And So To Bed

Suppose they gave an orgasm and nobody came?

Last night I had a dream about an old girlfriend. Actually it was a lot closer to being a nightmare than a dream, and I was initially going to write something about her this morning - something profound and incisive about our relationship and where it went wrong. But then I came to my senses and changed my mind. Let's face it: it's pretty difficult to talk about your relationship with a former significant other without sounding as if you're trying to cover up your involvement in a hit and run accident. Actually, it's virtually impossible. So I think that for once I'll do the smart thing and keep my mouth shut.
And yet...

This is a test...

Had it been an actual alert...

Rosemary Woods Strikes Again

I just read, with some amusement, that the cadaverous Arlen Spector is calling for a congressional inquiry into "destroyed evidence" in the case of the New England Patriots' videotaping of the New York Jets' signals. This horrendous criminal act - one surely up there in rank with Nixon's missing watergate tapes - took place back in September, so the good senator no doubt has spent the last five months earnestly delving into the matter, and so it surely a simple coincidence that he is making this great crusade for justice public just two days before the Super Bowl. 

I have an idea concerning this.  Spector should be declared legally dead - something already long overdue - so that the rest of us can watch the game, if we wish to, in relative peace.

Anyone know any good taxidermists?

The ravelled sleeve of care

Last night I was assailed by a torrent of weird, loopy dreams, one hot on the heels of another. The piece de resistance was an episode, if that's the proper word, in which I found myself quite literally in purgatory - that special patch of otherworldy real estate reserved for sinners and the unbaptized - awaiting the punching of my soul's ticket. This was disturbing for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that while loitering in God's anteroom, which bore a distressing likeness to a high school gymnasium, I was surrounded by a mob of goofy looking people dressed in children's pajamas. And they all seemed unaccountably optimistic about the disposition of their fates - an emotional state that I found myself utterly unable to share in. In waking life I am cautiously pessimistic about most things - an attitude that has always served me well - and I felt no differently about the prospect of having to account for myself and my questionable use of my time here on terra firma. In fact, my anxiety level in short order spiked so far out of control that it woke me up, just as my number was about to be called.
This got me thinking: maybe it wasn't too late to change my profligate ways, and actually accomplish something of lasting merit in my life. Maybe it was time to dust off some of the great-but-unrealized ideas that have come to me over the years, like finally completing that musical about the life of Franz Kafka, or launching a line of Marcel Proust action figures. Or what about that eggplant breakfast cereal idea I had late one night a few years ago, after one margarita too many?
But of course I know, deep down, that I'll probably never get around to seeing any of these things through to completion. That's the sad truth of most people's lives, I'm afraid - not enough time, not enough determined persistence - and the principal difference between successes and couch tubers.
And so, back to bed.

