RE: Extended Leave of Absence

It’s time for one last (sort of) bit of exploration. It won’t be long, I promise. And no pictures. This is, ahem, from the heart brain.

What I’m going to explore and attempt to find resolution to is this conundrum: People we affectionately refer to as “Bloggers” and meanly refer to as “Losers” (which one is more appropriate? Je ne sais pas) have this problem where after abandoning, through gradual, mostly subconscious steps, a blog (i.e. this one right here), they (i.e. me) feel the need to come back and leave some sort of explanatory note to future readers (of which there will certainly be none, right, because it’s been gradually, subconsciously abandoned?) who stumble upon it (i.e. this here blog here) and view it (i.e. same) as some lost relic, some lost artwork or piece of masonry containing codified laws and modern-yet-hitherto-unknown sentiments – and thus need some sort of explanation.

But that seems arrogant, right? This assumption that future stumblers ought to know just why it is that this blog wasted away into relic-hood anyways? And what about devoted readers? Shouldn’t they be explained to first?

Well, that brings me to the initial and major snafu in the whole plan: this blog had very little in the way of “readers” devoted and otherwise. I most certainly read it (ha!) and a few friends of mine occasionally checked up on it though a few professed to really never reading anything but merely checking up in that way that good friends are supposed to do. I can’t blame them. This wasn’t a particularly entertaining blog if your name wasn’t my name. Though i often wonder why some blogs prosper and others don’t, because there seems to be little difference between Big Blogs and Nobody Blogs, if both, that is, are regularly upkept and so on. Both kinds of blogs are inevitably narcissistic, and are made popular, if at all, because lots of people enjoy one person’s brand of narcissism. So, I suppose, some people’s brand of narcissism is just annoying (most certainly my own) and other’s are not (oh to be the blessed).

Anyways. I still wonder why it is we Bloggers feel the need to come assess the damage after the fact and make some sort of report about the whole thing, like a CSI team investigating a murder months old. Whatever.

For me, though there were other reasons this blog became gradually, subconsciously abandoned. The Big One was/is school. It’s much more time consuming than Summer, and thus it drains me. I certainly have free time, but what little I have I tend to devote to regenerative things like “Mindless Internet Junk” or hot showers. These sorts of activities refresh me, whereas blogging did not, because blogging, for me, was a deeply intense process whereby I tended to go so far inside myself or some other self/thing that I came out the other end exhausted and otherwise unfit for conscious experience until a regenerative event had taken place. So I found myself not wanting to spend more time exhausting myself after spending lots of hours reading/writing/breathing over/about/around/for school.

And I guess, well, that’s that. Perhaps I’ll return, but . . . perhaps and probably not. We’ll see. Ideally, I’ll get rich and famous and then this thing will be LOADS OF FUN because thousands of people will suddenly enjoy my brand of narcissism because someone else said it was good.

: smiley face emoticon representing my mood after dreaming reverentially about that last sentence’s topic :

@Car_Commercials: -5

While watching Roger Federer beat Novak Djokovich earlier today, I was forced to bear witness to a very odd car commercial. I don’t recall the car or company (those are things my brain makes a point of not remembering), but a portion of it went like this:

They start making a point about some new tracking system in the car that will identify obstructions in the road and alert you to them in time for a quick escape maneuver. As the “car commercial voice” is saying this, a car is being show driving along a road that’s winding back and forth through some sort of forest, each curve very close to the next one, looking something like this, but the cures were sharper:

The view is an overhead and an obstruction can be seen in the road, covering the lane that the car is driving in, thus necessitating some sort of maneuver. The inside of the car is shown and a man is going through one of the turns while looking at the radio while changing it (or something), an alert sounds, he looks up, sees the obstruction, and meneuvers away.

Now, who the hell averts their eyes when going through a curve in a forest road at night? Is this commercial really suggesting that it’s alright to be a terrible driver because “the car will make sure you don’t die?” Or, worse, I think, are they blatantly suggesting that we’re such bad drivers that they expect us to not watch the road during critical moments and so they’re giving us a safeguard?

I don’t know. But I was sort of sick watching the commercial. They were presenting a really interesting bit of new technology, but then they showed this guy being a terrible driver. Awful. Hate. Rage. Destruction. Death. I’m glad American car companies are dying. Gak.

