i want a lumberjack hat so i can keep stuff in it, like hot air. i want to walk around with a hat on with hot air in the hat in the space between the fur and the hat and my hair, i want to be like a cloud of floating air-hat-hairness for as long as this postnuclear winter wears on.

you know, i don’t usually include biographical details in these things, it’s a voice thing, it’s actually physically my voice i’m talking about, my voice cracks when i talk about myself, not like, squeak, you know, in the middle of what you’re saying. i mean like you’re supposed to crack an egg on a flat surface, and that’s how i normally, you get a clean break and you don’t have to pry your fingers under the shell to get what you want of it out of it. the egg i mean. but when i talk about myself it’s like i cracked it on a countertop edge and you’re not supposed to do that, the shell turns into a crater and all this shrapnel gets between your teeth and you get proteins and amino acids all up and down your fingers and you get salmonella from that if you don’t wash your hands.

ok?

this winter’s making me sick, i’m not joking, stepping on dirt in january and feeling it sag underneath your feet when it’s not supposed to do that? not seeing snow down here’s not natural, so late in the winter i mean. it’s giving me these dreams, i’m not making this up, i’m having extremely vivid dreams about people transforming into very friendly and human-like animals. like a man and a woman get trapped in an exercise ball, fighting each other to the death with samurai swords, and then when they go still inside of there because holy shit, they probably killed each other, you open it up and find a dead kangaroo which you know you can bring back to life with your sincere encouragement and brotherly love, and you do, and you get it to hop around even, and then you get to hop around too because you’re also a kangaroo.

i thought my spirit animal was a killer whale. i’m not exaggerating when i tell you that writing a sentence like that last winter, when i was waist deep in crime and punishment and chewing my nails waiting to make up my mind and grow up and stuff, spirit animals were the farthest thing from me. i got what i needed, it was cold as fuck the whole time, did what i needed i mean, it was awesome. the nose smells what it expects.

i’d like to take this moment to observe that in st. petersburg the sun shines about a thousand hours less than it does in boston, every winter.

i’d like to slush through sidewalk moats and not think about three months ago, the storm we got on halloween, when everybody lost power. i don’t know if i’m alone in this, but the first thing i did when the lights came back on was play fallout 3. i don’t know if that means anything, and i don’t know if i’m alone in that either.

Photo by Derrick Tyson.

so a while ago i mentioned i was writing a novel in the voice i use in this column. here is a reading of the first two chapters of that novel.

merry christmas home slices

Two pieces: An excerpt from Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales and “How I Got Divorced” (at 5:57).

according to my father the institutional failure epidemic stops with me. or him, i don’t know what to do about it and i’ve said so. to him. so i’m assuming he’s gonna bear down on it one of these days. i’m sure of it. just like he trims our hedges, &he painted the side of the house the sun hits most last summer. you’ll see. three branches of government aren’t going to change at all, i guarantee you that. nor go away, i’m scared of dying.

lots of controversy over where black friday gets its name. actually there’s no controversy, people from philly named it that sometime before ’66. for the misery. i can guarantee you this: three days ago, black friday, whatever, people don’t hear it and think “in the black,” they think, “i’m going to murder you with my bare hands. if i had a gun i would shoot you in the face. give me xbox. it is mine.”

i own an xbox. i own a guitar. i own a pair of boots which i broke. neither my xbox nor my guitar are broken but i imagine if i keep using them the way i’ve been i’ll break them too. i believe with all my heart the world ended. my girlfriend thinks i’m projecting.

listen.

i’m talking to you if you feel a general social malaise. i’m talking to you if you think the world is going to end before you die of old age. i’m talking to you if you feel you’re dying of old age prematurely. i’m talking to you if you don’t know of you want to have kids or if you aren’t sure if it was a good idea if you already did that.

folks, things are bad.

global warming, global economic meltdown, obesity, illiteracy, innumeracy, infant mortality, the atom bomb, the credit default swap, the remake, the hurricane, the disposable 3d eyewear. things suck.

i’m not saying anything new here or that we don’t know.

nor is it anything new to say “i’m not saying anything new here or that we don’t already know,” i.e. things have always been bad, there’s no such thing as the good old days, back then they talked about something called “the good old world” which was better than what surrounded them. going back into the ages, blah blah, to when some guy in the third century wrote the book of ecclesiastes pretending to be a wise man from the bronze age, vanity of vanities, spawning a culture either of exalted suffering or of exalted sufferers. i can’t make up my mind which of those two last ones is correct.

the bottom line i’m driving at, ladies, gentlemen, is that we’ve known about this pattern since the very beginning. aren’t you sick of it? if you’re like me, you resist it. if you’re like me, you’re ready for solution time.

