meet my pet skate, my tidy pharaoh

Yesterday I scavenged Patti Smith files and crammed her into my ears and head. That was before and during work. After work, I crammed her into my ears some more on the drive to get my hair cut and dyed. An hour later, freshly dark dark brown, my hair went under the choppers. In the end, the magician said, I’ve given you Patti Smith hair. Do be careful what you listen to. It will become you. This morning The Good Doctor walked into my office and told me I now look like Cleopatra. A short evening in a hair salon turned me into the visual progeny of Cleopatra and Patti Smith. Do you see the asp at my breast as I belt poetically into the microphone? Now this is my generation. Mark Antony—more grapes! And, no, you won’t be going back to Rome. Instead we both will live infinitely shrouded in pop culture mystery and embellishment.

Today is busy with sleep and headache. Not mine but rather that of foreign tongue and medical expertise up for battle with my red pen. I continue to be thankful I have not caught exploding head syndrome. Sometimes a pair of roller skates would come in handy.

simultaneity in occasional torn flavor

This morning Patti Smith tagged my ears. I’d listened to her only on the skirts and had never researched. She joined me on my drive to work and it did us both well I think.

Timing is off but oh well. Gumption of some off-key kind is in the air. Chill is in the air. And rain, from what I hear, but that just happens sometimes, despite the attitude of many weathercasters and the general populous who act like rain means another day ruined. "Just our luck," they chant in unison. That is why I lock myself in my office with James Brown some days. Please, folks, don’t be so arrogant to think that rain means yet another bad day for you you you. It’s natural and quite good for rain to fall from the sky. And don’t complain when the sun is too bright either. Instead sit and spin in the cycle of all cycles, life itself. Why when people don’t know how else to respond do they fall to complaining about whatever’s happening in the immediate? That ease into laze makes me want to drink cocktails with umbrellas and juggle jelly beans with my tongue.

With some time on my hands I did some research. Here is one biography on Patti Smith, and here is another from the same web site. Apparently she simultaneously grew up in two different New Jersey towns after having been born in Chicago.

And speaking of Illinois, a while back there was talk of school mascots of mal flavor. Today I came across an article at Flak Magazine about mascot battles, the vie for some kind of correctness in, upon some standard, respecting Native Americans. Pay close attention to the dates: The school's [Lemont’s] teams, since 1969, have been called the Injuns. It was a name change from the Indians, made, with little fanfare, to separate Lemont from all the other Indian-nicknamed teams in Chicagoland. (Injuns actually was not the most vile nickname in Illinois school history. It took Pekin High until 1981 to get rid of its nickname Chinks.) 1981, my mouth is agape. It took that long. Illinois is my home state; however, many people assume I am European. Please forgive me. In the end, we all live in a yellow submarine. The final paragraph is a chuckle.

Furthermore, read this article on appropriate music for the bank atmosphere and this article as per Slate on comically (sort of) poor musical choices for commercials.

Finally, make sure the trunk of your elephant faces the light. A guru in a white blouse just passed by my office door and told me that was good luck. If that doesn’t work, though, learn to balance an umbrella on your head and you should be set for life. Whether the sky is raining, the sun shining, or you’re getting pulled over by a cop wearing a middle-age mustache.

any garden is possible

Anything is possible, he said.

And the Dalai Lama picked at his ear.

It’s encouraging to know that two habits of mine are put in action by two wise men.

This morning The Good Doctor returned after a few days away. I arrived as he was about to disappear into the restroom. He looked weary and gave me a brief rundown of a frantic past evening and more frantic morning, which was about to plunge him anchorless into a long conference call.

Given the latter, I needed to ask right then. "Would it be possible for me to work half a day tomorrow?" Not the best timing, I know, but it looked like he might be occupied for the rest of the day and I had a situation. At the climax of Murphy’s law, he said, "Anything is possible." And disappeared.

Sunday one friend invited me to see the Dalai Lama in the morning; another friend invited me to a sex toy party in the afternoon. Back to back.

The Dalai Lama gave a lecture at Rutgers football stadium. An honorary doctorate degree in human letters was conferred upon him, and he spoke about peace, war, and reconciliation. Monks chanted and a flute and percussion concerto followed. The stadium was packed. In red robes he arrived on stage, put his hands together and bowed. Then he waved everyone to sit down, which he then did stage-front.