In other, more uplifting news, Roger Federer hasn’t lost a match at the U.S. Open in 2,199 days. So, that’s ridiculous and stuff. He’s also reached all four finals again this year. Stupid. He’s the only male not named Rod Laver to make all four finals in a single year (Laver did it twice, in ‘62 and, um, 69′? Maybe the second one was ‘68.). But he beats Laver anyways because Federer has done this three times, today being the third time he’s completing the achievement. Even more ridiculous: Laver has won all four majors in a single year twice, and Federe has never done that, but he’s won three majors in a given year three different times, and he’s looking to do it again tomorrow afternoon. And two more bits and I’ll quit: (1) Roger Federer has been to 17 of the last 18 finals (he lost in the semifinals of the Aussie Open in ‘08 because he had mono – so he only made the semis because he had mono; nice); and (2) at this year’s U.S. Open, Roger Federer was the owner of 15 grand slam titles and the rest of the field, some 100 men, Rafael Nadal included, had 13 grand slams. He has more majors than the top 100 male tennis players currently playing. Kinda stupid.

Nadal v. Gonzalez

This tennis match, a US Open quarterfinal, is becoming complicated in ways that tennis matches rarely are. First, Rafael Nadal, recent recoveree of knee problems from a few months ago and a recent recoveree of stomach/abdominal problems from three weeks ago, didn’t lose a single point on serve to start the match until his fourth service game. Second, he and Gonzalez held service the whole first set, leading to a tiebreaker. Third, somewhere in the eleventh or twelfth game of that first set, Nadal did something to his abdomen, no one is really sure what, and it may have been affecting him. Fourth, Nadal went up 4 – 0 in the tiebreaker, murdering Gonzalez point after point, but then inexplicably lost three straight points by putting two balls way outside the court on relatively easy returns and a third into the net, way down. Fifth, Gonzalez didn’t try or something and Nadal won the tiebreaker anyway.

And now here’s where it turns complicated (because up to this point it’s been abnormal but routine for that kind of abnormality). Sixth, Nadal calls for the trainer after winning the tiebreaker. Seventh, the trainer takes two and a half minutes to get to Nadal on court, which is VERY strange because there are no other matches going on at the moment, the courts are empty aside from Arthur Ashe, and all other players who might be around (no one) have their own trainers. So there’s no reason he shouldn’t have been there in thirty seconds. Seventh, the trainer spends a billion years working on Nadal’s abdomen, giving a full evaluation, which usually means something nasty, but…Eighth, Nadal gets up and the second set starts, and…nothing changes: Gonzalez and Nadal hold serve, two games a piece, 2-2.

Ninth, it starts raining.

It starts raining.

It starts raining.

Jesus, what more can happen in this? At one point, Patrick McEnroe, commentating alongside his more famous brother John (they’re incredible together in the booth), says that some guy was running in the stands behind Nadal. The mayor of New York City was in attendance, looking solemn and bored, that one chick from NBC Today was there with some other cougar-ish looking broads, and that stunning couple, Greg “The Shark” Norman and Chris Everett, were in a private box, talking with Pam Shriver about golf, tennis, and Pam being “a little brat” when Everett beat her in her only grand slam finals appearance.

All in all, it’s been one weird trip. And just now, they’ve come back from commercial and instead of the McEnroe brothers, I’m presented with Darren Cahill (awesome and underrated) and Mike Tirico (a rather banal ESPN talking head/game caller that I don’t really care for). They’ve just switched to Pam Shriver who has made her way into weather broadcasting. She’s in the USTA National Tennis Center weather room, standing in front of a giant  TV on which her white hand is pointing at various spots talking about the weather.

AND

AND

AND

And Mike Tirico just asked her if she was going to be back in five minutes with our five day forecast. Wow. I’m speechless. This is surreal. And now John “Infallible Analyst” McEnroe just said (he’s back by the way) “You know the old saying, ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ well this isn’t what Nadal wants.” Jesus, a bad joke/pun/pieceoftrash from John McEnroe. I never thought I’d see the day.

In any case, I’m going to spend the next five minutes picking my mouth up from off the ground.

Busy, busy, busy, busy…dead

School is, as the title suggests, making me quite busy. So busy, in fact, that it’s only because I somehow managed to plow through my massive amount of French homework rather quicker than I thought that I was able to use these few minutes for blogging.

For some reason, I’ve been in a nostalgic mood. I’ve been listening to Blink 182’s first album Cheshire Cat, an album which, by itself, evokes memories from when I was 13-14, around 8th grade and Freshman year in high school. I’m not sure why I’m desiring those memories, but whatever. I can’t fight it.

