Monkey Feet

Eight-year olds write speeches for the President. If you only listen to five MP3s today, listen to these.

(Via Said The Gramophone)

Alkali

What you need to know is that I am named for an uncle who drank himself to death—my father’s older brother, whom he adored and from whose shadow he never really emerged, and who, for whatever reason, set about at a relatively early age to destroy himself with alcohol.

I was on the phone with my Mom the other day. We were talking about a mutual acquaintance whose health is failing, and who seems determined to foil, through noncompliance and apathy, any outside effort to improve it. I mentioned the idea that the vast majority of human deaths are suicides, one way or another—passive, long-term suicides, most of them (an idea hardly original to me).

Sometimes, I said, all the fight goes out of you, and no matter how much concerned, quality care you’re getting, to keep breathing seems like too much goddam bother.

Mom:      Like your Uncle Jack. After the last time he got out of the
                 hospital, he knew he couldn’t drink any more. He’d been
                told. He knew what he had to do. But still...

Jack:       And yet, if you’re determined to give up...

Mom:      (sighs) You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t...
                (trails off)

Jack:       (snorts in disbelief)

Mom:      ...make him drink. Water.

My mom, she is a wise woman.

Acme

One last baseball-related note:

No matter how often I hear his name announced, no matter how clearly his official MLB bio specifies the pronunciation, I cannot see that name in print without mentally appending the words "...Su-u-uper Genius."

Hey Rube!

Some men think of baseball to keep pleasure at bay—which strikes me as strange and sad, because baseball is pleasure.

Thanks to the wonders of broadband Internet, D and I were watching Tuesday’s NESN webcast of the Red Sox / Devil Rays game, having a nostalgic wallow in the sights and sounds of hometown advertisements (Giant Glass! WZLX!) and grooving on a ninth-inning squeaker that ended with the most spectacular holy-shit-did-you-see-that diving catch that I’ve ever seen.

Afterwards D, commenting on the little roster pics that MLB.com puts up on the Gameday service (and Gameday is such a weird and fascinating hi-lo tech fusion anyway, operating on precisely the same principle as those moving-scoreboard dealies that brought baseball to the masses before the ubiquity of television or even radio), said of the Devil Rays, “Most of those guys look like they smell really bad.”

That’s an odd thing to pick up from just a visual, but looking over the photos, I had to agree. We couldn’t put our finger on just what quality it was in those faces. They weren’t just rednecks, they weren’t just thugs, they weren’t just wifebeaters, they looked like—

We said it in unison: “Carnies.”

You know, I hate to kick a team when they’re down, but really, looking at these pictures it’s all too easy to imagine some cowboy-suited Colonel Parker type trawling the lots of the Southeast and saying, “Hey, boy, you’re mighty good at runnin’ them bumper cars—how’d you like to make yourself some money playin’ PRO-fesh’nal baseball?”

Try ya luck, mistah? Three balls for a dollah.

What th— Cletus? Is that you?

Hey, Earl, some kid done throwed up on the Tilt-A-Whirl ‘n’ I need me a bucket o’ pixie dust.

Very helpfully rhymes with “eatin’ possum.”

Dude comes with his own sound effect: McCLUNG!!!

Say, Red, all them lizards we’s givin away for prizes is dead—take these spoilt hot dogs out b’hind the Dumpster and see if you c’n ketch some more.

We may laugh, but honestly—we would expect no less from Our Nation’s Weirdest State.

Son of Ten Unmediated Pleasures

1. Deep right-field seats for Opening Day, hot pretzels against the roaring cold.

2. The smell of thyme on my hands, and the smirk that tugs at my mouth when I give it a name.

3. Her hair, brushing my face.

4. The ping in the hamstrings, the twang in the quads, as the heart monitor ticks over 145.

5. Writing fiction longhand—ideas taking shape by an act of labor, building worlds like a carpenter builds houses.

6. Dough risen and resisting, humid with the panting respiration of yeast in a fight for life against my fist.

7. Warm sting of sunburn across the cheeks after an afternoon out.

8. Folding back into an Adirondack chair: it looks like it couldn’t possibly be comfortable, and then you’re in it and you never want to get up.

9. Twelve-dollar K-Mart jeans that are the match, for fit and comfort, of any I’ve ever owned

10. Being the hero. Killing the giant.

Profession

Resurrection Sunday

Noun.

An open avowal of faith or belief.

A calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive preparation.

An occupation or career.

Happy Easter, everybody.

The Mayo Clinic

Easter Vigil

Fifteen minutes ago, the doorbell rings: it’s Ash, one of the neighborhood kids, alerting me to a mess in front of our townhouse. Somebody has dropped a half-empty five-pound tub of Miracle Whip onto the sidewalk. The container is not damaged, but the lid is off and there are fat globs of pseudo-mayonnaise all over the pavement.

When I’m done discarding the container, scraping up the goo, and hosing down the sidewalk, I see something in the grass by the edge of the walk. It’s a half-eaten crust of bread. Like somebody was walking along in the sunshine, and was making himself a ham-on-white right there, outside, when he happened to drop this big industrial-sized tub of sandwich spread.