we are a people united by 11 principles, 11 core values, 11 beliefs, 11 ideas and 12 sentences. probably. i think we are. the thing is, nobody knows what these principles/values/beliefs/ideas/sentences are.

here’s the thing: you remember what 11/11/11 11:11 was like, right? you remember what happened? to you, around you? well, what about 11/11/11 11:12? did you feel anything like a species-spanning unity of perception? a thought that there were billions of other people out there, thinking about things? like, regardless of what had happened at 11:10, the minute after, we were just together as a species, observing a minute as it went by? like for just one minute, we were whole and together doing one thing, and then it was gone?

what if the reason that there have never been any good old days is that the only thing that exists is the present moment and it kind of sucks?

if you’re like me, you read that sentence and then go, “damn. i should be nicer to people.”

i think there are more people like me out there. i’m pretty sure about it, actually. i’m at least willing to find out.

Photo by Alexis Nyal

my new thing is answering yes or no questions with exaggerated faces and taking slightly too long to speak. i grew a beard on a piece of bread, i am really telling the truth here, i’m really going to tell the truth this time. the whole time.

i forget things now: how to spell the word “nipple” in my head (two p’s), how to tie my shoes although never have i ever tied them like you’re supposed to, i mean a couple times but i always forget how to after. i forgot my PIN number for my debit card and then i realized, what does it matter, money costs money now. i forget what i was saying. i took a lot of nyquil yesterday and my liver hurt all this evening because i drank in the afternoon. this wasn’t forgetting about the nyquil in the sense that i wore sandals today, more like i had the cheap wine and i was like, “fuggeddaboudit.” i’ve never said that, i’ll never say that. i was just like that, i said something different.

i ought to start in with those dual language books, печенка болит, blah blah, bladvak means pickaxe. (i have no idea whether that’s true or not.)

i figured out the following: if facebook came with a timer on the top of the screen which told you how long you’ve spent on it, it would ruin the whole experience for everybody. i forget how much time i spend examining my social life on the internet. i probably do it a lot. i don’t know if this makes me any more thoughtful, this examination. it’s probably in the contract somewhere that you don’t ask. oblivion is part of the agreement. the death of the orgy, but not the anonymity. bummer.

i dreamed the following: i locked a polar bear in the girl’s room, because it started mauling people after i set it free (it had really pretty eyes). i was worried as hell about whether or not there was still a girl in the bathroom with the polar bear just as i was locking the door. i bet i kill people in my dreams much more often than i am aware. i realize this could mean two things: either my dream self is unaware that he kills, or i am unaware that my dream self kills. i meant it the first way. it’s probably all just an accident. i could bargain murder one down to manslaughter.

with whom would i bargain? that’s all i want to know in this life.

everybody i know writes about poor people, i don’t know many poor people, i probably know a couple who are writers but i don’t know they’re poor. i read an essay by major jackson about how very few white writers have black friends. it made me feel that much more like i’ll never be friends with major jackson. i don’t think this is pessimistic, it’s just how i feel.

i wonder what a redwood looks like. there, i said it.

Photo by AlicePopkorn

i like john fahey, i like evil dead, i like nachos, i like having feet and hands, i like russians, i like candy, i like candy followed by soda, i like soda, i like shrinkwrap magazines, i like naked girls, i like long showers where you think of nothing but your troubles, i like when your shoes don’t smell bad, i like when your dishes are clean after you ate off them so you can eat off them again because whatever, i like “bicarbonate of soda,” i like also how nobody quite knows how to read quotation marks, like what if instead of writing out the words, “quotation marks,” i’d just put “how nobody quite knows how to read “”.” what the fuck would you have done?

oh boy, television really ruined me. i mean i can’t even remember my name or how i got here. it seems i have to get out of bed in the next hour, sometime in the next thirty minutes ideally so i can catch this bus. and go to class. television class. i’m i swear to god lying. you know what my absolute favorite thing about wordpad is? when you write the following:

. .

period, space, period

it doesn’t assume you’ve made a mistake by underlining it in red squiggly like certain other word processors. a friend of mine calls these “. .”‘s “aborted sentences.” i actually don’t have a friend who calls them that, nor do i, even, call them that, i just thought it would sound cool. my observational humor has cost me gainful employment and how many of dollars. i really don’t know if i mean any of this.

i can’t remember if “what are you even saying?” was a title i gave one of my stories or just a thing i thought to call one of my stories. and then never wrote the story. maybe for this new book i should do it as a series of wordpress entries growing shorter and more depressing as time goes on. maybe that would be shitty as fuck.

