In Stitches, or: What a Lovely Day for a Youtube

I find watching people knit extraordinarily fascinating. The knitters themselves they fail to understand, but that's merely because they are not Executive Producer Level Donors to the Theatre in My Mind®. Were they free enough with their liquid assets to be awarded this prestige, they would be allowed the concomitant privilege of watching the movies... in my... head. For example, should the knitter make a mistake and have to pull some stitches out, even just one or two, I am invariably reminded of the below:



While we're on the subject of what's going on in my mind, and not too far removed from the subject of Looney Tunes. This is probably the most effective anti-depressant in the world:



Now you see? No matter how big your problems might seem, they do not (most likely) involve a frustratingly stage-frightened amphibian... or Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos.

Just a Parboiled Minute!

Ah Springtime, it sits there just out of our reach here in the blear, February doldrums, with its promise of refreshing showers and pleasant temperatures. And what more apt harbinger of this "verdant spiral" could there be, I ask you, than 62 men in pajamas lying in the grass with their legs up in the air? Yes it's Spring Training again! First, for my thoughts on experiencing baseball season overseas may I direct you to this post from last year (have I been doing this a year already? Good God...). As for the present, I'm filled, as ever, with the sense of hope and excitement that is the flip side to the "wait 'til next year" let down of having your home team's season end in September. Of course nothing's been proven yet, and even on Opening Day, everything accomplished in Spring Training is still just meaningless exhibition (the Reds of late have seemed to fair much better when the pressure's off and they're in Florida, for example), but the simple fact that right now anything's possible is enough to get me all giddy. It's like in school when your teacher informs you at the beginning of the course that, at the moment, you all have A's, and it's just a matter of you keeping it there. In Spring Training, everyone's a World Series MVP, even David "Shitty Batter" Ross! Hold on a second... David Ross? Mr. Mendoza Line? MVP? I must be crazy, right? Well, turns out baseball season can have that effect on people...

There's a .txt File in My Mind

So tucked away in my My Documents folder between Kölschbrauereien.txt (Kölsch breweries in Cologne) and Prometheus (translation).txt (a translation I did of Goethe's poem, for practice) is MUSIC I NEED.txt, a sometimes forgotten list of... well, you can guess. It's neatly divided into two categories: Albums I haven't heard and want to buy, which reads as follows:

David Byrne - Rei Momo
Uh-Oh
Grown Backwards

Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala

The New Pornographers - The Challenger

The Magnetic Fields - The Wayward Bus/Distant Plastic Trees

The Mountain Goats - Hectic Pride

XTC- Mummer
Drums and Wires
Black Sea

And Albums I have heard and want to buy (a much longer list):

Ginger Baker's Air Force - Eponymous

The Bats- Daddy's Highway

The Bird and the Bee - Eponymous

Bob Drake - Medallion Animal Carpet

Farin Urlaub - Endlich Urlaub

Fuck - Pardon My French

Galaxie 500 - On Fire

The Gerbils - Are You Sleepy?

Kings of Convenience - Riot On An Empty Street

Let's Active - Cypress/Afoot

Luna - Bewitched

The Magnetic Fields - Distortion

Pere Ubu - Dub Housing

The Police - Ghost in the Machine
Regatta de Blanc

The Robocop Kraus- They Think They Are the Robocop Kraus

Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians- Fegmania!

Sparklehorse - It's a Wonderful Life

The Soft Boys- Underwater Moonlight

The Stockholm Monsters - Alma Mater

Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

Velvet Crush - Teenage Symphonies to God

The Verlaines - Juvenalia

Weather Report - Heavy Weather

Just thought you should know.

Clogging Up Your Drain Pipe of Love

On Valentine's Day
The philharmonic will play
But the songs that we sing
Will be sad...

"Nothing good ever happens on Valentine's Day." I was apprised of this fact on what was technically Friday morning but could have been Thursday night, depending on whom you ask (the debate rages on, but for my money the best solution is the one thought up by the public transit schedules that list their timetables for "the night of Friday/Saturday". End tangent). Anyway, "nothing good ever happens on Valentine's Day" says Ace Reporter, Meredith Snyder. Her definition of "nothing good" had nothing to do with the day's theme of institutionalized romance, but it got me thinking, and looking back, I'd have to agree. It's one of those days, along with Christmas and Thanksgiving that fall in the "impossible expectations" category. It is strongly impressed upon us that to be normal — to be functional human beings capable of love and affection, we have to get these three days just exactly perfect. We get cowed by the Big Eastern Syndicate into believing this triumvirate of terrifying holidays is somehow a measure of our dedication to the people we care about. Had a shitty Christmas? You must be incapable of love! What do you mean you didn't really do anything for Valentine's Day? Don't you two love each other? Maybe I'm oversensitive to this, being my father's child, which has meant after watching him fret for years about Christmas and Thanksgiving &c. being just-so, that some of it has rubbed off on me (or, god help me, is genetic), and I do have a certain conception of how these things should be. Now, I, in my decidedly Freudian way, hold myself to be much less susceptible to the kind of lachrymose treacle that informs my father's perceptions of these things. But I've always been kind of a sucker for Valentine's Day. Yes, much to the chagrin of the poor, embarrassed Ladies I Have Dated, I am all about big showy displays of affection. Not really in public, but just for the benefit of my beloved. I got this heart full of love, and I just have to express that with material goods!... Material goods and kisses! This year, alas, a series of extenuating circumstances made my usual tour-de-force impractical. Sure I'm a little bummed about not getting to celebrate this fantastic and exhilarating relationship in my accustomed fashion, but you know, there are worse things. And at least that proves I'm not a slave to the "impossible expectations" of the November through February Holiday Hell-Gauntlet. Right?

...Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day
That's all I really wanted to say...
-with apologies to Paul Simon

Time Out of Mind

........................................... ............ ................... .................... ........................... .......................... ........... .................. ..... ......... . . .. . . . . .. . ........... ........................................ ............... ................................................... . . . . ............ ...................... .... ....... . . ................ .................... ...... ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . .......... ............. ......... ..............
Welcome back! A . .. tknahs for tnnuig itno the Psychogenic Re-fugue-ee, brought to you . ....... ... ...... Moutn of Oviels . ........ ........... and by Bowie-O's! "Try Some; Buy Some!" When we last left our hero, he was deep in the bowels of pork-product hell, deliberating with his trans-dimensional traveling companion, the inimitable Cosmic Cricket over the respective æsthetic appeal of the reverses on the coins of the several Euro-Zone nations. A quick recap: While the Cosmic Cricket finds the proportional ode to reason embodied in Italy's Vitruvian Man design soothing to his Inter-Planar Soul, our dissociative protagonist insists that to his mind (fallible and mortal as he may freely admit it to be) the Greeks have, with their Athenian drachma motif, a playful and enchanting "meta-currency" that is not be discounted. Both sides are all too ready to agree, however, that the Hun — ever cautious these days — is bartering for his beers and Beamers a feathered travesty such as one would expect from the Swiss, and on par in creativity with the Belgians. What is needed, for the sake of the patriotic, Teutonic numismatist, is a light to shine in the darkness, perhaps in the form of a glossy day planner. The two agree to draft a petition calling for change — a nice Mephistopheles bust maybe................. ................ ... . . . ... ... ........... .... .... ....... ... .. . . ........ . . .. .. .. .. .. . .. ....... ....... .. . .. .. ... ..... .. .. .. .. .... .... .. .. ... ..
The problem I have with blogging is symptomatic of the overarching inferiority complex that governs most of the higher-order mental processes taking place in my brain at any give time. Why, I ask myself, would my friends and close relations (much less the ostensible, unknown Internet denizens trawling about for their next Reality fix) want to read a single sentence describing my decidedly quotidian existence out here in the woods — especially with all the far more enticing fetish porn out there? I guess I've just always had a hard time taking blogging seriously. From the first time I heard the talking heads (lowercase, mind) prattling on in their watch-me-get-paid-to-be-dumber-than-you-and-on-TV-yet way that I find so compelling sounding the death-knell of "mainstream media" and heralding the influence of the "blogosphere" over everything from Presidential Elections to bottled water, the whole thing struck me as a singularly self-absorbed affair — the kind of thing one used to keep locked up under one's bed, as he secretly hopes to become famous enough that someone might want to publish it posthumously. Assuming, that is, his mother doesn't toss it out like yesterday's Ghostbusters. I suppose I can understand the desire to get those thoughts into the public sphere before they're unceremoniously shipped to the dump (just like Ecto-Glow Heroes Egon, which I told you was going to be worth something someday!), but I was never really one for the "see what sticks method". But blogging is big, of course, and much bigger than my opinion of it. So what to do when people I know, people whose opinions I respect start blogging? I decide to see if there's something to the whole thing after all and see if I can't make it somehow useful, or at least unique to me. You read the results over seven months in 2006-2007, when I convinced myself that maybe up and moving to a new continent for a semester might actually be something people want to read about, and anyway it would save me a ton of money on postage. As the months wore on, though, and I fell into the routines that comfort us all and protect our sanities in our daily lives, I felt I had exhausted all the interesting things I had to say. In addition, my online photo albums had developed into a much better documentation of my travails, with the added benefit (what with pictures and their proverbial value-ratios to the word) that all I needed to type up for the photos were snappy, witty captions, a task to which I find my brain much more suited. At this point, you are asking yourself (and rightly so), "I've waded through all this shit, even the thing with the grasshopper, which I still don't get, and I still don't know, why, if you hate blogging so much, you have decided to foist this rambling philippic upon the unsuspecting Internets, bursting already with rumors as they are." Well, the upshot of all this is that I have been goaded by my dearest Meredith for some time now to get back into the web-logging swing of things (she assures me I have interesting things to say, and an entertaining style in which to say them), and as a means to that end, she has put a link to this very page in her own blog (see link above), so that any Tom, Dick or Harry out there can just click on it and see that I haven't updated since May! Can you imagine! I would just die of shame ...on the Internet!!! So that's pretty well why I'm here, plus or minus a lot of rambling justification. To close, I'll just say that, for the moment, I'm back. I may not update frequently, or have anything interesting to say at all, but maybe I can use this strange invention of our modern world to somehow organize my life and restore clarity to my, of-late, fogged and befuddled thoughts. Well anyway, buckle up and enjoy the ride. I can't promise we'll actually go anywhere, but if you're really good, when we're stopped at a red light, I'll let you hold the wheel and pretend your driving.