities shift. All the energy that went into feeding the monster is now used for personal enjoyment and longer-reaching projects. Before long they overhear a conversation on campus and they think, You’re still talking about that monster in your closet?

Library is Magic

You’re going to be sitting on the first floor of Ralph Brown Draughon library your sophomore year. (You pronounce and spell it Ralph Brown Draughorn.) You’re studying chemistry or tapping at an English paper; I can’t remember. At some point, you’re going to stop and climb the central stairs to the third floor. You’re going to look at all the books. You’re gonna inhale long and deep, as if the knowledge contained in three million volumes could be snorted. And then you’re gonna think, I want to know everything here. Around this time you stop listening to the bald Genetics professor talk about the variations of field mice living in sand dunes along the coastline of Alabama.

The attitude of the student body at large to the library seems to mirror that of society. “I’m a senior and I don’t even know how to check out a book,” a student from your class during a mandatory library visit will say in a way to convey his disbelief that anyone would actually use the library for checking out books. A girl from a different class will see you using the self-checkout on the second floor. “You’re going to read those? What a nerd.” You will consider throwing the heavier book in the direction of her face. A year later you will realize she was trying to engage you in playful banter, also known as flirting.

Your fourth year, right in the midst of your disaffected youth, I don’t need your stinking grades phase, you’re going to wish you had pocketed the out of state tuition your parents paid and spent three or four hours reading in the library daily. You could have sat in on a calligraphy class and went all Slackers on the whole process.

The Shit Between Us

2011-06-19T23:14:00.003-04:00

Why don’t you Google yourself. Type in your name. Your full name. First Middle Last. See what that crafty bastard pops out. Sure it’ll tell you all sorts of shit you didn’t know. Like how someone with your name, your exact name, First Middle Last, owns and operates a “transnational conglomerate focused on the spreading of interweb commerce throughout Northern Illinois.” Or like how someone with your name owns the record for most tuna melts eaten in one hour, which bluerokr92 finds “Epic!” but also “Totally gross!” Or like how someone with your name kept a two-and-a-half-year livejournal account dedicated to the life and times of Jared Leto

That last one might have been you actually. You can’t remember. Maybe you did all those things. You visited Illinois once. You went through a tuna melt phase. You did love 30 Seconds to Mars in 8th grade.

Don’t strain yourself. And make sure to close your browser and clear your search history. Don’t want anyone thinking you’re self-absorbed. That wouldn’t do.

+++

“I knew a guy who lived in a rest-area bathroom for two years. He washed himself in the fourth sink and slept in the third stall. He was the janitor. He told the guy who’d come check every four months he lived in an abandoned RV parked at the scenic view, which wasn’t too scenic anymore. All you could see now was the cracked concrete of an abandoned Pilot and what was left of three acres of state-protected marshland. There wasn’t an RV. The checker never checked.

The guy, he never told me his name, would always cover his stall with yellow caution tape during the day to ensure no one entered. All day, every day he’d sit in the shade of this giant oak, biggest tree I’d ever seen, and play harmonica. Thing was, he wasn’t even a good harmonica player. Sounded like a beached whale. Made some of the weirdest sounds I’d ever heard. Visitors wouldn’t mingle long at that stop. Never once saw a picnic.

Had to take a piss one day while cutting grass. Walking into the bathroom, I saw two boots sticking out of the third stall like the Wicked Witch of the West, the tread worn to tan rubber on the insides of each. Usually I wouldn’t open the door, but I did this day.

There was the bathroom guy leaning against the wall, toilet full of urine and Mountain Dew cans. ‘Hey guy. Wake up.’ Nothing. I kicked his leg. Even threw some of my water on his face. Yeah, I pissed on his face. That wasn't too nice. I regret that. Didn't move a wit though. Here’s the thing: I’d always thought people talking bout how we look peaceful in death were full of shit, but there he was, Bathroom Guy, propped up with a smirk on his face like he was King of the Rest Area. His hair greasy and gray and his face lined and leathered, but he was smiling. Smelling of shit and smiling.”

“He was dead?”

“Yeah. But here’s the most interesting part: he’d covered the walls in writing. On the left wall:

I AM I AM IAM IAM I AM I AM IAM IMA MIA IAM IA M I AM I MA IAM I AM I AM nancy reagan sucked my cock and liked it I AM I AM I AM [drawing of intercourse involving three phalluses and what looked to be a scared child’s anus] I AMA IAM I AM IAM I AM I MA IAM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM IA M I AM I AM I AM MIA I AM IAM IA M I AM I AM

Covered the whole wall. Most written in black marker, some scratched into the wall with a knife or a screwdriver or something.

Here’s what the right wall had written on it:

I DONT KNOW I DONTKNOW I DONT KNOW ID ONT NOW I DONT KNOW IDONTKNOW IDONT KNOW I DONT KNOW I DONT KNOW I DONT KNOW I DONT KNOW call 773-231-9987 4 jasmines treets IDONT KNOW ID ONT KNOW I DNOT KNOW DONKOW IDONT KNOW IDNOKNW I DONT KNOW I ONDKW I DONT KNOW IDONT KNOW INDONKNOW I DONTKNOW

All over that wall. The back wall was covered in shit stains and the crude drawing of a stick figure playing a harmonica under an oak tree drawn as to resemble broccoli. Almost covered the entire back wall. The figure was almost life-sized and smiling, a huge cartoon smile, the mouth six sizes too big, music notes floating toward a cloud-shaped shit smear.

Called 911 after the initial shock. Chubby paramedic with Oakley wraparounds and a shirt too small came to collect the body. ‘Gene pool just got a bit stronger. Humanity might make it another hundred years now that this sad sack of human waste has crossed over the line.’ Tried to nudge me with his elbow. He thought this would make us pals; this was him bonding. Just stared. Didn’t know what to say. Never been the sensitive type, but I respect the dead, especially the recently departed.

Bathroom Guy probably didn’t even have a funeral. That paramedic probably threw him into a furnace like he was roadkill. Quit working at the rest area a week later. Never been back. Haven’t even used that stretch of interstate since.”

“What does it mean?”

“Mean?”

“Yeah, what’s the moral to the story?”

“Moral? What are you, 12?"

"I couldn't tell if the story was real or if it was like an analogy or something. You know, some happening or whatever that represents a deeper truth. Or something like that."

"I guess the moral would be don’t be mentally retarded and don't fucking live in a rest area bathroom.”

Lucid

2011-06-19T22:57:00.001-04:00

After years of heroin and alcohol abuse no less. Some burn brighter.

South Carolina Shit-Kicking

2011-06-15T01:02:00.009-04:00

"Well fuck."
-- South Carolina Fan 4th Quarter Mantra

Dedicated to Austin: friend, lover, confidant, Eastern European porn aficionado, storm bringer and light rider, supporter of an inferior athletic institution

Auburn's record vs. South Carolina: 8-1-1

That's 85% of the time.

That's Auburn's best winning percentage against an SEC opponent.

Henry Ford got his first erection the day before South Carolina beat Auburn for the first and only time.

That year was 1933.

Auburn got tricked into losing 14-16.

Henry Ford also said all history is bunk.

Henry Ford hated the Jews.

And probably the gypsies.

In 1999, in Lou Holtz's first year, South Carolina went 0-11.

Vanderbilt beat SC 11-10 that year.

That's the funniest damn thing I read today.

In 2005, Auburn beat South Carolina 48-7.

Austin and I were playing baseball together that day.

His ex-girlfriend held up the score in interludes.

She stopped in the second half.

After getting beat 56-17 in the SEC Championship game by Auburn, South Carolina was invited to participate in the Chick-fil-A Bowl.

It was the "most lucrative" bowl appearance in the school's history.

Think about that for a second.

South Carolina has won 10 games once in its history.

That was in 1984.

South Carolina has a winning record against three SEC schools.

Vanderbilt.

Kentucky.

Mississippi State.

Steve Spurrier was reportedly 17 beers deep, pantless, and watching Top Gun again when he accepted the South Carolina job.

Right before passing out, he called Steve Spurrier Jr. and told him "We're about to go Maverick and Iceman on this mother fucker."

He treats his sons like he treats his quarterbacks.

He refers to Steve as Stever, e.g. "Stever, run 200 yards thataway and see if you can catch this golf ball. Gonna see if I can hit a hole through your hand."

The 2010 season was probably the second best in program history.

South Carolina lost five games.

South Carolina' s pregame intro and video is the dumbest shit I've ever seen.

A mascot in a cage?

Derivative.

This is the first image Google produces when "south carolina football" is searched.

No snide remarks to be made.

Austin informed me of Auburn's impending SEC Championship demise through graphic textual detail days before.

Then this happened:

And this:

Which ultimately led to this:

And then this:

Radio silence.

His one solace has been the Cam Newton Saga.

The recovery road is long and fraught with false paths.

South Carolina will turn the clock back to 1933 and beat Auburn again.

Surely.

Perhaps it will be the upcoming season.

But South Carolina will always be South Carolina.

(Austin, you made me do this.)

Preview of the preview

2011-06-03T16:57:00.003-04:00

Part of the magazine gig Jeremy's editing and I'm working on (there's an Auburn football preview magazine gig I'm working on) involved me giving answers to various questions concerning the upcoming season. Several of the other contributors answered before me. Thought I'd play it a little looser.

+++

Who starts at quarterback? Why?

No reason to doubt Trotter gets the call to begin the year. He is more experienced, paid more dues, trailed behind Gus longer, etc. Pretending I’m an oracle with a magical glass orb capable of seeing future events: Trotter gets injured against Mississippi State. Nothing major, bum shoulder, broken ankle, maybe a reinjuring of his knee. Moseley is installed late in the game, a game which Auburn loses, in part because of a bad interception stemming from a poor decision by Moseley. He starts against Clemson and is ineffectual in an Auburn loss. Frazier gets a serious look in the week leading up to Florida Atlantic. The two rotate in a breezy victory. Frazier, however, looks comfortable and capable. He starts against South Carolina and leads Auburn to a close win in Columbia. Frazier starts the remainder of the games. Auburn finishes 9-3 with a surprise victory against Alabama and enters the 2012 season ranked in the top five. Hurray!

Under what circumstances, if any, is Kiehl Frazier's red-shirt worth burning? Will he play this year?

Burn it. Burn it with great fury. Auburn recruiting reminds me of my days (weeks, months) playing various versions of NCAA Football on the Xbox. In virtual Auburn football, and in real life Auburn football it seems, there is no reason to redshirt a five-star player because there was always another five-star player waiting to be recruited next year. It’s like an assembly line. Gotta keep all the parts moving. (Perhaps too apt considering the nefariousness of college football recruiting. Not at Auburn, though. Never at Auburn . . .) So yeah, he plays. Hurray!

How important will this season be in defining Gene Chizik's career at Auburn?

Nein!

How much longer does Gus Malzahn stick around?

Gonna say two more seasons, three if Frazier or whomever and co. really get rolling by the end of 2013 and he’s feeling frisky. Forever if we put one of those industrial dog shock collars around his neck and make the boundaries the Lee County line.

Who's this season's most likely breakout player on offense?

Anthony Morgan. In 2009 and 2010 he was a corner, a return man, and a general special teamer. At some point he also injured his knee. But now that depth at running back is a real concern — Dyer, McCalebb, ?????? — he’s been moved to the backfield. Various coaches (working from memory, because Google ain’t no friend of mine) have spoken highly of his practice production. And he looked good in A-Day, which, of course, means nothing. Flimsy argument. But I tell you, he’s gonna do stuff, lots of stuff. (Also, eight is my favorite number.) Anthony Morgan — breakout carrier of the football.

Who's this season's most likely breakout player on defense?

Jonathan Rose. He will be but a true freshman, but he did enroll in the spring, and he will be joining the worst, most-in-need unit from last year, what with the secondary’s yearlong struggles coupled with the departure of Washington, Etheridge, and McNeil. He should see snaps, if not at the No. 2 corner spot then in the nickel package. Fan of the kid. Think he’ll do well this year. (It’s possible I’m not properly applying the term “breakout.”)

Where did you watch the national championship game? What did it feel like?

I was in the stadium. Can’t remember where exactly. They were nice seats though. You know when you really have to go to the bathroom. Like you’ve been holding it for 200, 300 miles. And after you release you walk back out into the gas station and there’s a cute girl browsing the candy aisle. You smile and she return smiles all pretty and friendly and stuff. You get into the passenger seat of your friend’s 1994 baboon-butt red Mustang, falling asleep as he drives into the setting sun, the internal temperature a direct result, warm but not hot. And then you suddenly lapse into a dream where everyone you’ve ever thought important tells you how smart and funny and special you are. Like that but with more pork nachos and confetti.

