Spoils

I have a grand and desperate desire to shoot off my grandfather's 1924 S&W .38 revolver. Five minutes remain of my 27th birthday, and by the time I actually post this diatribe, it will be over. I clutch this humming confluence of magnets and metals and radio-waves, suppressing the primitive urges of a hunter/gatherer.

It's not like I want to go frivolously blasting fully jacketed projectiles into the atmosphere with reckless wantonness... I want to line up spent Pabst cans filled with water, meticulously positioning their aluminum cylinders along a beautiful tangent, and then pick them off with 30 glorious grams of booming gunpowder.

And so I think about creation verses destruction, and it is my wonderful wife who winches in this whimsical wonderment. She has afforded me the tools of creation: a bread peel, an oil mister, and the perfect brotform. Maybe all these gears of the meek and micro living have influenced me, powered me to seek the feckless abandon in picking off beer cans from my fence-line.

But the bottom line is... my birthday kicked ass. Kicked all sorts of ass...............

Deep Breaths

inoutinoutinoutinoutintoutintout

And so it goes, the shuddering plunge. Despite what my projected persona may dictate, I am a spiritual man. Indescribable, enigmatic... I have wangled to the reach of wangle. I am 27 years old -- no extraordinary fete, I admit. And yet, I have lapped the milk of the damned, and 27 is the accursed fill.

Just a fan of the blues be I. The music and the tales that accompany them are legendary, dissuading aspiring musicians everywhere from delving into the gem of our heritage.

Goodbye Janis Joplin, Duane Allman, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Shannon Hoon... My heart will beat a little faster thanks to Robert Johnson, and a little slower thanks to Skip James. Their visceral impact will resonate for ages.

It has been brought to my attention that not only has Nate changed the name of his blog (although the title along the top of the browser still says All things Nate), but he has also posted a few personal experiences in the past few days. Apologies again... From now on I will double check my peeves before unleashing the venomous vim of my ire.

Keeping up with the Jones' (or Nates)

Once there was Nate, and he had all things. What type of lemming rube do you take me for, Nate? What caressed the inner mush of your cerebral carapace into thinking I'd believe your sinisterly sarcastic ruse?

Rewind the mental strings, rewind and reveal, Noah.
I've been perusing random blogs using the "next blog" button at the top of most blogger pages. Click and be swept off, ricocheting like an abused super-ball to a new blog. Press "next blog" again... find breath anew.

Three blogs have piqued my fancy so much as to follow them with fair regularity. The Book Design Review which guides me to strange text based entirely on looks (judged by the cover), Journal of my Life a fresh blogger living in Kuala Lumpur, and tonight's focus: Nate.

Nate is a designer, and the dynamo behind "All Things Nate." My raw rubbings originate from the very basic fact that Nate has nothing to do with ANYTHING at All Things Nate. To me, it seems a disillusioned couturier surfs the internet in the long solitary hours of his evening and plasters anything he fancies onto his broad, ugly ledger.

Here are my totally uninsprired attempts to replicate his sharpness... People want to be mayor of Detroit! It has just become more difficult to get a pet monkey!

Take that, Nate...
Actually, sorry, Nate. I will continue to follow your frantically frequent blog posts and enjoy your random finds. Apologies for targeting you tonight. It was just the paradox of calling your blog All Things Nate and then posting nothing except things you find on the net.
It is truly commendable and contemptable, that type of creative abandon.

Run-up

February of this year, as it happens occasionally, contains four perfect weeks on our common American Sunday through Saturday calendar. And the final quarter-block of these I have staked claim to as my birth-week. Why confine my celebratory fete to a single day when I can brand a gloriously stout rectangle in bright red sharpie.

It has practical reasons, of course. Lose an argument? Not this week. The resounding endgame to any dispute rolls so easily off the tongue in those three little words: "It's my birthday." Restaurant disagreement? Birthday. Who's turn to cook? Birthday. Who's sock is this in the sink? You bet your ass it ain't mine, not this week.

