Falling and Laughing

did you decide to throw in the blogging towel after your prolific post on moisturizing?

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:51:00 -0500

Yes! I reached the end of blogging with my moisturizer post. After that post, there were no more blogs to blog. I don’t mean just for me: for you too. Everybody. Quit blogging, everybody.

BUT SERIOUSLY you might have noticed I was running a little hot these past couple weeks. Words words words! I need to recharge the word bank and have a think on what I’m doing here, so I’m been taking a wee step-away from the ol’ Falling + Laughing as part of a general decrazing-of-my-life interval.

If I decide there are more things to blog about—that I did not, in fact, reach the end of blogging—I might be back next week with a special series called The Lighter Side of…. Falling + Laughing, in which I post photos of Gem and also offer my contemporary yet droll musings on such diverse topics as “going to the doctor’s office,” “airplane food!” and “wives.”

I’m so glad that this Nivea for Men REVITALIZING Lotion...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:56:41 -0500

I’m so glad that this Nivea for Men REVITALIZING Lotion Q10 has the strong masculine fragrance of every single cologne tester strip from every single issue of GQ from 1991-1993. (I mean all of them combined, at once, and also olfactorily-amplified.) Otherwise I would feel super gay wearing face moisturizer.

Besides reassuring me that I am extremely non-gay, the thick man-musk of Nivea for Men REVITALIZING Lotion Q10 also enhances my swagger. I feel like the protagonist of the video game series Grand Theft Auto. I might carjack you! I might make love to you (if you are a mad sexy woman)! You never know, such is the strength/unpredictability of my swagger!

Finally, the “Q10” part of Nivea for Men REVITALIZING Lotion Q10 is extremely technical-sounding, further reassuring me that I love to make love to ladies.

Wait a minute, tumblr radar: You’re telling me that there...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:27:00 -0500

Wait a minute, tumblr radar: You’re telling me that there exists, on tumblr, Polaroid photos? And not only that, but Polaroid photos of ambiguously poetic phrases set in stylish type?!?! Thanks tumblr radar for radaring me to this phenomenon!

The Elephant in the Room that the '90s Gangsta Rap Academic Establishment Refuses to Address

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:39:00 -0500

When Snoop Dogg makes a jimmy joke about your mama that you might not like, it isn’t a joke, nor does it mention jimmies.

Maybe you thought that “turkeycake” was the...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:41:00 -0500

Maybe you thought that “turkeycake” was the least-appealing-sounding holiday confection possible. Well, bad news for you, the Swedish Bakery on Clark St. yields fresh horrors with each new holiday season. Consider, for a moment, these three words:

Marzipan bowler hat.

Swish them around in your mouth. No, actually, chew them. Chew them thickly. Feel your fillings throb from the sugary punch.

Marzipan bowler hat.

Do you see it now, in your mind’s eye? The marzipan bowler hat? Good.

Now lick the brim. Lick the brim of the marzipan bowler hat. Its disgusting green fondant is making your tongue green. It is the sweetest thing you’ve ever tasted that is hat-shaped.

Now go sit in a corner, facing the wall, and rock back and forth quietly until St Patrick’s Day has passed.

(1) A cappuccino, fuck it1 (2) Somewhere nice (note total lack...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:51:07 -0500

(1) A cappuccino, fuck it¹

(2) Somewhere nice (note total lack of mosquitos at)

(3) CONGRATU-WAFFLES

(4) I left this Swedish waffle segment for you. It is the happy opposite of pouring out some liquor for fallen comrades. You are my risen comrades, and I thank you all for helping me keep my shit together, and better yet, for keeping me on my PMA grind. SYRUPY HEART CONGRATU-WAFFLE YOU GUYS!

—

_{1. I am embarrassed at how badly I misquoted the poet earlier this morning. The actual lines are, of course}

_{I might even have me a cappuccino, fuck it
I’m goin’ somewhere nice with no mosquitos at [n-word redacted]}

_{You might wonder how I verified the lines. I verified them via listening to them over and over again this morning. You can too, in fact I highly recommend it, esp. if you are interested in feeling 7’ tall/undmurderable.}

You win, Ann Sather! Swedish waffles make the best...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:52:33 -0500

You win, Ann Sather!

Swedish waffles make the best CONGATU-WAFFLES.

You, Svea, are a total Swedish tease. On account of your not...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:50:55 -0500

You, Svea, are a total Swedish tease. On account of your not having waffles.

Yesterday—begloomed outside, and inside filled with...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:40:29 -0500

Yesterday—begloomed outside, and inside filled with frantic February carryover—didn’t count as the first day of March. Today is the first day of March. And so let me offer you this, my favorite Saul Steinberg drawing.

Happy first day of March.

Photo

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:03:17 -0500

A CLIENT JUST TOLD ME TO EAT CONGRATU-WAFFLES

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:38:00 -0500

Also, to quote the poet:

Fuck it, I might have me a cappuccino.
I’m goin’ someplace nice with no mosquitos at.

March comes in like a lion

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:35:40 -0500

A lion who is currently attempting to maul me ballwise.

[May I make a request of you, my reader, of whom I am very fond?...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:58:00 -0500

[May I make a request of you, my reader, of whom I am very fond? If you’re on a reasonably high-speed connection, please click the photo above and watch the animated gif I made from ‘My Winnipeg’ before reading the below. You’ll see.]

—

A Final Scene from February 2010, the Month I’m Not Sure I Didn’t Dream

Lots of things happened in February that were dreamlike and uncanny. Many of these things were arm-punchingly wonderful. Unreal city. Others were arm-punchingly terrible/gutting. Between these two poles, middle ground was difficult to locate.