W. T. F.

Man O Manischewitz

Good Friday

I’m fasting today, naturally. I just had a little nibble to keep the pangs down—a broken matzoh. I washed it down with a glass of wine, kosher for Passover and sticky-sweet, like port but (at 11%) with only half the kick. On an empty stomach, though, it’s enough to mess me up a little.

I’ve got my problems with the whole Christian Pesach movement, though not for any toxic theological reasons: It simply seems like a stupid piece of cultural appropriation to me, like meaningless English phrases on a Japanese T-shirt, or meaningless kanji in an Anglo tattoo. That said, the symbolic foods angle has always grabbed me—it’s that idea of mindfulness again, of imbuing even the simplest action of human existence with sacred purpose.

Plus, y’know, there’s no cultural tourism in just eating. We all eat. And lamb is so very tasty, on a fine spring evening. So I grilled up a few chops on Palm Sunday, with homemade naan, and it was fine eating (though the mint chutney was thoroughly vile, and was quickly written off as a bad mistake).

For Maundy Thursday, though—the night when many Christian churches hold their quasi-Seders—I got a be in my bonnet that I did want to try some traditional Jewish recipes, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic—not ritual foods as such, but ethnically-identified foods I’d never tried.

Yeah. I’m talking about gefilte fish here.

And it was actually pretty good. I used boneless skinless tilapia fillets and canned stock, so it wasn’t the backbreaking marathon described in the above recipe, and the flavor was mild and pleasant. The texture, though... well, there’s not a lot of body, let’s say. In fact I’m struck by how many Jewish recipes call for basically grinding food to paste by way of preparation. Very odd.

This extends even to the undisputed hit of the evening, was the date haroseth, which I intentionally left a little chunky. This stuff’s dynamite spread on a matzoh.

The only problem? The recipe called for just three tablespoons of wine, leaving me with the rest of the bottle to get through. If I were Jewish, I could call on Elijah to help me down at least one cup of the stuff.

(Note Jesus’s cry at the Crucifixion—Eloi, Eloi, lema sabacthani?, which onlookers misheard as a call to Elijah. Given that Jesus is Himself presented as Paschal lamb of the New Covenant, there may have been some complex joke in this, especially as it came just before He was given the wine. Fucked if I can figure it out now, though. Where’d that bottle go?)

Thoughts On Children's Television, II

Maundy Thursday

I find myself unaccountably disturbed that the matryoshka-doll kids from Higglytown Heroes are shown to have nipples.

Thoughts On Children's Television, I

on the occasion of the kids' being home from school for Easter break

If you had told me five years ago that They Might be Giants would end up as the house band for the Disney Channel, I would have laughed in your face. Now that it has happened, I only feel confused and a little sad.

A Culinary Note

When making a slow-simmered Chicken Cordon Bleu variant, the combined funk of prosciutto, Lorraine Swiss, and Marsala wafting out of your Crock-Pot will make your kitchen smell like a diaper pail at high noon on a hot day. On no account should this prevent you from eating the stuff anyway.

Para²

If you’ve read the Missus’s blog—and she, amusingly, thinks there’s no reason that you should—then you know that we’ve got two new additions to the household. The link has a picture of them in their cage, but today I managed to get a couple of shots during their daily “flying around” time. Which, given what a couple of spazzmos they are, is more like “brief frenzied flapping until crashing into a solid object then panting sprawled on the floor for a while before repeating” time.

Luckily for them, these two beauties came already named. (I, sad comics geek that I am, was all set to call them Booster and Beetle.) This handsome devil is Blueberry—whom I, in my aforementioned geekery, have come to think of as The Lieutenant. Lovely plumage.

This’un, all green-and-yellow against the film noir blinds and the potted palms, is Chicory. Which I kind of like, actually: It sounds like a name a bird might give itself. I call him Chico, mostly.

Now, I’m very happy with the birds. They give me hope. They lift my spirits. Oh, sure, they're excitable and loud and rock-stupid, and I've got to clean up their shit and the millet hulls they insist on tossing around, and lay down newspapers, feed and water them, shift the cage all over, and trap and transport them (sometimes getting bitten for my trouble) when they fly around and can’t find their way back, like the birdbrains they are. But I accept these indignities cheerfully.

Because parakeets can, allegedly, be taught to talk.
I think you know where I’m going with this.

As seen elsewhere, I’ve already taken to wearing a bandana—particularly when I’m working out, or when the sun might burn my buzz-cropped noggin. And my glasses are already thick—I haven’t got the eyepatch yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time (a dose of the pox might help it along; hey, it worked for James Joyce). And then, my friends, and then...

AVAST, YE LUBBERS! I BE LIVING THE DREAM!

Mister Shhh

There are times when I feel like writing about nothing but the movies, and times when I feel like writing about nothing but politics. There have been times when I have only wanted to write fiction, but such times are relatively rare—there’s something in me moving always towards balance, like the bubble in a spirit level, and too much fiction has a way of throwing me out of plumb. (Poetry and songs have always slipped in through the cracks.) There are long stretches where I only want to write about music, or about faith. There are times when I feel like writing about nothing but my family. There are even times when I feel like writing about nothing but myself.

And, increasingly, there are times when I feel like writing about nothing at all.