beloved complainer

I feel like its been a pretty boring couple of weeks (no offense to those of you I’ve encountered, you were all fascinating, really. Its me, honestly…) Actually it is me. I’m bored. Just what I hate to hear my kid say. "How can you be bored?" I always answer like my parents before me. With a  room full of fun stuff and most of it ignored... Same with me. Tons to do, but the ennui.  Not that I haven’t seen some good DVDs and some good TV and hey, I’m actually reading a good book right now! Maybe it’s the rain. Seriously, I mean forget about discussing Saul Bellow's  Humboldts Gift, right? Pulitzer, NAY Nobel Prize be damned, I'm like half way through it. No, its my newfound love of white Tic Tacs that's on my mind. Ever since the teeth yanking of last month, I have been loathe to chew gum. And there were several occasions when I liked to chew gum, esp. whilst driving, and after work, walking to the ferry, and of course on the ferry. Some gum. But since the yanking, my teeth configuration feels off – the three new spaces in my mouth don’t seem right, and chewing gum makes the feeling worse. Make sense? Now I’m also a bit of a toothpick man. Yup. I likes to have me a toothpick around, this actually from my root canal of last year. Remember that! Ah, what a blog that was, I’m still getting comments about it: my root canal. Sigh. Well the canal left a sizable gap in the upper quadrant of me fool gulliver and a toothpick is almost always needed. And of course its well known: the ladies love a guy chomping on a toothpick.  Yep, I'm cool.

I don’t know how I got onto the white Tic Tacs. First I was drawn to the green Tic Tacs, spearmint, which are 100% vile, and wintergreen, which aren’t bad. And they’ve got like watermelon and lime and why would anyone want the white ones? How old school is that? But there I was in my favorite store, Longs Drugs, who often only have one version of something you may want, and this time it was the white Tic Tacs. So whatta you gonna do? But imagine my delight at the pleasure of the white Tic Tac – Their initial smooth vanilla flavor, dissolving quickly into peppermint! Its almost too much pleasure for such a little thing. Soon the empty Tic Tac cartridges were stacking up. What to do with them? Sculpture? Obsessive collecting? Hmm. Haven’t quite decided yet. Even the kid seemed to want them for a spell, but soon realized they are good for nothing. But full, they are good for everything. One or two at a time, sometimes three in extreme situations, but never four.

Remember that “Hair Cuts” sign from the other week? Well here’s another sign from my local walking area that deserves our attention: "Tapioca Dring" This is funny, but also kinda sad as well. Obviously a lot of effort was put into the sign, and it is a beautiful rendition of the vibrancy of tapioca drinks. And its easy to make fun of people’s bad spelling. I’ve been in this restaurant, and the dude who runs it is super nice. Probably too nice, and has a propensity for professionally made, misspelled signs (like "Daily's Special..."), but this one is a little weird in its incorrectness. And again, a little sad.

Speaking of typos. And don’t we love 'em, huh? I should mention two classics that came over the death wires of late:  (they didn’t get published, we caught them, but where’s the fun in that?) one notice asked for donations in the person’s name be made to the “American Mean Association.” I’m assuming they meant the American Heart Association, but talk about Freudian slips, when whoever was typing that out…
And this one which got a place on our infamous “wall of shame:” a man was noted as the decedent's “beloved complainer.” Beloved complainer! We knew they meant "companion," but really.  I said that had that been my notice, it would have been correct. Me, beloved complainer. And charter member of the American Mean Association...

I will complain about a few movies I’ve seen on the tube lately. First, The Number 23, with Jim Carey. Don’t want to expend too many electrons on it, other than to say if you spend the second half of your movie literally having the characters explain the first half, then you’ve failed on all levels.
Then there was a strange film called The Story of Us, which did have a lot going for it in some ways, good cast: Bruce Willis, Rob Reiner (who directed), Paul Reiser, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and a couple of good lines from Reiner and Reiser (“ei” rules when it comes to Jewish comedy…) but I have to ask of a film like this, which chronicles the nastiness of a marriage gone bad, and does so with great writing and acting and realism: why is this "entertaining?" Why the fuck do we want to see it? It is so depressing, and if it isn’t done artfully (like We Don’t Live Here Anymore), and is going more for comedy, then I have to ask, why?  Paul Reiser, as a (gasp) loud mouthed Jewish agent even says to his client, looking down from his glass tower: “see all those people down there? They all know they’re going to die. That’s why they’re so picky about their entertainment.” I agree. Carl Reiner gets off the two best shots however in his dumbass advice to the sinking Bruce Willis: 1) “There is no ass.”  The legs just thicken at their tops, what we think of as the ass, is purely a construct of language and perception. Deep right? And when asked about the longevity of his relationship, said 2) “Hate fades.”
We’ll see.