after i wrote “shitty as fuck,” i went, “ha. ha.” i think in ten years if the world hasn’t ended i will look back on this entry and go, “sigh,” and then, “i learned the russian word for ‘sigh’ that day but i forget it now,” and then sigh from the diaphragm like the goodyear blimp always wanted.

i’m fucking with you, the world already ended, and the goodyear blimp doesn’t have a diaphragm, that’s just what i did, personification, what i just did.

i have to write a novel in this voice, oh boyoboy

Photo by .reid.

i don’t know what to call it, i’m trying for a third night consecutive of being awake at this hour and it is going pretty well so far. this is usually the time when if i am going to really get off my ass and do something i have to do it right now, like, now, like this is now and this is the time when i have to start doing work and shit and stop writing my column. i made thirty hard boiled eggs today and i wasn’t even at work. i don’t even have work. this is all a lie. i’m telling you a story and you don’t even know. you didn’t even realize and how many things i’ve set up like this? it’s amazing. don’t apologize. it’s ok, i do this, you, it’s not your, i do this for me, it’s really quite selfish, don’t get, it’s my fault. i just i i i really should’ve made it more obvious what i was doing earlier, like way up there in the subject heading i haven’t even talked about forks yet oh shit. oh god. look don’t i didn’t mean to make you, i didn’t mean to upset you don’t go. wait. stop wait, let me walk you to your car. well at least let me call a cab for you. well the subway can be really fucking dangerous at this time of night and what kind of friend would i be if i. no. look, i didn’t mean to overstep any. he’s a lovely man and i’m happy for you. my objections to- i i’m not really going to get i don’t really do you really think now is the time? let me just walk you to the subway, it’s cold out, there could be, you know, what, i don’t know what i was thinking about forks anyways. i thought it was a funny thing that a person might say, that’s all i ever think about, whee this is fun, you know, blah blah up there.

Photo by PlayfulLibrarian.

As I’m one of those carping, bitter writers who’ve yet to make an actual living doing this, I’ve resigned myself to a day job. Not just any day job, but one as part of perhaps the most despised profession in the universe (Which? A virtual muffin basket and free copy of my as yet unpublished masterpiece for the most imaginative answers).  While I don’t see anyone rushing around creating shiny TV around my job (come on, cops? Surgeons? Serial killers? What’s so hot about them?) it seems TV-land loves the jobs you hate. Not least of which, lawyers, which populate drama series The Good Wife.

The wife of the title, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies, ER) begins the series as the least interesting aspect of this sleek legal drama. First seen demure, devastated and in pearls by the glare of flashbulbs. Alicia’s doing a Hilary, choosing to stand by disgraced District Attorney Peter Florrick. No, that allusion isn’t one of mine; the writers directly reference Hilary Clinton as a role model for Alicia – make of that what you will.

As Peter (a sleazily magnetic Chris Noth being Big behind bars) fights allegations of corruption, Alicia returns to her previous career as a lawyer to make ends meet. While Alicia’s struggles at work and at home are the stuff of drama, they don’t make her a character to warm to, as the writers at first appear to assume. This being a long held bugbear of mine – that being a Mom gives a character instant access to the viewer’s, and indeed other characters’ sympathies, negating the need for further character development.

Alicia lands on her feet at a prestigious Chicago law firm, at which old flame Will Gardner is one of the partners. Will (Josh Charles, who played an angry, unhappy husband with painful realism as part of the excellent In Treatment) carries a torch for Alicia, making him the obvious choice for a will-they-won’t-they dance.

More interesting are the peripheral characters: Alicia’s younger rival Cary and the mysterious in-house investigator Kalinda (Archie Punjabi, White Teeth). She’s steely and sexy in her uniform of tiny skirts, knee-high boots and black eye-liner. Yet, Punjabi’s performance is such that I’m far more excited by what’s she’s thinking than what she’s wearing, unlike Alicia – so often the stylish blank.

Better played are Cary and Alicia’s battles, his struggle to reconcile his ambition with his scruples, and his hopeless attraction to the secretive Kalinda. Cary’s a handsome, well-connected WASP endowed with a certain obnoxious charm by Matt Czuchry. Cary’s a familiar character (imagine Czuchry’s poor little rich boy routine in The Gilmore Girls, plus a few years, a very few disappointments and a well tailored suit), until the second season, when he gains a little more vulnerability without resorting to a total personality bypass. Czuchry even gets to use some facial expressions beyond smug or faintly annoyed!

