*…if you want to destroy my sweater

Wordpress 2.8 can kma… I have beaten you. Soundly. You have been little match for me, so you must go back to your hole and hide. Well, thus ends a week of extreme geekdom, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 2007–when I purchased my own domain name in anticipation of literary (and commercial fame) without really knowing what a “domain name” might be used for. The best I could come up with at the time was an extension of my somewhat lame blog. So, here it is: A more advanced version of my somewhat lame blog. And because the universes of Work and Play seem to be intersecting in this general vicinity, I will offer this tidbit of advice: Let’s all respect boundaries. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ll offer the following–my criteria for being my Facebook friend:

a. You are perfectly fine with me sometimes getting drunk and sending you incoherent/inappropriate messages via Facebook…

b. You are perfectly fine with my friends getting drunk (or worse) and posting incoherent/inappropriate images of me/us via Facebook…

c. You are perfectly fine with me posting pictures of Z, whose cuteness and charm is of the utmost importance to me–way more so than “networking…”

d. You are perfectly fine with me telling you to bugger off if you’re just interested in “networking”–that word to me holds little meaning. Worse, it smacks of the kind of douchebaggery that I’ll bet you never wanted to be involved in back in the day. But now you are. And that’s your business. Please don’t make it mine…

e. You are perfectly fine with me using the term “douchebaggery” in describing your behavior. Hey, I call it as I see it…

f. You want to just have fun and be friends–good, bad, ugly…

f1. You are fun…

f2. You respect that I like fun…

g. Enough. You may friend me, if you agree to the terms described above…

I’m being rocked at about 93% power by Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Rocked enough to write a mid-day, mid-book endorsement: Read it. The voices in this book are crystalline and entertaining enough that breezing through 50, 75, 100 pages at a time is easy and enlightening. Not sure why I put this one off for so long, but I nearly missed my stop on the train on my way back from My Big Day In The Big City last night. MBDITBC was fun…

Things I may need to look into:

1. An iPhone or the like. MBDITBC proved to be a humbling technological experience, as my beaten-up flippity phone (on which I text at a blazing one character per three # hits) felt tiny and inadequate. Still, I’m not sold on whether or not I have it in me to be that guy. The day job seems to demand it. My personality rejects it. The battle rages on.
2. Getting a new bike. The ol’ Death Bike, that got me through ‘97-’00 in The City, and that saved my life on more than a few close encounters with CTA buses and cabs, is on its last, sad wheels. If I were so motivated, I’d fix it up. But it needs a surgeon, and I’m but a mere specialist.
3. Wall shelving. You know those wall-mounted, long shelving units that kind of make your books look like they’re suspended? Sort of mod-looking and whatnot? I’d like those. Only for cheap. Thoughts? Suggestions?
4. Getting outside more. Enough of this list. I grow tiresome of it…

I was going to post something else today, but then, well, you know. Let me offer this by way of a eulogy: I vividly recall in third grade, the world stopped when the video (the complete video) came on MTV. I recall it being the topic of discussion at school, and the source of plenty of arguments–was there a specific system for predicting when MTV would play Thriller, or not? My friend, Pat Moody, claimed that it was on every day at 3:15. I recall that it always came on when we least expected, but that it was the day’s Big Event. Time stopped, and even my mother (who hated MTV) backed off and let us watch. I remember my older sister getting the album (or maybe the tape? But I think it was the album…) and not letting me listen to it unless she was listening. I begged her to borrow it, but she wouldn’t let me. I also recall this kid in my class, Nick Poskarbowicz, getting the red leather zipper jacket that MJ wore in ‘Beat It,’ and suddenly Nick P was the envy of the class. Anyway, this particular time remains rather vivid, so I offer some praise to the King…

However, if I had to choose one who influenced me and boys everywhere, it would be Farrah… Lest you be forgotten, my love–you are no man’s second choice…

For a record number of months, I’ve had “Quantum of Solace” on my coffee table in its Blockbuster sleeve, having heard nothing but lackluster things about this movie. “It’s too dark.” “It’s not James Bondy enough.” “Worst Bond film ever.” Etc. So, a slow week befell me, a daughter in bed, a bottle of wine opened, and I threw it in expecting to be underwhelmed and/or pissed. Quite the contrary. This is a great film, and, I think, one that had to be made if the Bond brand is to live on. If I remember correctly, this came out around the same time as the most recent Bourne film, so this movie was contextually panned. I say give it some time, and watch it as if the Bond legacy never existed, and you’ll find a film rather than just a movie. Aside from the reconnection to its noir roots–the color scheme is nothing more than black/white/brown–it flaunts Bond conventions with a story that is a continuation of the previous (and arguably The Set-up) film in many ways. He doesn’t sleep with anyone in this movie. He is personally motivated. He really doesn’t have much in the way of competition (the Grand Finale Death Fight scene really ain’t much). But who cares? If you were paying any attention, you’d realize that the re-branding of Bond is at hand, and, visually, this is a rather stunning film. The early (and I mean really freaking early) Bond films weren’t much–more “intrigue” than action and gadgetry. And I’m an afficionado. I know every Bond film by rote, and understand when the current film is paying homage to an earlier, better chase scene (e.g. the speed boat scene in Quantum vs. the one in Live and Let Die–advantage LALD). But forget all of that, this Bond rocks. And shame on you for not recognizing. Not only are the films fun to watch, they’re engaging on other levels (do you really remember anything at all about the Timothy Dalton years aside from his goofy-ass mug???)…

