May 2012
14 posts
Free of charge P.S.
I asked one guy if he had any chronic illnesses and he started laughing and said, “Like CHRONIC… ill-ness?” Then he put his head down on my desk because he was super high.
Free of charge
In the mornings I have been working at a homeless outreach center that helps people get state IDs, doctor referrals, food stamps, glasses, whatever. It’s unlike other places where I’ve worked with people experiencing homelessness because no one bothers to spin you a long yarn; there are strict limits to what we can give and to whom we can give it, so there is no point to arousing my...
Chain and the Gang, “Free Will” (live...
Haranguing the gay-hating king of North Carolina...
A lot of people have expressed impatience or eye-rolling about Obama’s statement on same-sex marriage. I keep wondering: what would it have looked like for him to do justice on this issue this week? What actions would you have had him do? What is he legislatively capable of changing in the near term? These aren’t rhetorical questions.
I have low expectations for presidents, both...
"Commission" by Ezra Pound, a new translation by...
Go, my hair, to the lonely and the unsatisfied, I have cut you off. Go also to the Locks of Love Foundation, Who told me they may give my hair to some spiteful children whom they hate, Who have made doctors’ and foster parents’ lives a hell. Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors. Go as a great wave of cool water, Bear my contempt of oppressors.
Go to the bourgeoisie who is...
Eddie Sensitivity Units
Last night we were talking about mutual acquaintances. One of the acquaintances has Asperger’s with strong symptoms.
M., a scientist by training, created a scale to gauge peoples’ sensitivity that ranged from the Asperger’s sufferer (least) to me (most). He named the units of measure “ESUs.”
I enjoyed the moment because, while I think of myself as sensitive,...
April 2012
10 posts
From Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer...
Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the props that Facebook did not notify you of, that you will not live to Like or repost.
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I heard this song in the middle of the night on...
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Conditional statement in search of a consequent
If I could meet someone with the last name Wood and not wind up at a Dolly Parton impression—that Dollywood commercial in the 90s in which she said, like, Who’d build the biggest water slide in the Southeast? Dolly-would! Who’d dip an ice cream cone in strawberries? Dolly-would!—then I guess I would be
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Part of "The Waste Land" by John Beer
A degree or two to the right of an imagined meridian marking time’s monotonous ecliptic tracing and retracing the animal steps that bring the man down narrow hallways, a painting hangs, depicting an almond tree in blossom, unfurling white petals against a deepening green, brown brushstrokes scarring the field, and in the center of the decentered vista, a fleck of canvas erupts through the paint,...
March 2012
10 posts
Bad lottery food
Bloomberg ranks my home state Georgia the biggest sucker in a lottery expenditures-vs.-winnings index:
Players in Georgia, whose per capita income is about 10 percent below the U.S. average, are doing the most damage to their personal finances. …
Georgia residents spent an average $470.73 on the lottery in 2010, or 1 percent of their personal income, while they received the sixth-highest...
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Dispatch from mom's birthday
1. Yesterday was her first birthday as a Facebook user, and she was disappointed that no one left birthday greetings on her wall; “I guess people just don’t want to.” Her birth date was marked private. I made it public, but now I wish that I had set it to today’s date so that people would see it and write on her wall.
2. On Problem Child 2: “Every time it’s on,...
Free Mystery Science Theater will
I keep trying to watch “Mystery Science Theater 3000” on Netflix, but it feels dated. The premise is unrelatable now: they must watch movies without selecting what or when they’ll watch.
When MST3K aired, it aired six hours a day, more on the weekends, and occasionally as an all-day marathon. I watched it because it was the only thing on—the same reason I watched anything...
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My need is your need, dog
Lately I think a lot about how we project character traits onto animals
My parents talk about their dogs smiling
and, they’re right, Ted does appear to be smiling sometimes
but of course he’s not
not in the sense that we use the term
even though it is so easy and so tempting to read that happiness onto him,
because you want him to be happy
and you want to think that you have...
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dumbassfils:
shousui:
i just wanna sext
sext is actually short for semiotext(e) is case yall didnt know
thats why parents are so worried about teens doing it
they have a lot at stake in the current system of power relations, after all
I know it's hard to nuance church and state
Here is Jeffrey Stout, himself a “secular liberal,” beginning a rebuttal to Rorty’s assertion that religion is a conversation-stopper in politics:
It would be unrealistic to expect membership in religious groups to have no influence on democratic decision making and debate, for one function of religious traditions is to confer order on highly important values and concerns, some...
February 2012
7 posts
“You never get likes on the posts you don’t publish”
– Zig Ziglar
Author talk
Strange sensation: hear a writer speak in a room full of people who love that writer, though you think the writer is hacky. These people are your friends, so while she talks you think about ways to moderate your criticism, then you think about how to be polite and uncritical, then you tell yourself that you need to chill out and just enjoy that they are enjoying her. Just chill out. Get annoyed at...
Stanley Hauerwas thinking about taking the plunge
The assumption is that there is someone right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person.
This moral assumption overlooks two crucial aspects to marriage. First, it fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or...
Advice from a homeless person on giving money to...
Dude: “I saw this woman I used to smoke crack with, and she asked for $5. I knew she was gonna use it to buy crack, so I gave her $2.50.”
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Your letters, they all say that you're beside me...
The summer after graduating high school I had intense moments with this girl whom I had liked since 5th grade, and in August, 2001, I bought fancy paper and wrote her a love letter. She was slow to respond; it took her until September. At my freshman dorm I panicked when I received her thick envelope, because, regardless of what the letter said, I knew that reading it was going to be a big...
January 2012
14 posts
The mundanity of audience reaction
Recent tour diary of Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna):
From the stage tonight I notice three different people crying as I sing “Blue Thunder,” which is a song about the power-steering action in my old 1975 Dodge Dart and doesn’t quite seem worth crying about, though admittedly it is also a song about being alone behind the wheel, and I wail about driving “so far away,” so...
“‘It is one of my joys, not to be a house-owner,’ wrote Nietzsche as...”
– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (via hollovv)
WatchAd by Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC that is actually airing across South Carolina this week. Notice that his name does not appear in it. As an act of subversion (re: campaign finance laws, “our broken political system”) it is fairly abstract and artistic but exhilarating, too.
Humbling moment in which you relate to something...
I was having a terribly shitty week, but friends have made me feel better bit by bit, and then today I watched a mid-period episode of The Office and realized that after Andy dated stern, 90-year-old Angela, he met Erin, who is so fun and—to me—almost unfathomably charming, and I thought, This narrative can be my narrative, and now I feel much better and am going to take all the Vic...
12 Delegates At Stake
If you get your parents’ cable account info, you can watch CNN live on the website or app. I don’t care about tonight’s primary but will watch some of the coverage for nostalgic pleasure. The pageantry and inane commentary was thrilling four years ago, like how it must feel to follow your football team as they ascend to the Super Bowl, if the quarterback quoted MLK a lot. I miss...