You’re So Hot I Want to Eat Your Underwear

Right when we got into the store I realized I forgot my phone in the car. On my way back to the car I noticed a good looking woman getting out of her car which was parked next to mine. She opened her trunk and started shuffling things around, her perfume moving through the parking lot. By the time you’ve reach my advanced age there’s no reason to gawk when you see something pleasant. You’ve seen thousands of good looking women in your day.

It’s not a big deal.

Not anymore.

I was walking behind her when I noticed this old feller sitting in his truck that had a faded NRA sticker on his back window. He saw the woman and his eyes bugged out of his head. He wasn’t discrete and ran his ancient eyes up and down her body. When she got to the side of his truck he used his side mirror to get some more. When she got to the other side of his truck he used the passenger side mirror to get even more. He still wasn’t satisfied and got out of his truck, lifted the hood, and acted like he was fiddle-faddling with the engine so he could watch her enter the store. The fucker shook his head in amazement and licked his lips.

No lie.

He licked his lips.

It was both sick and terribly sad.

I wanted to blow his dick off with a shotgun. I wanted to light an M-80 and tape it to his jerk-off hand. I found my friend who was looking at a painting with a pig jumping into a lake. I told her what I saw.

“Really?” she said, looking at me like if I lost my mind. “Poor old man. He probably has some bitchy wrinkled wife at home. If that’s the case you can’t blame him, right? Don’t get too disgusted, babe. That’s gonna be your ass in a few years.”

Nino’s Shit Pie

I like watching food shows. After spending too many years in the restaurant business I came to appreciate the art of cooking. At one point I even contemplated going to culinary school, but the thought of being around packs of bitchy whiny “chefs” for even ten minutes depressed me. So, I ditched the idea and got an English degree. Can’t say it was a better decision. I was still surrounded by bitchy whiny people. The only difference was I didn’t reek of poached eggs and sea bass when the day was done. I reeked of Kafka and Goblin Markets.

The last year I’ve watched a lot of TV. NATGEO. A&E. ESPN. The History Channel. The Food Network. The Travel Channel. I’m hooked on the Travel Channel. I’ve seen everything it dishes out at least twice.

I’ve watched hours of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Zimmern spans the globe eating things most people won’t. Frog hearts. Lamb eyeballs. Balls. Brains. Bugs. Porcupine. Lizards. Tuna sperm. Spiders and snake dick just to name a few. If you can stomach watching Andrew pop disgusting or “exotic” food in his gaping mouth (he actually does “pop” the food in his mouth and smacks when he chews), and the sight of a fat bald American wearing pastel-colored shirts then this show’s for you.

I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. He’s a lush, a jackass, and a pretty good writer. It seems to me that people either love or hate him. He doesn’t wear pastel-colored shirts, but sports equally ugly button shirts, wiry gray hair, scuffed boots, and a lone earring in his left ear. Really, Bourdain? One earring in your left ear? Are we still doing the left-ear-I’m-straight thing? Jesus Christ. Throw that shit away. Or give it to your niece.

I don’t care much for Rachel Ray. Too cheesy. When she hits the tube I tune into ESPN and watch the always bitter Skip Bayless defend white athletes and stir it up on First and Ten.

I like Samantha Brown, but I don’t watch her show much. I think it’s because she looks like a girl I once dated. The apparent differences are that Samantha has a pleasant disposition, smiles, travels the world, and doesn’t have a thing for wearing fuck me boots.

I’ve seen every episode of Man v. Food. Yeah, I know, the show is stupid. But I like stupid entertainment. The reasons why I like Mike Myers films are the same reasons why I can sit through hours watching Adam Richman eating giant burritos and burgers. I’ve seen him go from a husky dude from New York to a bloated dude from New York. According to Wikipedia he exercises twice a day while on the road. I doubt it. If you like cheap surface entertainment then check out Man v. Food. It’s awesome.

There are other shows.

Food Wars (hosted by a pretty girl named Camille Ford).

Carnivore Chronicles.

Hot Dog Paradise.

Bacon Paradise.

So on and so forth.

One day I saw a special on pizza. It was called Pizza Paradise. The show went across the country showcasing the best pizza in the land. Now, I don’t come from N.Y or Chicago so pizza is just pizza to me. Meat, cheese, and sauce slapped on some cardboard. Chuck on some veggies for some color and there you go: pizza.

So I was floored when some tacky jerk-off named Nino Selimaj of Nino’s Bellissima sold a 12-inch pizza that costs $1,000. Yes, you heard right: $1,000! But you won’t get greasy Italian meats and diced veggies on this pizza. Lord no. This silly asshole plops down caviar and thinly sliced lobster on his pizza. But wait! Not only do you have the luxury of shelling out $1,000 and sinking your choppers into what appears to be a really shitty-tasting pizza, but Nino himself (decked out in a suit, oily slicked back hair, and tanned wrists wrapped in mafia gold) will deliver his pizza to you in person!

Oh, joy.

Really, Nino? Will you do that for me?

Fuck.

Things you’ve said under your breath.

Things people have said with their last dying breath.

Things that drive people to drink.

Things that made Jesus think, “Maybe I’m in the wrong line of business…”

Things you can only find in Detroit.

Things that make you jump for joy.

Things that make people jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Things that get stuck between your teeth.