Will Cam make it in the pros?

Cam can do anything. Will the pros make it in Cam? Whatever that means.

Success for the 2011 Auburn Tigers is _____________.

Ruining the season of LSU or Alabama. Or at least that would be a lot of fun to watch, especially Alabama. To be honest, it’s hard for me to expect too much. This year’s all gravy, baby. I plan on enjoying the National Championship for the next 2-7 years. Hope Gene and co. don’t take the same approach. THE CHAMP IS HERE.

Failure for the 2011 Auburn Tigers is _____________.

A losing season and excessive quarterback upheaval. Also if Malzahn decided to leave at any point during or immediately following the season. Also finishing last in the SEC West.

One reason why Auburn could repeat as national champions is _____________.

Blake Burgess.

More Mailer

2011-06-03T02:17:00.002-04:00

This is a guy who used to scare the shit out of people. This is a guy who used to beat the shit out of people, or at least try. This is a guy who got into a big fight with Gore Vidal -- Gore Vidal! -- and who, when he threw a party back in 1960 to announce that he was running for mayor of New York, got drunk and stabbed his wife.

...

What it gets down to is that he needs the small risks to embolden him for the big risks of his books. That's how he's always looked at it. Writing is a fearful business: For him, going out and getting drunk and butting your head with some guy until you bled was nothing compared with getting up the next morning and writing. And he always got up the next morning and wrote. A lot of people said, Oh, he's wasting his gifts on that nonsense; he'd write a lot more if he just stayed at home and protected his talent. But that's not how he thought about it. You risk your talent in order to protect it, and so he fought and he fucked and he drank and he went through wives and he went through friends and he stormed the pulpits of the old order and he wrote the forty-five or so books that bear his name. And now he plays Texas hold 'em. And he still just finished a complicated novel that's nearly five hundred pages long. And if the novel seems diminished in some way, maybe that's because the culture is diminished in some way, maybe that's because Norman Mailer is playing Texas hold 'em instead of beating the shit out of Gore Vidal.
-- Profile on Mailer by Tom Junod

Ali bomaye!

2011-06-03T02:00:00.003-04:00

A longish essay on my continued battle with stale journalism, reactionary bullshit, the writing of Norman Mailer, and the fighting of Muhammad Ali. Click here if interested.

Black Ops

2011-05-29T00:42:00.002-04:00

A writer's job is to tell the truth.
— Ernest Hemingway

What a crock of horseshit. Since when has anybody wanted to hear the truth? People hate the truth. It's literally their least favorite thing in the entire universe. People will believe thousands of different lies in succession rather than confront a single scintilla of truth. People like love that crosses the years, funny workplaces, goofy dads who save Christmas, laser battles, whiny hags who marry charming Italians, and stylish detectives. But try telling somebody a single true thing about human experience and they'll turn on the TV and adjust their Netflix queue while you starve to death in the rain. People don't trot down to Barnes & Noble to pay $24.95 for the truth.
-- How I became a Famous Novelist, Steve Hely

Unrelated: My sister is in a sorority at the University of Tennessee. Today she told me the girls who chase after and have sex with black athletes are labeled "black ops." Stupendous.

Life, The Living

2011-05-26T21:53:00.004-04:00

I tried to write a paper on this using readings from Emile Durkheim. I struggle to figure out how I exactly feel about social networks. On some levels, I feel like they remove us from the collective group making everything depersonalized. We like people's statuses, get mentions from them, but we are not really on a personal level.

But at the same time, I really enjoy them. I get to hear lots of funny jokes from friends, share factual and entertaining links, create events so we can all be together for something that can all unify us or maybe even be for a good cause. I've even heard stories from where people have found some of their best friends or partners that started through communication in these networks.

And yes, I agree. I believe that we as society do demand for the attention. But with social networks or without them, It's probably going to happen at some level

I am glad these things didn't exist though when I was growing up. When hearing that my younger cousins who are 9 and 10 have facebook and gives me a weird feeling. Maybe I'm being that guy, but I feel generations that are growing up with a big access to high speed internet and whatnot will create a shift somehow in how we interact with each other.
-- Comment from Needy

I deleted my Facebook a while back. Reason being, the positives — interactions with friends, feeling of community, what was said above — were not enough to overcome my own personal negatives — hours spent in mindless browsing, sudden caring for people and events I don't want to know or care about, promotion of insular, cliqueish gossip culture. I do think social networks have positive benefits. I have a Twitter. I'm not sure how long I will have it, because I find myself becoming obsessive about checking, especially during moments, often seconds, of downtime at traffic lights. I know how I'm apt to waste time, how I avoid doing what I know I have to do to find fulfillment. And I'm trying to destroy those obstacles.

I feel as if my 20s are going to be about minimalizing my cares. So that I only care about a few things, very few, but I really, really care about those few. To cull so I can live obsessively how I see fit. To be able to say "I don't care" or "I don't know who that is" without smugness or superiority, simply with serenity.

To escape the bonds of stimulation anxiety.

My Brother

2011-05-26T21:50:00.001-04:00

I don't know exactly what motivates someone to dedicate their life to the written word. Other than only a handful of exceptions, it's certainly not money, although it's nice to get paid for something I've romanced in my mind ever since I was 15. I suppose the reasons are different for everyone. But for me, it comes down to this: I write because I want to say something beautiful and true. And I want it to connect with someone who reads it, even if we never meet, or the reader hasn't even bothered to see my name atop the story. And afterward, I want to sit at a table with a drink in my hand in a place like Elaine's and tell stories and jokes and argue about the mysteries of life with writers who long for the same thing.
-- Kevin Van Valkenburg

Necessity of Unbelief

2011-05-26T02:19:00.002-04:00

I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter said, "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief." It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames or reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith just because you feel you can’t believe.

. . .

If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn’t satisfactory read others. Don’t think that you have to abandon reason to be a Christian.

. . .

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian scepticsm. It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.

I don't know if this is the kind of answer that can help you, but any time you care to write me, I can try to do better.
-- Flannery O'Connor

And Nerds Shall Inherit the Earth

2011-05-24T23:11:00.003-04:00

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

. . .

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.
-- Paul Graham

Needy

2011-05-21T20:34:00.003-04:00

How often do you suffer from validation depression? OK, more like validation twinge. No new texts, no new @s, no new likes, no new comments on your wall. Worthless?

Maybe that's the real danger, if there is a "danger," of social networking and other forms of de-personalized instantaneous communication. You get to where you need it to validate your existence. To remind you you're alive.

Check and check and check. Someone tell me I'm important and special and not alone.

Doubtful that most people consider it this way. Perhaps it isn't. Perhaps it's just me.

You too?

Slackers

2011-05-20T15:00:00.004-04:00

It's kind of strange to suddenly now be treated like an overnight success when there's really no such thing in filmmaking. There's too much work, too many years of struggle and rejection. You can almost count on a decade gap between first thinking you want to make films and possibly making something that people might pay to see. Nobody wants to believe that, of course. I certainly didn't. That's not to say your formative film years can't be lots of fun. Just don't expect to have much to show for it for a while. People you went to high school with will be getting out of law school or getting their Ph. D.s, and you'll be working on a five-minute short that maybe fifty people will end up seeing.
-- Richard Linklater

Mmmmmmmmmm Yeaahhhhh

2011-05-19T19:52:00.004-04:00

For the more adventurous pizza lovers. Pop in a pepperoni for the kids and the Spinach & Mushroom just for the two of you. Topped with roasted and marinated portabella mushrooms and spinach, mozzarella and fontina cheese and a white cream onion sauce. You may even want to light some candles.
-- It's some damn good pizza

Yeah. Lock Cooper in his cage. Light the Ocean Breeze candle I bought at Walmart a couple weeks back at 3 a.m. Belatedly realize the group of Latino workers buffing the floor in front of the sporting goods section where pointing and laughing at me as I spent five minutes sniffing various candles while holding two bottles of $4 wine. Tell myself I don't care. Candles are a key component of my happiness and bathing ritual.

Eat my $7 mushroom and spinach pizza. Ohhhh. Yuummm. Tastes so good. The crust is the perfect consistency, right between chewy and crunchy. Ummphh. Drink my Dr. Pepper from an old Krystal's Milkquake cup. Yeahhhh. Read the blog of a similarly dissatisfied young thinker, attempting to be a critical reader, sometimes manufacturing mental dissent to match the tone of commentors. Feel a surge of righteousness. ITS ME AGAINST TEH WORLD!!! Suddenly realize tomorrow I will once again feel alone and scared and shiftless. Take another bite of pizza. Try to avoid thinking of the writing I should be doing for an Auburn-themed football magazine for which I am actually getting paid. Put the pizza in the fridge. MMmmmm. Take Cooper outside and try to avoid all human interaction.

RELATED B/C NOW IM ALL ZUMPED

2011-05-19T04:53:00.008-04:00

Dammit. Now I'm all riled. YOU THINK UR BETTER THAN ME?

Once when I worked as the Copy Editor for The Plainsman the editor called me to her computer. She had last week's edition in her hand. "You see how these two complete thoughts are connected by and?" "Yes." "When that happens we put a comma."

Of course. Of course. Of course. But, and this is where I might have trouble explaining my views with anything approaching relevance or rightness, but of course I knew a comma connects such separate parts. A sentence is also never supposed to start with a conjunction. Looking back through my 6th grade writing journal I saw where my teacher marked out the word "And" when I used it to begin a sentence. Because that's Wrong.

Back to The Plainsman, I didn't use a comma in that particular instance because I felt it interrupted the flow of the sentence inside a quote. Quotes are speech. Speech should read with some semblance of natural cadence. Thus, no comma.

I'm not totally saying I follow the "pause rule" for commas. (The "pause rule" being a comma placed at every natural, or natural seeming, pause point.) But sometimes I don't think "Hey Bill." should have a comma. It's not always "Hey [breath] Bill." It's all one utterance. Or even "What time do you leave, Jane?" There can be exceptions is the point. "Shit yeah he was scared." Pat Dye said that in one string. No breaks. A comma would inaccurately reflect what he said.

SO when I leave out the comma in such situations I am infuriated to think some readers will assume a second of superiority thinking I committed a grammar faux pas. I'm trying to strip away my school learning and reach a higher plane of understanding. Go back to your trivia and your sitcoms RAWR RAWR I'M TOTALLY PRETENTIOUS RAWR RAWR BOOKS RAWR.

But, dammit, don't be the grammar police. Because my complex relationship with the English language does not need your input or snide remarks. And because I will fume and consider overreacting before going for a walk or masturbating.

Unless, of course, it is actually a glaring mistake. Such as a time when I used filling instead of feeling because of phonetic similarity. Then let me know. Though from the above it may be hard to distinguish from the deliberate and overlooked. So . . . yeah, shit, I don't know. I think too much about such things. Don't join me being the subliminal message.

(Zumped is a spam-filled link site it seems. For some reason my Google search window now reads Holly Madison before plastic surgery.)

I ONLY READ LITRA-TURE

2011-05-19T04:25:00.002-04:00

On a related note-- I will spend not one moment of my life worrying about whether I'm being pretentious. Not one solitary instant. That's not an argument that I'm not pretentious; I'm quite certain I am. But I am also certain that living the kind of life I need and want to live, where I can surround myself with the kind of beauty that I feel is necessary to endure the slow motion tragedy of living, means abandoning concerns about pretense. Others will have to adjudicate that. The events of my life have taught me that self-possession can steel you against a whole array of big tragedies and petty indignities. Meanwhile, all the time you spend sitting around your apartment, not being pretentious, is no defense against anything at all.
-- L'Hote

I think about words like pretentious and pompous and self-important a good deal. Often in the context of behavior to avoid. I might be obsessed. I purposely avoid engaging in talk or practice I consider pretentious or pompous. I don't correct the grammar of others. I do what I can to not talk of how many books I read or what types of books I'm consuming in normal conversation. I sometimes purposely use slang or improper grammar to appear non-stuffy.

It probably has something to do with my father. He is a man of humility and self-effacement in all things. He never brags. He deflects. He considers himself a simple country veterinarian. Born and raised in the Southeast. Gonna die in the Southeast. Not redneck or backwood, but that blood still flows.

Largely it's a side effect of being the straight-laced son of a dominant Southern Baptist preacher. Two paths, in general, for the preacher's kid: raise hell or fear hell. Dad chose the latter, though he might just've dabbled in the former in his late teens. What I'd give to know him then.