Tibetan syllables resounded from the microphone, and is-it-all-going-to-be-in-Tibetan flushed across the faces in the stadium. The translator translated, then the Dalai Lama continued mostly in English. When he didn’t know a word or a phrase he shifted between the two languages and the translator translated.

He spoke about the negativity of anger and jealousy and the way those emotions cause people to act in ways they themselves don’t want to. He said that he too experiences anger and jealousy. For example, he said, I feel jealous about the beautiful English this man is able to speak. A smile came and his robed shoulders jiggled with laughter.

Early in the lecture he said he hoped that what he had to say would not be boring. At least, he said, the weather was nice—not too hot, not too cold. This was true. Later he apologized if anybody was offended by his informal manner of speaking to us, but it was the way he preferred, as if we were all old friends. He acknowledged that most of us were not as old of friends as others. His shoulders jiggled some more.

Let’s celebrate that. Formality is a language I don’t understand very well. I understand being polite and showing respect, but I don’t understand why it is ever preferable to cause uncomfortable distance in a situation for the sake of some supposed superhierarchical formality. As far as I can tell, it’s averse to living.

Because the event was in a football stadium, the Dalai Lama was barely visible on the stage to people not sitting directly in front, so he was projected onto a big screen. At one point during his talk, he put his finger in his ear, in one of the top folds, and began digging. Then he looked at his finger, speaking on.

I do this very thing, the ear. I don’t know why. It’s a habit like other people twirl their hair or pick their fingernails. People on the bleachers noticed him doing it, but he didn’t notice. Or he didn’t care. I felt deep partnership in the deep quest.

By visiting the link above, you can see a video of the lecture. I haven’t yet, so I don’t know if the whole thing is there or not, but because it may be I’ll leave the talk of peace, war, compassion, reconciliation, and the need for large-scale lifestyle changes to him.

As I drove away from New Brunswick, I called my mom. I had forgotten to tell her I was going to see the Dalai Lama and a spread of sex toys. "I’ve got you on speaker phone," she said. "Your dad is here, too." Ok. I told them both.

I had woken up at 7am. It was then nearly 2pm, and I hadn’t yet eaten. I was well on my way to enlightenment. My vision was transcendent and I couldn’t feel the difference between my hands, the steering wheel, or the air coming in through the moon roof.

At the party, wine and good snack was consumed and sex toys were sold like Tupperware. Vibrator technology has come much further than I knew. A few were shaped like elephants. I am fond of elephants. So fond that a sleep doctor and I are going to start an elephant polo team. As soon as our WEPA membership goes through.

Never before had my tongue tasted so many ointments to be rubbed on the body. By the end of the party my mouth was wine-dark, lips tingling with banana-flavored nipple sensitizer, and I smelled like a pheromonic garden of infinite delight.

Listen to music, cover your wang

Right here, Kristin Hersh sheds light on corporate monkeys and makes a lucid analogy in support of spreading music to ears. I haven’t yet read the NPR article she links because, for reasons unknown to me, I am not allowed to access NPR at work. National Porn Radio? I don’t know. I can access all sorts of blogs referencing all manner of crass, but a web site offering me world and national news and culture is off limits.

Later on I found this comic at Flak Magazine (linked at side). Finally I beat myself silly. There is much work to do and I was taking every spare second going back to these comics. It would be an unfortunate instance were slippage to occur. Dear Dr., Please revise your above-titled article on the relationship between hypersomnolence and your astronaut sex-ninja wife. This is the one that tipped me over. Read this if you’re feeling dirty, which apparently I was. Read this if you’re a twisted motherfucker, which apparently I am, though I shan’t boast. Join the fun. Eat thousand-year-old black eggs that smell like concentrated cat urine and taste like nothing comparable to anything. Transcend this world.

During the weekend, my roommate and I drove to get bagels with lox and cream cheese. For a third time, I was allowed into the bagel place at closing time, after all bagels had been put away. I don’t know why this is; I didn’t even get pushy or pull out my pistol. Afterward—I the driver and he the passenger—headed toward K-Mart for panties and wrapping paper. Part-way there—at 40 mph—my roommate, having decided he wasn’t interested in either panties or paper, opened the door and dropped out. In the rearview mirror I watched him bounce head over ass down the road. Turns out he’s made of rubber.

experiment boomerang

Perusing a feature article at Pitchfork yesterday I came across the name Simon Reynolds, which a) I’d been sporadically trying to remember and b) reminds me of a tale from Iowa City.

