Another Fond Farewell

For various reasons which need not be gone into in any depth in this semi-public venue, but which the astute among you may readily surmise, I will always remember this gentle giant of pharmaceutical research fondly:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24378509/
Adieu, Albert Hoffman.

Wither The Wire?

i've only seen more than a few episodes of any tv shows for the past four or so years in the past month. and those have all been episodes of the wire. this here is just to publish a mark of some thoughts made in one successive stem.


wire predictions
After noreece the city hall president gains the upper hand politically in the next mayor race due to bond’s mishandling of the clay davis affair, she uses her information about daniels to thwart carcetti’s plans and redirect power within the police department. Templeton’s shortcuts at the newspaper become close to scandal within the office but the sensation surrounding his stories earns him protection from the bosses and eventually success as he betrays his police informant to protect his own lies about the serial killer. Mcnulty’s career ends in ruins just as the wire tap is near closing on marlo, and the scandal cripples daniels, dodging curruptions accusations, in his work to reform the police administration. Marlo does get caught though, caught between too many forces aligned against him. All are enemies now he wears the crown, and his only allies are his troops. He’s got omar, the new day coop, and both legitimate and illegitimate branches of the police operation after him. In the end, one shall knock him down. It could be omar, for an ultra television satisfaction, but I think however marlo falls omar gets downed at last by Michael, although not necessarily outdueled. And in vacuum created through marlo’s death or arrest, Michael’s reputation as omar’s killer lifts him to the crown (note the crown and the no. 1 on michael’s shirt when he visits bunk in the police station). Marlo of course had been a bloody master but he won the western mainly on the false reputation for murdering stringer bell. This season is all about reputations, about perception as information spreads. Michael seems a ripe candidate to be the season’s, and the series’s, heartbreaker. Paws on the puppy. And bubbles saves a life.

The Ecstatic Trail

Some people get stuck with lice or cursed by psychotic daydreams. My lot is a hairy belly.

I am not a hairy person over all, no back hair for example; just tufted halos around my nipples, a bit on the breastbone. But then this patch on my middle, the hairy belly, a forest fortress round my bellybutton deeper, denser, darker than hair anywhere below my collar.

It’s not quite so much as my head. Not quite, but you can comb it.

Now men do have hair here, plenty of them do. You call it a happy trail. You call it so for it shapes usually a prim lane headed beneath the elastic band of your undies, the trail’s mood gained by its intimacy with these underparts. A smirking reminder it belongs really to the pubic hair.

But my abdomen’s overgrowth enters, for most who find it, rather too far into the obscene. It’s not hard seeing why. Picture a woman whose bush at a beach creeps out a furry full foot atop her bikini bottom.

The sight upsets taste. And in course, my belly hair fairly invited its round of humiliations.

I can remember leaving the shower at a friend’s house when in high school, his younger sister pointing. “He looks like Austin Powers.” Once a woman I’d been dancing with at a Chicago club lifted my shirt suddenly, I guess to check my shape to better judge if she should take me home. As if doubting it existed she tugged the fluff; I shrugged, she shook her head and made a wordless exit. Then at a backdoor barbeque, Fourth of July. There were beers, there were ribs. I prepared to run a race in the grass with Dave Kim. I took my shirt off. “Lars,” said Dave. “Your happy trail is ecstatic!”

Every man’s lot is his, indeed and yet my shame is not of the teasing, nor of the creeping out. The story cannot be made full till I confess that hand I myself laid in the making of the hairy belly, or so I ever suspected.

I was twelve and read in a sex manual that rubbing your hands in a clockwise manner above the pelvic region would help stimulate glands, inflate fecundity. Never mind I had nor use or exchange for intercourtly potential in those days, I did it the next time I masturbated.

I worked that hairless tummy with the one hand and got it ready for the other. And who but knows what my produce did where it spilled that day, but in days that came hairs of aging grew on my skin. Little did first, a trail, even vine, but they flowered, and by grownhood found and filled the shape of that circling hand.

Flimsy biology connects this to this, I know. I not so much believe as like fearing Christians dread it may be so, dread my own accomplice. If I can’t know in fact I did nothing to provoke my rash of lycanthropy, I least know I avoided not every disgrace I could to escape it. Then who again knows what pubescent stirring a warm touch might feed in a changing boy’s follicles?