That particular period was a strange one for me, as I”m sure it was for many people. It was around that time I started trying to figure out just what I was and who I wanted to be in relation to other people at school. I spent about two years running between four or five different groups of friends, and I never really developed deep bonds with any single person, which probably messed me up for life, but whatev. So I was unsure of who I wanted to be and, thus, who I wanted to be around.

What’s interesting is that about a year after this period, I met a few people who are six to eight years my senior and I’m still friends with them. They are, en fait, my closest friends. I’ve since become “just old friends” with a lot of people, but this group, which has expanded to about eight or nine, of older friends is now my “close group.” Weird. I always like to think that the reason I developed strong friendships with people six and eight years my senior was because I couldn’t get the emotional maturity I craved from people my own age.

I still think this is true. People my age tend to suck. That, or they’re focused on other things that are not my things and so I can’t relate and thus we don’t really connect in any way non-superficial.

So Cheshire Cat, and to some extent Dude Ranch, but none of the other Blink 182 albums, evoke this time period for me. And they especially evoke Xenogears, a video game RPG that I played constantly at the time.

Here’s why: Up to that point, and really, up this point, right now, I hadn’t played any time-intensive RPG video game without using a strategy guide. I liked being in control. I still do. It’s uncomfortable to not be. So with Xenogears, well, I borrowed it from a friend and there was no strategy guide at the time and so for the first time I was just playing this long, drawn out game without any direction, and this game could take you many directions at once without applying a linear gameplay style. Without the guide, I spent a lot of time backtracking and just all around being uber meticulous and anal about everything and so I probably put in three or four times the amount of time one would normally use to play it. And I had developed a ritual: any time I played the game (which was everyday) I would put on Blink 182’s Cheshire Cat on repeat and just listen to that album and play the game for three and four hours at a time, with my door closed, time just disappearing and I was the music and the game and they were me and that’s what was going on and it was great.

During a confusing period where I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be, there was stability: Xenogears, my room, and Cheshire Cat. So I guess my nostalgia for that period and that music is really a yearning for stability in a world of chaos. Innocence. All that jazz. Also, possibly, it was a period of taking chances: I wasn’t using a strategy guide, and I honestly got a thrill out of that. And it tied in to what I was doing in real life: wandering around a big world unsure as to direction and goal.

So I’ve been listening to Cheshire Cat this whole time. Which is bad, because I’m just reinforcing and bringing to the surface all those memories, which means falling asleep tonight is going to be difficult. I’m going to have to distract myself somehow and trick my mind into sleep.

I hate my life sometimes. Sigh…

School Talk: the first few days

It’s the dawn of my fourth day of school and I’m already sufficiently crushed by the weight of the bite I chose to, um, bite off. But no matter. I’ll just change stuff around, sacrifice social time and everything that makes me human, and I’ll dominate, as per last semester, and the semester before, and cetera.

In one of my classes, Classical Backgrounds of English Literature, the teacher spent five minutes talking about how he’s used to having all sorts of non-English majors in the class, and it’s really interesting, he says, to not only see what other disciplines are represented, but to have their perspective throughout the semester. Basically, he loves this whole pluralism thing. Well, he finally gets around to asking how many non-English majors are in the class (there are 38 of us) and four people raise their hands, at which point he’s sort of psychically crushed, for two reasons: one, he was really into pluralism and the universe just said “Fuck you”; and two, he just spent all this time talking about the normal class breakdown and when the class disproved it, he looked/felt dumb. Basically, I felt bad for the guy. When the universe decides to kick you in the balls, it’s usually unpleasant.

There was a guy the first day – 30ish, homeless, black (and yes, he was homeless: this guy was not one of those “hard to tell if he has a home or if he’s just dirty” kind of dudes; definitely without a home – and he was carrying around a boombox with Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” on repeat. The place was packed (it was the first day) and there were literally hundreds of people but you could hear above the fray, the whole time he was around “…You drive me crrrrrraaaaaazy.” It was pretty fuckin’ sweet.

I’m in three English classes and three French classes, two disciplines in which I know and have been in classes with dozens of people, yet it’s not till my sixth class (Tuesday afternoon) that I run into someone I know. How ridic is that? ASU is huge, too huge, perhaps, if this is the kind of thing that’s happens. But maybe it’s not. Who knows. In any case, it was lame, because all of my friends are Science-Oriented Majors or they’re not in school, so I have literally ZERO people to talk to on a regular basis about books I read, French I learn, etc. It really blows. No man is an island, my big fat ass.