I’d been compulsively reading Reynolds’ book Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture in America. One day I was reading it at a coffeehouse. A fiction writer from my grad department saw me and said with nostrils flared, "You’re actually reading that?"

Yes, I was actually reading it and it’s fucking brilliant. The book contains a great passage on the developmental history of electronic music and culture, which you could lay over just about any history or relationship and it would apply, the way a new thing comes to be, escalates, explodes, degenerates from what it was and finally transforms into something else and/or dies, or doesn't. Which is why I want the book back. Here is how it left me:

I had stepped outside my apartment, a converted garage tacked onto the back of a house where four failed frat boys lived—the front of my home was a paint-chipping garage door, for a cigarette. From the side of the house that I couldn’t see I heard a child crying, a painfully sad sound at any time. Within seconds two young guys, one of them pushing a stroller, emerged from around the side of the house. The little girl had to use the bathroom and it was breaking my heart. I toyed with the idea of letting strangers into my home.

The guy pushing the stroller, who turned out to be the girl’s father, was quasi-hippie, with shortish but straggly blond hair, loose unkempt clothing, my age or younger. The other guy was full-on hippie, or something, infinite layers of brown and pilgrim-pattern clothing, long nature-brown hair, au naturale shoes, au naturale scent. As the girl cried more, they glanced in my direction.

"She can use my bathroom," I said to them.

They walked toward the door as I put my cigarette out on my square-foot-sized "patio" and we went inside. My garage-home was set up like this: living room-kitchen downstairs, bedroom-bathroom upstairs. The fact that there is an upstairs and downstairs is deceptive. Each section was the size of a walk-in closet.

I sent the father and girl upstairs to the bathroom. I stayed downstairs with the full-on hippie. Unable to be in both places at once, I became a touch worried about my belongings. What if this was one of those scams? There was the right number of people to pull off the distraction scheme—and with the little girl. Some people are not beyond using children for devious means. I engaged in conversation with…I’ll call him Jesus from here on out.

He asked me about my spiritual orientation, which I tried to describe without betraying anything sacred with a total stranger. He quickly told me he’d achieved enlightenment by reading the Holy Bible. He took his bible out of his bag to use as a visual aid and carried on. The conversation shifted from a philosophical discussion about belief to a zealot monologue aiming to convert me to Jesus-hood.

I began to become confrontational. I am truly tolerant—I like to learn what people think and why, but such blind absolutist pushiness lights a relentless fire in my belly.

About this time, I heard the shaggy father upstairs. At first I thought he was talking to his daughter, and then I recognized the words he spoke. They were from a poem I’d just been working on. I raced upstairs to find him holding the stack of poems I'd left on my bed. "That’s my poem," I said. "I hope you don’t mind," he said, "I like it." What does it matter, I thought. "It’s ok," I told him. "Thanks."

"What’s this?" he asked. The guy was hyperactive--"what's that?", a little twitchy, and a little more interested in my things and my life than I preferred. I wondered what Jesus was doing downstairs. "That’s a book on the development of electronic music," I answered. "I just finished it. It’s good."

He expressed interest in it and then his little girl finished her business. I led them downstairs. Who knew what Jesus was doing with his bible and bag. We stood there talking while the little girl fidgeted. I had a thought.

I tend to become what I believe to be too attached to material things; i.e., I am a packrat. To see if I could, I offered the book to the hippie dad. After all, it had been given to me by someone else. How romantic to pass it on into the world. I doubted he could afford much and probably would appreciate it. He thanked me and they left, Jesus, dad, the girl, and the book.

I never saw Jesus again, but I did see Hippie dad a couple of times around town with his daughter. And once he stopped back by my apartment. He brought with him a few books on poetry and language that he’d gotten from some used-book sale. He'd brought them to give to me. I was touched and flattered and I felt a little ugly for being so suspicious of him. I hope he and his daughter are doing well.

Where I began: Simon Reynolds. I read part of another book of his while standing in a used bookstore in Minneapolis, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, but I had no money to buy it. (I still don't. Checking on Amazon, even a used copy is $49.50). I’d like this one too—he referenced Throwing Muses, alongside the Pixies, as an influential rock band, a reference I don't see often enough. Here is his web site, centered around his most recent book. Here is his blog.