Music? It’s still the Kills people. Argh. I’m latched on and cannot latch off. Me and the kiddo were spending about ten hours over that Barnes and Noble the other day, so he could buy some books, so his eyeballs wouldn’t totally distend from his sockets from Halo 3, and dangle pendulously to and fro. He likes books. Sometimes. Esp. if they have cartoons liberally interspersed among the words, oh yes, graphic novels, I believe they’re called. Some of the ones he likes now are Japanese, although a major publisher of these books, Viz Media, I’m gonna say now, I have a grudge against. Seems I interviewed with them several years ago for some kind of copy editing job. And even though said job was about 20 steps below the level of work I should be doing, I thought it would be a fun company to work for, and certainly better than where I was at the time, where things were BAD

So I secure an interview, which in itself ain't easy these days, but it goes swimmingly, they show me around, all very nice, ask a lot of questions, give me a copy test, seem genuinely interested. Then, you guess it, nothing. Now we’ve all seen this millions of times, right? It shouldn’t even warrant the pixels here its so common. But something about this really bothered me, more than the others. And believe me, I’ve been rejected by PLENTY of jobs, some of them I really wanted. No, this was mysterious. About three of the managers there gave me their business cards, so when I didn’t hear back, even after I’d sent courteous emails thanking them, and inquiring after their health, and then, after waiting the appropriate time, called and left messages, never to be put through, never to get a response. I finally made the plea: hey, really, I have no hard feelings if you don’t want to hire me, believe me I, more than most, understand. But since I came down and met you and spent the better part of a day filling out forms, and talking, and testing, I was kind of wondering what happened. Just a word, "you suck," or "we decided we hated you," or anything would put this to bed for me, or maybe you could advize my humble self so that I know why I was knocking on the wrong door. That's it. 10 seconds of your life. We'll move on. But nothing. Their silence was deafening. Viz Media! Write it down. Look for their books. They’re EVIL! Something was said. Some back room info was passed down to them from Employer X. They were so horrified, nay, MORTIFIED by whatever they learned about me, they tried to go on as if I never existed! What was it Viz Media? Sufficient time as passed, you can tell me now: did I spell “manga” as “mango?” Did I edit from right to left? What?

So needless to say I wasn’t spending my (son’s) hard earned cash on any Viz Media products. (Oooh, I know that hurts you to read that Viz. Sorry its come down to that.) We did get some manga, but from a rival company. Also some books with a lot of words in them. Then I was passing by the giant magazine rotunda, and who’s lovely faces did I see archly looking back at me from the “Women’s Interest” section? You guess it, The Kills. There on the cover of something called “Nylon” magazine. I looked at the kid. He looked at me. “don’t do it, dad,” he said, but I was compelled. “It’s the Kills!” Plus this mag was only about $5, instead of the $19 most magazines seem to be these days.  And pretty nice article on them too. A bunch of pix, and a decent interview. Nylon seems to be largely about British fashion and music, and I have been carefully studying it. I know what makeup Alison Mosshart used on the photo shoot. I know that Hince dates Kate Moss. Sheet, I thought they were a couple. All kinds of stuff that shouldn't matter if you like their music. Pretty.

Speaking of books containing lots of words, I return, out of less boredom now, to Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. Why? Well, its been laying around the house for a while now. Who knows how long really. I don’t know where it came from or why. But I, like so many I know right now, have been afflicted by this weird, “I can’t read anything” bug. So many people aren’t finishing what they pick up to read, or are just sick of reading books, that I wonder, is it some kind of epidemic? I go through this often. And when it gets really bad, and I’ve put down three of the books I just bought, cause they just aren’t doing it for me, and I’ve read Nylon Magazine cover to cover, and there aint’ shit on TV ‘cept Lost (don’t get me started…) and I’m wandering around looking at the books I didn’t just purge during the last purge, and grab a handful of weird shit like William Blake and Laurence Sterne and Saul Bellow and toss around and examine Humboldt’s Gift!  I've seen it before, I’ve opened it up many times and not gotten further than page one. But you’ve got to be ready for the book and the book’s got to be ready for you, right?  So Humboldt fucking rules. You want a book that rules the Earth? This is it. I’m only about half way through, and Pulitzer and Nobel prize aside, it might end up sucking, right? So I’ll check back with you in a bit on that one.

Until then its just me, your beloved complainer saying "goodbye," "hate fades," and of course, "there is no ass."

Comments

[Fenn]

Hey Lee,

How goes? I had not been to Skirblog for a bit, wanted to say hello. I see you enjoy the Kills ... I picked up the Midnight Boom not too long ago. Pretty good stuff. Have you ever listed to Accelerator, by Royal Trux? For some reason I cannot stop listening to this album. I can hardly understand anything they are singing, but for some reason they rule supreme on my ipod just now.

Havent read Humboldt's Gift, but Augie March was good. And, despite the fact that Oprah endorsed it, I got a copy of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. A dark, dark book, but excellent... if you are looking for a quick read to get you unstuck from your reading block, read it. It is gut wrenching, as a father, to read, but worth the discomfort, I think.

Say hello to I and F. Hope all is well