Things you’ve stuck in your ear, up your nose, or up your butt.

Things that change from ugly to beautiful.

Things that frighten you.

Things that enliven you.

Things to help raise your credit score.

Things to help lower your cholesterol.

Things organisms have done to adapt & survive.

Things that make certain men become priests.

Things that make certain women wrestle alligators.

Things serial killers think about.

Things you find in a dead man’s pockets.

Things you find in your own pockets.

Things named after Greek Gods.

Things people have done in the name of God.

Things that cause acne.

Things that cause cancer.

Things to consider before having a baby.

Things to consider before joining the French Foreign Legion.

Things you’d do if you had wings.

Things you’d do if you had the Green Lantern’s power ring.

Things to help clear your aura.

Things you can clear out of your orifices.

Things you should always buy generic.

Things you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.

Things associated with winter.

Things associated with summer.

Things you’d do if you only had a week left to live.

Things you’d do if you were President.

Things the atom bomb thinks before going boom.

Things the flower bud thinks before going bloom.

Things they put into processed meats.

Things you do during the five stages of grief.

Things you’ve learned from the Bible.

Things you’ve learned from the National Enquirer.

Things to say while sexting.

Things you should never say to someone who’s depressed.

Things you forget.

Things you desire.

Things you’ve done while under the influence of drugs.

Things you’ve done while under the influence of love.

Things that make you go “Hmmm…”

Things you see when staring up at clouds.

Things your pets do when you’re not around.

Things you can smoke.

Things you can recycle.

Things behind the sun.

Things to make your car run better.

Things you find alongside the road

Things you find washed up on the beach.

Things you build.

Things you compete for.

Things you do when you’re alone in your room.

Things Van Gogh thought just before cutting off his ear.

Things that go in one ear and out the other.

Things you can burn.

Things you can save.

Things to say to get a girl wet.

Things to say to get a guy hard.

Things to say to get kicked off jury duty.

Things you can carry.

Things you can hide.

Things that decay.

Things that rejuvenate.

Things made of plastic.

Things made of corn.

Things put into time capsules.

Things put into compost piles.

Things that live under your skin.

Things you find around Jim Morrison’s grave.

Things that remind you of Buddha.

Things that remind you of Judas.

Things your doctor won’t tell you.

Things your parents won’t tell you.

Things your lover won’t tell you.

Things your best friend won’t tell you.

Things the major corporations won’t tell you.

Things the government won’t tell you.

Will never tell you.

Click here to see the author recite this piece.

Two senior citizens, women with a slow drawl to their aging voices, I watched as they scrabbled for information. They were desperate for it. The pair strained their ears, they were actually standing in their seats, trying to find the best angle to capture the snatches of detail. A train conductor was the one speaking, his voice being carried intermittently on the air and around the train’s door. I was interested, not in the story of the injured boy on the train track, but why these two women, completely unrelated to the whole scenario, were so desperate for information.

Rubberneckers. The train wreck you can’t look away from. The gaggle that gathers around an incident, all without shame, barefaced curiosity seekers apparently anonymous among their brothers and sisters. You see it all the time. Should a police car pull up to the curb and the blue shirts inside get out, you’re guaranteed at least one curtain will open and its owner peer outside. People love to stick their noses in. The train station I was at with the old women wringing their hands to find out what was going on, that was a non-event. I don’t know what happened, but two ambulance officers, a St John’s officer and two members of the police were poking around the train line on the other side of the station. Two young girls who seemed to know the boy were sobbing and consoling one another, “He’ll be alright, he’ll be OK,” while a policeman interviewed them. Another took photos. I bet you’re dying to know what happened. I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. I didn’t find out. I looked though, snuck a peek. You’d do the same. You might be like the fellow who walked over to the other side of the station and looked over, right above the officers doing their work. He just strolled up, hands in his pockets, and looked over the edge.

I thought it was kind of rude.

I saw another incident involving a much larger gathering. Swanston Street in Melbourne, and a large crowd, about thirty or forty regular people crowded around the side of the road. This bulge of humans meant I had to walk around them to continue travelling. Unfortunately, the friends I was with detached and went to join the group. I sighed and sat down on a park bench nearby, waiting, watching as every person in that horde tried their hardest to get a better view. Like the pulsing swarm of punters at a music gig, squeezing and pushing to get to the front row. The main event here on Swanston Street was an act of violence, the aftermath, the punters hoping to get a little glimpse of the tension. At a gig you hope to get a guitar pick or drumstick to take as a souvenir. The gathering of rubberneckers were hoping for a mental photograph of the pool of blood, a broken jaw or a mashed in face. I know what happened in this scenario. Are you dying to find out? There was blood. There was a broken jaw. The police were involved. Tantalising, isn’t it? As a consequence, we were late to where we were going.

Why do people have such a macabre hunger for these sorts of events? Don’t they feel weird about it, standing over an injured boy or an arrested vagrant, staring down at them with no pretence? It’s clear they are there out of interest. I feel rude. Making it obvious I’m having a good hard look makes me uncomfortable. It seems like none of my business. The police are there, the ambulance officers are there, someone’s being treated or arrested, they’re probably a little embarrassed, or will be when they look back on it. I don’t imagine I’m helping that situation much by standing not but two feet away, staring like an open mouthed idiot. Maybe it’s just me.