When orangoutangs explode into sunlight…*

some things that make sense to me on one level or another follow:

An interview between a geologist and a musician, discovered and read at eleven on the dot. Animal Collective "like liquidy sounds". I do too. Furthermore under the canopy, "If you are just trying to do something to be different, but feel no personal attachment to what you are creating, then that’s a shame. If it’s not something you would respond to on a deeper level, why would anyone else respond to it?"

On the decline of Playboy magazine; or, looking back to a time before "hookers" supplanted "Botticelli’s goddesses"... In golden days, before culture scattered and thinned, women baring their parts in this magazine once had PhDs and read books. Once I forgot where I was, tried to link a reference to Playboy on this blog while at work, and was confronted with an alarming screen prohibiting my entrance to the site. Afterward I became paranoid I would be fired for being a pervert. This has not yet happened.

Relatively speaking, what is culture here and there and who's going at what speed to and from where? Who knows, but you may as well go and try to figure it out. The sun is hot and I’m done wasting time burning my ass on a hot rock. There are and there is Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life.

*via The Good Doctor I learned this alternative spelling today, alternative to what I had known at least: orangutan. As he said, there's always something new to learn.

rabbits go to new places

By way of dishpantheism, I’ve lit upon some smart comics on-line made by smart people. At least that’s my immediate turn.

(I just had memory of a last night's dream about a friend from junior high school. Many of them actually. We weren’t playing volleyball but rather having a party. I was filling one in on my present life. A behemoth wave tore in through the basement window. It was uncertain whether the party would be held there at my house or at another friend’s as originally planned. A woman from work, one I like, had parked her van, colored a beautiful nauseous green and decked out on the inside with couches and a dining room table, in the street, ready to unload food for the party.)

I’ve never been a comic-reader, except when people on sporadic occasion have thrown a comic my way. First, go here (added to sidebar). Then, hop about in the links. I’m not saying I just spent the first hour of work doing this. I’m just recommending a visit.

sensory fibers exposed

"Once we expose the vagal nerve, we’ll call you," said the doctor to the nurse.

This came out of the hallway earlier, in response to the nurse saying, "I want to be there, but it’s always so long until you get to that part. I have other places to be."

Work busies my head and hands today. This drop from the eaves is the fruit of such a day—outside force field, the speed of light, and a couple of space cadets each in motion with respect to one another—when I have been congenially irritable. I can’t explain the paradox; call it green tea. Call it the body purging itself of trash.

Next time you and I are making plans together, I will say this: Once I expose the vagal nerve, I’ll call you. In the meantime I may be eating dinner, petting the neighbor’s cat, showering, digging a grave, tending buttons, who knows. But once the vagal nerve is exposed, I’ll call you.

Peanut butter, yesterday and today

Yesterday the weather was beautiful and the day was pleasantly eventful, on target for how a Sunday should be. Today my whole body is sluggish and I'd like to jet home and nap like an animal. Existential thoughts dot the ants in the attic.

Find out what pattern your brain is. I did:

Your Brain's Pattern

Your brain is always looking for the connections in life.You always amaze your friends by figuring out things first.You're also good at connecting people - and often play match maker.You see the world in fluid, flexible terms. Nothing is black or white.

What Pattern Is Your Brain?

Pretty accurate. I don't know about the figuring things out first, though, unless it involves concocting strange melange meals.

My current roommate(s) have witnessed me concocting and eating the following:

-tuna on a baked potato, along with salsa, cheese and spinach. I hadn't planned to add the tuna to the baked potato, but the barbecue-sauced meat that was originally offered to me turned out not to be enough for the three of us. Since I wasn't terribly excited about barbecue--yet my body needed protein--I took a can of tuna from the shelf. Problem solved.

-a tortilla filled with a veggie "burger", cheese, spinach, mushrooms, and a cut-up hard-boiled egg. Does that really seem odd? Reflection tells me not. However, there is reason I rarely cook for other people. Who wants beet soup? On a baked potato? I'm in. Never combine ketchup with jelly.

My roommates have heard lore but not witnessed the following: The Peanut Butter and Mayonnaise Sandwich, which someone introduced to me long ago in a cornfield really freaking far away. Initially the idea repulsed me, but who was I to assume, never having tried it.

I prefer Miracle Whip over mayonnaise, though I rarely eat either. I'm a mustard girl--any mustard, and salsa girl--any salsa. I used Miracle Whip, not mayonnaise. The combination works surprisingly well--the tang of the whip with the nut and slight salt of the PB. I haven't had one in years.

