Everything I Tell you is Hearsay

i was doing this all day. and now, my baby is 10.

sniffle.

she just keeps…. GROWING!!!

there doesn’t seem to be much i can do to stop it, either.

my sweet.

next? she’ll be headed for vegas…

this disease causes me to vastly overestimate my physical capacities. i think i am stronger and have far more stamina than turns out to be the case. this disease is made worse by the application of things like red bull, or more pertinently here, 5 hour energy (which i bought a case of at costco today WOOT!!) this fine Sunday, my disease manifested itself in the following way: first i went to the gym for an hour and a 1/2 and then decided to go on a 40 mile bike ride. full on.

i live at the top of Sylvan hill and since i value my life, i will not attempt to ride either up or down it. so i took my trusty trek and loaded onto the max. i started my ride at the pioneer place mall and rode all the way out to where the pavement ends on the springwater trail. this is somewhere past the 20 mile marker. this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do before i left my house.

by the time i’d wheeled thru gresham i needed a snack FUCKING HARD. having left the house without any food wasn’t so smart, i’ll admit, but i’m pretty sure the 1/4 pound of ham & cheese hot pockets and 1/2 a bag of chili cheese fritos wasn’t necessarily the brainiest thing i have ever done either. there was some protest from the abdominal region. especially after i climbed back aboard the trek just a few short minutes thereafter. abruptly i felt the need for a little break RIGHT NOW DAMMIT. my belly felt the 50 or so crunches i had subjected it to that morning were enough of an insult without the addition of enough nitrates to kill a small camel. i decided that the bench by the trailside looked like a lovely place to take a wee siesta.

my view from the bench was quite lovely actually…

after i’d rested a bit i hopped back on the bike. turns out i was only a couple hundred yards from the end of the pavement at this point. the trek has super skinny tires, off road is out of the question. i was fairly sure my ride back was gonna be brutal, so i was quite happy to make my little u-turn and start heading west.

coming back i felt like every part of my body was protesting at the treatment i had subjected it to. knees, thighs, abdomen, shoulders, wrists. ugh. i had vivid fantasies about how my couch was going to feel once i got to sit on it. i needed a break, but every bench i encountered seemed to be occupied by people who seemed like semi-permanent residents. like, they had auxilary furniture surrounding the benches. i was smelly, sore, and, i’ll admit, am not overly fond of trail-dwelling hobos even under the best of circumstances, so i did not feel like sharing my bench with anyone else. or asking them to share theirs, as the case may be.

after about 13 miles, i found an unoccupied bench and sank down upon it with the gratitude i usually reserve for the toilet after a 45 minute car ride and frantic dash indoors.

i am MUCH happier to be sitting down than i appear

i was counting the miles in single digits and for this, i was fuckin overjoyed. the sun was starting to wester, and all i wanted in life was a soft place to put my ass. the max station began to seem like a source of satisfaction and pleasure i had previously only known in the beds of certain lovers i have had.  godDAMN i have never been so happy to make use of public transportation. ever.

back up the hill home. carried the bike up two more flights of stairs. then, oh, then. my home. my couch. thankyoubabyjesus. i have rarely been too freaking tired to stand still under the shower, but by god, i was at first.

i guess i’m proud of myself, though i feel like a dumbass for thinking that 40 miles would be a cakeride. i imagine my hubris will be punished. i expect to feel like i got beat with sticks by this time tomorrow.

pray for me…

and yet, sometimes, it happens.

just, hahahaha

it was, i will readily admit, my idea to go out to sand island. i wanted some sunshine. i wanted it all over the place.

so, the SIGN says that in low water conditions, it’s a walk. apparently, these conditions were not those. after slogging through what i can only describe as a freshwater swamp (after deciding ahead of time there were DEFINITELY NO FISHES IN THERE) the river channel was indeed a little daunting. but, what the fuck, i was already wet up to my chin and somehow, didn’t want to give up.