My inherited self-effacement gets tedious. And that's no doubt why I'm attracted to the brash and bold. Inside it stews, suddenly spewing when least expected, or needed, or wanted.

I associate pretentiousness with a feeling of superiority. Underserved superiority, which is more or less a reworking of the definition. Really, I think a lot of pretense and pomp is a lack of empathy, a haughty blindspot to the abilities and worth of those deemed lessers.

So maybe I'm saying don't worry if people think you're pretentious, after all worrying over the opinion's of others is of no use, but don't cling to feelings of false superiority over the likes of tastes. Freud calls these petty powerplays "the narcissism of small differences." (Or that's what I understand the term to mean, or at least can be applied to, taking it out of context.)

I'm still too much my father's son to get at what I want to get at.

The Jokes

2011-05-18T04:16:00.004-04:00

A link to the video. I'm dumb and have no idea how to disable auto-play. No offense, Kevin.

That's my friend Kevin. He is very funny. If you live in Auburn, and let's be honest you probably don't, this blog has 4-9 readers, 80% of which I know by name, but if you do, you should come out to the Ale House tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. and support him and other local comedians. I buried the lead in that last sentence. So again, 8:30 Ale House, Auburn.

What makes for good comedy and writing: upsetting expectations. Recognizing the cliches and then fleeing to new, unexpected ground. The twist. With the best you don't even realize what happened. You just know it's funny/inspiring/touching/resonant.

For your eyes only

2011-05-16T14:29:00.002-04:00

Wrote a post last night for TWER about University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido and the documentary Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach, which was directed by Richard Linklater. It's the best documentary of a coach I've seen. Helps that Linklater is a helluva filmmaker, one of the best living in America, I think.

Garrido says "fuck" and versions of "fuck," i.e. "fucking," "motherfucker," "goddamn motherfucker," many times in the above video.

Your mind all growed up

2011-05-13T14:52:00.004-04:00

When I was in high school, I read an essay by William Golding of Lord of the Flies fame that asserted that there were three types of thinking. Grade-three thinking meant going along with what everyone else thought. Grade-two thinking was reflexive contrarianism. And grade-one thinking was the genuine search for truth. It wasn't a very good essay, but the tripartite system it proposed stuck with me, and it later struck me as a helpful way to think of the evolution of the typical Gen-Xer's relationship to pop culture. Grade three: you spend your childhood steeped in crap, enjoying it because you don't know any better. Grade two: you reach adolescence and come to realize how insipid the vast majority of pop culture is, but love it all the more because laughing at it is even more fun than laughing with it. (In college I visited a high school friend who had turned his room back home into an ironic shrine to the Fonz and was working on a comparable collection of Pac-Man paraphernalia. I agreed that this was indeed truly epic comedy.) Grade one: you finally grow up and focus on stuff that's actually, y'know, good.
-- Adam Cadre

Don't agree with everything he has to say about Simmons (tone gets a bit smug, though from what I've read he's not wrong about most of it), but I did find his ideas about shared cultural humor and the inherent ironic distance of that humor fascinating.

Truncated rectum like a bleeding sea snake

2011-05-10T00:36:00.003-04:00

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
-- Thomas Mann

I try to run from "quotation knowledge." Most often quotations are taken out of context and twisted to reify the suppositions of sloppy thinkers. But, since this particular quotation reifies this particular thought, I will use and abuse. We all hypocrites, baby.

Protracted* research has proven one of the only things worse (harder) for me than writing is not writing. Writing is damn hard. I struggle with basic e-mailing. Not writing is worse. I feel like less of a man. You jam cram all your hopes and dreams into one basket and that basket gets real heavy.

Poop.

* Protracted is often followed by rectum. Which is gross. Don't protract your rectum. Probably would itch. Might have used the term incorrectly above.

He's German

2011-05-09T23:52:00.005-04:00

Cooper and I now correspond through a complex series of click speak. Plan your day accordingly.

More Book Obsession

2011-05-09T15:21:00.002-04:00

I read books.

You heard me. Those thingees with covers and pages that you hold in your hands? Smell like paper and trees? Portable brain defibrillators?

I’m not talking about college assigned books. I’m talking about the books that I found at that time. The books that spoke to me and maybe only me. The books that kept me from sleeping at night so I could read them. The books that haunted me while I walked around during the daytime. And I’m here to tell you I learned more about war, politics, and social and individual identity from reading books than any class I took, any nightly news, and fat-mouthed politician.

And I didn’t just read them. I devoured them. I mean I did everything but chew and gum them to death. I wrote copious marginalia on every page. I took them with me everywhere I went. Including the bathtub. Europe. Bars. Restaurants. Lover’s beds. Those books were beaten up with reading.

I spent hours in the University of Oregon library. I stole several books. I was so into reading them I wanted to bite them. Eat them. They made my brain hurt in the best possible way.

. . .

So I’m saying hey, your zeitgeist is upon you. And underneath the story of BUY THIS and FEAR THIS and HATE THAT, rising up and punching through the infomercial we call public discourse in a moment of danger is this: read books.
-- The Rumpus

Find something you're passionate about. Doesn't have to be books. Do what you must do. Nah what I mean?

Yes Ma'am

2011-05-09T00:25:00.002-04:00

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language. This single duty, properly pursued, produces complicated, various results. It's certainly not a call to arms for the autobiographer, although some writers will always mistake the readerly desire for personal truth as their cue to write a treatise or a speech or a thinly disguised memoir in which they themselves are the hero. Fictional truth is a question of perspective, not autobiography. It is what you can't help tell if you write well; it is the watermark of self that runs through everything you do. It is language as the revelation of a consciousness.
-- Zadie Smith

Fail Yourself

2011-05-08T23:44:00.001-04:00

It's my experience that when a writer meets other writers and the conversation turns to the fault lines of their various prose styles, then you hear a slightly different language than the critic's language. Writers do not say, "My research wasn't sufficiently thorough" or "I thought Casablanca was in Tunisia" or "I seem to reify the idea of femininity" - at least, they don't consider problems like these to be central. They are concerned with the ways in which what they have written reveals or betrays their best or worst selves. Writers feel, for example, that what appear to be bad aesthetic choices very often have an ethical dimension. Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self - vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That's why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great.
-- Zadie Smith

4 Da Intellectually Curious

2011-05-08T16:52:00.001-04:00

If you consider yourself an intellectually curious person, I suggest adding Marginal Revolution to your daily to-read list. Largely about economics, but Tyler Cowen is curious, and knowledgable, about a wide, wide range of subjects. I skip a lot of posts, but I almost always find something worthwhile when I do read, especially enjoy his Assorted Links posts.

Also: Watch Friday Night Lights if you have time. Makes me cry a lot. Cathartic. Inspiring. Though-provoking. Empathy-expanding.

4 Da Haterz

2011-05-07T04:10:00.003-04:00

Obsessed Orbiters:

Don't read too much into that last post. It wasn't about me getting drunk and cheating on my girlfriend. More or less just your common existential, this-kid-thinks-too-much screed after a night of craziness, some of which I probably wouldn't be overly proud of. Such as: Kicking over a trashcan and then flipping off the guy who said, "I'm sure the campus appreciates that."

Basically: No need to get really drunk and kick over trashcans at 4 a.m. on Thursdays. A fulfilling life can be had without such things. Learning, I'm trying.

You get up

2011-05-06T19:01:00.010-04:00

Hope you all had a great Cinco de Mayo. I celebrated my proud Mexican heritage by spending nearly $50 filling my belly and brain with toxins, toxins which left me laying facedown in the wee morning hours on the 3rd floor of RBD in the fiction section. I then drove to Waffle House and ate steak and eggs as the sole patron. Youth!

I've come to realize, through various tests, that I have a hard time dealing with the ~~physic~~ psychic weight of not remembering or being unable to control my actions. The day (sometime days) after is painful. I'm not Tucker Max. I'm not Charles Bukowski. I spend a fairly sizable chunk of my time trying not to harm people through my actions. And I do anyway. Quite often. We all do, surely. But I've become more aware of my part in the pain of others and that is painful itself.

So apologies, world. I never meant to hurt you. I'm doing my best.

Death before death

2011-05-05T00:13:00.003-04:00

You notice how certain people have five or six hot-button issues they recycle repeatedly? All canned phrases and pomposity. Don't be that person. Never stop learning. Never stop growing. Don't let people know what you're going to say before you say it.

I am not offended that these creatures (that's the word)
Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem,
Pay so little heed to me. It's part of a complicated
Flirtation routine, anyhow, no doubt. But this talk of
The garment center? Surely that's California sunlight
Belaboring them and the old crate on which they
Have draped themselves, fading its Donald Duck insignia
To the extreme point of legibility.
Maybe they were lying but more likely their
Tiny intelligences cannot retain much information.
Not even one fact, perhaps. That's why
They think they're in New York. I like the way
They look and act and feel. I wonder
How they got that way, but am not going to
Waste any more time thinking about them.
I have already forgotten them
Until some day in the not too distant future
When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport,
They looking as astonishingly young and fresh as when this
picture was made
But full of contradictory ideas, stupid ones as well as
Worthwhile ones, but all flooding the surface of our minds
As we babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of
change.
-- "Mixed Feelings," John Ashbery from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

FNL

2011-05-03T14:02:00.002-04:00

In which I talk about Friday Night Lights and get carried away describing a drive I took down Donahue at dusk.

Done is Done

2011-04-30T05:16:00.003-04:00

So ends my days as a delivery driver for Willie's Wings and Stuff. Time to get on with the dreams and ambitions. Try to keep you looped.

(Unrelated: Been thinking I would make a good con man. Lucrative if I could quash cognitive dissonance.)

And more

2011-04-27T05:09:00.004-04:00

The saying goes, If you want to win an argument, change the conversation. Or I think that's a saying. Should be if it isn't. Caught in an indefensible argument? Dealing with criticism and questioning over the purpose or direction of a written or verbal opinion? Mix that shit up. Keeps your wit sharp. Or, sometimes even better, own that shit. Yeah, you are guilty of X, Y, and perhaps even Z. But aren't we all guilty? Aren't we all something less than perfect? If you're feeling Biblical: We've all sinned and fallen short. It's fun. Do it right and people (men, women, children, the infirm, the mentally-challenged, checkout clerks) will think you're funny and socially astute and great in bed and much more!

+++

True freedom is freedom of thought. The FDA and law enforcement agencies can regulate your body, the physical space all around you, and your possessions. But they can never regulate what one man knows to be true in solitude. Trying to find these truths is maddening and isolating. Herd instinct and the desire to fit keep most away. Art, sunsets, and serendipitous encounters are the only protection I've found.

+++

"I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water."
-- Harlan Ellison

Trailer for Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Knew nothing about Ellison going in. Now feel like I know a good bit. Interesting if you're interested in the creative process and the man or woman behind any lifetime striving for production of art. Going to have to read some of his stories soon.

Some them tidbits

2011-04-24T05:04:00.003-04:00

Highlight of night: Heady and obviously stoned (visible bong + Bob Marley Jamaican-hued print hanging on wall) Southern Union student alone in his girlfriend's Creekside four bed, four bath luxury condo regaling me with his tale of undeserved firing from Sprint in Opelika, the firing directly connected with corporate conspiracy. His bong is named after a Phish song. Most of his ticket was paid in quarters.

+++

The contemptible smallness, the mediocrity of my work, the disorder of my days, these are the things that make it, to say the least, difficult for me to get up in the morning. When I talk with people, when I ride on trains, life seems to have some apparent, surface goodness that does not need questioning. When I spend six or seven hours a day at my typewriter, when I try to sleep off a hangover in a broken armchair, I end by questioning everything, beginning with myself. . . . I must bring to my work, and it must give to me, the legitimate sense of well-being that I enjoy when the weather is good and I have had plenty of sleep.
-- The Journals of John Cheever (published posthumously)

Sometimes it's hard to grasp how much the Internet has changed the world, and how much it has changed how we view and interact with the world. For personal instance, this blog, which has basically shifted from somewhat satirical football blog concerning UT and AU sports to my personal intellectual life journal (a Livejournal?). The thoughts and quotes and life tidbits I share would, in the past, the recent past, be saved and hidden. I would keep a sporadic journal. But instead I keep a sporadic blog. The sharing is not the same, but it is damn close.

Know that when I seem to go a bit too far, when I seem to come off as real serious or misanthropic or melancholy or whatever else, that that's only a portion of my personality, a portion I would've kept to myself in past generations. It's all new. I'm trying to find my way like everyone else. Know that you shouldn't take anything on here too seriously. Because I don't.