Whatever the reason, all these people want the information. They want to go home and tell their friends the story that sparked up their otherwise average day. They want to store away the moment to bring out again at a party, when the conversation turns to recounts of similar stories. It’s really a purely selfish interest, a crowd of spectators without a sport.

I have this sudden desire to make French toast. It’s 3:18 AM Central Standard Time on February 9, 2011, and I ate dinner hours ago, and more recently I prepared myself a late-night snack. But enjoying a full stomach very early on a Wednesday morning doesn’t make me crave the French toast any less. What matters is it’s 10 degrees outside, and the wind is howling at 35 miles per hour, and it’s snowing heavily.

Since it’s snowing, that means I need French toast. And I need it now.

But there’s a problem. When I go to the store, there’s no bread on the shelves. There are no eggs. I do find a few cartons of milk, but they aren’t really milk but almond milk, Silk-brand Pure Almond Dark Chocolate Milk with ExtraAntioxidants.

Over the years, I’ve been proud to have my fiction appear alongside writers I greatly admire (William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Margaret Atwood). The first poems I ever published came out in an issue of The Hudson Review that contained James Wright’s last-from his wonderful final book, This Journey. It meant a lot to me.

I’ve recently been doing a big clean out…and in staggering down memory lane, one name keeps appearing with baffling frequency…LYN LIFSHIN. She is everywhere. And of course, my humble publication record doesn’t even give the slightest hint of just how truly ubiquitous she is.

If there’s ever been a journal that has published poetry, the Vegas odds are she’s been in it. It’s astounding. Over 120 books she’s published–I think. Thousands of mag publications. Literally.

I’m torn between admiring such prolific output…and wondering about all the postage. I imagine all the cover letters…the envelopes laid out in long hallways (like M.C. Escher winding stairs). What must the machine behind that enterprise look like? Simply to keep so much material out in the mail is a logistical feat.

And keeping track. Last week I got a “thanks but no thanks” letter from the Indiana Review–for work submitted three years ago! I’d forgotten I’d written the piece, let alone sent it. Maybe Lyn’s just really well organized.

I think too of the loneliness of some poor editor of what will end up being a two issue journal or webzine…and they don’t get a submission from Lyn. How would you feel? Lyn, we’re waiting…

I’ve occasionally considered the possibility that Lyn isn’t actually an individual, but a code name for a cooperative.

Then the truly disturbing notion occurred that perhaps she’s doing a Joyce Carol Oates on us (one of the funniest articles I’ve ever read was on Oates, in the Atlantic Monthly, called “Stop Me Before I Write Again”)…not only publishing endlessly under her own name, but under a range of pseudonyms. Lyn might be sitting back and thinking, “Hmm, I’ve got 200 poems I wrote yesterday, how am I going to get them all out?” Yes, a ticklish question arises for Lyn Lifshin scholars-just how much contemporary poetry is she responsible for?

Questions fill my mind in the case of writers like Lifshin and Oates. Do they lick all the stamps themselves? Have they ever lost a piece of writing? I just found a whole book I’d forgotten about and am resurrecting. A BOOK-not one poem or story. Admittedly, one of the reasons I’d forgotten about the book is that it was written in a period of deep alcoholic and narcotic confusion in Tonga, where it actually seemed like a reasonable proposition to shoot a speargun at a government official trying to protect himself with a giant tortoiseshell (I got the bastard, don’t you worry–right in the thigh-and then I got my passport back).

I watched 200 handwritten pages blow out the window of a twin engine Otter over Papua New Guinea and seriously considered going after them (I was skydiving then and figured the jungle canopy would be kind to me). Then I thought they looked rather lovely floating down. They reminded me of a great moment at an old Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference concerning the soon to die John Gardner–his angry ex-wife had hired a plane to drop leaflets all over sunny green Middlebury, exposing his cadlike behavior. My friend Stanley Elkin, who had to walk with a cane because of MS, insisted I scurry after some. Tim O’Brien and I laughed ourselves sick.

I wonder too if Lyn and Joyce are now diligent about backing up. They’d be good backers up. Press Save. Press Send. I only recently lost 150 pages in a computer crash. Bang. Gone. Imagine how Lyn and Joyce would feel.

I’m very suspicious of people who are well organized and save everything. Hunter S. Thompson (someone you’d think I’d be pretty supportive of) worried me with his neatly mimeographed letters.

As Miles Davis once said…and I happened to hear because I was the only one with him…he wasn’t exactly talking to me…”Not all music has to be heard to be listened to.” It was kind of a Bruce Lee insight.

Some writers are so prolific you wonder how they have time to even proofread their work, let alone actually read it back and consider. William T. Vollman is a good example. You can skip not just pages, but whole sections. Hell, you can skip books.

What’s my point? Well, I don’t apologize for that speargun incident one bit. That dill hole had it coming and I nailed him. I tracked him down and I hit the target. It happened in the lobby of the Dateline Hotel. I pressure packed him and reassured the guests who witnessed it. “Just a personal matter,” I said.

It’s easy to forget words-and let’s face it, most of them should be forgotten. I couldn’t quote a Lyn Lifshin poem to save my balls. You remember people you wound-and help.

The strategy of trying to put out as much as you can into the fossil record of culture is fair. Just as long as it has the thzing. That’s what the speargun sounded like.