thus commenced a quarter mile swim across the channel. the Columbia, for the record, is a pretty cold place. and i am an idiot, who had it in my head that a) the current wouldn’t be that strong and b) it was heading the other direction. i am not the world’s strongest swimmer (insert bouyancy jokes here) and so i was definitely feeling a little nervous about 2/3rds of the way across when i noticed how incredibly cold i was, that i had drifted much further west than i planned, i was quickly running out of what steam i had, and land seemed much further away than i thought i was likely to make.

channel of doom

panic, she did set in. i guess i’m not as afraid of drowning as i am of being killed in a car crash, but i’m afraid enough. and panic, i have discovered, is NOT good for much of anything. it does not help you think more clearly, or swim with more determination, it just makes you hyperventilate and sometimes cry. in this case, i didn’t actually get to either point because i decided, at this point, to try and put my feet down. miracle of miracles, there was some sand under there. praise the holy baby jesus. i did not die in service to my recreation.

this is not to say i did not pay for my hubris. i have a medley of scratches from the fishless swampy place, a sunburn all over the place, and sand in places sand does not belong. all the people on the island with boats were STUNNED i would attempt such a retarded thing, and this did, i am happy to say, score me a ride back across the channel from a kind samaritan type who was not interested in watching me drown or get run over by an outboard motor; for this i am grateful.

now to salve my pride and sunburn with aloe and liquor.

not that i claim to have my finger on the pulsing throbbing hemmorhoid of pop culture or anything, but i like to think i’m good at recognizing people who have been in movies i have seen. it’s kind of an obsessive hobby of mine;

“oh, that guy was in the 3rd to last episode of Arrested Development, and the commercial for Olestra, and Dune.”

but there is NO WAY i would have been able to identify

THIS GUY

ignore the black baby for a second

as the same guy as THIS GUY

seriously. i could have stared at it all day and all night and all damn day again.

and since i am not a huge fan of the humiliation humor, and i think this new project will project will be just as squirm-worthy as his last offering… i say yikes.

By Curtis Sittenfeld

went away without a book to read and plucked this off the shelf where i was staying. i finished it in less than 24 hours and it left little impression on me. i have the distinct feeling that if i were to fail to write this review promptly, i would forget what i thought altogether.

having attended public school for the length of my primary education, i can’t speak to whether this portrayal of a private boarding school back east really captures what it is like to attend one, but i can say this with utter surety; i was most definitely at one point a teenage girl, and i do not feel this novel in any way even captures a glimpse of what it was like to have been one.

i was actually turned off from the opening line, which is trite to the point of pain;

I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the roman architecture mixup

this novel is a first-person account given by one Lee Fiora the adult of her time at Ault, a boarding school outside Boston. while i am usually a fan of this first person voice,  the narrative in this case  seems self-indulgent without the concomitant indulgence. none of what happens to this character takes on any color, texture, or temperature. there is a strange sense of both being unable to see past the end of Lee’s nose, but there being nothing of consequence going on behind it.

the fundamental premise is that Lee, a heretofore successful public-school student from a working-class family has managed to win a place and scholarship to a school that would otherwise be socially and financially far beyond her scope. once she arrives she is totally unprepared, academically, personally, and emotionally for the experience. while the plot lacks much in imaginative originality, handled properly it could still have been a rich vein through which to explore alienation.

however, this character displays a degree of ambivilence about her life and surroundings i found utterly disingenuous.  teenagers may feign this much detachment, but i have never known one that actually felt it. especially not when they are surrounded by so many people so fundamentally different from themselves, and completely without a social network of any strength.

what’s more, the way Lee interacts with her peers seems to fly in the face of expectations. she holds on to a strangely aloof demeanor, despite her professed loneliness. she regards all friendliness on the part of her fellow students with bewilderment. not a healthy skepticism, which would at least seem more reasonable, but rather a complete lack of comprehension about any gesture made toward her other than open hostility. what’s more, she seems to lack any real sense of herself in a way i also find somewhat difficult to understand. i may not have been the most self-aware person out there, but i certainly had a self-image, even if it wasn’t accurate or nearly complete. this character almost never mentions how she views herself; not the complicated question of her place at Ault or what things she has going for her, nor even the most mundane sense of how she looks or feels about her appearance in anything more than the most cursory way. i usually have at least some sense of the physical attributes of my main character, but in this case i barely have a sense of what her insides are like, let alone her outsides.