+++

Connection between marijuana and hip hop. Linked, heir?, to earlier generations' connection between marijuana and jazz. The outlaw status? The legality issue? Diaspora?

+++

I'm gonna spend tomorrow playing golf with a friend/coworker drinking and heckling a much younger, more naive, less intelligent coworker. 3 to 1 one of us wrestles him on the No. 5 green. 10 to 1 we get kicked out for lewd language and improper behavior unbecoming of golf.

Only game in town

2011-04-23T02:16:00.005-04:00

In this period of our literature we are producing mainly insular works, as if all our writers were on an airplane in economy seats, beverage trays shading their laps, face averted from one another, masturbating furiously. Consider, for instance, the New Yorker fiction of the past few years, with those eternally affluent characters suffering understated melancholies of overabundance. Here the Self is projected and replicated into a monotonous army which marches through story after story like deadly locusts. Consider, too, the structuralist smog that has hovered so long over our universities, permitting only games of stifling breathlessness.
-- William T. Vollman circa 1990

Insular, selfish — selfish meaning serving no purpose but self-glorification, selfish implicating writing obsessed with its own cleverness and intelligence — writing is such a slog to read. Goddammit, show some heart. Write with your balls and the tips of your fingers. Write with your hair and your big toes. Write with your spleen and your mitochondria. Write so sacrosanct sections of your soul don't implode. Write so you don't go supernova sitting in traffic. Write so you don't have to smoke pot every day. Write so you can quit after three beers. Write so you can look yourself in the mirror without blinking.

THE RULES

1. We should never write without feeling.
2. Unless we are much more interesting than we imagine we are, we should strive to feel not only about Self, but also about Other. Not the vacuum so often between Self and Other. Not the unworthiness of Other. Not the Other as a negation or eclipse of Self. Not even about the Other exclusive of Self, because that is but a trickster-egoist's way of worshiping Self secretly. We must treat Self and Other as equal partners. (Of course I am suggesting nothing new. I do not mean to suggest anything new. Health is more important than novelty.)
3. We should portray important human problems.
4. We should seek for solutions to those problems. Whether or not we find them, the seeking will deepen the portrait.
5. We should know our subject, treating it with the respect with which Self must treat Other. We should know it in all senses, until our eyes are bleary from seeing it, our ears ring from listening to it, our muscles ache from embracing it, our gonads are raw from making love to it. (If this sounds pompous, it is perhaps because I wear thick spectacles.)
6. We should believe that truth exists.
7. We should aim to benefit others in addition to ourselves.

Navel-gazing for the Middle-Class Intellectual

2011-04-22T05:49:00.004-04:00

Therefore I currently feel most interested in reading/writing novels that aren’t improvements on or innovations of other novels. I want to view each potential novel as already definitively and unavoidably unique, improvable only in comparison to itself and then only from its creator’s singular perspective. I want to learn about another human’s unique experience from reports they’ve made themselves while excitedly aware that they alone, regardless of what others are thinking or doing, have access to what they’re reporting upon. I do, sometimes—rarely, I think—want to know, ‘What do you think other people are going to be thinking about in 20 years?’ or ‘How do you feel humankind, generally, is going to feel like in 50 or 100 years?’ But mostly I want to know, ‘What are you thinking about?’ and ‘How do you feel?’
-- Tao Lin

Interesting if you're concerned with The Future of The Novel, though the language gets all jumbled. The above is the best, clearest section. If you're not interested in The Future of The Novel, you shouldn't worry. There's a decent chance you live a full and healthy life. Very few, and most of those being dull, pretentious people, care about The Future of The Novel, me being one, mostly because I want to write a novel one day and I'm trying to figure out just what the fuck is happening on a large scale so I can not do what everyone else is doing. Or maybe just try and do it better — the best I can at least.

Blah blah blah blort

2011-04-21T17:13:00.002-04:00

In compensation for this a.m.'s self-pitying, drunken post, here's a poem about a woman's perfect ass.

Good Lord, thy bottom, lass,
That rump! The world
Goes round, I know, I know,
But asses, mostly, do not so.

Yes, asses, mostly, do not so,
For lasses, mostly, lump
Or sag. Canst make me fag
To love thy ass, thou being lass?
-- Springer's Progress, David Markson

Part Deux

2011-04-21T07:26:00.001-04:00

Forgot to mention this. Something I finished on Pat Dye. I am proud of it. Especially that last section. Think that's mighty good. I forgot because I drank a bottle and a half of wine after work. I drank the wine because I'm scared. I'm scared because decisions are starting to pile at my feet. Decisions are starting to pile at my feet because I'm afraid to make them.

Just enjoy Pat Dye.

Jazz will kill you dead

2011-04-18T19:40:00.002-04:00

To have a sound and style that are unmistakably your own is a prerequisite of greatness in jazz. Here, as is often the case in jazz, an apparent paradox is at work: to sound like themselves musicians begin by trying to sound like someone else. Looking back to his early years, Dizzy Gillespie said: "Each musician is based on someone who went before, and eventually you get enough of your own things in your playing, and you get a style of your own."
--But Beautiful, Geoff Dyer

Vailidated

2011-04-18T05:55:00.005-04:00

While the publishing industry waited to see whether it faced the embarrassment of yet another partly fabricated memoir, Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” a book popular with the Pentagon for its inspirational lessons on Afghanistan and Pakistan, forcefully countered a CBS News report on Sunday that questioned the facts of his book and the management of his charitable organization.

The report could puncture a hole in the uplifting narrative of “Three Cups of Tea,” which has fed a charity run by Mr. Mortenson, the Central Asia Institute. The institute has built schools, mostly for girls, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
--The New York Times

Daily during my last two semesters of college I walked past pictures portraying professors and various Auburn University employees reading "Three Cups of Tea" as part of the University's multicultural reading program. Mortenson was invited to Auburn to speak. There was an entire "Get Caught Reading Three Cups of Tea" agenda at the library. The fucking book was read aloud in shifts by students and library employees on the second floor directly next to the primary entrance. HA! Fuck that guy. Join the Internet Horde Army on Amazon and slay the lying bastard! (I say, half in jest, half in all seriousness.)

I feel validated for my snap assumption that the book was pulp pseudo-inspirational bullshit. Could certainly be wrong. But I certainly feel right right now.

Same self :: Same now

2011-04-18T05:34:00.004-04:00

One of the first experiences I can remember involving my father: Riding along as he drove Millie, our one-year-old Miniature Schnauzer puppy, to a client's house so Millie could be deflowered and inseminated by an all-black Miniature Schnauzer named Poot.

The remembering occurred April, 18, 2011, at 4:32 a.m. while watching a Bill Burr standup special on television by way of Xbox 360 by way of Netflix Instant Queue.

Something else I thought and/or stole*: The future self is irrelevant, as the future, hoped-for self never exists. The future self is totally reliant on the now self. There is no future self if there is no now self. To say you're going to read Gravity's Rainbow over the summer is to assume the summer future self will be more motivated and focused than the self now. Who You Want To Be slamming against Who You Are.

*Not to imply the above item was stolen; it wasn't, as it was an original experience perhaps unrivaled in the history of man, which is neat to think — that you took part in something, some small, seemingly insignificant event, that's never happened and perhaps never will happen again, even if it was only the smallest bit different, and even if you can't be 100% sure any action or thought is unique or special in any way whatsoever. All that to say there's a glitch in the matrix no doubt.

Hell, you're late

2011-04-13T16:18:00.002-04:00

Part I of II on the life and times of Patrick Fain Dye.

Some shit you don't care about

2011-04-09T18:21:00.002-04:00

Are there writers, academics, intellectuals out there writing and teaching in this way, in the sense of daring to attempt something wholly new? Are there writers, academics, intellectuals out there showing similar willing to break with past practices, even if that means breaking with past positions, changing their minds, risking failure?

Barthes didn’t manage to produce a novel, but he does describe the kind of novel he would like to see written. It would, he says, be simple: which he defines as non-ironic, unself-conscious, non-arrogant, loving. It would be filial, so conscious of its lineage and it would desirous–something that calls for reading, that wants to be read and that we want to read. Those are perhaps surprising, not especially innovative criteria for this “new writing practice.” But then, again: How many contemporary novels do this? How many novels manage to be both intelligent and generous (non-arrogant)? How many novels are filial, in the sense of being alert to or even interested in the complex tradition of the novel? I’m thinking of what Tom McCarthy has said recently about what he sees as a refusal to engage with a legacy of modernism, or even with the fact that the nineteenth century realist novel–still the template for so much of what gets written today–was already anxious about itself and its own tenets. And how many novels actually manage to be objects of desire, to be something I want to read, that calls for reading?

+++

The idea is to develop a practice of notation that would achieve what the best haiku manage to do, which is capture in a minimal number of words something of life that makes us feel something; specifically, that makes us say, Yes! That’s it! That’s exactly how it is. The task of novel-writing would then be to somehow weave those moments together–or more accurately dot them, scatter them throughout a longer narrative because the novel just can’t sustain that level of intensity. But the question of how you’d actually achieve this is left suspended. So I’d suggest that the connection between haiku and the novel is left open because this problem– How to pass from the note to the novel, how to turn a sequence of discontinuous notes into a piece of lengthy, sustained prose?–is never adequately resolved.
-- On Roland Barthes

Why not me?

2011-04-08T08:04:00.003-04:00

Ask yourself that about something you really want to do. The more answers and excuses provided and presented might just be a good indicator of how important it is you do the damn thing.

Who's a nerd?

2011-04-06T17:12:00.002-04:00

Exhaustive (-ing) attempt at an introduction to science fiction novels over at TWER. I was once ashamed to openly talk of my Star Wars book addiction. But no longer.

Dye on Rocky Top

2011-04-05T20:56:00.002-04:00

I like going to Knoxville. Everywhere you step there's tradition. General Robert Neyland. The stadium's named after him. He was one of the coaching greats. He helped plant the seeds the game grows from. Those letters, VOLS, sitting up on top of the stadium, must be fifty feet high. The stadium is in a bend in the river, but we don't see the river when we go play, that's for the spectators, the river is. We hear "Rocky Top." I like "Rocky Top." I just like to hear it early in the game, rather than at the end. In Knoxville, you can hardly hear anything. It's loud; 95,000 fans make a lot of noise. First time we went, they had that old sorry Tartan turf. Now they're gone to something new. Three years ago, it rained on us. But we wouldn't have won that year indoors on a dry field.
--In the Arena

Psychology of The Rat

2011-04-02T05:01:00.004-04:00

Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me?

The Rat always assumes the personal in the general out of self-loathing and crushing jealousy. The cycle of inaction continues unbroken.

Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me? Why not me?

Constant mindfulness is the only cure. You know who you are.

Wham bam clams

2011-04-01T05:41:00.001-04:00

Women want to tame the untamable. Chivalry is sexism. And jealousy and insecurity implode all relationships.

Better, British 'Catcher in the Rye'

2011-03-30T00:20:00.003-04:00

From Martin Amis' The Rachel Papers:

Think back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: 'Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I've got a soft spot for old Charles. He's all right is Charlie. Chuck's . . . okay.'

+++

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road.

Very well: demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extraterrestrial wayfarers; Intense Consciousness of Being; pathetic fallacy plus omnipresent deja vu, cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager's religion. The Rev. Northrop Frye fetchingly terms it 'queasy apocalyptic foreboding'. An Angus Wilson character terms it 'adolescent egotism', thereby driving me almost to suicide last Christmas. Is that all it fucking is, I thought. For the question that interested me about this feeling was not 'What is it?' so much as 'Does it matter? Is it worth anything?' Because if there isn't a grain of genuine humility there, it's the electrodes for me. Does it simply get weaker and weaker, like one's sense of uniqueness? Or do some of us hang on to it? Then, I suppose, I'd have to throw in my lot with all those twitchy twenty-five-year-olds I had noticed about the place, the characters who find egocentricity numinous in itself. Intermittently articulate, something held back, a third eye hovering above their heads, intrigued and forever gripped by the contrast between them and everything else. Look round: everything, except you, is (wait for it) quite unlike what you are, altogether dissimilar, a totally different kettle of fish. Yet this is what interests me most about the observable world.

+++

Herbie now propounded the toiling paradox that was the ostentatious 'unconventionality' of youth was, in point of fact, nothing other than a different sort of conventionality. After all, was not the non-conformity of yesterday the conformity of today? Were not these young people as orthodox, in their very different way, as the orthodoxy they purported to be subverting?

+++

The true teenage is a marooned ego but his back is always turned to the new ships; he has a kind of gormless strength that can bear to live with itself. For her, every day, you have been selling your youth. Keep that in mind.

