If your rapper name is C-Murder, and then you get charged with murder, I bet come trial day you'd wish you'd picked a name like C-All Around Nice Guy or C-Innocent.
My mom arrives in mere moments, for another extended stay.
(Insert long thing about how that effects me, G, and our life, and how I may or may not post anything for awhile, and throw in a self-deprecating comment about how my absence will be your gain.)
See you in a week.
In my former contractor days I used a formula to figure out how long it would take to complete a job. I'd simply estimate how long it should take, then double it and add a half. So a one-day project, painting a kitchen for example, will take two and a half. A three week job, like an addition on a house? Seven and a half weeks. The formula is startlingly accurate.
The extra time needed is not the fault of the contractor or the do-it-yourselfer. It's Murphy's fault. The creator of the laws which assure no matter how simple the task, no matter how adept you may be at completing it, something will fuck up so royally you will rue the day you were born. Anyone who has ever set aside an hour for a minor repair (like replacing a washer on a faucet) and found themselves staring into a gaping hole in the wall a week later --cursing at two stripped, corroded valve stems that cannot be removed from the Paleolithic-era plumbing to which they are attached-- knows what I'm talking about. Another related golden rule is this: Never, and I mean NEVER utter the words "How hard could it be?" or its certain-to find-you-drunk-and-weeping-in-a-corner follow up, "All you have to do is..."
So you see, the formula allows for the unavoidable.
There are three men in my kitchen right now bringing new electric wiring up from the basement. We are to have a outlet there, another in the bathroom, and a breaker box in the hall. To do this they've had to cut hundreds of small holes in the hallway walls so they may feed the wiring upward through the building, and over to each destination. Once here, in our apartment, the wiring will be attached to a new breaker, and fed out to the outlets and light switches. That completed, the dust has to be removed, the feed holes have to be plastered and sanded and painted, and final clean-up follows. These men assure me they will be done by the end of the day today.
One thousand dollars says Thursday. Any takers?
Behold: Spy-der-man.
(via Zeebah)
This from Jon: Pete Townsend clearing the air about his position on the war, and why his song Won't Get Fooled Again was requested to be, but did not get used in Michael Moore's Farenheight 911.
My opinion of Michael Moore has changed quite a bit over the years. It's not that my politics have changed as much as I feel like I've slowly outgrown him. His approach, the zeal and single mindedness with which he tackles his subject matter...it seems adolescent to me now. Like thumbing through a Stephen King novel and fondly remembering when you thought he was the greatest writer of all time (oh come on...you know you poured through his books in middle school, don't get all "My sixth grade favorite? Robertson Davies" on my ass).
But I did see F911, on opening day, and I'll admit I was delighted and moved. I'm glad it's out there, I'm glad it's doing well, etc. However I fully realize my feelings about the film were not formed out of an unbiased assessment of his endeavor, but ego-based wish-fulfillment instead --the pure joy of having my own thoughts and suspicions and standpoint splashed up on the screen. The phrase 'preaching to the choir' gets bandied about a lot, and they're right. All I know is sitting in a theater with a few hundred like-minded people (and realizing there are thousands more) was even more powerful than the film itself, and was the first time I had felt hopeful, safe even, in a very long time.
Moore isn't who many of us would choose to be the voice of the Liberal Left, but unfortunately he's all we've got, with an audience anyway. And in his defense, unlike his Neo-Con counterparts, he'll be the first to admit that his films and books are from a singular point of view, and that he has a clear agenda, which I applaud him for. When you factor in that only teenagers, fascists and religious zealots feel they can actually change the world, well... I'm glad he's retained his adolescent angst.
During the rainy morning dog walk, an elderly man approached holding up an enormous umbrella.
Me: Wow, that's quite an umbrella!
Man: (smiles) I know. It's a tent. But I stay dry under here.
Me: You could keep five people dry under there.
Man: (laughs) I suppose I could.
Me: I like the stripes; red, yellow, green. It reminds me of an African flag.
Man: The flag of Italy.
Me: Isn't the flag of Italy red, white and green? I think red, yellow and green is the flag of Chad, or Ghana, or, oh I don't know my flags. But it looks African. It's pretty.
Man: You think my umbrella looks African?
Me: Yeah, like an African flag. Well stay dry! Have a good day!
I walked on. When the dog and I made a full-circle back to the spot where the man and I spoke, his umbrella was in the garbage.