I’ll end with a rundown of what’s required in each class for every two or three days of class, covering about a week or a week and a half of “real” time, to give The Internet an idea of how sufficiently crushed I am:

Fre 205: 2-3 French readings and perhaps the answering of some rather benign questions, again in French
Fre 311: 2-3 French readings and the definite answering of some rather benign, comprehension-oriented questions, all in French
Eng 303: the reading of an entire play/novel
Eng 440: the reading of an entire novel
Eng 388: the reading of four short stories and the execution of a writing exercise
Fre 312: 2-3 French readings and 1-2 writing exercises, all in French

So, every week or two, I have to read a billion things in French, write a billion things in French, and then read, like, 3.5 novels. It’s going to be awesome.

School Today but lots of Poker Talk

My first class is in three hours. My head is throbbing. I’m tired as SHIT. It’s all my fault, though. Instead of going to bed last night, I ended up playing poker till 1am. I’m richer, but also tired-er.

For posterity’s sake, I’m going to describe a particular hand of poker that was crushing to Waldo. It was pretty awesome. Here’s the view from Waldo’s end:

He’s got pocker Jacks. He’s the dealer and I’m small blind (so he acts first pre-flop, but I act first everytime afterwards). He raises to a dollar pre-flop. We play $10 buy ins, so a dollar pre-flop raise is 10% of our original stacks , and since blinds are 10/20 cents, it’s also five times the blinds, so it’s a solid, “get out of this pot if you’re skerrrrred” bet; also, at this point, Waldo has about $20 and I have about $23. I call his dollar pretty easily. The flop comes 10-6-4 (irrelevant suits) and I immediately bet two dollars. Waldo thinks for about ten seconds then calls my two dollars AND puts three more on top of it. Before he’s finished putting the reraise into the pot, I raise him all-in. He freaks. He then spends about five whole minutes talking out loud and showing me his hand and hoping he’ll divine some sort important information and eventually he folds. I then tell him that I had a lousy pair of tens and he was crushing me in terms of hand-winning percentage, to which he voted me the most awful person in the world.

It was pretty sweet. What makes the hand so much more crushing, though, is the thinking that went into it, on both sides. The psychology works out like this (and Waldo and I talked about it so it was even more crushing to him):

With Waldo’s pre-flop bet, I figured he had overcards (probably AK [ace-king] or KJ [king-jack]) or pocket pairs, but I was leaning towards overcards (because they’re easier to get). I had Q10 [queen-ten], which is ultimately worse than anything I figured he was playing (and worse than most hands people shoud generally be playing), so by calling his dollar raise, I was intending, quite from the beginning, to play a hand more or less me vs. him, rather than his cards vs. my cards.

So when the flop came 10-6-4, my quick two dollar bet was great, for a few reasons. One, if Waldo has overcards, this flop missed him completely and so my bet says “I know you have nothing. Do you want to risk that I have nothing as well, because anything beats you?” Two, if he has pocket pairs above ten, he has to think that I might have bigger pocket pairs. He was first to act pre-flop, so he has no knowledge of my hand, right now. I’ve called a dollar pre-flop from great position, and now I’m betting out two dollars right away on a bad flop. So if I’ve got bigger pocket pairs, he’s going to get crushed. Three, if he has pocket pairs lower than tens, he has to wonder if I have a ten, in which case he’s also getting crushed. And four, maybe I’m bluffing completely (which I do, a lot). Maybe I’m trying to bet so that he thinks all of the above and lays down a hand, in which case, he has to call. In any case, he decided not only to call, but reraise two and a half times what I originally bet. This tells me that he thinks I have a ten or junk, but that he’s still sort of scared I might have something better and so if I fold to the reraise, he wouldn’t mind at all.

From my perspective, my two dollar bet felt great because of all of the above. I also know Waldo the Poker Player and I know that I can get him to lay down certain hands if I play it correctly. I also know he sees me as, at times, completely unreadable because I’m liable to get just take any two cards and run with it, but not always, which is what makes it difficult. At any time, I could have exactly what it looks like, but when the money gets big, you have to start worrying that I’m playing completely different. So when he reraises three dollars, I know right away that he has pocket pairs above ten, at which point I automatically, no-thinking-required shove all my chips into the middle. This is the only way I can win the hand, because any showdown is going to involve me losing a lot of money. Thus I have to get him to throw away the hand right now. And by shoving all my chips into the middle right away after his relatively huge reraise, I’m giving him all sorts of reasons to get out and move on.