I wish I could tell you about all of the things, or most of them anyway. I want more life. I want more words.

But I didn’t want this fever-dream of a month to end without noting something that happened late last Monday night, after the El Perro Del Mar and Taken By Trees show. After this, maybe the most magical/haunting show of my life (“BLUE MOON”!!!), I decided to take the Clark Street bus home.

Recently a much-threatened-but-never-before-enacted mass transit doomsday came to pass here in Chicago. Operating funds were slashed. This mainly affected the buslines. Post-doomsday, buses come much less frequently, especially in the small hours of the morning. So they are now more apt to be packed, even at hours when they would have been desolate places before.

So Monday night, or Tuesday morning, I wait a long time for the bus to come. Such a long time. This is OK, I am warm from the afterglow of an astonishing show. Finally the bus pulls up. I board, and a wave of heat hits me, first facewise then bodywise. This is the hottest bus I’ve ever been on. And everyone on it—there is scarcely an open seat—is in their nod, drifting off. Such a hot bus. Everyone so sleepy. Sleeping riders sleeping hotly, in their nod, in their drift. I take a seat and watch them, marveling. It is almost precisely like all the interstitial train scenes in My Winnipeg, the movie that has haunted my February. Nodders surround me. Sleeping riders nodding.

I wrote those words as an outside observer, which strongly suggests I wasn’t sleeping myself. But what I felt most strongly was a sense of connectedness with all these swaying sleepers. What I thought was: Maybe I am sleeping too. Maybe each individual sleeping on this bus is dreaming themselves awake, dreaming themselves watching the others sleep. Maybe we were all calling this reality into being, making it manifest.

Did the bus have some leak in its exhaust system? Was this some collective gas-vision we were all having, nothing more than the play of carbon monoxide molecules on brain molecules?

So warm, so drowsy, swaying together.

These are the kinds of weird thoughts one has in February, somehow both the shortest month, and the longest month. One wants March to arrive, to break the spell, to wake one up, yet one also doesn’t.

"Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook,..."

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:40:09 -0500

“Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.”

- W.G. Sebald, from The Rings of Saturn

Snakeles

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:59:00 -0500

The other night I made up that I dreamt that there existed a race of snake people. They were called, naturally, snakeles [from the Latin snake (“elongated reptile”) + people (“featherless biped”); pronounced “snake-uhls”].

By some weird dream logic I cannot cipher, the existence of these horrifying chimeras necessitated the remaking of several major landmarks of popular cinema, including M. Night Shyamalam’s The Sixth Sense. In The Sixth Sense: Remake Edition, the creepy kid’s catchphrase is “I see dead snakeles.”

Reposting this jaunty photo of Gem from last summer for two...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:04:00 -0500

Reposting this jaunty photo of Gem from last summer for two reasons:

(1) How could you ever get sick of looking at this, my very favorite visual emblem of PMA?

(2) Yesterday, at the IKC dog show at McCormick Place, I met, for the first time IRL, an Australian shepherd. Looking into his eyes, and seeing his coat and markings, and taking the measure of his overall size, his bearing, I felt instantly certain that I had figured out the non-Rottweiler half of Gemma, which half had previously been shrouded in the mystery of “some kind of shepherd dog.” It’s hard to explain, but I just knew.

G being half Australian shepherd explains a lot about her. For instance, her ability to leap a 3’+ gate in a single bound, and be all, “No biggie.”

I was so excited to tell G this revelation about her genealogy when I got home. She has really taken it and ran with it, to the point that she is now speaking in the most preposterous Aussie accent. (It sounds a lot like fake Cockney and is really quite terrible, but what does she know, she’s only a dog.) I don’t have the heart to tell her that no, we aren’t going to be throwing any shrimps on the barbie any time soon. But tomorrow’s March, summer isn’t so far away. Summer is coming here, and leaving in the antipodes. You’re better off here with me, Gem.

—

_{[Photo is by my bruvver Joe, who as you can see takes v. nice pictures, for instance of my nephew Jed]}

Photo

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:03:00 -0500

ROY BATTY TRIAGE UNIT // MORE LIFE DOWNLOAD IN PROCESS // PLEASE...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:23:31 -0500

ROY BATTY TRIAGE UNIT // MORE LIFE DOWNLOAD IN PROCESS // PLEASE STANDBY

“Vibrational Match,” Marnie Stern I find this to be...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:13:44 -0500

“Vibrational Match,” Marnie Stern

I find this to be the very best song to listen to when you’re trying to stay highly motivated/throwing wild fives/PMA’ing very hard, and also when you’re trying to have a heart attack.

— I just had the weirdest dream. I dreamt I was reading an...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:52:00 -0500

—

I just had the weirdest dream. I dreamt I was reading an article in the New York Times about how curling (the winter sport, curling) is really big on Wall Street. The traders, the masters of the universe (are they still called that) got really into watching it on CNBC (!). Some compared watching curling to drinking a nice Merlot. As weird a notion as this all is, I wasn’t totally sure I was dreaming at first—you know how some dreams are hyperreal that way? It wasn’t until my fevered subconscious threw up the preposterous detail of the “kizzle kazzle” that I knew, for sure, I was dreaming.

This is a shame. It is nice to think that something called a “kizzle kazzle” could exist in the actual world. That something that is wobbled to compensate for slush on the ice is an actual thing.

Dream logic being preposterous and octopus-y and inexorable as it is, I was somehow able to take a screenshot of my dream.