This year’s Florida trip was, in fact, awesome (see the entire photo album on my Facebook page). Things I noticed while walking along the beach: The early 90’s tattoo craze that brought tats from the prison population & street people to “extreme” college students (the rise in popularity of tattoos and rock climbing as a “hobby” are, in fact, intimately bound) and then to everyone else is now coming back to bite many of those folks right on the back fat. Now, those brave middle-class pioneers of tattoo are themselves middle-class parents with middle-class beer guts and middle-class wrinkles. Their once glorious tribal markings and tramp stamps and barbed arm bands are rather humorously on display above plaid Old Navy swim trunks and sagging stretch marks. It could have just as easily been me, as I’ve been known to jump a bandwagon or two. But it’s not. So, I look forward to seeing them when we all reach our 60’s and retire down there. Will be quite the visual feast…

I’ve finished Evan Wright’s “Hella Nation,” which took longer than I’d planned simply because I found that reading essays about the fringyest people in our country all in a row had a negative effect on my sense of comfort with people. Kind of like watching a Dateline To Catch a Predator marathon–it’s interesting at first, and then the more you see, the worse you feel about humanity. Still, it’s a book worth reading, and I highly recommend it (maybe in between essays, watch an episode of South Park or something light to cleanse the palette)…

I was in Milwaukee on Friday night to witness the ordination of a Marquette friend at Gesu Church. This marked the first time I’d set foot on the MU campus in more than a decade, the first time I’d been to church in at least seven years, and the first time I’d ever witnessed anyone becoming a priest. I was struck by how “not mine anymore” the campus felt–it was very much like walking on foreign ground. Except for the reception in the AMU, which I was stunned to see still had the Brew Bayou. Given the amount of change the campus has undergone, I figured that the old coffee shop had become a Starbucks or maybe was given up to office space or something. But there it was. That was a warm fuzzy, as was seeing 2 old roommates and a few other old friends, all of whom I hope to see again sometime in the future…

I’m not sure to what extent I’d call Slumdog Millionaire the “feel good movie of the decade,” though it may very well be the perfect story. The intersection of reality/fiction here is what makes this movie emotionally gripping enough to have been the Best Picture. In celluloid or whatever the hell they call it now in the digital age, we love the fact that Jamal and Lakita have a kind of (if implausible) happily ever after. Though the realism of the utter filth and poverty of Mumbai haunts this would-be love story in such a way that we kind of demand to know (somewhat knowingly, unfortuately) what ever became of all of those little kids who got to bear witness to the mob beatings and all of the other Too Real shit that we see early on. There were points when I thought I was watching Boyz n Tha Hood-Mumbai, which then made me feel oogey in a kind of third-world porn kind of way–like, as I sit on my red Ashley couch, sipping wine and snacking on Famous Amos cookies, I feel a twinge of sympathy for those poor souls sleeping amongst the piles of filth and whatnot. I appreciated the fact that the story reflected the times so that we see the housing boom (and Salim’s involvement in this new empire) in India, like a rising, doomed empire. Anyway, Dev Patel was awesome and Freida Pinto stunning, and there’s really nothing to hate about this movie. It will make you feel…

1. I’ll watch NASCAR and drink a glass of red wine while doing so. Further, I will ask you to leave if you are pulling for Kyle Busch…

2. I’ll watch an entire dubbed movie on Telemundo or Univision. Recent favorites include: Predator, Aurora Encounter (this film is bizarre/creepy in any language), Delta Force, and Roll Bounce. I don’t speak Spanish…

3. When I watch Deadliest Catch, I feel as though I can taste the crab legs every time they show those guys chucking them into the tanks. I think about how I could never work on those ships, simply because I would haul in a pot, grab one of the Alaskan Kings and take it into the galley and prepare it in a huge pot with a few Stroh’s…

4. I find Charlie Rose one of the most exciting men in television…

5. I haven’t laughed out loud during a Simpsons episode in years, but must watch it because it’s like a security blanket to me…