Norman Mailer

Last week I read, with some surprise, that Norman Mailer had died. I say "with some surprise" not because his death was premature - he was 84, after all - but because I had begun to think that he would be around forever. That tends to happen - in my mind, anyway - when a person recreates himself over and over, the way Mailer did. And he was good at it, too. Not only that, even when he missed the mark, you couldn't say he wasn't interesting.
I didn't know Mailer personally, but I know a lot of people who did know him, primarily from the time he spent in Provincetown. There, his reputation was mixed. He was recognized as a great writer, but also viewed (by some anyway) as a sort of local crank, a guy who would wander into the Governor Bradford Bar and challenge anyone and everyone there to arm-wrestle him. I don't know if he ever had any takers, but I'll bet that if he did he was able to hold his own.
While I didn't know Mailer, I'd see him from time to time, while I was in Provincetown on vacation. I used to stay at an inn on Commercial St., just a few houses down from Mailer's place, an imposing sort of Tudor-Edwardian edifice located right on the beach. One morning that I recall in particular, I was walking along the water's edge, not paying much attention to what was going on around me, and I very nearly bumped into him. This might have been my big opportunity to tell him how much I admired his writing (true for the most part), and engage him in a casual conversation that would of course have eventually led to my own writing (pathetic for the most part), and then of course he would have asked to take a look at my novel, and would have - of course - pronounced it a work of genius and got right on the phone to his publisher in New York.
But that never happened. I did the smart thing and kept walking that morning, and for one simple reason. It's one thing to delude yourself into thinking that you have real talent, and it's a delusion you can sustain for a long, long time, in spite of all the rejection slips from unknown editors, because, hey - what do they know? But it's another thing altogether to risk showing your work to someone of Norman Mailer's stature, and take the chance of hearing that you're out of your mind and wasting your time. Then you have to face the music, and start being realistic about your talent, or lack thereof. And I wasn't ready for that at the time.
The last time I saw him, a few years ago, it was early on a Sunday morning, and he was leaving a local convenience store with a newspaper just as I was getting out of my car. I watched as he got into his Camry, and as he pulled out of the parking lot, he paused and looked at me. It was a difficult look to read (was he going to ask me to arm-wrestle? I wondered), but one thing that came through was that he knew that I knew who he was. I left it at that, for the reasons stated above.
Sic transit gloria Norman.

Press 1 for English, press 2 to detonate your telephone...

In the course of my work day, I receive something on the order of anywhere from thirty to fifty telephone messages, the majority of which are not true "messages" at all, but rather snippets of incomprehensible gibberish, left for me to decipher as best I can. Because of this, I am sorely tempted to change my prerecorded greeting from, "Hi, I can't take your call right now, etc..." to something more to the point, along the lines of, "Please leave a rambling, incoherent message with a garbled phone number, and I'll promptly erase it when I return. Have a pleasant day, and try to stay out of police custody."
This would undoubtedly be frowned upon by my superiors, but really, where would the harm be? Nobody listens to my message anyway, and even when I emphatically state that I am out on vacation, for example, people still leave laundry lists of demands indicating that they expect me to call them back immediately, if not sooner. Our clients' sense of entitlement seems to be linked to deafness in some way that calls for further study, though it won't be by me. I have my hands full as it is, what with having to wade through all the calls I receive, on the off chance that one or two of them might actually warrant a return call. My keenest desire, or one of them anyway, is to smash my telephone to smithereens with a ball peen hammer, but this course of action might carry with it an ominous downside, and that downside is that if people can't leave crazy messages on my voice mail, they may well show at our office to deliver them in person.
And then I wouldn't have the delete button to save me.

You say Osama, I say Obama...

I normally try to pay as little attention to political campaigns as possible, in that it is a subject, or spectacle, that invariably only depresses me.  The sight of allegedly sentient beings behaving like trained monkeys throwing feces at each other and performing for bananas makes it nearly impossible for me to be optimistic for the future of this country, particularly when the bananas are being provided by the NRA or some other equally loathsome special interest group. And at the top of my list of groveling hominids currently out on the stump is Mitt Romney - a man who possesses no ethics, convictions,  or standards of decency whatsoever.  There is apparently nothing that he will not say or do in order to get elected, and I am continually amazed that anyone takes him seriously. But then again, he somehow managed to snow the voters in Massachusetts, a state he didn't even live in when he ran for governor. He accomplished this, in large part, by resorting to pure fakery. In one of his gubenatorial ads, he stood with his sleeves rolled up and his head under the hood of a car, pretending to be a mechanic - a "regular guy". He might as well have pretended to perform open heart surgery while he was at it, since it was laughably obvious that he couldn't distinguish a dipstick from a rectal thermometer. Still, it worked. People fell for his snake oil routine and voted for him.

Fast forward to a few days ago, when Mitt reaffirmed his Reagan-style vacuousness by somehow conflating Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden. In a news conference he prattled on about how Barack Obama was calling for worldwide jihad, but it isn't so much what Romney said that captured my interest; it was the fact that he never caught himself in his mistake, assuming that is what it was. He never so much as batted an eye.