a disproportionate amount of time is spent remembering the first half of freshman year and the last half of senior year whereas the rest of Lee’s time at Ault seems to pass in a indistinct haze. what’s more, the promise of that oh-so-trite first line is never actually realized; nothing really happens to Lee. she goes to school, she makes a handful of friends, though only one of any real import, she performs with a remarkable lack of distinction academically and fails to create much of an impression of her time at Ault, or of Ault itself.

there are any number of leading comments that would seem like foreshadowing, except that the author follows up on none of them. any reference to her adult self is utterly self-contained and discrete. no real hints about Lee’s future are contained in these asides, but they are frequent enough to become somewhat pestiferous when details about her actual thoughts and feelings and impressions of Ault seem so sparsely populated and lacking any vibrancy.

the author’s description of Lee’s lone passionate preoccupation, one Cross Sugarman, also lacks a certain veracity. she experiences a fleeting and totally unconvincing infatuation with a girl in her freshman year and then becomes indistinctly obessed with Cross after a strangely tender, but wholly isolated encounter at the local mall. though her intensity of feeling for him seems genuine enough, her behavior as a lover defies logic. teenage girls are not well known for their self-control or for their willingness to accept being nothing but a sex object for a person who shows up at random in their dorm room one night after 3 years of having virtually no contact. perhaps the strangest part is that Cross himself seems willing to genuinely like Lee, but her own lack of sensitivity seem to undermine any possibility that she could sense or accept this on any level apart from being receptive to his sexual advances.  and just at the moment she might begin to want more from him than a fumbling encounter in the spare dorm room up the hall, he disappears. unaccountably she becomes suddenly but sporadically emotional enough to seek him out for the very first time, (the only action of hers in this entire scenario that resonates with any sense of truth) only to recoil when he is on the verge of telling her that he cares about her more than she seemed willing to let him.

all of this happens in tandem with a somewhat sudden plot development the subtext of which, very much in bright red letters was “this is meant to be the climax of the story, and it is DRAMATIC!” Lee is asked because of her status as a scholarship student to consent to an interview with a reporter from the NYT. the interview is conducted by a caricature of a latina reporter with a chip on her shoulder who through hard work and spunk made her own way through Harvard! this character has an agenda that is painfully transparent to everyone except Lee, who then says a variety of things which are then used in an article which humiliates her and Ault and everyone there.

or, at least, that’s what we are expected to believe. but her dramatic and embarrassing behavior results in a completely passionless reaction from almost everyone and has no discernible consequences other than that the people who already didn’t like her very much, now they like her somewhat less.

i found this novel dull, flat, and lacking in any emotional resonance or intellectual veracity.

boo.

so… a while back, i said the phrase  “Something Awesome” in a random context that does not matter here. however, i can say these two words to a certain someone and always make them laugh. this person was having a bad day, so i decided to google “Something Awesome” and see what i got.

i thought the results were pretty amusing…

Borat: Clearly, awesome

Elephant on waterskis; that's going to be one hell of a wake...

homo-erotic 70's style gladiator & birdie

what could POSSIBLY be MORE awesome??

**as a meta-amusement; now, when someone googles “Something Awesome” this post will pop up. fuckin’ sweet.

by Stephen Hunt

i would like to start out by saying; this book fucking tricked me.

it was a snatch & grab on the way through the fantasy section at Powell’s. by the look of this cover i was expecting a somewhat whimsical tale about orphans travelling around in a hot air balloon that they procured in some no-doubt-amusing manner and all the hilarity that would ensue as they floated around about the landscape all willy nilly. tra-la-la!

no-eh.

this is instead, a dark, scary, complex politico-philsophical rant of epic proportions.  it’s kinda like Dune, but with hot-air balloons instead of the Guild. plus also a lot less good.