6. I was utterly inconsolable when, after having tuned in for all of VH1’s Top 100 Songs of the ’80s, I learned that Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” lost to Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer”. It just couldn’t be so. As a child of the ’80s, I recall vividly being rocked at least 75% harder by every track on Hysteria over Slippery When Wet. Granted, both rocked. But Pour Some Sugar on Me was the moneyshot of moneyshots at all of our junior high dances. It was the rockinest song of the ’80s hands-down. It’s not that Bon Jovi wasn’t up there, because they were, no question. Simply that Pour Some Sugar on Me is the quintessential ’80s rock song, as it’s so obviously about that which was on all of our minds at the time–being drenched with granulated sugar, of course. Living on a Prayer is like a story about people and stuff. Who cares, you know? I don’t know. It just really bothered me that I tuned in, stuck with it for every hour-long installment or whatever they were, only for all of my illusions to be so utterly dissed…

7. I’ve lost interest in this list now…

I used to be so easily inspired. Trips to Barnes & Noble these days, however, yield little more than low-grade anxiety due to the overwhelming number of New Books and Unfamiliar Authors. I used to be so in touch. Maybe it comes with my age, but so anyway–I caught a Bob Edwards interview with Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill, a few weeks ago on NPR. It clung desperately to a lobe in my brain and then dislodged itself last weekend as I browsed the BN Current Events section.  I stumbled upon Wright’s Hella Nation, a collection of his essays/articles that have appeared in everything from Hustler (”Heil Hitler, America”–a superb bit of embedded journalism at the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian (still not clear on the reasoning behind the repetitive name, except that its followers all tend to be a little slow on the draw, as it were) compound in Idaho) to Vanity Fair. In an even stranger twist of kismet, in his introduction to the collection Wright recounts how as an editor at Hustler, he lobbied the editor of Premiere to let him write a story about the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards show that year. This rang a bell (not b/c of the porn, just stick w/me here, this is going somewhere interesting, at least to me). Anyhow, the editor of Premiere decided to give the story to one David Foster Wallace instead, who used Wright as his AVN & greater porn-world guide. In Foster Wallace’s essay on the AVNs “Big Red Son” (originally titled “Neither Adult Nor Entertainment” when it ran in Premiere and then later re-titled for his collection Consider the Lobster) he refers to his Valley guide as “Harold Hecuba” (Evan Wright)–a clever Gilligan’s Island reference, because Hecuba (played by Phil Silvers in an episode called The Producer) in fact gets off the island, just as Evan Wright wanted to get away from the porn world. So, I was hooked. The book is incredibly entertaining and insightful w/r/t the fringes of America. It falls somewhere between Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and all of Foster Wallace’s Harper’s pieces in which he chronicles being a fish out of water (which pretty much sums up all of his narrative nonfiction work, eh?). Added bonus: Unlike the other two aforementioned favorite authors, Wright hasn’t killed himself, so hopefully I’ll be able to enjoy his writing for many years…

Back in the late 90’s, I attended a reading/lecture at the Milwaukee Public Library from Richard Preston (not The Music Man, the infectious disease/Hot Zone man). It was a year or two after my panic attacks and hypochondria really settled in, and I had, by all accounts, absolutely no business being within 5 miles of that lecture. I was in the front row. I was there with my girlfriend at the time, who was the unfortunate recipient of the kind of crazy that her Iowa-born/bred background couldn’t possibly comprehend. So when I dashed out of the lecture short of Preston’s wrap-up, I did my best to cover, then I recall just back-peddling and saying I didn’t feel well. In fact, I had an aggressive monkey-virus, indiginous to interior Congo; the kind that affects 1/2 of .04% of the human population, but which, if spread, would ultimately wipe out mankind as we know it. After a number of visits to Marquette’s student health center, and a number of rather forceful reassurances that I didn’t have said disease (including one flat-out plea to not come back to MU’s health center), I moved on to something else. So, the swine flu alarms me, mostly because, as a recovering hypochondriac, this hasn’t been on my radar. I’ve been mostly focused on MRSA and other super-bacteria. Did I mention that I now work in a hospital…?

Yesterday was 85 & sunny. Today was 50 & stormy…

3rd flat tire in 3 months happened yesterday. I can now change a tire in under 10 minutes. If anyone has a flat, please call me–once I get there, I can guarantee you NASCAR-like service. Z played merrily while I worked; she hardly even had time to work up a sweat before I was done, and we were on our way to Famous Dave’s for some victory beef (not pork, not anything that has pork–see paragraph 1 above. Oh, and during the “Mad Cow” scare of ‘00, I powerfully freaked out a bit–it is the hypochondriac’s worst nightmare; an incubation period of 13+ years, meaning that I could be doomed and not even know it, leading to a kind of stab of fear every time I forget something basic; did I just forget, or is it Mad Cow???)…

It’s not easy being me…

The Fat-Burning Burger, courtesy of Men’s Health:

1/4 lb of ground buffalo or turkey (I used turkey tonight)

Red onion slices

Romaine lettuce leaves, sans the rib

1 fried egg

1/3 cup sharp cheddar

1 tbs dijon mustard

Do the stuff, put it all together, eat, be surprised…