To my way of thinking, this can mean only one of two things. He's (A) an idiot, or he's (B) a calculating idiot who was deliberately trying to create further confusion in the minds of an already alarmingly confused electorate ("I'm not voting for no terrorist."). This tactic has become a staple of the Republican Party (see Iraq, invasion excuse of the week) and underscores their contempt for the very people they're trying to court. I think of it as a form of political date rape - the BMOC getting the innocent coed plastered, then ravaging her and in the aftermath laughing it off with his friends. In the eyes - or mindset - of Republicans, that's all the peons in this country have ever been good for - seducing them into giving up their vote, and then casting them aside once they've been screwed.

And so - with a bad taste in my mouth - to bed.

Minimally minimal wages

This week, deciding it was time to find a way to bring a little extra income into the household coffers - what with the upcoming money pit of the holidays looming on the horizon - I took it upon myself to see if I could find a part time job. I wasn't expecting to land anything in the medical field or with NASA, just something relatively unchallenging where I could put in a few hours here and there, not be expected to find new planets or cures for diseases, and put a few extra dollars in my pocket. Something at a bookstore seemed like a logical fit, in that I have more than my share of shamefully useless knowledge about books rattling around in my head, and I might finally be able to put it to some purpose, and actually get paid for the effort.

This just goes to show how naive I am.

My first stop was Barnes and Noble, where a markedly indifferent clerk tossed an application to me and told me to fill it out. As I began working on the application, listing my academic credentials, my lengthy work experience, and my publishing credits, I felt more and more confident, and began to think about how much money I should hold out for. But my confidence was short-lived. When I handed the completed application back to the clerk, he looked it over with an utterly blank expression, as if I were offering him a finger painting done by a toddler. Then he opened a draw, and deposited my application onto the top of a large pile of other applications - or finger paintings, as it were.  Someone would call me, he said, if there were any openings.

I'm not holding my breath.

My next stop was Borders, just down the road. At Borders I was told that I couldn't fill out an application there; I had to do it online. It seemed presumptuous of them to assume that every job applicant has access to a computer,  but I kept my mouth shut.  Maybe this was their clever way of weeding out neanderthals who communicate information by banging on hollow logs. Who knows?

At any rate, I went home, opened a beer, and logged onto the job application site. It seemed straightforward enough at first, but after all the usual questions were dispensed with, there was a second, much longer phase of the application, consisting of an exhaustive battery of psychological questions. Given the questions I was asked to answer, I can only assume that Borders must have a long and storied history of inadvertently hiring pyschotics and mass murderers, and this is their clumsy attempt to see that it doesn't happen again.

The "questions" were actually all declarative statements of the "When I get angry I want to kill the first person I see" variety, and the provided answers ran along a scale ranging from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree", which I found limiting. What if I neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement? I would have liked to see choices like "beats me", or "I couldn't care less." Or better still, in the case of the aforementioned homicidal tendency statement, "it depends on who the first person I see is". The questions were all so ridiculous that even a raving loon could have figured out what the "correct" answer was for each one, so the whole thing struck me as a waste of time.

Anyway, I answered all the questions the way I thought I was supposed to, and sent off my application/mental disorder screening tool to Borders. Then, just a few hours later, the manager called and left a message saying she wanted to talk to me. Not wanting to seem too eager, or desperate, I waited until the next day to call, and when I did, I was told that I had been selected to be interviewed. I wanted to say that I thought I already had been interviewed, what with the serial killer questionaire and all, but I thought better of it.

The woman I was speaking to then addressed the issue of compensation. "We have two openings right now, one for cashiers, and one for working in the cafe. They both pay a little less than you were asking for on your application."

"Oh," I said, meaninglessly.

"The cashier's position pays $6.75 an hour, and cafe workers get $7.25 an hour. Do you have a preference?"

