xtcian

the snake eats itself

2/23/06

The Meta-Blog About the Blog Talking About Itself, Chapter 18

Sometimes, like tonight, I wonder if I should go to a more random schedule with the blog (you know, like EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD DOES) since it would relieve me of the burden of being witty. However, doing so would relieve me of the burden of being witty.

When I started this thing, I wrote every single day without comments, and that included holidays like Christmas and New Year's. I told myself I'd do it for a year, and there are so many entries back then I'm proud of, but you'll never read them. My delightful friend Quinn occasionally reposts entries from the times when she had no page hits, but I feel like if I do that, you will all find it an unbelievably cheap transgression.

As it is, I take off all weekends and even the lesser holidays, but the main problem with keeping you all interested is this: my love life is accounted for. If you look at all the livejournal and blogspot blogs with 1.8 billion hits, it's mostly people in their early 20s who may or may not reveal who they've been fucking (and all the sturm and drang therewith).

I look at my diary entries from those months of my life (the early 1990s), and fully 94% of it concerns my efforts to bed the other gender. Now, I was a well-known cad of the highest order, and thus those pages will not be unsealed until they repeal the Freedom of Information Act in the late 29th century, but at this point you are stuck with me already having proposed, gotten married, and having a child. All documented on this site.

I'm also a guy. Not a striking chick like Dooce, nor am I always one step away from showing my tits, like that podcast woman who gets drunk and usually winds up in the bathroom with her digital camera. This, as you might expect, puts a ceiling on the amount of damage I'll ever do on the internet.

In essence, I feel like a throwback. I began this thing before blogging was cool, and now there are so many pictures of me (and Tessa and Lucy and everyone else we know) on here that I've had to go back and take out names, delete actual places, and try to obfuscate certain opinions that I was silly enough to entertain in the era of eternal Googling.

Already, there have been entries I've been ashamed of. One was about my old job at the Woolworth Building that I completely deleted because it was no longer how I felt, and unbelievably rude and inaccurate to boot. Lately, I've come to think my musings on Islam were not befitting someone who actually possessed a liberal arts education. And there was this one entry that was about my own grandfather - misread by some of Tessa's family - that pretty much made me persona non grata in Houston for a couple of years.

So here's the question: why do I do it? Is it the same desire for notoriety that fueled the best Wednesday's Child entries in college? Do I lack community enough that my only solace are the comments section, where I rarely say anything? Do I have some sort of magical thinking, wherein my order falls apart if I don't blog every weekday? Or is it just the same reason cavemen bothered to etch buffalo on the sides of caves?

Maybe I do this because I love to hear everyone talk. Perhaps these are all letters to my daughter, so she can know her dad like few do. Maybe it's an ongoing love letter to my wife, so see if I can get her to laugh (which is actually quite hard). Or maybe these entries are just notes to my future self, reminding me to avoid complacency and remember there was a time when there was honor in endurance.

oh this will never do

2/22/06

Arrived in Venice, CA at 2:14am safely. On Book 10 of the Aubrey/Maturin "Master and Commander" series, "The Far Side of the World." Book bears almost no resemblance to movie starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. I would imagine those who saw the movie and then read the book were either utterly confused or utterly riveted.

My lumbar muscles can't quite take five days in the car like they used to. Still want to drive to Anchorage on that highway, though.

"Exhaustion" from this trip doesn't give quite enough meaning to the word. Almost fell asleep thinking of a better word. Desire others in comments section to make this blog interesting tonight, as I have no sweeping generalizations to add. Except that conservatives are terrible in bed. Discuss.

do they go FLIP FLOP

2/21/06

Greetings from Santa Rosa, NM. As Homer Simpson said, "hey, there's a NEW Mexico!"

First off, a shameful pox on those who did not believe the ducks would be walking to breakfast in the Little Rock morn. As I checked out, they had retired to the wading pool, happy as... well, ducks in water, I suppose.

I know how much everyone clamors for my unusually ironic brand of photojournalism as I traverse this fine country looking for ways to belittle my fellow Americans, but this little piece of tautological signage on a gas pump in Oklahoma always sends my grammar-fiend mother into paroxysms of misery:

Later in the night, I stopped for gas in rural panhandle Texas, where the local teens had descended in order to get their cases of Bud Light before the clock struck midnight. The cashier was not pleased, and when I got to the front of the line, I saw the rock upon which her indignation rested. Next to my deeply faggy Evian ("Does this answer your question?" from the movie "Heathers") you will see a giant Holy Bible with relevant pages marked for impulse inspiration:

One thing about driving to LA - while my wife and daughter fly - is that the car becomes the repository for all the shit they didn't want to carry with them. This time I've got a massively heavy office chair, bags of shoes... and the Baby Einstein Discover and Play™ Activity Center in the back seat:

This Activity Center says "dog" or "gato" or "cow" and then moos or barks, followed (no lie) by an excerpt from Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Then Beethoven's Fifth. Then "Old McDonald." And this happens every time I go over a bump, hit a pothole, or take a swift turn off the freeway.