+++

So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind seeing a beggar kicked or a girl run over because it's all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?

+++

This may be bluffing, but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example, and that you're no better. The teenager can normally detach his own behaviour from his views on the behaviour of others; but I had no moral energy left.

The Zone

2011-03-29T03:00:00.001-04:00

Chris Jones feels me. (He posted this today. So there weren't no borrowing.)

Then came the actual writing, which I don’t really remember, if I’m being honest. I must have written it, because it’s there for me to see, but unlike most of my stories—I can remember specific moments from the writing of most of my stories—I can’t remember anything about that one. Which means I must have been well and truly in what I’ve always called The Trance.

It’s one of my happiest places. I can’t explain it very well. The only thing I can think to compare it to is what athletes call “The Zone,” only with no physical fitness or dexterity involved. Every so often—but not nearly often enough—I’ll slip into this mode where everything feels automatic somehow, like I’m not really conscious of what I’m doing. I’m just doing it. It might last fifteen minutes. It might last two weeks. And like Lee says, I know, without a doubt in my mind, that I won't have done my best work unless, somewhere along the way, I’ve entered that lost state.

You Trust

2011-03-29T02:48:00.003-04:00

Me on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Great book. Reading the post now, a day later, I missed a lot of the bigger issues and implications, instead focusing mainly on Pirsig's thoughts on Quality, an idea and theory probably not of central importance to many of its readers. But learning to write is learning to trust oneself. So nah-nah-a-boo-boo to those who disagree.

Two on one, bro

2011-03-27T05:15:00.003-04:00

Three guys were standing underneath a bank drive-thru off Gay. Walking to my car, a bit drunkenly, I thought they were together. Then punches and kicks and yelling and crying.

"Two on one, bro! Two on one!" the lone long-haired attacker yelled into what I assumed was a phone. "Who you got with you? You got Andre? You got Sean? [Come at me bro. Come at me!] Hurry two on one!"

I watched sitting in my car alone, the only non-fighter in sight, the paneless window acting as a sort of viewing receptacle. Real reality TV.

The two defenders-cum-attackers were not fighters. They were not nimble. They were not agile. Their right-handed punches came from behind the head and finished opposite their left shoulder. At one point one guy, who'd just recently regained his footing after a brutal couple seconds on the ground absorbing numerous punches and kicks to the face region — "Look bro. Your friend is crying." — said, "Hey man, we're hippies."

That's what it looked like: Two drunk/stoned apathetic slackers doing confused battle with a hopped-up tragically horny bro drunk and buzzing from five Red Bulls and vodka. Quality entertainment.

A whole fucking squad of cops arrived before I left. As they were pulling in long-haired attacker locked eyes with me. "A witness! He saw the whole thing. Ask him. He saw how it all started." The two defenders agreed: "That fucker is crazy. Ask that guy. We were just walking and that bastard attacked us out of nowhere."

At one point, feeling obligated, feeling like I should justify my voyeurism, I walked over and talked to a cop. I told him I'd seen most of the action. One of the hippies was sitting on the curb bleeding. I saw at least three open cuts. The other was pacing behind him. The cop told me to hang around for a minute.

I got back into my car, internally hoping I didn't smell like Sangria and sweet tea vodka. Soon after I was waved back over. The same cop wrote my information down. He then asked me what I'd seen.

"Well, I don't want to say definitively it was the one guy who started it all, because I thought they were all together until punches were thrown. And I'm really not sure how it all began. But I will say [the long-haired guy] seemed to be the aggressor. He was definitely doing most of the punching and kicking. I actually heard one of these guys say, "Hey man, we're hippies." During the middle of . . . "

"All right. I'll call you if I need more information."

I wanted to write a clever ending or something ambiguous to make you head scratch or whatever, but it's 4:44 a.m. and I just got done working a 12 hour shift.

What I was working toward: I'm a terrible witness because I try too hard to see every situation from all possible sides and I don't trust my own vision or memory. Most of my recollections come with numerous asides explaining my fallibilities and failings as a viewer and as a human being. It is as annoying as it sounds.

Can't Escape

2011-03-25T17:25:00.001-04:00

Now that Western Christianity is a dead letter religion among the suckup SWPL set, something needs to replace the evolution-sized hole left in their heads from the excision of the traditional organized religions. That worshipful, in-group yearning is replaced by a new religion: the religion of “sustainable living.” Gaia is their God. Lettuce their Eucharist. Global warming their Nicene Creed. Canvas tote bags their cross. Marathons their forty days and forty nights in the desert. Recycling their tithe. Pet adoption agencies their soup kitchens and charity organizations. It’s a fucking joke, and it’s on them. They think they are above the religious impulse, when in fact they are as much a base animal as those plebes who earn their sneers; they’ve simply substituted a different flavor of the religious crack that gets them high.
--Roissy

Is true.

Hummmm

2011-03-25T16:07:00.002-04:00

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
--Robert Pirsig

Oh My! He So Crazy!

2011-03-25T05:09:00.007-04:00

Sometimes I get manic. Manic happy. Everything is Right and Flowing. I get light. A million miles high. Everything that is and will be contained within me. I am all things. I am you, I am me, I am we. I am a constipated Henry Miller. I am a metaphysical Bukowski. I am a fearless DFW. I am a hopeful Doug Stanhope. I am a begrudged Martin Amis. I am an outgoing Joan Didion.

That's rare. But when it does — when it does — the world makes sense. It's the only way I can initially approach women. Must be above looking down, pulling strings. There must be some separation. Must have this manic not caring. Uncaring. At those times I feel above societal shame and repression. I don't need their favor. I am their favor.

I bop and juke in my car to Lil Wayne, ignoring the laughter and mocking glances of black faces at the stop light. I roll through The Hill with the windows down and my hood on, smiling back at the sorority girl in the turn lane. I see you girl.

I become outlandish. Women love outlandish.

"I'm an English major."

"So you want to be an astronaut."

Smoking hookah. Abusing Dr. Pepper chapstick. Hamming rudeness. Talking simply to amuse myself. Uncaring of reaction. Giving the bird to a pita building in downtown Auburn.

It's like a type of disassociation of self. Almost me watching me. Not quite. There aren't two discernible personalities. But there is some other force (so to speak) "taking over." (Approach that sentence with care.) A subconscious robotic control. Thought and action become almost one. The Zone I call it. Or would call it if I ever talked about it. In my head it's called The Zone. The Zone is a sacred place. I need to cross-reference The Zone with Zen. I wanna say zazen.

Literally feel untouchable. Not physically. I don't feel invincible or immortal. It's a mental construct. All my thoughts congeal to sense. Ever joke comes out perfect. My timing is obscene. I'm deadpan, I'm slapstick, I'm an orator. It's ridiculous.

I'm not sure what portends The Zone. Sometimes I think it's a mixture of exhaustion and delirium. Other times it seems to be a THC comedown and caffeine. An almost surety to produce its effects, if occasionally only a glazed mirror, is sudden-influx THC and dextroamphetamine and amphetamine (low-grade speed). That does it real nice. Makes you fun and smart and full of cocksureness. It generally involved walking toward the rising sun on train tracks one inline foot after the other.

The Zone fades suddenly. Try too hard to grab and it fades to mist. And like mist you're not even sure it was ever there. Something above grasping. Something secular. Think too hard, concentrate on The Zone, and The Zone punishes you. Peripherals are the answer. It's almost a releasing of desire. It's gentle fatalism. The world is shit and sadness and all you can do is accept this and go on anyway. It don't matter. But you keep on playing like it does. We've all been in those situations. We keep going to humor someone who doesn't get IT. My little cousin Tony just thinks the alpha and omega are paintable Lord of the Rings tabletop figurines. I believe that's stupid bullshit but I'm gonna keep rolling these dice because my little cousin Tony needs me to. You do what you can to be interested in life.

Sometimes you think they do get IT and you're really dumb to keep searching. Dumb and pitiable. The Zone is a shelter from that. If only for a bit.

Sometimes The Zone transforms itself into a Right and Flowing blog post. Like a brainslug dug out of your brain and transcribed. Your subconscious, your undermind, is above editing. Or so it says. You trust.

+++

My first hero was Zorro.

+++

I tried to warn you.

Grammar Smammar

2011-03-24T02:59:00.006-04:00

Another thing that depressed him was prescriptive rhetoric, which supposedly had been done away with but was still around. This was the old slap-on-the-fingers-if-your-modifiers-were-caught-dangling stuff. Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what identified one with the upper classes.
-- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

I read this passage yesterday, a week after my own post about how grade school grammar nonsense was destroying writing in America, a post which reads a bit smug now, not as smug as On Talent, which I had no intention of writing in a smug tone, though I suppose no one ever writes or says something smugly on purpose, I suppose it's always a by-product, something deeper bubbling to the surface and spilling out to smother the town folk, but this passage from Robert Pirsig's very good book hit home. I especially like: "Hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people." Take that, we say!

I see writing first and foremost as a means of communication, a mystical transference. Take a tour of my brain for a couple hundred pages. Most self-proclaimed "grammar Nazis" I've encountered are pompous, self-important, insecure (small-penised?) assholes. Does anyone write while thinking, "Noun, verb, subject, direct object, dependent clause. Noun, verb, subject, independent clause, gerund . . ." ? How silly, right? Almost as silly: Facebook statuses bemoaning the grammar of other Facebook statuses.

I honestly could not diagram a sentence better than a common sixth grader. Never could. Grammar was always one of my weaker subjects. I'll show you yet, Mrs. Glewen!

Somewhere in Pirsig's passage is an explanation of why traditional newspaper journalism, and its writing style, is disappearing.

All of this to say: I was a poor copy editor for a year at The Plainsman.

Remember

2011-03-23T16:28:00.000-04:00

John Keats died at 25. Rimbaud gave up poetry before 21.

Your Shit Stank

2011-03-23T02:38:00.003-04:00

Strip mining in search of your core might be the bravest yet least respected and recognized act a human being can undertake.

May I suggest you approach this process with care while under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide.

On Talent

2011-03-22T02:58:00.006-04:00

I've been getting more and more compliments lately about my writing. And I don't really know how to respond beyond saying thank you. It's always a sincere thank you. Because the compliments and praise beat back the self-doubt and constant questioning for a couple hours. I am always earnest in my thanks. And I'm not singling any one person out. No one person or comment inspired this post.

But the word choice often makes me pause. "You're so talented." "You are extremely gifted." Never: "You work so hard." "You must have taken a long time to write this." Almost always talent. Always God-given, uncontrollable, unreachable gifts. Not hard work.

I think of myself as a good writer. Not great, not excellent, but certainly with some understanding of what writing is — the process, the goal, all that. None of which came naturally.

What those who tell me how "extremely talented" I am don't see: the 300+ books I've read in the last three years, the 650+ blog posts I've written, the three days it took me to write the frat post, the months of internal monologue and the four days of wall-staring it took me to write the shaker thing, the pacing, the walks alone, the constant considering and internal reworking, the TV I don't watch, the video games I don't play, the ancillary acquaintances I don't have.

So when anyone approaches anything I do with reverence and asks how? I nod and smile. Because I know how. At least the majority of how.

Not to say talent is a myth and we're all blank slates who can achieve any height simply through hard work. I don't think any amount of work can transform you into a Kafka or a Faulkner or a David Foster Wallace. Talent is real. We're not all created equal.

But I do believe if you keep showing up, and you keep trying really, really hard, especially when no one is making you, good things will happen.

+++

Walking through the boob-less bra section of the Auburn Walmart carrying two Mexican microwavable dinners and a $3 bottle of wine at 2 a.m. after leaving work is a great reminder to try hard.

+++

Esquire contributor Chris Jones on self-doubt and writerly fear.

+++

Cooper is in the living room raping his big blue pillow and grunting.

Three Good Books

2011-03-17T17:31:00.003-04:00

Unbelievable, it came on the first try. I was flabbergasted. I'd been trying for weeks—for so long, in fact, I was reconciled to creeping up on it slowly, perhaps over a period of months—and suddenly victory was mine. Breathless, hoping it hadn't been a fluke, I threw again. As I watched the trick unfold, it came to me that a ghost or a spirit was controlling the yo-yo's movements, and that to be really good one had simply to give up one's desire to dominate the yo-yo and instead let the ghost take over. It was if someone spoke to me through the yo-yo. See how easy, was the implication. Just practice till you get over your clumsiness, practice until you can yo-yo without thinking about it and then let me take over. I threw back my head and laughed. I danced a little dance on the sand and shouted out into the pine trees. I knew that in all of Fort Lauderdale and very probably in all of Florida there was no one other boy who could do what I had just done.