I felt like saying my preference was to actually get paid for work that I do, but I realized it was a lost cause.

"Are those figures you quoted me in dollars?" I asked.

There was a pause, and then she said, in an uneasy voice, "Yes".

"Then I'll need to think it over and get back to you," I said, enigmatically.

After I hung up I brooded over this disheartening exchange for a long time. $6.75 an hour? They must be crazy, I finally concluded. Or maybe it was me who was crazy, for thinking that they'd actually pay me a respectable wage.

I'm still waiting to hear from Barnes and Noble.

A pet peeve

Yesterday I made the mistake (I usually make at least one significant mistake per day; this was the worst for yesterday) of going to a local "superstore" that has, as its raison d'etre, the trafficking of pet products to the public.
Without delving too deeply into the oppressive nature of such a place, with its mind-boggling assortment of bizarre trinkets and baubles for the indulgent (read, crazy) pet owner, allow me to simply state that I couldn't get the dog food I went in there for and get out fast enough. But fate had other plans for me. I couldn't find the brand I was looking for, and was shunted from one inept employee to another. Finally, as I was on the verge of leaving emptyhanded, I literally stumbled across a display of what I was after, and proceded to the checkout line with said dog food in hand, thinking, "Thank god that's over," but as usual I was wrong. The fun was just beginning.
An interesting feature of such stores is that they allow people to bring their pets with them, and I soon found myself lodged between a large woman wielding a nasty little Chihuahua that was hell-bent on biting me in the groin, and a young girl with a slobbering dog of mongrel lineage. The line wasn't moving for some reason, so I got out of that line and went to another, which was occupied by only an elderly woman who had no dog with her. I was congratulating myself on my smart move, and then I noticed that the elderly woman seemed to be having some difficulty with her credit card. Difficulty is actually an understatement. She was behaving as if she had never seen a credit card before, and so the clerk had to patiently guide her through the process of swiping the card through the machine over and over again - to no avail.
"I'll tell you what," the old woman finally said. "I'll write you a check."
Sensing what this would entail, I let out a sigh - a sigh that was entirely justified as it took her what seemed like twenty minutes to write the check - one letter at a time.  She may as well have been using a hammer and chisel as a pen.
Finally the transaction was completed, somehow, and as I was thinking "Thank God", the elderly woman abruptly launched into her life story - uncut and unexpurgated. Worse still, the clerk seemed genuinely interested, and encouraged her to prattle on, oblivious to my exasperation.
"And then, in 1942, we moved to New Jersey..."
Finally, when I could stand it no longer, I cleared my throat to get the clerk's attention, and she responded by glaring at me. Then she turned back to the woman.
"You know," she said, "it's been really crazy here all day, and it's so nice to finally meet someone who isn't in a big hurry."
And with that she glared at me again - a lot harder. She might as well have appended this second glare with the word "asshole", not that it was necessary. I knew where I stood with her. And that's why I put the bag of dog food back where I found it and left the store.
I hope the dog likes TV dinners and sandwiches.

And so to eternal rest...

I have long had a morbid fascination with obituaries (although I suppose you could reasonably say that most of my fascinations are morbid), but this morning I read one that took the cake, as it were.
In the local newspaper, I was perusing the roll call of the recently deceased, and I came across an obituary for a 94 year old woman that started out innocently enough, with the usual business about what a full life she'd led, the listing of her survivors, etc., and then, when I came to the end, I saw this:
"With her passing, X's final wish was ultimately granted when she did not have to see Hilary Clinton become president."
My first thought, after squinting in disbelief, was that it might be time to cut back on my alcohol intake, but when I went back to the obit a while later, it was still there. An odd aspect of this story is that years ago I knew this woman slightly, and she didn't strike me as being remotely the type who would insist on something like this, so I can only conclude that the inclusion of this bit of tasteless nonsense in her obituary means that someone in her family is suffering from a serious mental illness.
Which would make him or her just like every other rabid right-winger I know.