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.

A single plastic container, all alone

My wife made this comment, offhandedly. The subject: a plastic salsa tub that she had just washed, now destined for the recycling.
It struck a chord in me, and I immediately blurted, "That is going to be the title of my next blog post!" though I had no notion of a topic for said post. And so, in the tracks of the great word-painters (inebriated, stumbling through the black, bleak blankness) I contemplated this single sentence. Could it describe the grotesque tableau that surrounds the average man? Plastic containers... stationary figures... solitary...

I've been reading Kafka, if that is not obvious already.

I guess I have no choice but to surrender this sentence to pure poetry. Something ethereal and serendipitous provoked that prose. And yet something deep-seeded and tyrannical within me desperately wants to make it my own, to swage and sinter it into a uniform theme, an impression, an epos. Yet my hammer is weak, my anvil soft, and no matter what my concentrated effort, unadulterated this phrase stands stronger alone.

And thus is life. To detect inspiration, unprovoked, and clutch and claw at it, and occasionally fall flat. Only occasionally, though, for that is art.

Suck on that, Princeton.

I just finished watching Mystery Science Theatre 3000, The Movie. I was returned to 1995; Clinton was the president, Gorbachev jokes were still vogue, and humor was a simple equation for my friend Brett and I. Most sleep-overs took place at his house, considering he had Oregon Trail on the computer, super Nintendo, unlimited Nerf toys and satellite television ... whereas my house had public radio and was wood-heated. To be fair, though, my house had superior food. At Brett's, meal time was typically sugary cereal or white rice with butter. My mother, on the other hand, would prepare vegetable lasagna, sautéed tofu sandwiches on home-made bread, pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse.

In retrospect, my house developed us as physical young men quite effectively. We were compelled to play outside by the complete lack of lazy enertainment inside; kicking soccer balls through the laundry line supports, hitting rocks with baseball bats against the corregated walls of the International Curling Club, throwing water-balloons off the roofs of downtown businesses after scaling the fire escapes. Granted, Brett had a sizable collection of Super-Soakers and a Slip 'n Slide... so on hot days, it was really a toss up.

However, Brett's house held the coup de grace... the nudie channel. Somehow Brett was able to decipher the pass-code of the parental lock on his satellite receiver. If I remember correctly, it was the expiration date of his father's credit card. (Please don't ask me how he knew his parents' credit card information... not only did my parents not own a credit card, we did not own a microwave, a computer, or a CD player.) So, after guffawing at Mystery Science theatre 3000 and stealthily ascertaining that his parents had truly retired for the evening, we would punch in that sacred numerical cypher and gawk at the nubile bodies afforded by the soft-core cable porn industry of the day. Those are sweet memories.

Anyway, recounting this is relatively pointless. What chiefly compelled me to start orating about it was the simple fact that the fictitious hero of the movie was wearing a UW-Stout sweatshirt. Suck on that, Princeton.

So, my slovenly posterior has defaced this chair irreparably. My two months spent out of work have passed quickly, and the calories and carbohydrates have mounted within me in haste. The rain sinks me, and I miss my bike.

A muscular woman on television beckons toward some bizarre machine, a spindly, spidery confluence of tension bars and flywheels and cable-winders. Her arm is veiny. It encourages me to try a free trial; to unfold this glistening miracle of modern mechanics and reshape my o-so-pliable physique. This cyprian employs the devils of the sales-trade, plumbing the depressed and sleepless to fatten her pocketbook with the spoils of commission.

My own objectives are far less clear. Why do I sit at this black hour, listening to the rodents who nest in my attic and the late night adverts for personal-enhancements, typing into the silence? Why, indeed.

Spoiled

Outside an unfortunate rattles glass in pursuit of deposit refunds. His tattered shambles lean precariously into the recycling bin and he sweeps a gloved hand back and forth to stir up the cream. Glass money. A strange connection there, with the tribes of old, using unwieldy stone currency and this modern vagabond scrounging for large, fragile nickels. His face weather beaten, scowling, he mounts his aluminum steed, his plastic bag saddlebags dangle like testicles from either handlebar. Half filled with the spoils of the day, two dollars and sixty-five cents worth of returnable bottles and cans, they clatter-clang back and forth as he peddles down the alley.

I am spoiled. Sometimes I let that creeping anxiety depress me. Yet a glance out my window provides the relief I need for today. Because here I am, seated before a massive, high-tech gizmo wired to the world wide web, space heater blowing warm air up my pant-leg, speakers streaming a radio station in San Francisco. I have nothing to bitch about. I am just peachy.

Sabbatical

Flunkies don't get to take sabbatical. Only career junkies. I recently read that Bush spent 2 years out of the last 8 on vacation. I sincerely hope that President Obama takes an equal amount of vacation time, because I am sure he will be working much harder.

I had a dream last night that I am going to record here for reasons of archive. This blog is a morgue file for my thoughts, and this is just another crinkled page to jam into a box for possible future applications.

I stumbled backwards into a room, bumping into a large billiards table. "Watch it!" a voice scolded me. I turned to apologize. To my surprise, I was standing face to face with an oversized midget who scowled at me as his companion leaned his normal size torso on his undersized arms.

"Sorry," I muttered as I turned to leave. My elbow once again jostled the table.

"I said watch it!" I glanced backwards and noticed a small scorekeeping chalkboard affixed to the side of the table. It read:
1 wall shot = 10 points
2 wall shot = 20 points
Bumping the table = -25 points

and below it was scrawled

Chuck 30
Tyler 45
Noah -100

I protested, "I only bumped the table twice! Why am I at minus 100?"

and they turned to me and said, "We don't like you very much."

Little Mr. Sunshine

The sun shines again. The blanket of fog has finally dissolved, there are pancakes in the skillet, the radio plays Tico Tico endlessly as Rev. Mark Time pays homage to the Hudson River plane crash. According to him, that was the song being piped through the fuselage during Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's flawless water touchdown that saved all 155 passenger's lives. And I have no real reason to doubt the reverend, and no reason to believe him either.

Eggs sizzle. Tico tico is also the name of a nudist cruise by Caribbean Hideaways/Orient Bay.

Life, she goes on...

The Doldrums

The fog is starting to depress me. It presses in with it's stink of cinder and mildew. The meteorologists blame it on stagnant air, but I will call it the lazy winds, or maybe the unmotivated atmosphere.
Who can trust a weatherman anyway, sham soothsayers in their secondhand suits, waiving manicured hands at projections of isobars and conjuring visions of picnics in the unmaterializing sunshine.
So I say, out you damn murk. Let the lazy winds cast you into condensation-hell. Gnash your yellowed teeth at others, you doldrums.

What day is this?

The main thing that bothers me about being unemployed, besides the boredom, anxiety, monetary drain, self-pity and general pruning of any sense of self-worth, is the fact that I have no idea what day it is. I have no frame of reference. Word has it, some people in my predicament use television scheduling to maintain their clockworks. I, however, work in the reverse, and find myself wondering why my radio programs are not on this Saturday morning.

Everyday feels like Saturday. I am boggled when Tegan rises at 6 am, showers, wakes me further with coffee kisses to say goodbye...

Drunken voices, drunken parades, marching down the alley in front of the house, between the hemispheres of my brain. Shouts, exclamations, jubilation. Is it Saturday? Friday? What are you people doing, so rowdy and inebriated on a weekday? Is this.. a .. week... what day is it?

The early retreat of my better half signals school-night. Might be Sunday. But not Monday, because Tegan does not have class on Tuesdays....

Pride? Dignity? These are drown-able offenses.

Sinking in the bottle again.
Mohalo