It was beautiful. I took a pompous little civil servant down, on the run, at 10 feet, missing a major artery. I got my passport back and legal clearance to leave the country. I left behind the book I was writing then. Cost of doing business. It’s taken me a long time to learn just what business I’m in.

It’s called Thzing. Our mission statement is “Wounding and helping.” We choose our shots-and when to extend a hand. Let others crank shit out.

This is the face of pure evil. Her name is Eddie. We call her Special Ed.

I know what you’re thinking. Ah, she’s soooo cute. Wrong. She’s deceiving. Those big dumb eyes are no more than fishing lures. She wants you to pet her, to feed her, to tolerate her. “Please,” she’s saying. “Treat me like a princess.”

Which is all well and good, you might say. She’s a cat. Cats are instinctively selfish beings. They do what it takes to make us love them, because love means food and warmth and tummy rubs. They feign interest because it gets them the attention they need.

Victor knew that Christmas was important to me.  None of the kids could come and they were really too busy for us to visit.  I asked Victor to take me on a trip.  Maybe away from home, I wouldn’t feel the pull of Christmases past.  That may have been where I made my mistake.  It turns out that it’s Christmas wherever you go.

The trip could’ve been flawless, but someone in Dubai gave me the evil eye. I didn’t see it happening, but I know when I get smacked by a witch.  My eyes and eyebrows started itching.  Before long my eyes were all but lost in a sea of red swollen skin.  I looked like I had been mugged. I scratched out almost all of my eyebrow hair.

My ears began swelling next, itching and also turning red.  My earlobes looked like individual testicles, dangling next to my face.  I’m here to tell you that turning 63 was enough to face, without looking hideous as well. (If you thought I’d provide a picture here, you certainly don’t know me as well as you thought.) Over a two-week period it gradually got better, so it appeared that, thankfully, that evil affliction was not a permanent one.

Then we got to Singapore and I looked almost normal, although my ears still felt a bit funny and, of course, I didn’t have much in the way of eyebrows, which is an unusual look. Now you would think that the evil eye had finished its dastardly work, right?  That’s what I thought.

I took what was supposed to be a soothing bath the first morning of our week in Singapore and threw my back out.  To be more precise, I threw my butt out.  I don’t know how.  Nothing whatsoever happened.  I just felt this shooting pain and that was it.  I didn’t let it stop me from enjoying Singapore with Victor, though.  It is a wonderful place, I’ll tell you about it another time.  We walked all over Singapore.  Seven days of walking and being enthralled.  I was okay walking.  Walking only ached.  What I couldn’t do was sit.  Sitting hurt.  Getting up from sitting to standing was agony.  But after being up for a few minutes, making the quietest whiney noises I could, the worst of the spasm would pass and I could walk pretty much normally.

As the wonderful week in Singapore was coming to an end, the hotel rules were that we had to leave the room at 10:30 am.  This was reasonable, however our plane was not due to leave until 11:30 pm, so we bought time in the hotel until 6 pm and also another day of Internet access, in case there was an emergency back home.

We went to the airport at 6pm and checked in, five and a half hours early for our flight.  Our actual trip home was 27 hours, in steerage, of course, counting the wait for the second plane at Heathrow.

They make you sit on planes.  I kept trying to stand up.  I tried to explain.  They don’t care what your reason is; they want you to sit.  It was a long time sitting.  Flight Attendants do not provide drugs.  I asked.  I think that is a glaring hole in their passenger service.  Flight Attendants should provide drugs.  It would be better for the passengers and also better for the Flight Attendants.  Where’s the down side?

Thankfully, the flights were just about on time and we got home when they said we would.  When I got in the house, I called the doctor’s office.  This was Wednesday afternoon.  I couldn’t get in to see him until Monday.

I stood for days.  I had “compulsory TV watching with Victor” while standing at the bar in the TV room.  I stood all the time except when in bed.  I can be in a lying position, but only on my side, with a pillow between my knees. (That reminded me of how I had to sleep when I was pregnant.  That was a nice memory.)

I had an MRI because the orthopedist wanted to see inside my lumbar region.  (That is the polite way to say that he wanted to see what was cooking inside my butt.)  The MRI was fun.  You are cocooned and you wear earplugs and they send you into a cylinder.  It’s very comforting.  It is surprisingly noisy though, so I kept waking up thinking how bad the music was.  I was sorry when the 30 minutes were up.  It was very relaxing.

Unfortunately, my orthopedist just went on vacation for two weeks, and although they said that I would find out the results overnight, they didn’t really mean it.

Well, it’s been a week since my MRI and I finally got the report.  The problem is that I have no idea what it means.  My discs are “desiccated throughout the lumbar spine.”  Now aren’t we all wet inside?  How can my discs be drying out in all that blood and bodily fluid?  I have cysts here and there, some going off to the right and some off to the left.  I have at least four discs that are “bulging.”  And this one is my favorite: “At L4-5 there is facet arthrosis and a disc bulge with central/right paracentral disc extrusion extending inferiorly 1.2.cm, contacting the descending right L5 nerve root as it exits the thecal sac.  There is mild bilateral neural foramina narrowing and mild spinal canal stenosis.” Now that is just one sentence in a tightly typed four page report.  I have not a clue what it means.

Victor says that he only did retinas so all he knows is that I’m getting shorter.  My back hurts and I’m getting shorter?   I think this evil eye is stuck to me.  I need an evil eye remover.  Anyone got any ideas?