So Waldo folds. During and after, he kept saying it was a great fold on his part, because he figured I had caught something sick and was trying to trap him. This is what poker players do. They think a particular fold is good, because they’re laying down what looks like a winning hand, and then they repeat, out loud, the conclusion that it was a great fold so that they don’t feel so bad. Thus I couldn’t help but let him know that I had pretty much just made a sweet-ass, soul-crushing move with a lousy pair of tens, to which he agreed and proceeded to commit suicide. Or at least he wanted to.

In any case, I’m fucking tired, my head hurts, and I have to go to school and see if I still know French (I have two French classes today and that’s it). So that should be interesting.

Religious Conversations

So, I’m sitting in my brother’s living room with Brian and Biggie (neither of which is my brother) and at some point we stumbled upon the topic of religion, God, and lots of things that don’t make sense (to us). But that’s not really what I want to talk about, thankfully, because who really gives a shit. Besides, it doesn’t go anywhere and people start convincing themselves that yelling=logic and that’s just no good.

What I wanted to talk about was something I find interesting: when people talk about religion, it always seem they do so with like-minded individuals, and thus it’s really a bunch of people sitting around agreeing with each other in loud voices. Like, if Nazis got together and decided to talk about racial purity/impurity, they would all be like “Yeah, I hate them Jews. Me, too! Right, I mean, they’re just so awful. Exactly. I hate it when they…” And thus continues a conversation that ends when someone gets tired. Like, tonight, for instance. Brian, Biggie, and me: we’re all agnostic or worse (or better, depending on your perspective), and so we ended sharing war stories, which, to be honest, I’ve heard several times before.

I think it would be accurately characterized as a session of great catharsis. We’ve all heard these war stories, or variations of them (at some point, they’re all the same: “my girlfriend told me I was going to hell for X,” “a Christian/Mormon friend tried to convert me,” and cetera), and so we’re all just repeating them to one another (or rather, AT one another – no one’s really listening) in order to produce some sort of psychological release. It’s a totally selfish endeavor, but we do it anyways.

But everyone does it. Everyone has some topic like this with friends that comes up and everyone gets a big, ejaculatory, non-sexual-organ release. I guess we need it though. It sort of seems necessary to acheive cathartic release every now and then.

For no reason other than that it’s flagrant: “big, ejaculatory, non-sexual-0rgan release.”

Oh yeah. School starts Monday morning, which is tomorrow, I guess, at this point. So that should be cool.

“Big, ejaculatory, non-sexual-organ release.”

On Watching and Relating to Perfection, Citizen Kane

I just finished watching Citizen Kane for the first time.

The rumors are true: it’s the most perfect movie I’ve ever seen.

And yet, somehow, that doesn’t make it the best movie I’ve ever seen.

That’s what’s strange. When you encounter perfection (for Orwell’s film is surely as close as one can get), you don’t know what to do. You feel complete, which is actually unfortunate because “completeness” shares something in common with “emptiness”: they both make you feel the same way. I’m talking about that pit-of-your-stomach sensation that’s more or less indescribable, the one that tells you you’re in the presence of something rare, something beautiful, for pure void is as pretty a thing as pure wholeness. In the face of entirety or its opposite, the feeling is the same: a mixture of shock and that warmness that comes from morphine and, presumably, other opiates. It’s strange and certainly unnerving, not to mention neck-hair-raising.

Another thing you notice about perfection is that it feels distant, cold, rational. That last attribute is key. What we experience in life, 99% of the time, is at some point irrational. Some aspect of just about everything doesn’t make sense. Thus when we come across perfection, we’re unsettled immediately by a lack of irrationality, by the presence of Universal reason and nothing else. Everything works. Nothing is wrong or out of place or incoherent. No disjointed nausea, no fractured sense of narrative flow, no existential cogitation – just pure rationality, pure sense.

That’s what I felt watching Citizen Kane, and it was particularly fierce during the credits, probably because I was allowed time, finally, to reflect on the last one hundred and nineteen minutes. And not once during those two hours did I wrinkle my nose at any wrongness. That’s impressive because I subconsciously prepare my proboscis during the opening credits, readying the muscles for wrinkling. And but then so to go through an entire movie without resorting to projection-on-my-face gymnastics to silently but physically express the bad taste in my mouth (code for “moral outrage”) – well, that’s just crazy.

What makes it all so much more pungent is that in life, we rarely stumble upon (much less succeed in seeking out) items and events that register as one extreme or the other, totally good/totally bad or any other dichotomy you might be entertaining. People are never smart and funny and cute and physically adept – or if they are, you don’t know them well enough. And movies are never perfect in all areas, either, lighting, dialogue, story, cinematography, acting, costumes, staging. The movies we love and exalt are still very much with fault. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was imperfect because we felt like we were watching Forrest Gump: the Sequel. The Departed wasn’t 100/100 because the ending, as dramatic and dramatically violent as it was, felt the tiniest bit forced, like Martin Scorececeseseceecese wanted to kill everybody, no matter what. And even The Godfather trilogy was not without imperfection (let’s not even start on the third installment and Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter’s Razzie-winning performance).