The strange chill at the heart of The Good Wife means the initial premise of Alicia breaking down the door to the boys’ club of the legal profession doesn’t quite fly. The Good Wife recalls series’ like The Closer and Medium, in which the protagonist relies on supposed feminine qualities like emotional intelligence and empathy to give her a leg-up in a brisk, factual, masculine world. But this distinction is made with all the subtlety of a falling gavel: note a scene during the pilot, where Alicia tries to track down evidence to exonerate a client; she makes vital progress by bonding during a vacuous, lazy oh-dear-aren’t-men-silly moment with a female clerk.

The series tries to cast the poised, tamped-down Alicia as the heart of the series, often expected to bring her time as Wronged Woman and Mom, rather than any political nous or legal skill, to bear on sensitive cases involving victimised women or families. This patronising characterisation aside, The Good Wife develops the glimmer of something special in its mix of female characters.

Ally McBeal this isn’t, the cases often dry, or sad, or self-consciously earnest rather than outrageous, with febrile twists and long-reaching consequences. Alicia and Kalinda develop a tentative, barbed, sardonic friendship lubricated by tequila, which doesn’t fall easily into the broad types of female relationships beloved of TV-land. It is neither the shrieking singletons who bond over the fecklessness of men, nor the catty on-off rivals over men, or work, or men. Did I mention men? All of which makes for perhaps the most genuine female friendship on US TV.

The Good Wife doesn’t break new ground in presentation or point of view; its stories are told in traditional Good vs. Evil fashion, the courtroom debates are pitched battles for the most part, exciting at the time, but not memorable. The second season introduces more moral ambiguity and twisty plotting that’s a marked improvement, as well as the sense of a wider, murkier network beyond Alicia’s firm. The Good Wife’s latter cases revolve around the meeting of commercial, legal and political interests, in a gratifying fashion that’s less tidy, but more believable.

Never mind if Alicia and the terminally boring Will continue to circle one another, or if Peter revives his political career. I want to know more about Cary and Kalinda, about the somewhat clichéd Dianne Lockhart (fabulous Christine Baranski) and her endless collection of shoulder-padded outfits, the deliciously amoral spin-doctor Eli Gold (an entertaining, if slightly overcooked guest turn from Alan Cumming). Look out, too for  a daring, cynical recurring role for Michael J. Fox  and for an appearance from America Ferrera post Ugly Betty – her guest role proves that she deserves a character that isn’t hemmed in by her ethnicity.

The Good Wife seeks to make a point about women’s place in American society and politics. I don’t even mind if it’s not quite sure what that point is. As a comment on the status quo The Good Wife doesn’t reveal anything earth-shattering: gender and race remain factors in American politics, but the attempt is intriguing. Even Alicia becomes slightly more human as the series progresses, though improbably made up and coiffed round the clock.

Strange, too, are the viral video and YouTube skits created by various characters as part of their politicking – neither as funny, nor shocking as they should be.  Rather like the often painful efforts of countless rom-com writers trying to convince us that their fictional novelist/songwriter/screenwriter character can really write (see Music and Lyrics, Alex and Emma, Never Been Kissed, etc)! American TV has long been accomplished at high concept,  topical dramas ripped from the headlines, and  The Good Wife continues the theme. It also consistently manages to be a little odd and suprising while mired in gloss, and for that, worth watching.

Photo by Beto Ruiz Alonso[/add_caption_link]

this will be the longest year of my life.

i don’t know whether i want anymore women who don’t know what they want. i don’t know if i ever did, or what was ever attractive about that if ever i did. know what i miss about childhood the most? snow cones. how you ate to the bottom of the snow cone if you were a good person, because it costs fucking money to freeze that water into ice, and how grateful do you think flies are? that root in what you throw out?

the challenge always has been: be more grateful. i haven’t worked out in sixteen years and i think like botox victims who forget how to be happy from never smiling, maybe not lifting heavy stuff makes me

i don’t know how to complete that analogy.

is it ever an analogy, what you don’t want to complete? i should read dostoevsky again. i miss having other peoples’ problems to worry about, but i don’t miss thinking about heaven all the time. or was it hell, i forget what i used to hate to think about. ergo, sum.

i ought to listen to funk music more often, and instead of moving my hips to the beat, move a part of my body that nobody would think of moving to funk music before. not penis, that’s obvious. i could do the funky pinky all fucking night. nobody would understand and they’d all feel so bad, i’d win the lottery and everything.

wearing a goatee around, you feel like you are masquerading everywhere you go. i guess i could see how that could be fun to some people. yesterday a woman in a ridiculous hat told her friend, “Thanks for helping me date myself today!” i shouldn’t have just thrown out my old goatee. i should’ve saved it, put it on like a stick, so i could hold it to my face and be a different person whenever i want. like opera glasses for my ego.

special triple issue.

happy school year, amigos. cartoon comic book land is here