This past Christmas I found myself with some time to kill between the morning festivities and the evening hijinks, so I decided to treat myself to a matinee showing of Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s newest film. I thought it was a safe choice, as the film had been in general release for a couple of weeks, and theaters were full of new, fluffy holiday fare like Little Fockers and the Jack Black vehicle Gulliver’s Travels (or period pieces like True Grit and The King’s Speech for those without kids). It seemed unlikely there’d be much turnout for a psychosexual drama set in a professional ballet company.

What I want: to crank creation’s contrast knob to fully illuminate what’s right about the world.

I wanna be Faith’s strung-out junkie. My dreaming veins singing a better tomorrow.

What I don’t want: to be dust, rust. Roadtripping with demons—Oblivion or bust.

Don’t wanna be that one suicide bullet locked and loaded in the chamber of grief’s gun. Don’t wanna be your blood-lusting grave, your ghost-moan grave, your any kinda grave.

What I want: to spend time in your joy’s city. I’ll sweep the streets, round up criminals, direct traffic—anything and everything to keep your bliss vibrant and alive.

I wanna radioactivate, self-immolate. Burn away all poverty, fear and sickness to fuel the fire of our well-being.

Don’t wanna be an inert gas in the Idiotic Table of Elements. Wanna be a full-on kick in the balls to ignorance.

Never wanna torture or kill any animals or insects in the making of these words, these beliefs, no matter how low I may get between thought, between breath, between life and death.

But if anything must die, let it be the ego. Let it go.

What I want: for you to write on my flesh everything you see and hear when you sleep. Wanna believe the pen outlasts the blade. Freedom outlasts the chains.

I wanna shred your self-doubt, refold it into a confident origami.

Wanna see you go out into the night, take a deep breath. Sip in stars, planets, moonbeams. Let me visit the solar system in your head. Let me be asteroid, nebula. Let us become the Universe of We.

Don’t wanna be old news, worn-out shoes, poorly played blues. Don’t wanna be a perpetual cruiser up and down the Boulevard of Bad Vibes.

I wanna shake our collective birthright of shame, blame. Want the veins in my hands to be Sanskrit letters spelling out the words: “I will hold you up when you’re down.”

I wanna believe that had we lived in the Warsaw Ghetto we would’ve been survivors. We would’ve been books for all to read in the secret libraries.

I want our hearts and minds to unite and revolutionize. Don’t want racism’s fist to be supersized.

And finally, I want every sacred word in every language—dead and alive—to be your first and last name. So whenever I call out to you it feels like I’m praying.

No Animals or Insects Were Tortured or Killed in the Making of This Poem

(Click on above link to watch a video of this piece)

I flew from Miami to New Orleans last weekend. There is a gallery there showing some of my paintings and I wanted to go to the opening.  Victor came along because he really likes the food in New Orleans.

At the same time as the opening in New Orleans, there was a huge on-line auction of outsider art.  We had previously sent in some bids, but you could also bid live, on-line, with the people on the floor who were actually physically at the auction.   Before we left the hotel for lunch, we bid on a wax replica of Tiny Tim from the Barnum and Bailey Circus.  He was around about three feet tall and wore a little suit, complete with bow tie.  It appeared that we won him and we were ecstatic.

We walked to meet Ronlyn Domingue and Todd for lunch at Galatoire’s.  I had Victor practice their names.  By the time they came, he had it down as Toddlynn and Ron, having gone through many other permutations. (One was Scrodlynn and Dodd.  You get the picture.  I really can’t take him anywhere.)

When they arrived, they were just so young and happy. It lifts your spirits to be around people like them.  They told us that they heard that only the hoi-polloi are given seats upstairs, so we were relieved to be seated downstairs with the hoity-toity people.  Oh, and they were genuinely impressed that we now owned the three-foot wax figure of Tiny Tim in a suit!

I learned that I had been mispronouncing Ronlyn’s name forever.  I was saying  “Dominique” as though it were French, but it actually is Domingue which rhymes with Meringue, the dessert, (not the dance.) Victor is not the most patient photographer.  Here is a picture he took of Ronlyn and me:

When we got back to the hotel we got back on the auction web site. We then won a seven-foot tall, three- foot wide wooden door painted by Molly Proctor.

We were really doing well.  Then we bid on something and the bid came up green and then it said that we won the item, also in green.  Then we realized that if someone else on line clicks the next bid on his computer a fraction of a second before you do, they win the item.

Tiny Tim didn’t come up green.  Molly Proctor’s enormous door didn’t come up green.  We hadn’t won them.

Bummer.

But now we knew the rules.  Coming up soon was a repulsive pair of wooden carved figures: one of a crouching naked man and a matching one of a woman with three breasts and, um, a hoo-ha.  I really didn’t want this item, but Victor really did and he promised to put it somewhere where I’d never see it.

When the picture came on we were ready to click to raise our bid if we had to, but nothing happened for a while and then they said they couldn’t find the figures and went on to the next item.

Well, after losing Tiny Tim and a seven-foot wooden door, we were livid.  Someone had actually stolen those two repulsive wooden statues!