But this is the reason we love these objects, these movies, because like us, they’re constructs with faults. We can relate to them in ways perfection wouldn’t and doesn’t allow. I projectile-vomited, sure, after watching Sophie Coppola do her best Frankenstein impression, but I related all the more because how often have I completed a work only to find that it sucks some major balls? It’s in this context of viewer-relating that I assure you: a great many people do not love Citizen Kane the same way they love Casablanca or Roman Holiday or (in my case) Notting Hill. In fact, most movie critics point out that Orwell’s film is considered the best of all time but is almost never a critic’s favorite movie. Roger Ebert has Citizen Kane at number one on his list, but prefers to all other films Aguirre, the Wrath of God. And so it goes with many others. The panel that selected Citizen Kane twice in ten years as the greatest film of all time for the American Film Institute perpetually qualifies the list by saying “It’s the most technically innovative film of all time” as if to appease their own hearts, the beating red vascular organs that cry out for Humphrey Bogart or Vivien Leigh or Peter O’Toole or (in my case) Hugh Grant. I submit, then, that Citizen Kane is no one’s favorite film, but everyone’s best film.

And that’s perfection.

Imagine Citizen Kane is being broadcast from the planet Mars with sophisticated and operational communication technology. We can hear it and see it well enough, but we can’t touch it. That’s perfection: seeing and hearing but never feeling. I’m not necessarily talking about emotions here in the sense of happy/sad/frustrated, but rather the way you feel watching the end of No Country For Old Men or any scene in Blue Velvet where Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) does something very much fucked up and sick. You feel these moments principally in your gut region; you can reach out and grab them, hold them, rearrange them, deliberate on their fate, go to bed with them, fight and argue, break up with them. With Citizen Kane, though, you encounter walls of ice. You can’t rearrange them, you can’t deliberate – time has decided for you. The movie remains forever untouchable, forever a masterpiece, no, THE masterpiece.

For this same reason, bare-chested Achilles will always win out over modern-day, flowing-cape Superman. We identify with unlimited rage more so than with unlimited goodness and optimism.*** We’ll choose Casablanca over Citizen Kane every time. Those of us who read history still love Thomas Jefferson, in spite of his paradoxical and Duessa-like personality. We can relate to Achilles’ pedal and emotional impurities, to Casablanca’s unrealistic special effects and Umberto Eco’s staunch criticisms (“It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects.”), and certainly to the third president of the United States (to most presidents, actually: Clinton’s did-not-have-sex bit, Bush’s mental shortcomings, Carter’s naïveté, Washington’s unfailing and problematic stoicism…). But we can’t relate to the ice-cold purity of Citizen Kane. It’s on Mars. We’re not. And thus, we can only watch.

***I’m referencing the Superman of the last twenty or so years. Originally, he was conceived as a hothead, sort of in the same manner as Achilles, but eventually he morphed, due to public consumption and later reiterations, into the perfect superhero American Boy Scout, the guy with super-optimism and super-moral superiority (and logically-deducable super-penis et al.).

David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, and Craft Sessions

Anytime you sit down and begin your craft – whether that’s some sort of skill-and-hand-eye-coordination-intensive video game, the writing/playing of music, or perhaps the writing of literature/blog posts/whatever – you can tell, a few lines, measures, scenes in that this is going to be a good session, where shit is just flowing out of you in unimaginable and highly suspicious ways; an okay session, where you have to sort of struggle in non-epic fashion to get stuff to work, and occasionally get brilliance but more often wind up with average material that isn’t totally useless but will definitely require some clean up later; or an awful session, where you recognize, quite early if you’re a professional, that the task ahead of you is Sisyphean in nature and from which requires your immediate, no-questions-asked extrication, so that you retain some degree of humanity, soul-ness, and overall ability to make general if inaccurate sense of reality.

Knowing this, having realized it over the course of many sessions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or through hours and hours of guitar/piano/singing or because of innumerable banging-head-on wall tantrums while trying to write, I have a hard time giving up “good sessions.” Once identified, I’m pretty much glued to my chair. When I pick up the guitar and plug in, I can tell, pretty much within thirty seconds, if this is going to be an epic session, or just an average one, and I make plans accordingly. Or back in the day when I was a pro at Tony Hawk’s video game, I knew right away if this was the moment I beat my already-ridiculously-high high score or if I should just go through the motions and practice a bit. Or, in the present case, if some particular writing session is good/bad/ugly (in this instant, good).