It was tempting, upon seeing the pristine alignment of chronology February afforded, to picture the glory of boxing in an entire birth-month. But the small victories afforded by that hasty flare of judgement would have had unintended repercussions, for the daily grind of a month-long festivity would have chewed away the anticipation, the run-up, to the big payoff.

So I'll take my week, thank you. And if you don't like it... tough. It's my birthday.

HST

February: the month of my birth, the shortest month of the year and the only that occasionally changes.

Today is the anniversary of the death of an icon. It's paradoxical that I can't summon words right now. Inspiration is cruel...

So long Hunter.

'Twas brillig...

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things; of shoes and ships and sealing wax; of cabbages and kings.

Lewis Carroll is my favorite poet. The Jabberwocky conjours the fantastic imagination in every child. What does mome-rath look like, and how do they outgrabe? I used to be able to rattle of it's entire nonsense from memory, along with several Tolkien rhyme riddles and the better part of Coleridge's Mariner.

Poetry, like all art, is difficult to pin down. Critics and aficionados seek to distance themselves from the pedestrian folk by claiming cerebral superiority... that the subtle enunciations of true art are inaccessible to the uneducated. Yet the same critic cannot discern an unknown Pollock from the flinging spatters of an orangutan better than the flipping of a coin.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Don't rely on Disney. Go read Lewis Carroll today!

The Continuing Crisis

There is a panic rising within me, and the fear chews in my lungs, languishes in the depths of my bowels. At first, I dismissed it as a childish obsession. But now the crisis has worsened, and it is definitely a very real concern.

There are more of me. I ticky-typed about this before, but it was just a link and a baffled exclamation. Now that I have cleared my senses and delved deeper, I have discovered yet another me. I know that this is not the same impostor I uncovered before, for he was in middle school in Lansing Michigan in 2007, and this new pretender seems to be under the age of 7 and lives in the greater Houston area.

I decided to be proactive. I would compose a letter, a dignified and intelligent summary of my logic; namely that there can be only one me, that I was here first, and that he should kindly begin using his middle name as his first.

This has not happened for two reasons.

The first is that, as my spouse carefully explicated, most of my eloquent pennings are actually the incoherent scrawling of a seemingly mad-person. One arriving in the mail, unsolicited and uninvited in a crumpled and sweaty envelope, may be startling or downright frightening. Especially given my passion on this topic and my tendency to get carried away and off-topic.

The second (and I admit, more concrete) reason is, due to their age, these minors cannot be easily located. My first intention was to simply look up any Rademachers in Lansing and send the letter, addressed to Noah, to any and all of them. I was surprised to discover that 30 Rademacher families hold residency there, and not only would sending thirty copies of a letter be cost-prohibitive, there is also the real possibility that several of those households are related, and upon realizing they had all received the same postal rant, the police would be dispatched to knock on my door and analyze my mental health.

Sadly, I am at a loss for what to do next. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The direction of mass media

I have to write this before it slips my memory. My wife is asleep on the floor, face down, and I anticipate that I will be joining her shortly, and the more sleeps between me and the spectacle on the news earlier this week, the more likely I will forget.

It was Thursday, and the noontime news blazed in my television screen. Those poor saps, they have been in makeup since the wee hours, powder-puffed beneath the studio lights while most people are still sound in their beds. The noon broadcast is the end of their day. They are calling it in, the bottle in their desk drawer whispers loudly.

Congress had arrived at a compromise on the economic stimulus legislation, with Republicans loudly clamoring for concessions then voting against it anyway - with a few defectors however. The newswoman blinked into the camera. "And it looks like a victory for President Obama's massive package."

She knew immediately what she had done. Her ears brightened and her eyes watered, but it was difficult to say why... Was she just incredibly embarrassed by her thoughtless wording, was she holding in a huge guffaw, had she been set up by a mischievous TelePrompTer operator?