That evening we flagged a cab to take us to St. Claude near Spain.  It’s just Southwest of Treme, made popular to the rest of the country by the recent TV show by that name.  The Gallery was a madhouse.  Andy Antippas is the owner of the Gallery and I think he’s always been in New Orleans.  The show was very eclectic and wonderful. The gallery was filled to bursting with interesting pieces of art.  Some pieces were beautiful, some were shocking, some were kind of nasty; there was something there for every taste.

There were so many fascinating people there of all ages, each with his own idea of appropriate dress.  Some of the attendees had piercings and oddly shaved hair, and others looked like ordinary businessmen and women.  It was really fun to be there among all of them.  The weather was perfect.  I felt good seeing some of my paintings lined up on their very own wall.

(This is the web site for it:  http://www.barristersgallery.com/
in case any of you feel like buying three creepy weird paintings.)

It had been a wonderful weekend.  The weather forecast called for rain, but it hadn’t begun yet. This was a good thing because the taxi taking us back to the airport only had one windshield wiper, and it was on the passenger side, and that lone wiper didn’t come near to touching the windshield, it just shook in the wind as though it had taxi windshield wiper Parkinson’s.

A few days after we got home, we got an invoice for the Molly Proctor door.  Victor forgot that he had previously sent in a bid for it, so we were bidding against ourselves!  (HA!)  Pretty soon an enormous door will arrive that will have the power to make me smile every time I look at it.

I have a lot of trouble sleeping. I have just about every sleep disorder a person can have, things you’ve never heard of, esoteric sleeping disorders.  When I can’t sleep or I wake up and can’t go back to sleep, Victor wins. I’m too tired to write or to paint, so I give him massages. He can get a massage when he’s fast asleep, wake up enough to enjoy it and then go right back to sleep. He’s an unusually gifted sleeper.

Recently we were in a hotel in Sweden where there was this sign in the bathroom:

 

 

My daughters both love “products.”  I got my love of “products” from them.  I wanted to try all of them. The “Schampo” and the “Balsam” were both in the shower. I didn’t know if the “Balsam” were a conditioner or a body wash, so I regretfully didn’t use that one when I took my shower.  I didn’t want to body wash my hair after “schampoing” it, in case it wasn’t a conditioner.  The only balsam I know about is that really unusual wood that is so soft you can carve it with your fingernail.  I couldn’t figure out if that would be good for conditioning my hair or washing my body, so I used a bar of soap I saved in the plastic hair cover from the last hotel.

 

 

 

 

 

Also on the counter were these two lotions:

 

 

 

 

Naturally, I couldn’t sleep and Victor was snoring away, so I grabbed one of the lotions and tore off his blanket and gave him an exceptional massage.  Victor does love a massage, regardless of whether he is asleep or awake.  I gave him a good, hard working over.

But I was still awake.

So I snatched the other lotion and gave him a second massage with that lotion. I thought it would be interesting to compare them.  It’s not like I had something else to do in the middle of the night.  My eyes wander out towards my ears when I’m tired, so I can’t even focus to read. The massage started out perfectly, but after a while the lotion dried out, which was weird. I had never had this happen before.  His skin felt like paper. Victor mumbled that he thought perhaps the aloe vera was not a lotion but was instead a liquid soap. I went into the bathroom and ran water over my hands and, by golly, it sure got sudsy.

So I returned to Victor and I told him he had to get up and take a shower, because he couldn’t leave the liquid soap rubbed into his skin all night. Surely he would get a rash or at the very least it would dry out his skin and make him super itchy. He was snoring again.  I shook him awake and repeated myself. He declined. He had no intention of jumping in the shower in the middle of the night.  He wanted to sleep. He didn’t care one whit about the state of his skin in the morning, or ever, if truth be told.

But I felt bad about using soap on him for his second massage of the night, and I still wasn’t tired, so I gave him a third massage with the original lotion. I gave him a super-long, super-greasy massage to try to counteract the crusty film of dry soap. By this time, I had tired myself out enough to go to sleep myself, which sometimes happens.

In the shower the following morning, Victor was completely obscured in suds, without having to use any product whatsoever. It was as though I were watching a body wash commercial where they used lots of computer animation. And in the end, his skin was soft and smooth as a baby’s bottom.

In our four decades together, we have been continually calculating and honing all sorts of strategies which make our living together function as best it can. When we first retired, we were together all the time. That might sound like fun, but it did not turn out to be.  After we came to our senses, we decided to do our volunteering in different places and on different days, so that we have some time apart. This keeps us from being together 24/7, which we quickly discovered was a recipe for getting on each other’s nerves. We’re in our sixties now, and we simply don’t know how much longer we will have together. We want to make the time we have good time.

Don’t get me wrong, we still get into arguments; we’re far from perfect, but you learn certain tricks over the years. I can’t say I know what tricks Victor uses to keep me from making him crazy. I’m sure that he must have tons of them, though. I know I can’t be easy to be around all the time. My kids have told me that enough times. These maneuvers must be covert or they simply wouldn’t work. I’m quite sure he has no idea how often I have to count to ten and to ten again until I can answer a question that might well have resulted in a snide answer, without the requisite pause to get knee-jerk anger out of the equation; or how often I keep my eyes closed tightly when he is driving, so I don’t make that squealy noise that escapes when I think we’re about to be smashed in a massive car accident. That squealy noise really ticks him off. You know, that is the sort of thing is that I mean here. We had to learn the art of making concessions to each other. The art of compromise, done clandestinely, so as not to call attention to itself, done smoothly, no keeping score. (That part’s important.)