When it is silent, there is also a Fisher-Price bunny rabbit that Chip got Lucy, with about fifteen songs that get sung every time the car jiggles. One in particular:

Do your ears swing low
Do they tumble TO and FRO?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?

...I've heard it so many times that even I have run out of stunningly pornographic alternative lyrics, and that's saying something. If it has been silent a while, a computer chip kicks in, and the doll screams "HUG ME!" from underneath my golf balls. My relationship to the Baby Einstein and the Fisher-Price rabbit has become a little like Tom Hanks and the volleyball in "Cast Away."

I'm beginning to talk back. I'm beginning to tell them things. Secrets.

i need to get off the road

military two-step down the nape of my neck

2/20/06

Greetings from Little Rock, Arkansas! Spiritual home of a President I never stopped loving, and proud address of the Peabody Hotel, where apparently every morning a group of ducklings parade across the lobby and into the restaurant. I hope to get up in time to see this blessed event.

Like pimpin', road trippin' ain't easy. Especially when you've got a little girl waiting for you three days away and your late-30s lumbar muscles aren't what they were back in the days of endless American skyscapes. Then Tessa had to go and send me this picture:

...after which, my heart about broke in two, and I was all, "Dude. It's hard enough to find a decent salad in rural Georgia, why you gots to do that to me?"

Speaking of rural Georgia, I have two places to recommend in Jasper. The first is a new joint called Bridge Monkey, tucked away in a deeply inoffensive, well-landscaped strip mall just off the highway. They are, in a phrase, the encapsulization of my teenage id and grownup wants: an espresso joint with wifi, cute 11th-graders playing Magic the Gathering, and twenty hi-def gaming monitors with vibrating chairs.

Geeky, to be sure, but you get the feeling you could stay there forever and be swept into its warm technological embrace. And games like Dungeons and Dragons are not being played just by Super Spaz DorkWads any more - there is a new cadre of slightly-cool kids whose tastes verge on the Goth yet shop at Hollister. Brandenburg symphonies are piped onto the sound system, and the toffee nut syrup flows like brown ambrosia. All this in, basically, the middle of nowhere.

The second place, again, again! is my buddy Salem's Jasper Family Steakhouse. I have had $54 steaks at some of the finest places in Manhattan, and I have had Salem's Sharptop Sirloin for $12.99. I am here to tell you that Salem's steak is better. WAY better.

The buffet at JFS is better than anything I ever had as a kid, and thus, when there, I eat like one. I know I've prattled on about this particular buffet before, but when so many of your friends are artists, it's impossible not to put Salem in the same category.

I-40 in Tennessee is littered with billboards promoting as-yet-unsigned country singers and their albums. I didn't know this was a good technique, but seven hundred billboards can't be wrong. Because I'm a hoity-toity blue-state commie northerner, not to mention a pill-popping leftist stooge, I fucking hate country music, but I appreciate the moxie of these people. Even as I find it unbelievably depressing.

In fact, I consider myself a Southerner, and certainly I was in the South from early puberty through my 30th birthday, but every time I return I feel more and more removed from it. Perhaps I became overly aware of how much I loathe the politics of every single person I see at every single gas station, but my contempt for certain aspects of southern culture is becoming problematic.

I was inside a chain restaurant bathroom last night when a 40-year-old adult dragged his son by the arm into one of the toilet stalls and absolutely tore into him.

When I say something, what do you do? YOU DO IT, YOU HEAR ME?

I froze in front of the mirror in horror.

When your mother says something, YOU DO IT. If you MOUTH OFF ONE MORE TIME I'm going to TAKE IT OUT OF YOU!

And with that, a big SLAP!

STOP CRYING! DON'T YOU START CRYING!!

I knew the dad was winding up for another slap, so my choices were twofold: bust open the latrine and beat the ever-living shit out of the father, ram his head into the toilet, kick him in the ribs and break his kneecaps in front of his terrified son - or just get out of there.

And while I was frozen, hearing this awful commotion a few feet away, two different men peed, washed their hands and left without raising an eyebrow. Their complacence ran over to me, and I just hung my head. You will hear this story, and in your version, you will bust open the door, perhaps. If you were there, however... I don't know. I left, got in the car, sheepishly told Salem and his family, and then thought about it all night.

I suppose it's all too easy to lay this shame at the door of "the rural South" - kids get hit by their parents in every zip code. You just feel, however, that if it had happened in the Upper East Side, I would have been armed with enough moral indignation to at least tell an authority or two. Someone else in the next stall would have done something. Or perhaps it was just my personal weakness in the face of brutality, a momentary ambivalence that would have struck anywhere.

Sometimes, all we can do is keep our side of the street clean. I look again at the picture Tessa sent me above and think, how could I ever hit this creature? I promise you, Lucy, nothing you EVER do could be bad enough. I know you're angelic and a baby and incapable of right and wrong at this point, but there are two things I swore never to do as long as I live:
1) call anyone "ugly"
and 2) hit a child. Ever. EVER.

I'll think of more, but that's a good start.