Asides

“We sit in our dark rooms,” Celeste Dessau said. “Traffic in the area is being rerouted for reasons nobody is willing to discuss. Wild animals have been seen entering the city. All air-mail letters are returned to sender. We are determined not to turn on the lights. Manhole covers begin shooting into the air. It rains in triplicate.” (Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star.)

I’ve lately been fortunate enough to be accompanied in my grocery shopping by the ghost of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Every week, the cashier (Dipal, upon whom I harbor an immense and speechless crush) seems alarmed at the volume of sausages and other salted pork products Hunter requires. When she rings up my groceries, Hunter retreats to the next aisle to leaf through the gossip tabloids.

I know better, of course, than to ask Hunter for dating advice.

My MFA friends couldn’t stand Daniel.

Daniel was a poet, and he’d been Special Forces in Eastern Europe when the Army had nothing to do with Eastern Europe. He liked big girls. “We have enough too hard,” he told me. “I want soft.”

Daniel put the barrel of a .45 ACP in his mouth in a hotel room in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

I miss him.

I’d hit a rough patch, and for a while I was — to borrow Aimee Mann’s words — driving sideways. Lately, I feel like I’ve managed to get the wheels turned in the right direction. One day at a time, I’m pulling out of the skid.

Tink’s been limping around the apartment and complaining, loudly and frequently, since Tuesday. The diagnosis is both a relief and a worry: five minutes with the vet stretching and feeling Tink’s right rear leg and we discover that she’s got a luxating patella.

In English? Her kneecap floats around.

The good news is that she’ll live, bless her bitchy, klutzy heart. A yowling and limping young kitty makes for some worrisome moments.

The bad news? For one thing, it’s genetic, which makes me cross my fingers for Zeugma’s sake. For another thing, if it gets bad enough, the corrective surgery — involving transplanted ligaments and the carving of a deeper groove in the leg bone — sounds absolutely excruciating.

She’s a-sprawl on my desk right now, purring away on top of some Foucault and two back issues of JAC that I’m clearly not going to get to tonight. Zeugma, having taken the repeated recent measure of her sister’s temper, is staying down by my feet.

But, yes, Tink still thinks she’s a person. (And you can see her favoring that leg.)

Tell her nice things.

My zero-draft attempt (4.8 MB mp3) at remixing NIN’s “Hand That Feeds.” In my mild changes, I tried to take off some of its square-wave synth edge, to make it feel warmer, more organic. For my own amateur tastes, I think it worked, but the warmth I was going for made the song feel, to me, even uglier. Looking at the song in GarageBand, though, gives me renewed respect for the ways Trent Reznor and other musicians compose: that’s a whole lot of stuff to keep in mind.

Much of my GarageBand tweaking was spent stripping down the song. I’d be scared to go in the other direction, to add sonic complexity. But that’s what I try to do in my writing. So I think it’s great that Reznor has offered folks this opportunity, but I gotta admit: I’m not going to buy the new album. The self-expression in Reznor’s lyrics hasn’t grown much since Pretty Hate Machine, and, well, I’m pretty happy to leave that teen angst behind me.

Would that Reznor would do the same. Still, I’m sure it sells, though I won’t buy it: my musical Big Shot purchases this season are limited to the new albums from Beck and System of a Down.

Traveling. Had a night out with three friends who I’ve known for twenty years, in a part of town where — long ago — all of us had spent many a dissolute night.

This band really, really sucked, so I won’t tell you their name. They had a theremin player, which was neat, and I thought she sounded kinda good. But, no, I’m serious: the band as a whole was absolutely godawful in that pretentious, negligibly talented way where you can’t tell if they know they suck so they’re purposely playing terrible trying-to-be-freaky songs or if they just suck and don’t know it.

But how could they not know they suck? How could they not know???

After we left that place (formerly The Restaurant Where the Dead Go to Eat, on the middle floor between Club Heaven and Hell Bar), we went to Pharmacy Bar, and things got better.

Matt on the left, Samantha in the middle, Mike W. on the right. Had a good time.

Back to the greens and greys — please, hit ‘reload’ in your browser to get the links to look right, and let me know of any inconsistencies or infelicities you see. (I’m colorblind — inherited all those recessive gene traits — so it’s often difficult for me to tell if something doesn’t quite look right, and no, I don’t need any jokes about no wonder why I dress so funny.) Feedback welcomed; I’m kinda proud of that title type-graphic logotype up top.