There was a time when my sleeping difficulties used to cause friction between us. He used to wake up if I left the bed and then he’d be grumpy all day from lack of sleep. When I figured out that he didn’t care if I woke him for a massage, it totally fixed that problem. It gives me something to do when I’m bleary and tired and it makes him happy. I really feel a sense of accomplishment when I can make Victor happy, since Victor is calibrated a bit off to the cranky side, truth be told.  Frequently it leads to a nice bit of hanky-panky which is always rewarding.  He goes right back to sleep, and there is the added bonus that sometimes it wears me out enough to go to sleep myself.

When we got married, we honestly didn’t understand what being together entailed. We each came with pre-conceived notions that turned out to be hopelessly fanciful. It took us a good long time to learn that for our marriage to survive and to thrive, we had to work at it. We had to figure things out. Sometimes it was hard, but we fell in love for a reason and over time, consciously working at it, we grew together and fell in love over and over again for a million other reasons. For Victor and me, the world is our oyster now, for as long as we have together.

(Excuse me a minute, Victor is hollering at me from across the house, so I need to count to ten a few times before I go to see what he wants this time….)

As I was buying a copy of Moneyball at an airport bookstore in Dallas a few years back, the cashier asked, “Are you Jonathan Franzen?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m a better writer than he is.”

Okay, I didn’t really say that. But I sure felt that way.  I’d just read his infuriating best-seller The Corrections, so my indignation can be excused.

Fast-forward almost a full decade to last month, when my airport doppelganger became the first writer to appear on the cover of TIME magazine since…I don’t know, Mark Twain or something. There he is, gazing Obamalike (if not Olearlike) into the wild blue yonder, above the enviable headline great american novelist.

I felt the same rush of vexation that came over me that day in Dallas. Here is a guy who looks like me and who does what I do and who lives where I once lived, and he has again managed to not only make the mainstream media take notice of him—that TIME cover is in the freakin’  iPad commercial!—but shower him with near-universal acclaim.

Do people genuinely admire his work, I wonder, or is the coronation of Franzen merely the result of lit-crit groupthink? Does no one else see what I see? Is no one else put off by this?

Even its champions concede that The Corrections is an uneven novel. Its opening is notoriously dull (apologists excuse this “post-modern” introduction, preposterously, on the grounds that it is a “challenge” to readers). Its central plot device is something from a forgotten sit-com’s Thanksgiving episode (or a John Hughes movie). And the prose reads like a high school English assignment in which a list of fifty-cent words must be strung together to make a story.

(Ironically, the same problems Franzen exposes in the William Gaddis opus The Recognitions, the supposed inspiration for The Corrections, he replicates in his own book).

All of which is neither here nor there. As Orwell said, every novel is a failure. And there is plenty to like about The Corrections, if you can ignore those fundamental problems.

My beef with Franzen—and it’s unforgivable—is that he condescends to his audience. If you’re going to name your fictional Midwestern city St. Jude—and you really shouldn’t, because the symbolism is so glaringly obvious—you cannot, you cannot, have a Danish tourist on a cruise ship ask, late in the book, “Isn’t St. Jude the patron saint of lost causes?”

It’s an insult to our intelligence, a violation of the one inviolable writer’s commandment, namely, Thou Shalt Respect Thine Readers.  It’s the literary equivalent of Pete Rose gambling on his own team, and warrants a lifetime ban, a metaphorical death by stoning—not a prominent magazine cover.

If Jonathan Franzen is the king of American letters, as TIME suggests, the emperor is naked.

 

You might remember Poykpak’s Williamsburg-set Hipster Olympics video from 2007. Events included MySpace photography and ironic t-shirt hunting, and it featured the American Apparel Instant Replay and sponsorship from PBR (“When you aim for authenticity…”) That video was a pretty good primer for anyone who asked “What’s a hipster?”

The literary world needs more essays written by men who are disenchanted with the behavior of women. Perhaps it’s only my experience, but it seems as if publishing is rife with memoirs and self-help books and online rants about how men won’t commit and can’t communicate and how chivalry has gone the way of the Dodo, whereas similarly-themed works from the male point of view are proportionally scarce.

‘Dear log, can it be true? Do all Simpsons go through a process of dumbening? Wait, that’s not how you spell ‘dumbening’. Wait, ‘dumbening’ isn’t even a word!’

– Lisa Simpson

 

It’s been a while since my last missive. Too long. It feels like a virtual slap in the virtual face of this fine website. I can hear the mutterings about ‘that lazy Australian’, and the knives, if not yet being sharpened, have certainly been taken from the drawer.

I can only offer that most generic and unconvincing of excuses – the same one employed by philandering sportsmen and murderous wives ever since mental illness was dragged into the twentieth century, became a subject of sympathy and thus exploitable – I have been depressed. And while the pop psychologist in me says putting my feelings on the page might be therapeutic, trying to write whilst depressed is like trying to tap-dance whilst drowning: monstrously difficult, and of questionable efficacy. In any event, do any of you really want to read the kind of drivel that results from ‘writing as therapy’? The considerate writer either sends that shit straight to their stalking victim, or incorporates it into the pain-shrine they are building in the disused closet.

