“People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads and suggest, oh, so very delicately.”
Norman Bates said that in Psycho. He said it in the parlor scene as Marion nibbled on sandwiches, taxidermy looming, and politely suggested that Norman put his mother in the madhouse. We watched it the other night, streamed it on netflix (I always said I was never going to be one of those people who put a television in their bedroom, but here we are logging countless hours on the macbook in bed watching movies). It’s a great film. Lots of long, jarring shots: Marion’s face on the bathroom floor, Norman’s neck and chin above the guest register. Read the rest of this article »
After lazily living life offline for the last many months (I have a family for chrissake), I’ve decided to dip the toe back in and see how it feels. As you see, I’ve included video evidence that life has indeed been going on (more evidence here) erstwhile. But, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was actually online more than not compulsively checking sites like Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com. I loved your site to death Mr. Silver, but I really don’t want to see another poll for at least two years. Thankfully that mania had a happy ending. It was a frantic, exhausting and ultimately cathartic heave-ho to the dark Bush years. I hope an Obama administration can shine enough light onto government to prevent a lapse into another mini dark age in our lifetimes.
I’ll look forward to posting again in another year (I’m only half joking).
Though the spirits have been good all around of late (owing to my new job, which makes me less of an asshole), the bodies have not. The wife, 7 months pregnant, nurtured a month long cough into pneumonia and a two night stay in the hospital. And, my right eye doesn’t work. The wife is better and thanks to her mom, nana, things actually went pretty smoothly around here while she was laid up. I managed to put two fence posts in the ground the afternoon the first snow storm rolled into town. Which was good because the fence was leaning and the snow hasn’t let up since.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’m not one that can just sit down and bang out a couple paragraphs of thoughts. I have a tendency to dither, edit, delete, rewrite and eventually abandon ship. It doesn’t help that I work on a computer all day long (I don’t want to talk about it), so cozying up in front of this is the last thing I want to do when I get home. I was reminded of this by my great friend Jeff, who, similarly employed, said as much while noting that my blog was languishing. (Thanks for the reminder Jeff and fuck you your blog isn’t exactly teeming). It’s been particularly hard the last few days as it’s grown uncomfortable hot around here. (Uncomfortable hot in Portland, Maine in late September is high 80s. People from the South who cannot understand this, I will assure you that I do not understand anything about you). Which makes it hard to do anything other than drink American urine beer (I’ll bore you about beer at another time). Ultimately though, I have to remind myself that it’s not Mogadishu here and the weather means little more than a few moments of discomfort and the occasional screwing up of the eyes as I walk outside and fail to process the discordance associated with seeing yellow and red leaves blown about by a breeze nearly ninety degrees.
I guess that’s pretty much the whole point of this post, trite as it sounds and faulty as it is. It’s not Mogadishu here. I was going to write a nice little lament about the melancholies of middle age life in America: family, mortgage, work. The letting go of youthful aspirations, the abandonment of secret artistic pursuits, the seepage of energy into anger, the final and complete acceptance of the long-held, quiet, suspicion: I have failed to do what I really wanted to do. Ergo, I am a failure. I was going to write that and wrap it nicely around one of Walt Whitman’s wonderful inscriptions to Leaves of Grass, Me Imperturbe. There he etches a preemptive headstone for the anxiety of modern American life that I was to celebrate. But having read it over enough times to begin, just to begin, to imagine the force of life impertube in trees and animals. Having read that, and having vented anger here, and having read today about the sacks of grain in Mogadish. Fought over in the baking heat with machetes and handguns. Having had my weak American beer. Not out of thirst or hunger. But in the quiet of the self-balancing night. Where I am outside my occupation. Where everything is less important than I thought. Here I have perspective and must practice it if I hope to use it sometime when my problems are more than trifles.