State Education Secretaries say the darndest things! But that's nothing. Last time he had dinner at Arnold's house, he leaned over and called Maria a "horse-faced, good for nothing bourgeois whore."
Good thing Maria --unlike dirty, stupid six year old girls-- has a sense of humor.
G comes home last night (after having been sequestered away all day taking a test), drops his bags, turns to me and says "Gephardt? Kerry picked Gephardt?" I laughed figuring G had heard about The New York Post mishap, and was luring me into a practical joke if I hadn't. "Yeah, pretty crazy, huh?" I answered, going along with the joke.
"Gephardt." He repeated, confused and a bit deflated. "I just saw the cover of The Post on the way home. I never would have..." I cut him off. "Wait. You do know it's Edwards right? The Post headline was a mistake. Kerry announced it would be Edwards this morning."
G was visibly relieved.
Hours later we started discussing the Post again, and their hard-core Republican agenda, and began coming up with conspiracy theories about the paper, like... what possible motive could there be to purposely print such an error? We couldn't come up with anything too damning or interesting so we gave up. G changed the subject with (what appeared to be) a non-sequitur, "I wonder if it'll [the issue] be worth anything in the future. Like getting your hands on a Tribune with the 'Dewy beats Truman' headline." We paused, looked at each other with matching Homer Simpson Doh!'s, and ran to the computer.
Logging onto ebay, the Post's brilliant, diabolical plan was made perfectly clear.
"Did you buy one? One of the papers?" I asked.
"No, I didn't" he said.
"Do you think they still have some at the newsstand downstairs?"
"I'll go check."
Lord-dee it's hotter than a, than a (I don't know, make up your own folksy saying; dazzle me) out there. Part-way through our morning walk my dog was like enough already and turned tail to get back to the AC. Even the city employees doing road work on my street are all slumped over on their flatbeds, unable to continue the useless milling around they need to do in order to stretch a three-day job into a year and a half. It's Sahara hot, Mojave hot. Hot, hot, hot. Yet each and every little old neighborhood lady insists on wearing a sweater -- over her (markedly non-tangerine) muumuu and stockings. Do they do this to taunt us? Is it a part of the Greatest Generation's plot to torture us with guilt, point out how (unlike them) we're just a bunch of whining assholes who were given the world on a silver-plated platter and yet STILL find things to bitch about? Well it's not workin' Grandma! I saw that bead of sweat trickling down your arm flaps. I'm so on to you.
Some men look at you like they want to fuck you, and others look at you like they want to eat you. I don't mean 'eat you' as a metaphor for oral sex --I mean Hannibal Lechter, human flesh with a side of fava beans eat you. There's really no other way to describe it. But if you're a female whose age falls somewhere between having developed secondary sexual characteristics and the arrival of your AARP card, I bet you've seen it.
The look has nothing in common with a standard ogle, from say, the kind of man who thinks it's playful to methodically and openly appraise each passing female. That guy's guided by a simple routine: He checks out your front, you pass, he turns, checks you out from behind, then he may say something, utter a few words of approval perhaps, or quietly file you into a mental category: Goddamn I'd love to do her or I'd do her or I might do her or I'd only do her if I hadn't gotten laid in a year and was really, really drunk. Depending on a million cultural and socioeconomic factors the recipient of such an appraisal will either be flattered, or insulted, or so disgusted and immune that it won't even register; but not afraid. I might want to punch the construction worker who's whistling and making rude gestures, but I'm not afraid of him.
The eat you stare is a whole other beast, it's more sinister, has real evil in it. It is hunger, it has teeth. The look, although lascivious on the surface, is NOT the look of someone who wants to fuck you. Well he might want to have sex with you but it doesn't end there. It goes beyond the consumption of the flesh we enjoy during the sexual act, it is in fact its opposite: it's sex as a means for consumption. And unlike other kinds of leering, the eat you stare isn't qualitative, there's no accounting for personal taste or media appointed specifications, you don't have to be a scantily clad hottie or classic beauty. The sole requirement is that you are a female of child-bearing years, period (no pun intended). I could say it's the face a misogynist failure of a man makes when confronted with a woman, any woman, just because she's there; but that's too simplistic. It's the kind of projected self hatred only serial killers and rapists understand. And it's really, really creepy.
I had a point, something about how I hate walking past the OTB in my neighborhood and how I usually cross the street so I don't have to, but I've lost it now.