--Stop-Time, Frank Conroy

Why this obsession with being the best? Why did he have to assume that only quality could legitimize his work? In fact, he could hardly even begin to think about it except in terms of quality. But what if he was making a mistake? Or indulging in an unhealthy fantasy? Why couldn't he be like everyone else (like Krause, for example), simply painting as well as he could and giving more weight to other things? That kind of modesty could have considerable effects; for a start it would allow him to practice other arts, should he wish . . . or all of them. His medium could become life itself.

--An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira

January 20, 1997

People often ask what my "opinion" is. Well, I guess my opinion is that the bake potatoes are too dry. Oh, but it isn't only that—that isn't all I mean! Why must I be torn apart like this? Why must we converse with one another in this fashion—this "opinion" exchange? Is there no alternative? Isn't it possible to restrict ourselves to the facts? Would that be so terrible?

February 19, 1997

Nodding, bleeding out as steadily as anyone ever, the go-getters uphold their migration. Sometimes it's even beautiful—their freedom from thought and their vigilant impulse to nestle further in to the flock. Lord, let them nestle well—do not leave one behind! Let them pass, squawking, drifting blankly in their beautiful rows—let them find that warm nest far away and breed and die. And let their brood return to us as welcome criminals.

February 25, 1997

Standing there waiting for fries, me and this older man. He said to me, "You'd think they had to grow the potatoes!" I replied, a bit too loud, "Daddy fucked me!" The man seemed angry—I don't think he understood what I meant. It's as though we were on the same field, playing different games. He, however, seemed not able to understand that a different game from his own was possible.

--Letters to Wendy's, Joe Wenderoth

Reality Hunger wants to eat your books

2011-03-15T19:09:00.002-04:00

An essayistic synopsis of David Shields' Reality Hunger is now up on TWER. He and his book have turned me onto some very interesting writers. The book and the post are worth reading if you're interested in writing or the future of the novel.

Youth of the Nation

2011-03-15T18:51:00.002-04:00

Learning to write is learning to forget the lessons taught in grammar school. It's a learning to circumvent the hard rules of grammar altogether. Bend the rules. Twist the rules. Make the rules your bitch.

I found a school writing notebook from 6th grade in my worn blue desk at my parent's house. Mrs. Dodgen was my teacher's name. She was a hardass. A disciplinarian of the old school. She smelled of moth balls and had a giant mole on the right side of her nose. I remember having to constantly fight the urge to pop it with my pencil.

One story I wrote was about purple people eaters. The sentences were stilted and lacked flow. I wasn't a preternatural genius of writing. My writing has only recently gotten less bad.

The purple people eaters killed all the town members. The purple people eaters sucked the brains out of the children. And they danced on the graves of their enemies . . .

Or something. There were a few red marks, misspellings and the like. She also crossed-out "And." After all, you can't start a sentence with a conjunction. What silliness and unproper speech that would produce, children. Your sentences must die on the page. Please keep all personality and style out of your writing. Write how you think we want you to write. Go read a typical high school or college paper. The smartest kids are often the worst.

Play me out, P.O.D.

IT'S TRADITION

2011-03-13T21:57:00.002-04:00

How Fraternities Work over at TWER. A full study would take thousands of words. But here's a start. Trying to hit at the truth through reduction and hinting. Always hard to tell if that's successful.

Gypsy Man Remembered

2011-03-11T23:57:00.003-05:00

Last Spring Break I aimlessly drove around North Carolina. I eventually ended up on a tiny island near the southern most tip of the Outer Banks called Ocracoke. I spent two nights on Ocracoke. I met a man named Raymond. This is Raymond's story.

(New TWER content coming late Sunday/early Monday. The recent arrests made it difficult to post anything not football related. Champs on and off the field.)

+++

Raymond has crazy eyes. That's the first thing you notice about him, if he's not wearing his sunglasses. Chances are he is, even at night, especially at night. Those wide, often bloodshot eyes, those supposed windows to the soul, are an epitaph to his tales. They keep talking when he stops.

He lives in an RV behind a gas station/ convenience store beside a marsh full of feral cats constantly scrapping and screwing. He hasn't always been there. In fact, he's only been there three weeks. Gonna spend the summer in Ocracoke at least. Maybe a year. Maybe two. He doesn't know. Never does.

Raymond has seen it all. If he hasn't, he will. After all, he's only 46 and he still parties. Say what you will about him, but he still parties.

He graduated high school in Germany. His father was in the Air Force and he lived lots of places. In Germany, he was a bricklayer apprentice and did something with wine. A wineback perhaps. He was also a cook, Mediterranean-style mostly, which means he can cook anything.

Germany wasn't his bag. He wanted to see America. So he bought a one-way ticket for $200, which ain't bad. His plane landed in Baltimore and he hitchhiked to Florida where he was a truckdriver for three years. But that got boring. Raymond is a man of movement. This time movement moved him West.

Next he was a cook at a YMCA in Monterey, California. Everyday he'd wake up round 6 a.m. and cook breakfast for 200. He'd always cook the eggs last, adding some lime juice. That was what you had to do with that large a portion of scrambled eggs. His eyes said that was a secret of the culinary arts not often shared.

He'd worked in the YMCA a couple years everyday when his boss offered him two weeks of paid vacation. Raymond packed his Kitchen Sink bag and hitchhiked to Tahoe, Nevada. Why not.

The first guy that picked him up had one leg. He was a cab driver. They talked about life and the normal bullshit. Eventually the one-legged man said he and his girlfriend had an extra room. Raymond could stay with them and drive a cab. He called his boss in Monterey and told him he wasn't coming back. He'd moved on.

So he did that for six years, skiing and trading bumps for cab rides, living with old one leg and partying, lots and lots of partying. His eyes got wide. They're probably still there driving cabs and being deadheads. Or dead. He decides dead. His eyes look sad for a sec.

Tahoe was great but he needed something new. And to get away from those damned deadheads. So he went up to Washington. He was going to be a commercial fisherman in Alaska. He didn't know shit about fishing, but it couldn't be that hard, right?

He bummed around the docks for a couple days, asking, begging, for a chance, any chance, to fish. Eventually an old captain gave him a shot. By the end of his eight years up North, Raymond knew everything about fishing. He fished long line, nothing like that Deadliest Catch shit. This was more dangerous, in his opinion anyway. His eyes betray his pride. He was a damned good fisherman, a damned good one.

He even survived two boats sinking. The first one was in the freezing waters off Alaska. There were six men on his boat, three died, including the captain and first mate. One guy died before he even got off the boat. He came out from the hold and got squished by a loose metal box. Fucking flat. Smack. Raymond was 5 feet away. Or was it 20? Whatever, it was close. He and the two greenhorns survived the freezing waters by urinating on themselves, trying to keep their minds off the pod of orca whales or whatever that could fucking eat them at any moment. Can't think about that shit, gotta keep hope alive.

The other sinking was on a river. Something about lots of cash and guns and trying to cork the holes so it didn't sink before the dock. It sank, taking all his shit, iPods and all that, with it. He got a compensation check though. And not for used prices. All new by way of insurance. So that was cool.

Post-fishing life is a blur. Lots of bouncing around, through Canada and 49 states of the Union, all but Michigan. He wanders inside the RV, producing an antler he made into a pipe. Inside the pipe is ashy material which he confirms to be weed. He opens a cabinet and brings forth a wet paper towel full of tiny brown lumps. He's got some seeds he's trying to germinate. Gonna plant a few behind his RV next to the marsh where nobody will see.

But mainly he likes to drink. His dead wife's family says he's an alcoholic. Maybe so, but he functions. And that's what matters, right? He wasn't even welcome at his step-son's wedding. Even after he gave him his vintage motorcycle, which the little bastard went and sold on eBay for $60,000. Shoulda kept it. Worth at least $120,000 now.

Life's not so bad for Raymond. He's got his RV, which he bought off a man in California who only used it to drive to Dodgers games every couple months for six grand. He still parties, which he proves later that night, sitting around his turf-covered table with four college students — three brothers from NC State and a confused journalism student from Auburn. They play poker and take shots of Bacardi Gold. Raymond is the instigator, branding pussy any not keeping his 46-year-old party pace. Come on, he's 46; he's still partying.

The brothers wander away at 10:30. Raymond and the other kid are left sitting around. We should go out. It's Saint Patrick's Day after all, Raymond says, his eyes reflecting the dying fire. He wanders off to find a bike for the kid. Only take a sec. They won't mind.

Raymond takes the lead, riding down the middle of the main road, periodically looking back to make sure the kid hasn't rode into a ditch. He chooses a bar called Dajio. It's full of locals. It's off-season here on Ocracoke.

Inside Raymond and the kid order beers. Star Trek The Next Generation is playing on the main TV. Raymond doesn't watch; he is too busy chatting up a group of four females sitting five seats over. The kid hears snippets of conversations. Raymond introduces himself, asks if they have boyfriends, offers to buy one a beer. It doesn't go well. Their body language screams leave us alone. He pushes onward. Raymond has never been a quitter.

The kid wanders outside to smoke a cigarette. Raymond eventually joins him. They talk about women. Raymond outlines his strategy. It involves perseverance, lots and lots of perseverance.

His eyes get bright. Do you have a boyfriend? Husband? Are you happy with him? What can I do to make you happy? Raymond will ask. Are you sure you're happy? He pauses a sec to take a drag. Sometimes they're happy. Most of the time they're happy. But not always. You gotta keep trying.

And try Raymond does. Every woman at the bar. The kid hears him apologize to a college-aged female for brushing her "beautiful breasts." He offers to lick spilled beer off the lap of another woman. She refuses his advances several times. Raymond is unfazed. He's seen it all before. Maybe the next woman will be more accommodating.

As the kid leaves the bar Raymond is still there, drinking and chatting up a middle-aged man. He is talking about harvesting oysters to fry this summer; he's already bought himself a pair of hip waders.

Yep, he figures he'll hang around Ocracoke for a spell, moving on when he gets the urge, because he's a still-less soul forever on the move.

So what does he do, the man he's been talking at for the last few minutes asks. Raymond doesn't pause, his eyes take on a look of remembrance. He's said this many times to many different people.

What does he do? He's a gypsy, man. A modern-day gypsy.

Outtake

2011-03-09T15:39:00.003-05:00

I'm in the process of writing a post about my experiences with fraternities and the tangential issues I have with Greek life for TWER. It's been a slow process. The below was originally part of the post, but I now realize it doesn't fit with what I'm trying to say. So here you go.

+++

I called the member of fraternity XYZ once, twice, three times. Just like the ticket said. No answer. I got out and walked toward the back door. It was open. “Do not disturb, initiation in progress,” a printed piece of paper taped to the doorframe read. I stuck my head inside. Nothing. I let out a tentative hello, unsure whether to announce my presence or to charge in bold and blind.

I was in week two of my job delivering for Willie’s Wings and Stuff. “Work hard, son. Just work hard,” my dad once told me, bemoaning a lazy kennel cleaner he’d hired then fired. My lifetime work experience began and ended with cleaning up dog droppings and trying to avoid getting clawed and chewed by cats my dad was sticking, feeling, or probing. I went inside.

The hallway directly off the backdoor was lit and empty. All the doors were closed. Think tumbleweed. I remember a twitchy halogen bulb overhead. Maybe that’s a memory glitch. Halfway down I heard what I sounded like chanting. Think large European churches. The sound was distant, as if I was hearing it from a block or two away. I made it to the end of hallway and opened the door. Pitch black. A stairwell. The chanting increased. Full on Gregorian. It seemed to be coming from the bottom of the stairs.

I quickly closed the door and started back the opposite direction, redialing “Adam” or “John” or “Stephen” as I walked. No answer. I stuck my head back outside. The wings in my hand were a package and I a postman from the ’50s. Rain or shine, through sickness or injury, I was gonna deliver. I walked back inside and opened a door leading to the stairwell closest to the backdoor entrance.

This stairwell was also dark, but runway lights lined the stairs. As I descended the chanting increased. Theater loud. The dark disoriented. I was sure monks were behind me, to my left, my right, hanging from the walls, directly in front of my face, just out of sight. At the bottom was a door. Through the narrow rectangular window was more darkness. I opened the door.

Attende Domine, et miserere, quia peccavimus tibi . . . The hallway was structured the same as the lit one a floor above. I checked my phone one last time as I steeled myself for entry. What would I find? Self-flagellation? Goat masks? Homoerotic exercises? Only one way to find out . . . Through the rattling hum of Latin chanting I felt a vibration. “Hello?” a voice asked tentatively. I put a finger in my opposite ear to hear. “Yeah, hey, I’ve got your Willie’s," I yelled. “Where are you?” “I’m inside. I’m coming out now,” I said hurriedly. Don’t blackbag me, I know nothing.