I’m not sure what other people do, but I can fully attest to finishing a blog post and giving it an immediate grade as to how it was written, not necessarily based on content (though that’s certainly a contributing factor as to just how well-written it is; after all, shit material will usually wind up as shit blog post). While writing each post, I can tell if it’s a good day or what, and I sometimes stop writing in the middle of a discourse on a rather interesting topic because things aren’t going well. The topic might be right and the details and coverage excellent, but if it’s not happening with the way the words are coming out, it’s not happening. Often I struggle through and finish but sometimes I flat out walk away and come back reticently, wishin’ and hopin’ that the juices are flowing much more efficaciously than before. Hell, I’ve completely written off (pardon the pun) for good entire posts and their subject matter because I had such a traumatizing experience writing them, because it’s horrifically painful to continue putting one word in front of another in an effort to get to the finish line when those words are just not right. The sounds, the tones, the meanings, the flow, the dynamics, everything – when it’s all going wrong, I abandon ship and make emergency attempts to not devolve completely into an irreversibly harmful psychological meltdown.

And that’s what this post is not: it’s above average, it is more or less beautiful, it flows, it sounds great,  andI think the meaning is relatively uncluttered. Of course, I may have jinxed the whole affair by writing that last sentence, and you might not be aware, but this sentence right now is not doing much in the way of continuing the trend started by the previous five hundred words. But so it goes, I guess. Ringo Starr once said that when a song is going great and everyone is really jamming and it’s just all kinds of awesome, NEVER think to yourself “Wow, this song is going great and everyone is jamming and it’s just all kinds of awesome” because every time, he says and I quote, it gets really fucked up. So I’m committing a rather egregious sin, but it was all in the interest of art – sort of. And, in any case, this felt like a natural ending point (or at least some place where “tapering off” didn’t seem like a completely awful idea).

…

Well, I stepped away for a minute and suddenly realized I wanted to talk about reasons why this particular writing session was/is going so well. I just spent the last five or so hours watching a spectacular David Lynch film (Mulholland Dr.), thinking about that spectacular film, and rereading (at this point only half of) David Foster Wallace’s long essay on David Lynch. I haven’t said a word to another human soul (much less used my vocal chords for sound) in at least three hours and I’ve spent those three hours more or less cooped up inside my head doing all sorts of things one does once ensconced in the skull. So I don’t think it’s any surprise that I consider this post to be especially well-written, because DFW and Lynch*** both give me raging, artistic hard-ons and thus I’m filled with the nearly irrepressible urge to ejaculate artistically.

So, um, that’s that.

*** Both these men have the same first name. It’s probably nothing, but it seemed semi-significant considering my unnatural and still evolving and maturing lust towards/about/at their respective work. My dad’s name is David, too, but we don’t necessarily get along or really see each other, and it wouldn’t be totally off-base to say that my feelings towards him are the exact-and-thus-polar opposite of my “unnatural and still evolving and maturing lust” concerning the first two Davids. Freud would naturally have a field day unearthing all kinds of neurotic behavior involving this seemingly entirely coincidental set of names. But I’m pretty good at psychological self-diagnostic exams, so I’m well aware, thanks doc.

Brett Favre! Brett Favre! Brett Favre!

When Brett Favre signed a two-year deal with the Minnesota Vikings yesterday, bypassing training camp and all around getting his way in just about everything, half the world shrugged and said “Cool, I always liked that guy” and the other half cried “Oh Brett, why have you forsaken me!?”

Many sports articles have been written in roughly the last 24 hours and Favre has been painted with some colorful terms: “selfish,” “petty,” “insecure,” “indecisive,” “manipulative,” and the beautiful list continues. He’s been labeled as a sell-out and a guy who certainly, if nothing else, lost ‘Hero’ status indefinitely.

But, honestly, I see these outcries of outrage as a lot of knee-jerk, emotional reactions to a volatile situation involving a once immaculate sports celebrity. Because Brett Favre, for as long as he’s been around (some 350 years), has been known, widely and without doubt, as a fun-loving, football-playing, Mississippi son of a gun. No matter what the score, no matter how awful things are, he’s got a big smile. And even when things are going right, and he’s crushing teams with touchdown bombs series after series, his rough, rugged face is still adorned with that playful, almost child-like smile. People take all this to mean that he enjoys the game on a visceral level, and that’s one of the reasons he keeps playing. Now, though, with everything that’s gone on the past two years, people are starting to hate him, starting to see it all as an act, as something awful and terrible and deceitful. The hatred is running deep and nothing less than a miracle or a time machine can reverse the river.