Her coanchor was a much easier read. After several seconds of uncomfortable air staring into those big dow eyes, the camera panned back to the larger picture. Beside the blinking, silent woman sat a remarkably red man. His lips were pursed and a vein was pushing out of his forehead. Either his tie was fatally too tight, or he was about to burst into spasms of middle-schooler giggles. Suddenly, he coughed very abruptly and picked up his glass of water.

As he took a very long drink, you could hear his sputtering breath behind the mug. By this time, the woman had lowered her head and now sat with her eyes locked on the desk. "Ahem!" the man exclaimed. "Sorry, I had something in my throat," and as he spoke the corners of his mouth betrayed the smirk that desperately tried to force it's self outward.

"And in our final story, we're going to tell you why lots of local fishermen are hoping you want to give your valentine crabs..."

Adventurous consumerism

I bought new underwear a few days ago, two pairs of red and blue striped under-shorts, the premiums. I'm still on the fence about them. My confidence in the capitalist market was first shaken by the absence of medium size Hanes tagless. There was an abundance of petite and large, even extra large and double x. I truly considered buying the large, my yearning for boxer-shorts-sans-tag was so strong. But we all know the perils of underpants that are too loose.

I tapped my forefinger against my front teeth and pondered my options. I began to sweat. Triple pack of standards, jumbo pack of economy quality, patterned, striped, themed ... or the premiums. In my humble opinion, it is a tarnish on the name Hanes that they dare label underpants as premium and still sew tags into the waistband.

There was one other factor that factored into my decision factoring. The purchase would be made with a shiny Target gift card. My budget would be unaffected. Pitching caution to the wind like a soiled sock, I strode with jolly confidence to the cash register, sparse two-pack of top of the line garments in hand.

Upon my arrival back at home, I shed my old vesture and tore into my new investment. I was apprehensive about the tighter thighs, but the fabric was soft and the elastic stretchy. For any of you who are following this story with a vested interest, I will surely pen a follow-up once the proper molding time has elapsed.

Imaginary Games

A cheerleader's coach barks at her squad. Her Adam's apple plunges and heaves the cigarette smoke from her airways as her furies are enunciated with carcinogenic blue wisps. "You suck!" comes a voice from the stands. Transported through the ether, the demoralizing prose intoxicates those grass-stained gladiators grinding their youth into the turf. They hang their heads and scan the withered and beaten sod that their jagged rubber soles have unrepentantly gouged. And in pursuit of what?

The home crowd shuffles from the bleachers. The burden of their single-file sorrow bends the turnstiles, and a subsonic groan lingers over the field. On the score-board (dedicated two years ago in memory of a 5th year senior guard killed in a hazing "incident") the yellow LED lights show an insurmountable deficit. With 15 seconds on the clock, the home town trails 21- 13, the visitors crouch over the ball with 1 yard to go on a third down.

And then... the fumble. The quarterback lets the snap slip, spilling the essence of the game between his splayed legs. A collective gasp sucks the atmosphere out of the vicinity, leaving the players to choke on oxygen deficient air as they scramble for the precious bauble. Wagers are suddenly clutched tight in mid-transfer as eyes bulge... the whistle sounds, as does the buzzer. The visitors have recovered the fumble and the game is officially over.

And so we all, myself included, breathe again. And we will... until next year.

The Run

I am going to call this, "Race against micturition." I personally think that would be a great slogan for a charity run for prostate cancer. I use humor to ease my own life's tribulations. However, benevolence has nothing to do with my own race. No - I pair myself off against... myself. Will I break in that ugly face of necessity, or will my bladder break first? Is this a valid, scholarly pursuit, or a drunken belligerence?

The race against my bladder has been greatly impeded by a freakish inability to spell even the simplest of words. I know the words, I know the meaning, but expressing myself has been the true barrier. If only I lived in Olde Englande... I have no point to make, but I was curious if I could manufacture one before... well...

I ... lose.