He was standing in the parking lot when I got outside. His face was pockmarked from youthful acne and his hair was sweaty and stuck flat to his head. He looked at me as if I’d seen him naked.

“You didn’t answer so I went inside,” I said. “Initiation?”

“Yeah, tonight’s our initiation. I was hoping you’d get here before my part came up.” He looked down and to the right, avoiding my eyes.

“Well, good luck with that.”

“Appreciate it. Have a good one.”

All We Got Is Time

2011-03-06T05:17:00.003-05:00

All my fellow Willie's employees are outcasts. They weren't the prom king or queen. They weren't voted best smile or nicest or whatever. They weren't the star quarterback or The Guy or Girl of their high school class. They outwardly disdain Greek life and all that goes with it. They're outsiders.

I consider myself an outsider. I don't look like an outsider. I don't come from an outsider family. My parents are still together. We're firmly entrenched in the middle class. I deliver wings in a car manufactured in 2011. Yet I still feel detached from Auburn — the Auburn Man.

It's something I've thought about a lot over the last couple months and weeks. How my path diverged and what that says about me. And what it says about them, those others that didn't question the traditional path paved with pussy and good fortune.

Every time I hear someone trash Frat Guys I think, that could've been me. I could've been that guy so easily. In fact, if I could go back, I would've dabbled in that life. Just to see.

Think I'm going to try and sit down and do some serious considering and writing about all that nonsense here soon. Might be nothing, might be something.

+++

If only I could transfer the words and thoughts and floating tidbits from my brain to the page exactly how I imagine them. If only. That's the struggle. It's never what you want it to be. That's not it at all. I wanted to say so much more.

Getting close is the only consolation.

+++

I don't have an addictive personality. (Knock on wood.) I've tried and quit various substances, and I've never felt an overwhelming, all-consuming urge to ingest anything before a certain arbitrary timeframe. Think I'm lucky in that regard.

That said, I'm trying to quit chapstick. It's been a day and a half and my lips are fire. I've been using chapstick daily (hourly) for the last two years or so. The main reason I'm quitting: I've misplaced two of my reserves and the third has become unusable. Which also explains my attitude toward home improvement. Toilet's broke? Fuck it. Got two others.

+++

Somewhat kitschy metaphor which describes life in a vague, Hallmark-card-pseudo-epiphany kind of way: Driving in the rain and trying to get the windshield wipers to match the ever-changing amount of precipitation. Too fast and the blades squeak and squawk. Too slow and you can't see a damn thing. Every now and again the blades and the amount of rain match perfectly. Those times are beautiful. They almost make the other maddening moments worth it.

Rue the Reckoning

2011-03-04T17:07:00.001-05:00

I will scream my love of Frisky Dingo from the mountaintop.

Be Bad

2011-03-03T03:40:00.004-05:00

I've been having a hard time writing lately. The words, they ain't a flowin. Jeremy's been having the same problem. We talked about it today. We're not sure what it is, why we aren't letting loose the flood, tapping the well, slicing the vein. Whatever you want to call it.

I can't and won't speak for Jeremy, but, for me, I'm pretty sure it's because I've built my identity as WRITER. That's what I am, ostensibly. I don't call myself a "writer," but that's what I tell myself I am. Or will be. Or want to be. Or aim to be. Or what the hell ever. We don't know ourselves. We simply try.

Writer or bust. And that's dangerous. Because I've let the mythos inside my head prevent actual work. I'm terrified. That's why I can't write. I'm so fucking scared I'm not going to be good enough. So ever little thing I write has to be the best thing I've ever written. Because the sun rises and sets on my success as a writer. What a terrible attitude.

Give myself permission to be bad. I wrote this on my hand while at work (I often write shit on my hand, should probably carry a notebook). A simple post about Frisky Dingo took me hours to write. I was paralyzed. Could barely string two sentences together. Is this profound? Will TWER readers be impressed by my sentence construction? Nobody gives a damn. Trust yourself, ya fool.

This blog is a practice field. There's been a lot of bad writing, poorly examined ideas, and hasty posts here. But that's OK. It is what it is. I'm not ashamed of the process. Thank you for sticking with me. I think it's all building to something one day. I'd still write if no one was reading, but it's nice there's a faithful few.

My college experience as a football analogy to this point

2011-03-01T07:58:00.003-05:00

On 1st down, fumbled the snap but it was recovered by the center "PARENTS," though I lost 2 yards on the play. 2nd down saw an easy and simple HB Dive for a gain back to the original line of scrimmage. On 3rd and 10, saw wideout "POLITICAL SCIENCE" on a fly route, but he has notoriously bad hands and was covered by a safety "YOUR MAJOR PLUS $1.50 WILL GET YOU A CUP OF COFFEE." So, I went through my progressions and threw a quick slant route to "JOURNALISM" slot receiver, though he was double covered by a linebacker "NO SALARY" and a cornerback "NON-EXISTENT JOB MARKET." Pass was completed for a gain of 4 yards. On 4th and 6, looking to save field position and having no better alternative, I elect to punt "LAW SCHOOL."

Per EDSBS

Paradox inside a conundrum

2011-02-28T02:44:00.003-05:00

My "public" life, that is my life not inside my head out amongst the peoples, is a constant war against self-consciousness. My writing life, that which allows and fuels my writing, is a wallowing in self-consciousness. The more time I spend alone and writing, the more socially awkward I become.

Dammit.

You're not that weird

2011-02-23T16:00:00.003-05:00

With the assistance of the captain of his sloop, Jemmy rigged some sails to his carriage, and after a few trials of the new contrivance in the lanes about Rawcliffe, he set off one day to Pontefract with all sail set. Having a fair wind he went at a dashing speed. When he reached the town every one turned out to see the wonderful ship that sailed on dry land.

But when Jemmy reached the first cross-street a puff of wind caught him sideways, upset the carriage, and flung Jemmy through the window of a draper's shop, smashing several panes. The crowd that followed speedily righted the carriage and extricated Jemmy, who paid for the damage he had done, and led the way to the nearest tavern, where he treated the whole crowd with ale. This bounty naturally elicited great enthusiasm, which exhibited itself in pro-longed cheers, to Jemmy's great delight, for he was one of the most conceited of men.

The authorities having intimated to him that he would not be allowed to sail back through the streets, the crowd yoked themselves to the carriage, and drew him triumphantly out of the town, and would have dragged him halfway to Rawcliffe had not a favourable wind sprung up, when Jemmy spread his sails again, and was blown out of sight of the crowd with expedition. He reached home without any further mishap.
--James Hirst — extreme eccentric, prankster, equalist

OUTKAST!

2011-02-22T09:28:00.002-05:00

Long post about OUTKAST! Read about OUTKAST! on TWER. OUTKAST!

Just found this

2011-02-22T04:51:00.001-05:00

Neat animation.

Don't kill yourself, Doug

2011-02-22T03:47:00.008-05:00

Doug Stanhope was in Birmingham Saturday. My friend Kevin and I went to see him. The show was in the upstairs room of the Birmingham bar Zydeco. For about two hours Doug drank and smoke and rambled through his set while dealing with drunk attention whores and buffoons. The set was brilliant and biting. Doug says shit. Real shit stripped of all nicety. Which is why he will never be popular. But also why I love him. More people should know about Doug Stanhope. The show was more rock concert than comedy show.

There's nothing quite like leaning against a pipe-covered wall in a darkened bar feeling the slight buzz of beer number three while listening to one of your intellectual heroes do what he does so well for two hours.

Stanhope sets are dense. There aren't many obvious "jokes." The punchlines aren't baldly paraded. He is more philosopher/social commentator than comic. I've seen a decent number of comedians live, and I've almost always walked out the door with several takeways I can mentally chuckle and mull over. Stanhope is more visceral. Stanhope is something you experience. Listening to Stanhope is like reading the best kind of book. He seeps into your brain*.

I do, though, remember one particular portion of his Saturday set. Early on, I think it was, when someone in the crowd was being drunk and belligerent, Doug said something to the effect: Nothing you do tonight will have any effect on me at all. Short of shooting me or shooting at me, I've seen every possible thing you can do. He then bashed Birmingham saying he it's a bridge he can burn and "Why do you think we scheduled Birmingham and Chattanooga as two of the first stops?" He, of course, didn't totally phone it in. He cares about his fans. The man's a pro.

I've co-opted that attitude, that — there's nothing you can do or say that will effect me personally on any level — ambivalence, for my work at Willie's. It's gotten to where working is almost, not quite, of course, but almost, almost like watching someone deliver wings through a smudged window. I sometimes feel like a voyeur in my own body.

For example: Couple nights ago I took an order from a black woman, a poor black woman, who lives in an apartment complex that is basically government housing. She ordered some wings, lemon pepper probably, and french fries. At one point in the call she conferred with someone off-phone and asked if they wanted some Sprite. She never actually told me she wanted Sprite. Repeat: She never actually said, "And add four Sprites to my order." After a long deliberation with whomever, she asked me how much it would cost. "For the wings and fries?" I asked in a pleasant, non-frustrated tone. "Yeah." I told her and we parted ways forever. I thought.

But, alas!, she called back after her food was delivered.

"Where's my Sprite?"

"Excuse me?"

"I ordered four Sprites and they're not here."

"Mam, you didn't actually say you wanted Sprite."

"Yes I did! Yes I did!" She starts yelling about how she has nothing to drink and how she said she wanted Sprite. She's really, really mad I didn't have the driver deliver her four Sprites.

I start laughing. She's pissed. I wonder what she looks like right now. I wish she was here so I could see her hop and yell and tell me how I'm a terrible order taker and a second-rate delivery driver.

That's when I knew: there's nothing she could say that would have any effect on me whatsoever.

"You're a terrible delivery driver." Don't care.

"You're fucking stupid and I hope you die." Yawn.

"I'm gonna shit in your exhaust pipe." Can I watch?

The trick is, and this is where Stanhope is miles and miles ahead of me, is getting that ambivalent about the reaction and reception of something you actually care about. Now, if someone leaves an anonymous comment on something I wrote saying the prose is hackneyed and I'll never amount to anything as a writer, well, that still stings a bit. (A lot. . . More than I would like to admit.)

*He may or may not call me a faggot for writing that paragraph.

Twilight Zone Life

2011-02-22T01:49:00.002-05:00

I'm existing in the time-between-time which is Willie's Wings and Stuff, so I'm wide awake at 12:49 a.m. after passing out at 7 or so and sleeping until about an hour ago. And that's after I fell asleep at 6 a.m. yesterday. I have no contact with the normal, 9-5 world.

So I'm awake and I've decided I want to go to the library. Before I go, I'm gonna drop some quotations from A Fan's Notes: A Fictional Memoir by Frederick Exley, which is a very good book written by an institutionalized alcoholic obsessed with the Giants. Of course it's more than that. It's his whole life. And it's heartbreaking and human. Worth a read.

(Long, exhaustive post about Outkast should be posted on TWER today. Was ready to post yesterday but Jeremy was unsure about the words "nigga," "oral openings," and "genitalia.")

Why did football bring me so to life? I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity—perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.

. . .

We were Wops and Polacks and Irishmen out of Flatbush, along with one mad dreamer out of the cold, cow country up yonder, and though we may not have had the background, or the education, to weep at Prince Hamlet's death, we had all tried enough times to pass and kick a ball, we had on our separate rock-strewn sandlots taken enough lumps and bruises, to know that we were viewing something truly fine, something that only comes with years of toil, something very like art.

. . .

"Don't you know? I want a destiny that's grand enough for me! Like Michelangelo's God reaching out to Adam, I want nothing less than to reach across the ages and stick my dirty fingers into posterity! Want? Why, there's nothing I don't want! I want this, and I want that, and I want—well, everything!" Taut with self-loathing, I added, "And, incidentally, that's my theme song, you know?" Then I broke into song. "Aye, yi, yii, yiii . . . fair sen-yor-eeee-tah!"

. . .

Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.

. . .

I certainly didn't want to fight with him. I did, however, want to shout, "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss" -- all those things I so cherishly cuddled in my slef-pitying bosom. I didn't, of course, say any such thing.

. . .

What I am now certain I am beseeching them to consider is that of itself longevity is utterly without redeeming qualities, that one has to live the contributive, the passionate, life and that this can as well be done in twenty-six (hence Keats) as in a hundred and twenty-six years, done in no longer than the time it takes a man to determine whether the answer is yea or nay.