The magic doubt buries itself in the moment as a scar. If coincidence, yet there it goes, swirling round the umbilical.

Raise Another Glass

Well, hell, as long as nobody else has any new music, words, or commentary, I'll mark the birth of another grand American creative spirit, whose birthday falls on this day (no, not Lars--his birthday was last week).

You weren't perfect either, JMH, or you might still be among the living. But you sure could wail the heck out of a guitar!

So, fly on, fly on, into stratocaster stratospherics.

Mailer Elegy

A moment of silence, if you please, for the passing of Norman Mailer, an author and a character that several of us here have long appreciated, a man who will be missed with a voice that could not be overlooked.

A virtual wake may be in order: wherever you may find yourselves at this time, hoist high a drink, give a grin and a wink, and remember a story or a turn of phrase or a moment of outrageous media manipulation of the sort that only Mailer could orchestrate...

Here's to you, Norman Mailer, in some literary pub of the ages in which the old souls gather for camaraderie, unto which they resort for the rubbing of elbows, the sipping of whiskey, and the reciting of well-told tales.

We're all probably out of place, somewhere.

From Anton Chekov's "An Anonymous Story":

picture from http://filmplus.org/plays/orchard.html

"I keep making plans for our life, plans and plans—and I enjoy doing it so! George, I'll begin with the question, when are you going to give up your post?"

"What for?" asked Orlov, taking his hand from his forehead.

"With your views you cannot remain in the service. You are out of place there."

"My views?" Orlov repeated. "My views? In conviction and temperament I am an ordinary official, one of Shtchedrin's heroes. You take me for something different, I venture to assure you."

"Joking again, George!"

"Not in the least. The service does not satisfy me, perhaps; but , anyway, it is better for me than anything else. I am used to it, and in it I meet men of my own sort; I am in my place there and find it tolerable."

"You hate the service and it revolts you."

"Indeed? If I resign my post, take to dreaming aloud and letting myself be carried away into another world, do you suppose that that world would be less hateful to me than the service?"

"You are ready to libel yourself in order to contradict me." Zinaida Fyodorovna was offended and got up. "I am sorry I began this talk."

"Why are you angry? I am not angry with you for not being an official. Every one lives as he likes best."

"Why, do you live as you like best? Are you free? To spend your life writing documents that are opposed to your own ideas," Zinaida Fyodorvna went on, clasping her hands in despair: "to submit to authority, congratulate your superiors at the new year, and then cards and nothing but cards: worst of all, to be working for a system which must be distasteful to you—no, George, no! You should not make such horrid jokes. It's dreadful. You are a man of ideas, and you ought to be working for your ideas and nothing else."

This May Evolve Into Something

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Running. Feet padding pavement, but nearly not. Of course it hasn't actually, but time has stopped—accelerated and slowed at the same time. Like a train acheving traction on ice now careening, brakes sparking and screaming. Still moving forward.

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Government. Job. Others. All seem to oppress. We talk about it. All the time, us. But we also don't pay attention. We've resigned to facts on which we've performed surgery. Possibly due to incompetence, we've now injected puss into them. We've marred them with our cynicism syringe. We've got grand plans to examine, understand and repair. No one is more intelligent, better adjusted or more aware than us. No one comprehends as we do. We do not respect previous generations. We are precious and unique.

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A bridge toppled into a river. You couldn't get a call into any of the area's area codes. The cell-phone companies' infrastructure couldn't shoulder the barrage.

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It's funny how a person can be whisked away from you. That person ends and immediately after you're informed of that fact, it was meant to happen like that. The person is no longer a being so much as a period of time. People say people live on in your heart, but people would have to "live" in your mind because that's the organ with which we experience memories. But even then, memories are of a certain length. A memory is a recollection of an event or a series of events that took place earlier on.

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Teleological. Logical movement toward its end. Of course it is in the last place you look. Of course you, "knew it was under there." Just like you knew it was under every other thing you picked up and once you were informed of its absence; it was meant to be like that.

Periods of time and absence. You are angry for a period of time until that emotion is replaced by this emotion. Despite its replacement, the original emotion remains absent.