Yesterday, I was telling Mr. Anigans and glomgold about peanut butter and provolone as sandwich filler. This combination also surprised me, but it's tasty. Would be better, I think, with some vegetable accompaniment--spinach perhaps, maybe cucumber, and some sprouts, something red.

That's when glomgold told me about a restaurant that specializes in peanut butter concoctions. Research shows me that Peanut Butter and Co. is located in New York, in the West Village, not far from where I rest my head at night. I plan to visit. Imagining that a sandwich that contains a swipe of PB and some extras could cost upwards of $5, maybe $10, however, I'll visit once, steal their ideas like a good businesswoman would, and concoct at home. Neither Miracle Whip nor provolone appear on the menu.

Finally, I'd rather not see any more pictures of Bush posing authoritatively in business-casual attire next to damage or officials in New Orleans. He makes each picture look like a poster for a television show about a disaster having taken place in some Anytown, USA. In this case, looks are everything and unfortunate.

As political commentary is not my forte, I will return to the planet made of coagulated peanut oil and sing a little song about white rabbits and hope for the future.

More enlightenment from the hallway’s mortar

Heard from the hallway: I’m really a very simple guy. Things build. It builds.

Though I couldn’t see him I think the speaker was the orange-face fellow in the chronic cardboard business suit.

Recently the workplace started a valet service which pushed parking space for the employees across the street and a country’s length away. I don’t mind this. I am congenially peripatetic.

Having observed for the past couple months, I conclude that the valet girl is not real. She looks suspiciously like every amusement park ride worker of the female variety: sunny pony-tailed hair, khaki pants, white shirt tucked in, slim and athletic figure, golden-tanned skin, sneakers clean and sporty.

Yesterday I realized that every morning she is standing in front of the building next to her valet podium when I arrive; she is still there when I leave in the evening. I have begun saying Good morning to her and Good night. I have concluded that it is not possible she is real. She is the Eternal Valet.

(Don't ask me what "real" is. I've still got my lab working on it.)

Though she is not real, she is less unsettling than the librarian whom I realized was a character from a Lovecraft novel. Disguised as a quaint elderly woman with a British accent who listens to classical music all day, she brings her lunch in a brown paper bag and spouts the history of the medical library number system.

Therefore, something gruesome must be lurking behind that desk.

Things build. It builds. Snakes and soda bubbles will one day burst out from the hospital’s innards, exposing sacred secrets. I’m tapped in.

Make-believe but so in love: a treatise on developing criteria for a roaming system

Mmmm…bad coffee. But I was cold and sluggish and charmed by the highway strip, beleaguered by belongings. Next, a vectoring happiness. Draft a new Veda.

I wanna be like water if I can. ’Cause water doesn’t give a damn.

Turn up the music to muffle office drivel, so far so good: Sons and Daughters (conclusion: I prefer Love the Cup to The Repulsion Box), Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip, Silver Jews, Bright Flight. What will come of this listening? A geodesic dome, for sure. A gingerbread house. A tantalizing tome never to be finished. Naked wood.

This morning as I was getting ready for work (i.e. throwing on clothes and gathering CDs to lozenge the work day’s throat), a song from µ-ziq’s Lunatic Harness came on. The past two days the i-tunes "party shuffle" has frequently been playing tracks from this album. This pleases me. It’s one of my favorite albums, particularly track 13, "Midwinter Log" which feels like being chased by everything you love toward some end that isn't an end at all, and it's totally in rhythm with rhythms you didn't know your body beat to.

So I got to thinking what my other favorite albums are. Difficulty steers the making of this list. Goes like this: I think of a couple of true contenders and then I think of others that I just can’t leave out. And then others that I just can’t leave out. Until I’ve thought of so many the list becomes worthless because it is no longer a list but rather all-comprising. Runaway mind, runaway dog. So populated by other voices.

Immediately in mind:
Kristin Hersh’s Hips and Makers. Already I run away. The Grotto, which I think is her best album since this one, doesn’t hold for me the root intensity of Hips and Makers. It’s newer, though, and gaining ground. The Grotto has an undeniable clarity lending to its own unique intensity, where Hips and Makers has a more raw, otherworldly intensity. Each has been right for the me I was when I took it in. I might tack also to the list her new band 50 Foot Wave’s first CD, though it too is yet too new for the list; nevertheless, I repeat and repeat the thing and I still want more. What a brilliant piece of pure energy. There’s good reason she’s my hero. What you chase at night will haunt you in the day. You want it to.

Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. An embryonic me knew an album that sounded like this had to be out there, and it is. My psyche and circadian rhythms had been waiting for it, and when I heard it, it was unquestionably right. As in, if you lived here, you’d be home. O, headless chicken. O, perfect masters. People come and go, and forget to close the door. Some of them will turn up when you least expect them to. Remember me.

Doug Martsch’s solo album Now You Know. This one also is just slightly too new in me; however, I think it’s thoroughly brilliant from start to finish, lyrically and musically. Last week I celebrated it each day. My current favorite is track 2, "Dream". It happened again last night. Wanted to escape my limbs and the certitude of death. "Stay", the quiet love song at the end quiets me and makes me love more thoroughly. Quiet in the roar of doom.

There is music that simply appeals to me: I like the sounds the instruments make, the voices, the words, the melodies, the rhythms. But it feels distant, like it’s outside me, circling me. The few above, though, feel like they’re inside me. They don’t just sound good; they make sense to me in a profound and full-sensory way that a close friend makes sense. Kindred and meaningful but without reasonable explanation in terms of language I know. The Gödel on my shoulder whispers, "It’s because the system is incomplete and thus unsatisfactory for such proof and explain." There it is at last: criteria for the list. Perhaps one day I'll have objective criteria, perhaps not.

Just keep telling me this is life and we didn't miss it.

Don’t walk into walls; walk through them, grasshopper. It will follow you. And boy do I like a military snare drum chasing me down.

on the ice cream dome

This hope has been realised in the most beautiful manner. But between the clear vision of this goal and its actual realisation it was necessary to surmount a serious difficulty, and as this lies deep at the root of things, I dare not withhold it from the reader. We require to extend our ideas of the space-time continuum still farther.

--from Relativity, by Albert Einstein, authorized translation by Robert W. Lawson

Cheers, my man. Just like life. I have a clear image of the ice cream cone in my mind, and it is beautiful. Now, to get through all the traffic lights and animals darting into the road on the way there.

Friday night I saw Sons & Daughters at Mercury Lounge. This was my third affair. Fortune put me up closer to the stage for the final two songs, which were great. Before that, I was pressed up against a wall, straining my calves and feet trying to keep on the tips of my toes so I could see. Seeing this band, in my opinion, makes all the difference. In a previous post, I referenced an Other Music review which described the interplay between Adele Bethel and Scott Paterson as erotically charged. Seeing the intensity on their faces, the tortuous ocean-flapping of Adele Bethel's arms and the sweat dripping down from Scott Paterson's fixed eyes, makes all the difference. While my left side pressed hard against the wall, my right side suffered reverberations from the offbeat clapping of a stocky fellow who also could not sing along in any way resembling tunefulness. Behind me two pretentious musician fucks talked loudly at the back of my head about meeting up to play together. Why don’t you go now, I thought. You’re not doing anything else besides depleting the value of my ticket. They looped like this: Uh, you know, uh, drop by any time, uh, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, turn off the bad porn and instead go see Sons & Daughters. You might bring a microphone and wrap its cord around your neck as you're climaxing. If you're one to learn by example.

Opening the show was Jeffrey Lewis whom I had never before seen or heard and who impressed me deeply. Intelligent, creative, boundless and right on the very idea of right on-ness. I purchased a CD, which I rarely do at a show. O, money. I plan to purchase more regardless of o, money. There is happiness to procure in the way of astute, honest lyrics. Now I’m going to show a low-budget video, said Jeffrey Lewis as he picked up a large sketch pad and faced it toward the audience. He’d drawn pictures to illustrate a song about a character called Champion Jim and flipped the pages with the lyrics. This was the first of the low-budget videos. He also makes comic books. Visit him here.

Last night I watched the final episode of Six Feet Under on demand. It leaves me full, quiet, beaming, inspired, at peace, profoundly sad, and eager to make the most of my days alive. For a show on television to accomlish this is a feat and renders even littler the tripe beneath it. I may have more to say on this another time, but right now the vastness of its meaningfulness is still moving around in me.

That's news for today. I am busy playing the role of a busy professional in an office. And remember: When you know not what else to do, say hello to the grasshopper on your neck.