All those people coming here after Lisa kindly linked to me in her Iron Tongue of Midnight write-up of the wonderful Volti concert (which I’ll get to in a few entries – I’m a bit backed up, once again), and all they’ve gotten for days and days is the same entry, which is me waxing philosophical in my jockstrap. Usually I’m a little more on the arty side, so I hope no one was scared off. (Of course, any baseball fans who stumbled here unawares, eager for any scrap of Red Sox musing, may be scared off by the arty side.) But I generally try to leave a day or two between postings anyway in order to give adequate reading time, since, as several kind friends have thoughtfully pointed out, in case I had overlooked it, my entries tend to be long. There are just as many notes as necessary, your majesties. And I’ve been dealing with old bills drifting in piles like autumn leaves, and I’ve also had those to sweep up non-metaphorically, and a new job, and major plumbing problems and minor surgery (maybe I should make it clear those were two separate situations, only one of which involved my body), so things have been in a bit of disarray – but that implies that sometimes they aren’t. Several years ago some friends of mine were coming to my house; Arby had seen it before, but his wife had not, so I started to apologize for the mess and the teetering random piles of stuff, which were due to my painting the living room, when she interrupted me to say, “Patrick – it’s OK. I’ve made that same excuse myself.” The mess really was mostly due to the room painting (honest!), but she was pointing out a larger truth. Who can keep up, or halt the entropic slide?
And what we see is only the tip of the iceberg (which is why I so often feel as if I’m traveling steerage on the Titanic). For instance, take last Wednesday. I was down by the piers, looking for a nice outdoor spot in which to eat my ham-and-cheese turnover from Acme Breads, just purchased in the Ferry Building. It’s actually quite difficult finding a nice spot to eat outdoors, which is why I usually hate it and do anything to avoid it; just as you find an empty and clean bench overlooking the laughing strand, and the playful zephyrs waft through the rustling palms carrying the gentle quarking of the gliding gulls, some pig comes stinking up the entire pier with a cigarette or a loud radio, and who can eat then? Possibly you know the hell of overly refined sensibilities. Anyway, I had found a suitable spot, and a gull came very close to me hoping for leftovers (I guess once baseball season ends, and with it the concrete smorgasbord at Major Phone Company Park, the gulls resort to working the waterfront). I was trying to remember if it was gulls or pigeons that were rats with wings, when I noticed gunky black stuff, like an oily residue, spotting the bird’s yellow legs. The residue looked oily because it was oil. There had been a huge spill in the Bay that day, which I read about in the local paper only on Friday, and I had a one-gull experience of it. I felt like Fabrizio in the Charterhouse of Parma wondering if he had experienced the battle of Waterloo or not. If I’d known the gull was a survivor I would have shared my lunch.
I’m not yet at the “I’m comfortable reading blogs here” stage at work, and I wish my desk were configured so that I could see people approaching me, to facilitate quick screen switches, but just in case I’ve added a few more of my frequently read sites to the blogroll so I can reach them conveniently. It was actually modesty that kept me from adding more sites earlier; all these people seemed to know and link to each other, and it seemed like blogosphere social climbing to add them to my modest little roll, as if I had plopped down my lunch tray at the table with the popular kids and then watched my oily string beans and flabby tater tots congeal under that mistaken move. Then I realized that only linking to people who had linked to me first was like standing in the ballroom refusing to dance unless someone asked me first. (Please, draw no conclusions about my high school social life from these hypothetical examples – I was far too pathologically timid even to think of approaching the popular kids, and I think I was too far out of the loop to know who they were anyway.) So I’m adding away, on the assumption that there’s no reasonable cause for offense. What can I say? I’m a stranger here myself.
5 comments:
Just videotaped "One Touch of Venus" tonight for 42nd Street Moon, and realized it's my favorite new Kurt Weill score, whose signature siren song is "I'm a stranger here myself."
Glad you got a job, and glad you got to experience Le Disasteur, channeled through a gull. Weren't you smelling the petrol yourself during lunch, though, especially since you are the essence of overly refined sensibilities?
Mike,
I've never been to a 42nd Street Moon show, and I was thinking about going to One Touch of Venus, but I'm sorry to say I missed it. I love that song too.
I wasn't smelling the petrol, though it can be hard to tell with all the cars going by -- I think I was there not too long after it happened, and either the slick or the smell hadn't spread that far yet, or the wind was blowing it away. I did manage to eat my lunch, which took about ten minutes, and was actually too rich for me, which distracted me further from the oily evidence.
You're sure quick on the draw -- I just posted this! So I don't know if you read it before I finished all the revising I do after I first post.
Let me know if you ever come down towards the Financial District.
OK, Mike, I just read your Civic Center report and figured out the times -- I did smell the oil, but it was while I was indoors. We were about to call the building supervisors when someone said that a local building was having its roof re-tarred, so we just figured it was that. I think the smell had dissipated or the wind had shifted by the time I was on the piers.
Steerage on the Titanic? How delightful! Your visit would simply charm the dancing, drinking Irish people. Those snobs upstairs just don't know what they're missing.
But I digress. I wanted to thank you for two things. The first is that I realized that I could never keep a blog right now because, in everything I wrote about, I would see a methaphor for the Bush administration. In fact, i already see my as yet unborn grandchildren rolling their eyes behind my back and mouthing "there she goes again" because I don't see this bitterness ending anytime soon. Thanks for keeping it fresh.
And the second is for slipping entropy in there. I expect to see Brownian motion and Archimede's Principle in future blogs.
V, Hey, want to feel old? That awful awful Titanic movie is having a special DVD release for its 10th anniversary. Tenth! Yes, it's taken that long for DiCaprio to be regarded once more as a serious actor. I love to think of my Irish ancestors if they had seen what's-her-name in steerage dancing their jigs.
There are actually quite a few subjects where I think people might be rolling their eyes at me in that "there he goes again" way, so I try to bring them up only at intervals. You know how you like to joke that I'm OCD, and I like to pretend that you're joking? I try to avoid doing that with certain subjects.
That said, I think I see the Bush administration itself as a metaphor, as an effect rather than a cause -- it is just the pus oozing from the open sores of American society. Why should an incredibly rich, powerful country that prides itself on its religious values so consistently fail at basic social justice? The Onion has already made satirical hay out of those who vote against their own economic self-interest. But do the so-called "values voters", whose values are as weak as their reasoning, actually read anything in the Bible they keep pounding? There's a lot more in there about protecting the weak than there is about regulating sex. So what's the deal? I won't even start on all the problems our greedy sense of entitlement cause, or the ones caused by our acquiescence in the status quo.
I think focusing on the Bush administration can hide the deeper problems. Things aren't going to be peachy once he's out of there. It's like those people who focus on SUVs as a problem -- that distracts from the real problem, which is our creation and reliance on car culture.
You may recall this came up because of TSR's entry about the Venezuelans -- and my first reaction was Why are people critical of Venezuela's government? Chavez is anti-Bush! But of course there's more to it than that.
I actually looked up entropy before putting that in to make sure I was using it correctly. I didn't want you to be disappointed in me. But don't be too impressed -- there are certain scientific principles all English majors like to refer to; one is entropy (it explains so much about their lives) and the other is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (unreliable narrators!).
I think I missed my big opportunity to use Archimedes in my last Red Sox entry (that's displacement, right? it's the "if you win, someone else loses" part I was thinking of). As for Brownian motion, I can't think of it without thinking of your moronic colleague (I chose the words carefully so as not to narrow down the possible identity)making that elaborate joke about farts that none of the eighth graders, surprisingly enough, understood. So you'll have to explain it to me so I can hone some quips.
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