Facebook is…

Facebook is to communication what chicken McNuggets are to haute cuisine.
Facebook is where people who don’t really like each other can stay in touch.
Facebook is to friends what 🙂 is to happiness.
Facebook is an opportunity to say “happy birthday!” (to veritable strangers).
Facebook is where real thoughts are nipped in the bud and presented as such.
Facebook is a grandmother’s dream come true.
Facebook is where you can picture yourself over and over and over…
Facebook is where people are sure to find…something.
Facebook is where bitter people blossom.
Facebook is where interesting ideas can be shared until they are no longer.
Facebook is where people who are obsessed about something obsess.
Facebook is to friendship what water is to single malt scotch.
Facebook is the bathroom wall for logorrhea sufferers.
Facebook is where you can care shallowly.
Facebook is to productivity what termites are to two-by-fours.
Facebook is for sad people to seem happy.
Facebook is where you can change your status without changing one iota.
Facebook is a kennel of barking dogs.
Facebook is the La Brea tar pits for the egregiously self-centered.
Facebook is a tower of babble.

Facebook connects human beings to bits.

Just because!

We do lots of things and believe lots of thing without really thinking about them and sometimes someone else shines a little light on the strangeness of it all. To wit: I came into the bathroom and my eight-year-old daughter was holding one of the large bath towels. The area between her two hands – an eight inch circle – was soaking wet. She was obviously washing her face with it.

“What are you doing?”

“What?”

“The towel – it’s soaked!”

“So.”

“That’s a towel!”

“So.”

“You should be using a wash rag!”

“Why? It’s the exact same material.”

“Wash rags are for washing!” I was getting a little snarky. “Towels are for drying!”

“Wet things.”

“What?”

“Drying wet things so they get wet – like this.” She held up the towel.

“Not like that they don’t!”

“If it’s wet enough they do.”

“Yeah, but now…”

“It has to dry.” She finished my sentence. “Like it always does when it gets wet. And then it gets dry and everything is fine.”

“But that’s too wet!” I said and just then realized how ludicrous this all was. Two pieces of the same material – one two feet by four feet, the other six inches by six inches. I’ve always known that the smaller piece could get really wet and the bigger one could not! Period. End of story.

But why? Just because!

i felt bad

i felt bad
because i called it stabbing
when it was fencing,
but then figured, shit,
it might as well be called stabbing.

Hagiography

I can’t say how much I love how Edward St. Aubyn skewers the holy, high and mighty, landed, nam-ed, people of his Patrick Melrose novels. But I also feel a similar anger toward his own prodigious talent. Like, well, fuck you, Eddie, with all you got through whatever genetic re-redistribution that led to your own genius! You are the heir to whatever it is you do. You skewer them with the same unabashed cruelty and poetry that they do others. Yes, you are infinitely better and more able, while they skewer, you fillet. And I Iove you for it. But I hate you, too. That cruelty doesn’t come from nowhere.

And that’s the point, I guess. I love you again.

goodness!

and this

and this.

this is just fun and timely

The first line of “On Poetry” by David Orr, entitled Daily Devotions, from this last Sunday..

“It is impossible to picture certain poets buying Cheetos at a Sunoco. Granted, this is true of a particular sort of person in any occupation – it’s hard, for example, to imagine Mitt Romney with iridescent orange dust all over his hands, unless he had accidentally purchased Halloween.”

Geographical Chauvinism

Duluth looks down on Two Harbors. Rochester looks down on Duluth. St. Paul looks down on Rochester. Minneapolis looks down on St. Paul. Chicago looks down on Minneapolis. Los Angeles looks down on Chicago. New York looks down on Los Angeles. London looks down on New York. Paris looks down on London. And Two Harbors knows Paris is just a bunch of queers.

His wife was small, diminutive

His wife was small, diminutive,
kept order in the place they lived
made lists of things and scolded him
when he bought something on a whim.

The girl was round, voluptuous,
she ordered fries and chicken strips
chewed bubble gum she shared with him
before they worked out in the gym.

His wife would wait at home and cook
and clean and read another book
and glare at him when he came in
fresh showered with a sheepish grin.

The girl would go out to the bars
and drink and dance under the stars
and send him pictures and silly notes
he read in the closet behind the coats

that smelled of must and of his wife
to whom he’d promised all his life
that day when she seemed worth it all –
open, caring, beautiful.

But now she’s scrunched and crumpled up,
filled with contempt, her loving cup,
tired and weary, wrinkly and prudish,
so, really, was he being all that brutish

by wrapping his arms ’round something so soft,
so round and moist that lifts him aloft,
that giggles and smiles and laughs at his jokes
and teases and tickles and fondles and pokes?

Must he avoid this happiness
to uphold a law that was really a guess?
Should he stay with scrunchy or go with the lass?
The answer, he knew, was of course, yes.

loser

I’m a loser. I really am. And not in a really bad way, but I’m not cool, or daring, or particularly outgoing. Not that I ever was, but I think age solidifies our personal qualities. So my loser-ness is increasing.

I don’t go out much. I don’t really care to. I don’t particularly care to see music performed or movies in a cinema. Brian Eno could come through town but if it looked like rain, I might skip it. Okay, not Brian Eno, but anyone else. It might be too loud or too crowded. Parking might suck. I’m cool just listening to the radio.

Travel really doesn’t interest me. I know I should be hang-gliding en la montanas de Brazil right now, but I really don’t want to. I don’t like heights, Brazil is a long way away. Air travel sucks, who knows what kind of shitty hotel I’d end up in?

I like well-prepared, high end, locavore cuisine, but not if it inconveniences me to get it. The amazing new restaurant? It’s miles away. The joy of cooking? Not any more. Too much work. I crack a can of this or that and eat standing up in the kitchen.

I don’t watch much television and I rarely see any movies so I’m absolutely unable to keep up with any pop culture conversation whatsoever. And that’s not some, I just sit around and read great novels, I don’t. A bit of this and a bit of that.

Maybe this just makes me a homebody, and not a loser, but sometimes if feels really loserly.

My friend thinks I’m boring. My family mocks me.

I pity my wife.

I’m a loser.

i wrote it on the wall — I wrote it on the wall – that might help

Thoughts for October 6

Follicle Law

Why are there so many men with square-staches and bald heads? They’ve been proliferating exponentially for the last decade. Where did all that hair go? Why not beards? It’s as if a rule were decreed by the king of these things making it illegal or immoral for a man to have some hair but not all hair, and that upper lips and chins must be covered by a thin layer of whisker.

The Mother Ship

What has happened to Uptown? When Prince wrote about it, quite frankly, it was still rather a dump, but the arrival of the much-maligned Calhoun Square kicked off a renaissance that ushered in the unique, chic and local boutiques. Now there’s an LA Fitness. An LA Fitness. And somehow, like a fleet of alien spaceships, great big blocky condominium buildings with silly names are moored all around the place. I can’t see the sense in any of this. Who, at one point, looked around and thought, “Congestion. This place needs more residents.”

Skinny Little Lovers

Prisons provide weights – apparently so the hardened criminals can develop even more hardened physiques, making them stronger and more dangerous upon release. I propose we remove all the weights, limit the caloric intake to reduce the physical mass, encourage long distance running (within the confines of the yard), broadcast only Lifetime movies with the likes of Valerie Bertinelli and Marcia Gay Harden, serve up 19^th century romantic poetry if anyone wants to read, and drip a steady stream of ecstasy into the water supply.