The Food Kitchens are all booked up, so instead we’ll

1. Ride BART out to the end and back
2. Call all of our friends
3. Invent new facebook/myspace awesomeness and distribute to same
4. Respond to all the craigslist CE ads with encouragement
5. Dress up like Clowns and make balloon animals at the airport

Ailments of the Rotting Donkey

1. Or Brother Mule, if you prefer the nomenclature of those that misquote Mr. F from Assisi.
2. I’ve eaten half a bag of snow peas, and I expect to see the dividends later.
3. I’ve gotten used to getting old enough to find the benefit of that sort of daily review.
4. After all, I’m a growing boy. Growing hair where there wasn’t as much, that is.
5. On the back of my hands, in particular.
6. Though I’ve been masturbating less, all told, not counting the last half-week.

Following the breath, tracing the sinew

Yesterday the fella that runs my local 7-11 in the morning asked me where I’d been…  It’s been a double handful of weeks since I sped through for my 15 ounces of coffee and 8 ounces of starbucks slosh in a 24 ounce cup…  Flattering and alarming that he noticed, though perhaps that’s always how it feels the first time you’re recognized as a regular.  There’s a guy down at Farmer Joe’s who knows me for buying the peanut butter cups… Nobody has spotted me today, I don’t think, though the bagel and cream cheese and coffee and banana/blueberry smoothie at the stand in the middle of the oil-change place might get me back a few more times…  That’s enough elipses, isn’t it?

A Cascade of Shoes

So many are dropping.  Yellow and pink and white stripes up and down 11 months of phone calls.  All of our laminated cards and proof of coverage in splotchy black and white, enshrined in some little folder behind the glass door.  I don’t begrudge our new dauphin, mostly because I was one once, in a far away fiefdom, and someday I might be again.

I have to tell you Sparks, that’s the farthest yet…

A long September less than halfway gone today,

Nothing wrong except the things that always were.

I can’t remember what the last thing was I meant to say here,

It’s gone and done and gone away.

Expected Surprises

I get it now–she’s wearing a red hoodie because she’s little red riding hood.  Except she’s the wolf.  Which is to say that Hard Candy  is every bit the taught psychological fable of abusers and victims and tables that turn which I expected when I first thought it was a movie by Andrew Vachss, who wrote a book by the same name but with a different set of victims and wolves and tables.  There’s no relation, in fact, but I think Vachss must love this movie anyhow.  It is ugly and brutal and filmed in a lingering and loving way that ratchets up the viscerally disturbing plot to the point where I was quite glad in the end that I wasn’t watching it alone at my apartment.  And watching movies at my apartment but not alone…

A Matching Catastrophe

1. We’re going to spend 45 minutes or so now to discuss all the things I need you to do to cover up for my incompetence.
2. In addition to providing you some insight into the job I should be doing that you will now have to…
3. I will also be explaining the things you will have to play catch-up with because I wasn’t doing my job to help you keep up to date this year.
4. Guess what? There are lots of things that will be harder this time because I wasn’t smart enough to advocate for the easy way.
5. The one thing I did get done is to stick my nose in your business so I can point out ways that you have let me down.

Reactions to the Brooklyn Adventurist

I caught up on one of my old friend’s postings, and gave him a sample plate of my reactions… In all caps, of course.

1. Garfield minus Garfield YES

2.Buzkashi REALLY? PHOTOS?

3. On TV at Wall Street AWESOME BUT ALSO GOOD THING YOU WEREN’T SINGLED OUT SO THE TIMER ON YOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME PROBABLY DIDN’T TRIGGER.

4. Dock Ellis I AM IN AWE

5. Never taken drugs TRUE YOU ARE NOT A DRUG THIEF

6. Singing Bartender AS GOD IS MY WITNESS YOU WILL NEVER GO UNEMPLOYED AGAIN.

7. Singing Bartender II ARE THERE EXTRA FLIERS?

8. Rob votes now YOU ARE STILL MY HERO NOW

9. Ice Cubes Hardening I HAD A MOMENT LIKE THAT BUT I WASN’T ALONE AT MY APARTMENT.  I SHOULD HAVE WAITED LONGER.

PS: For the half dozen of you who actually read this regularly–Would you prefer the posts without jumps?  If my (probably 0ur) Brooklyn friend was using them, it would have taken me twice as long to catch up, with all the extra clicking…

The story of an irritable dragon (from once upon a carpool mixtape)

For years it has plagued me but now I know–the tale I heard in the car on the way to Hebrew School was Michael Hutchence’s The Green Dragon, from the movie Dogs in Space.

Once upon a time there was a green monster and he ate a whole train full of obnoxious people.
Of course he got a very bad case of indigestion that lasted for many weeks and so he eventually decided he needed some medicine.

Crayon Thieves

It takes a lot of noise to wake me up, but the car alarm did it.  Not after a minute either; I was alert in time to hear the thieves gun the engine of their getaway vehicle and roar away.  Waking is different from rising, though, and it took me a few minutes to realize that the claxon wasn’t going to be turned off by a neighbor, and what’s more, it was coming from up the street where my own sweet Agnes was parked.