People, though, are being really childish (not child-like) over this whole affair. And it’s because they continue to believe, day after day, that their heroes are somehow excempt from their mortal nature, that people like Brett Favre and John F. Kennedy can transcend the petty squabbles of us mere humans, transcend and surpass and thus not be party to any of the dumb, irrational, mean, and nasty things the rest of us often do. And that’s where they’re wrong, and that’s where the heartbreak sets in, and thus the knee-jerk reactions to Favre’s current decision-making.

When our heroes make the same kind of mistakes we do, it hurts us, it reminds us that we’re either all heroes or no one is a hero, and that in the end, humans will be humans, that is, humans will be stupid, irrational, hurtful, mean, and all around just not very nice or noble in any way. When we remember this, and especially when we’re forced to remember this, the pain is unbearable. So I consider the knee-jerk reactions in this light and see a nation of instantly disillusioned football fans who’ve just watched one of their towering idols, who has watched over the game for the last decade, step down unceremoniously off of that pedestal and into the madding crowd, into the world with the rest of us. What if God was one of us, indeed.

And my brother, when adding his two cents, brought up the underground but widely and secretly believed proposition that only jackasses and assholes get ahead in life and, you know, win. That is, people have to be jackasses and assholes, and avoid training camp using lies and public deceit, or punch and yell at their own teammates (MICHAEL JORDAN), or, if you hate Kobe Bryant, rape white women in Colorado. This is the only way to win, it’s secretly held, that Shaquille O’Neal has to be overly obnoxious and forceful and selfish, that the only reason Pat Riley has another championship is because midway during the 2005-2006 season, after recognizing that the Miami Heat (of which he was General Manager) were really good and might have a run at the title, fired Stan van Gundy, citing OBVIOUS LIES, so he could take over and coach the team to a championship. It’s these sorts of things we look at and think, well, I’m not a dick so I guess I’ll be finishing near the end of the pack, as usual. It’s these sorts of things that put (some of) us off, causing additional and extra-sensitive disilluison.

And hey, maybe he’s right. I don’t know. I’m sure, occasionally at least, nice guys finish first or second, and that it’s not always the case that jackasses get the girl, get the W, get the trophy, whatever, but it’s difficult to ignore the apparently overwhelming data. If you just look at the last decade of NBA champions, for instance, it’s hard to ignore:

2009: Los Angeles Lakers – Kobe Bryant is known for being a hothead, selfish, mean, ballhoggish, and, oh yeah, he apparently raped that white girl in Colorado. And let’s not forget that one time in the All-Star Game where he told Karl Malone to get the fuck back because he wanted to take on Jordan, one on one, to prove who was better.

2008: Boston Celtics – Kevin Garnett has anger problems (among other things) and his behavior has earned him some well-deserved hatred. At one point, he got on his hands and knees and taunted an opposing player as the ball was being brought up court.

2007: San Antonio Spurs – No one likes Manu Ginobli, and everyone is convinced that the Spurs for the last decade have been horrible cheaters who kick, scratch, bite and otherwise maim other players in subtle, subterfugal ways and it just all around drives people shit-crazy. Example: Bruce Bowen has repeatedly tripped people to hurt their ankles, and Tony Parker is known to fall down at the slightest hint of contact, drawing unnecessary fouls.

2006: Miami Heat – Shaq and Pat Riley, already covered.

2005, 2003, and 1999 were all Spurs victories; 2000, 2001, 2002 were all Lakers victories; and 2004 was notable for only having one selfish guy on the whole team – the coach, Larry Brown.

So  maybe Jon’s right, and you have to be a dick to get anywhere. I don’t know. I’m probably an asshole, too, so, um, whatever.

In any case, fuck it, we’ll do it live.

My only real comment here other than the above is to question why these people who loved and now hate Brett Favre weren’t already disillusioned with heroes and other famous and significant celebrities. I mean, they lived through Clinton’s blowjob, Bush’s mental incapacitation, probably JFK’s love affairs, and probably Nixon’s Watergate. So why fall suddenly ill at Brett Favre’s announcement that he, too, is human and not above obviously self-interested behavior?

Well, just another tragedy of human existence, I guess. I’ll have to add it to the growing list.