we have: robot-people, crustaceous folks, the Fey-breed (ironically named since their traits are due to environmental exposure and not genetic in nature), worldsingers who ostensibly keep the Fey-breed in line cause they (the Fey) have scary magic-type powers and would run amok wanting… like freedom otherwise, the aristocracy, the guardians, the titualar court of the air, wolftakers,  a vallianous force to the south the “Cassarabians”, and an armless king. and i’m definitely forgetting some stuff. oh yeah, the scary locust guys who can only come through a tear in the fabric of reality when people start eating each other.

lost yet??

i will admit, the book was pretty engrossing in parts. in other places, it was just gross. like where we encounter the underground fields of people been grown for food. soylent green anyone?

mostly, it was top heavy and too ambitious for its own good. i feel like this was an epic in three parts smooshed into one overlong novel of questionable absorbability. i found myself getting to the middle of the page and saying “whaaa?” not because i couldn’t keep track of the 18 simultaneous plot lines, but because i just wasn’t interested enough to bother trying.

also, it is very clear that this author REALLY REALLY thinks socialism is a BAD THING. also, religion. and government in general.

i did make it through the whole thing, but it really became about showing this book who was boss, not because i had any real desire to see how it all turned out. and perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing really got resolved and there was a clear implication that more was to come. mercy.

this book would have been vastly improved to have lost about 9 or 12 of the subplots and just stuck to the 6 or 7 reasonably interesting main-ish plots. complexity of tale does not automatically = epic in the way that was clearly intended. creating an unnecessarily byzantine network of politico-religio-philisophic-psycho-sexual happenings & characters does not make you seem like a more gifted author capable of vision of enormous scope. it just makes you seem like you are trying REALLY HARD to look like one.

thumbs down

Middle Cyclone Neko Case 2008, Epitaph

there is no other musician i love and respect more than Neko Case. her aesthetic, her sense of language and melody, her vocals rich and passionate. i drove 1500 miles all by myself this summer to go see her play in Reno as a part of an odyssey of self-discovery and challenge. being exposed to her music has changed me as a songwriter and a person.

and it may well be that i suffer the bias of the blinkered by love.

i first came to know her work by being taken to a show she performed at the Crystal Ballroom some years back. the boy i was in love with in those days knows a thing or two about music (this is sort of like saying the ocean can be damp at times, but i digress) and i had come to trust his judgment on my behalf in terms of what i might enjoy. before i left the show i had scampered over to the merch table and bought the CD she was touring to promote, and i have been a devotee since.
however, it was not love at first listen with this record. she didn’t stray significantly from her style, themes, or tone, but for some reason i found this album much less approachable than Fox Confessor. over the weeks that i’ve had it, i’ve come like it more and more and am ultimately very positive about this effort.

with her customary wit and tenderness there are moments in this record that simply shimmer. from the title track “Middle Cyclone”a winsome and spare track with words to make the jaw ache:

say someone made a fool of me; well i can show ‘em how it’s done

can’t give up actin’ tough, it’s all that i’m made of…

i still can’t tell precisely what “Prison Girls” is meant to be about, but the refrain i love your long shadows, and your gunpowder eyes draws me in every time i hear it.

from “Vengence is Sleeping”

i’m not the man you thought i was…

you’re the one that i still miss, yes you’re the one that i still miss, and the truth is that it comes as no surprise

by far my favorite track on this album has to be “The Pharohs” whose opening line hooked me the first time i heard in under the desert sky back in August…

we were married in the mirrored hall when i was sixteen, you spoke the words ‘i love girls in white leather jackets’ it was good enough for love, it was good enough for me

and the line which anchors this whole album for me…

you said i was your new blue baby, and you were right…

overall i’d say this is a satisfying offering. for those who are already fans, it delivers everything fans expect; solid melody, haunting lyrics, dynamic vocals and a passion unique to Neko. not to mention lots of references to birdies…

i love explodingdog. really.

he’ll sometimes draw pictures based on titles people send him. i’ve been sending things for a while now and finally today

this idea came last night when someone asked me “if you could run away right now and know that everything would be okay, where would you go?”

and i said “1995″

so. this did make me smile.