Flashback

2011-02-19T00:45:00.004-05:00

I saw some shit on Twitter about this year's Southeastern Journalism Conference — a self-masbutaroy roundtable where aspiring journalists (read: nerds) get together and congratulate each other on being mediocre. I'm pretty sure I had a couple editorials entered. Doubt I won anything. I was not a very good editorial writer. Could never gather the necessary pompous outrage. The other side always seemed plausible. All my op-eds read like a shrug.

This year's conference is in Troy. Last year's was in New Orleans. Here's a story from the archives about me setting a stripper's nipples on fire while not giving one damn about the "competition."

(This was during a minimalist phase. I think I was emulating Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son then. Maybe Bukowski played a role as well. If I were to rewrite this particular post, there'd be more inner-monologue and narration. But I'm not going to, so here you go.)

+++

"You boys looking to have fun?"

"We're poor college students. No money for dances, sorry."

She scratches her leg. She says her name. It's either Harley or Marly. I decide Harley, like the motorcycle.

"That's fine. I am not in hurry. I'm just trying to get in the flow. Just got here. It's crazy out there. Took me 50 minutes to walk 10 blocks."

She continues scratching her leg. It's as if her hand is a rake and her left leg is a fertile field. Tilling the earth for coca trees, I assume.

She talks some more. Something about don't trust that bitch behind you and find her if I need to know what's what. And don't use the ATM. There is a $15 withdrawl fee.

"I don't usually talk this much. Must be the Adderall. I appreciate you being honest with me. About the dances."

"Sure. You can go make money whenever. Don't let me keep you."

"No worries. I am just getting the vibe."

She's not young. But she's not old. She's in limbo. I'd guess she's 30, but I always guess high on strippers.

There is a lull in the conversation. She stands and lowers her top.

"Lookee here."

I do. She sits back down.

"Is that a tongue ring?" one of the guys with me asks.

"Yep. And it vibrates."

"Can I feel?" he asks.

She opens her mouth. He sticks his finger inside.

"That's awesome," he says.

She looks back at me.

"Have you ever seen someone light their nipples on fire?"

I feel my eyes get wide. "No, I can't say I have."

"Do you have any matches? Like the one's that are in a book. A matchbook would be best."

I start patting pockets. My companion does as well. There is a fervor. We both really want to see her nipples on fire.

"Aha. Here you go," he says, handing her a black matchbook that reads Larry Flynt's Hustler Club which he'd picked up the night before.

She takes one and hands the matchbook to me.

"Lick it and split the end. Like this." She takes the non-flammable side of the match out of her mouth and splits it down the middle, forming a mini-clamp.

I do the same and hand it to her.

She lowers her shirt and places a match on each nipple.

"All right. Light 'em up."

I reach into my pocket and retrieve a lighter. I look at Harley, narrow cheeks, hand working left leg, top down, matches on nipples, curly hair framed by pulsing neon.

Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind is playing. A blonde with fake tits is wearing a pharaoh's hat and licking a middle-aged man's ear on the main stage.

I light the nipple matches.

They look like candles and her a cake. She smiles. I smile. My friend blows out the right match. I wait. How often do you get to see flaming tits? I think. The feeling is primordial. Something in the Y chromosome attracts men to breasts and fire. The combination is almost too much.

She begins to look worried. I blow out the left match.

She takes the burnt matches off and tosses them on the table. She pulls her top back up.

"I'm just trying to make my first dollars." Our faces must have asked why.

I reach into my wallet and pull out two ones. Her crotch lifts and she points to her underwear.

"Or you can put it in here," she says, cupping her right breast.

I self-consciously put one in each location. Drinks here are expensive.

She stands, leaving her Newport in the ashtray.

"I'm off to work. You find me if you need something. Any advice or whatever."

She starts to walk away, stops, turns her head and looks at the still smoldering cigarette. She takes an undecided shuffle toward our table, changes her mind and walks toward the bar.

Three Stacks

2011-02-16T16:01:00.016-05:00

I'm laughing at the calendars and clocks/ Ascot to match the socks/ What's in your Speakerboxxx?
Andre 3000 is the smartest, deepest, funniest, and greatest rapper ever. The man is a poet.

(The rest of that song not involving Big Boi, who is a brilliant rapper himself, is fucking terrible. Sleepy Brown switches sunglasses and coats as he leaves groups of beautiful black women for other groups of beautiful black women. His repeated words: I can't wait. No, I can't wait.)

First 1:00.

First 1:35

Product is hooking them before they brains get fully developed/ They get enveloped by the vision teller/ The television tells them their vision/ So now its hard for them to make decisions without feeling uncool, unschooled, thumb-ruled/ Rule of thumb: you can't be dumb

0:45-2:00

PRESCIENT

2011-02-15T21:45:00.001-05:00

Who knows what Gus Malzahn is going to do? Maybe not even Gus Malzahn. Once Chizik and Co. start rolling with recruiting, once the depth and talent level approach something close to even, things are going to start getting real in Auburn.

Last Friday kicked down the door. Yeah, that door. The one labeled “National Championship Contenders.”
--Nov. 30, 2009

Boom.

Clowning

2011-02-15T17:23:00.005-05:00

No pressure, Jadeveon. You're only carrying the dreams of an entire fanbase. You're only expected to be the best defensive end in the history of its program. You're only supposed to deliver SC its first SEC Championship in your freshman year playing an impact position in the most challenging conference in college football against future NFL tackles and tight ends who will no doubt employ all sorts of chip blocks and double teams you never saw or dreamed of in high school.

Honest question to which I do not have an answer: How much impact can a true freshman* defensive end have?

THIS IS A VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF FLATTENED DREAMS. HAHAHAAH IT WAS VERY FUN.

*Assuming qualification. Still in doubt it seems. I hope he qualifies. Honestly. I'm excited to see him play.

In the land of TWER:

2011-02-11T13:56:00.003-05:00

. . . a basically empty, insecure person whose whole life involved trying to impress people and manipulate their view of me in order to compensate for the inner emptiness . . .

David Foster Wallace wants to be your best friend.

I AM ME

2011-02-09T23:36:00.004-05:00

I guess my point is: this is the life I dreamed of as a boy. I got into this business to see new things. I’m vain about my thick-ass passport. Yes, I’m a cliché: I grew up obsessed with Hemingway. I wanted his sentences—and his life. I’ve been to his house in Cuba and in Key West. I’ve been to the Floridita in Havana and Harry’s Bar in Venice. I wanted an adventure. The search for it inspires me. In that sense, it makes me a better writer. I like exploring new cultures. I love new experience. I like being outside my comfort zone. I seek that feeling. So it makes me a good reporter. I hope. It helps my work. I think. I hear people talking about “the writing life,” and part of me rolls my eyes, but another part says: that’s what I want. I don’t want to be in media, or create buzz, or be a brand (though I do think about that), or have a take, or yell at people on television, or be followed by a million people on twitter (I’m not on twitter), or anything like that. I want a life that takes me out into the world and allows me to come back with stories that matter to people. I want to do each of those stories as best as I can.
--Wright Thompson

Yes yes yes. 1,000 x's Yes.

I just want to tell stories that impact people's lives in some way. I don't want to contribute to the isolation through self-promoting Facebook messages and tweets. I don't want to be part of the media. I don't want to be a polemicist or a pundit or a talking head or an ideologue of any kind. I'm not on your side or their side; I'm on everybody's side. I don't want to be a part of any group. I am me. That is enough.

Update: I am now crying. Maybe one day I will be able to write like Wright Thompson.

Believe in The Chubb

2011-02-08T13:58:00.001-05:00

New column over at TWER about apathy, Auburn basketball, football players, Rob Chubb, and Geico.

Wisdom of Jesters

2011-02-07T21:11:00.005-05:00

In that situation, alienated from my normal surroundings, I realized that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you'll find you've become a butcher. And if you don't want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you're going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.

. . .

They don't seem to realize that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they're going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materializes. But everything's not going to be made of leather, the world won't stink of sherbet. Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you'll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to animals—you'll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.
--Russell Brand

For all the heroin, pot, LSD, drinking, and sex, it's a surprisingly coherent and honest memoir. The whole thing reads like a long story. He, or his ghostwriter, I like to think it was Russell, writes with an easy conversational flow, which is about the best thing I can say about a celebrity memoir.

I will always love Star Wars humor

2011-02-04T17:05:00.004-05:00

Gonna start writing a weekly music, movie, book, anything vaguely "cultural" sharefest over at TWER. The first one about Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop was posted today. Not sure what form future posts will take.

If only. . .

2011-02-03T05:03:00.003-05:00

Decide what matters, and do the best you can. The rest is ancillary.

Maybe that whiffs of naivete and cynicism, but, as far as I can tell, that's the essential question of life, once you get past dogma and self-importance. Now all you have to do is be honest with yourself and recognize your own bullshit in a way which does not totally crush your spirit and zest for life.

Reporting from Willie's

2011-02-01T18:22:00.000-05:00

If you're not busy tomorrow, if you don't work or if you're not a productive member of society, you should join The War Eagle Reader's Recruiting LiveBlog. We will converse on a diverse range of topics, mostly involving the life choices of children.

It'll be super fun!

Get you that respect

2011-02-01T14:04:00.002-05:00

"You don’t have to be overly macho. You don’t have to be over-complimentary. Gain her respect. And that’s treating her as an equal. Don’t bullshit her. Treat her as a human being. Treat her as you would treat yourself. As soon as you have that respect from her, she’ll treat you with the same respect that you show. Then you fuck the shit out of her."
--John Holmes

He was Dirk Diggler, basically. He claimed to have slept with 14,000 women. He also had a very large penis.

When heroes get handsy

2011-02-01T00:02:00.003-05:00

Tit grabbing marauder?

I was halfway through my Chappy's roast beef and mushroom sandwich (too many mushrooms) when my girlfriend* told me she got kicked out of SkyBar for throwing a drink in Kenny Irons' face. He grabbed her ass. Not once, not twice, but three times. She told him, after the second handfull, not to do it a third time. Kenny, being Kenny, gave her the backdoor hello once more — Kenny's never been much of a quitter — so she gave him a whisky sour to the face. . . . And then she quickly got the boot. SkyBar, being a shrine to all things evil and wrong with our fair town and country, worships athletes and the status associated therein.

She don't play. Even if it was Kenny Irons circa 2007.

When I told her of my trip to Pat Dye's Shangri-La, she told me Dye, who was drunk at the time, probably on Evan Williams if I had to guess, just a guess admittedly, grabbed her breasts several times. They were at some country club, and he was no doubt full of old-man-could-give-a-damn. Don't you know I'm Pat Dye?

She don't care.

In review: My girlfriend has been physically felt** by Kenny Irons and Pat Dye. If I could build an Auburn Mount Rushmore, those two men (Dye certainly, Kenny depending on the day and mood) would be immortalized on it.

I'm still trying to decide how I feel about this information.

*I say "my girlfriend" not to demean or imply her self-worth is somehow connected to her status as my lady. It's not at all. I do not wish to spread her name, for her sake. Even if a portion of you know me personally. So: easy jackals.

**I don't think molested is the proper term. Seems a bit heavy for the situation.

The Tingles

2011-01-30T06:16:00.008-05:00

A famous academic paper in the 70′s coined a term for the costs of too much information: narcotizing dysfunction. The authors described a world where people are bombarded with more than they can possibly consume, or possibly comprehend as a result of the mass media. In the face of the overwhelming deluge, we spend more and more time reading and listening, leaving less and less space for action. Knowing about problems comes to replace doing something about them. And beneath our superficial understanding of our surroundings is a growing apathy. Information becomes a substitute for action because it is a manageable and achievable end, action is replaced because to chase it is to accept futility.
--Ryan Holiday

Because when you find something that confirms preconceived notions, you pass it along and name it momentary self-assurance.

A note ringing true in the comments:

“Stick with first impressions. Don’t extrapolate. And nothing can happen to you. Or extrapolate. Form a knowledge of all that can happen in the world.”
--Papa-M Aurelius

I wrote for TWER* the other day about the guy who edited every version of the "All I Do is Win" tunnel video. Not gotta make you shit fire, but it does the job. (Maybe I say that because it hasn't gotten the same number of inspiring and self-affirming comments as the shaker post, few though they may be, though this particular post wouldn't and shouldn't. On some level I realize. But I am in no way above flattery and anonymous encouragements.)

I like the inspirational video more. The song's from Inception. Gets me all tingly and happy.

*With generous editorial help from Jeremy.