Regardless, I have good reason to be low. Because my country is in an apathetic, political limbo. Because the two sides competing to become the Australian government were so spineless and uninspiring that they both lost the election. Because the fate of my nation now rests in the hands of three men, and one of these men – a country redneck called Bob Katter, who wears a ten-gallon hat with a suit  – this week labelled the internationally respected climate change experts Nicholas Stern and Ross Garnaut as ‘lightweights’.

This is the triumph of the ignorant and the stupid, the gormless, sweaty meat-sacks who resent being forced from their couches for one hour every three years in order to participate in the democratic system. And, sadly, I cannot simply hold my nose and tell myself that I’m not like them. Not any more.

 

About three weeks ago, I destroyed my 42 inch LCD TV. I had purchased it less than a year earlier for almost two thousand Australian dollars. It is now totally fucked.

If I had destroyed my TV with a gun, or by pushing it out the window of my first-story flat to the shock and dismay of my wife, or driving over it with a Prius in some kind of confusingly worthy performance art piece, it might make for a good story. I would say something about shrugging off the decaying tendrils of old media, saying no to its brain-rotting bullshit, and how I’m counting down the days to the baby boomers dying, man, so we finally can have gay marriage and legal pot. You would read it and think me crazy, or pretentious, or dangerously sexy. And I would be reassured by your praise and my swelling loins that I am better and smarter than ordinary people. Oh, so much better and smarter.

I wish it had been that way. Because instead, I learned the horrifying truth about myself.

I am one of them.

I am a Wiitard.

 

There are two key safety features to the Wii remote. The use of either might have allowed me to remain ignorant of my ignorance.

First of all, just in case a white pointy controller which you spasmodically waggle around isn’t quite penis-y enough for you, it comes encased in a thick, fleshy, condom-like sheath. In the event of the average suburban ape experiencing a herp a derp moment, this jacket theoretically offers protection to both the controller itself and whatever consumer item or fat child it is hurled at. I peeled these off mine as soon as I got them, partly because I thought them unnecessary, but mostly because they creeped me out and I didn’t want my undersexed fiancee getting any unsanitary ideas.

More sensibly, each wiimote also has a strap which is simply and easily affixed to one’s wrist. Had I taken the three seconds necessary to do this then I could be watching season five of The Wire, in big screen surround sound comfort, right now. (Alright, season two of Futurama. Alright, THAT WEIRD JAPANESE PORN I TORRENTED LAST NIGHT.)

But, of course, that kiddy-safe crap is for morons, and maybe girls. Certainly not switched-on, sophisticated guys like me. And I sure as hell wasn’t about to look like a dork in front of my friends by taking basic precautions while playing Wii Sports.

It was only about forty-five seconds after we began playing that the Dunning Kruger Effect ruined my evening, my television, and ultimately my life.

 

The Dunning Kruger Effect, simply put is this: stupid people are too dumb to realise that they’re stupid, and thus consistently overestimate their own abilities. Meanwhile, smart people tend to underestimate their own abilities (relative to others) because they assume that others are as self-aware as they are. This in turn leads to what I call the Inception Effect. An entertaining, spectacular but essentially absurd action flick is sprayed with a superficial layer of metaphysics, giving its plot the appearance of complexity. Because it’s actually pretty straightforward, the less intelligent viewer (i.e. average mainstream film-goer) is able to understand what happens in the movie. But, thanks to the Dunning Kruger effect, they believe that their superior intellect has guided them through an Escheresque masterpiece. They tell their friends that it ‘really makes you think’ and give it four stars on their blog. Conversely, the more intelligent but less self-confident viewer is disturbed when they find this supposedly mind-bending experience underwhelming. Was there a deeper meaning they failed to grasp? Was it all a sophisticated allegory? Did they miss a crucial detail during the couple of minutes they tuned out while imagining what they’d to Ellen Page in a dream? So, rather than risk looking stupid, they go with the flow. The movie gets near-universal acclaim as an intellectual thriller of the highest order (rather than the clever, sometimes striking popcorn piece it is). And consequently, the standard is lowered for everyone.

Being (as I now know) a stupid person, I overestimated my own ability. But, being previously aware of the Dunning Kruger effect, I believed that was actually an intelligent person who was modestly underestimating my own abilities. Which puts my actual level of ability many orders of magnitude below what I had previously assumed. In this case, my ability not to let go of a Wii controller when swinging it towards a widescreen TV.

 

There is a special kind of dissociative state that kicks in when one is struck with a sudden and shocking misfortune. Time slows. The mind imposes an immediate, self-protective state of denial, making everything seem unreal, almost laughable. Stunned, the brain whizzes uselessly in a search for an impossible solution – how can what has already happened be prevented?

But it is real. I have just killed my TV. The screen is a fractured rainbow (and not the ecstasy-inducing double kind). My friends are standing there in horrified embarrassment. This is not what they signed up for. My wife is pale and slack-jawed. She is not angry, or disappointed. Rather, she is experiencing something much worse – a glimpse of her future. Stuck with stupid. I try my best to make light of the situation and lessen my friends’ discomort, but there is no way to undo the revelation of my true nature.

I am one of them. The lost and the damned. The mindless and the selfish.

An ordinary, everyday idiot.

 

Anyway, that’s enough for now. Time to print this off and send it to Zooey Deschanel. I know she’ll write back this time, that bitch.