Get to know your imaginary community (part 1 of 22)

St. James Place is a modest, lower-middle class community located along the Eastern border of our imaginary city. Originally settled in the great northeastern pyrite rush of the 1820s, St. James Place became known for both its prostitutes and its sasparilla throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1903 discovery of an old leather and cork sports ball in the public square put St. James Place in the running as an alternate location for the baseball hall of fame, an honor this beleaguered town saw slip through its hands when the ball was revealed to be a key instrument in a primitive form of bondage-style sex playfully referred to by town residents of the day as "them ol' peculiar hoodwinks in the parlour," and made briefly famous on a national level with the publication of Philbert Tripleday's 1906 foxtrot of the same name.


Did you know? . . .
-You can get to St. James Place on the Pennsylvana Railroad?
-St. James is the patron saint of vinegar-based condiments?
-There are two Wendy's restaurants on the same street in St. James place?!?
-The scenes at "Adams College" in the film Revenge of the Nerds were shot in St. James Place?


And did you further know . . .
-Famous celebrities born in St. James Place include: Neil Patrick Harris!
-The St. James Place Children's Zoo tops the nation's list in unaccounted-for ungulates! Nobody knows how they got out, or where they went! This zoo needs more oversight!
-On an average day in St. James Place, there are over 4000 sandwiches eaten! This is hundreds more than are eaten in Marvin Gardens!

Dream Analysis, or Terror Quantified

This morning I woke up and remembered a dream I had. Not a dream from last night, but one from sometime in the past couple weeks. You know, you have dreams and you forget them, then for some reason you remember them days or weeks later. In my dream I was eating a Big Mac. I wasn't enjoying it. I remember putting the Big Mac back down in its box (this is where I put burgers when I need to take a "burger break") and feeling mildly stressed out because I still had about half of it left to eat (I'm still a die-hard member of the clean plate club, modern nutritionists be damned). It was a mildly stressful dream. If the unit of unpleasantness in dreams is the nightmare, this dream may have been about 1/20 of a nightmare. It is less exciting to have bad dreams this way, but I imagine I get more sleep at night.


In my waking life I very much enjoy the Big Mac once or sometimes even twice per year.


What does it mean?


After careful consideration, I believe the ambivalence towards the Big Mac in my dream is either:

a.) an unconscious expression of my real-life ambivalence towards the Hardees Thickburger. I love the Hardees Thickburger; however, I am horrified (to the tune of 1/5 a nightmare) by the cultural aura surrounding it.
-or-
b.) an unconscious expression of my real-life ambivalence towards Mark McGwire. I love Mark McGwire; however, I am horrified (to the tune of 1/5 of a nightmare) by the cloud of steroids-related controversy surrounding him.


I have boring nightmares.

the metaphors we live next to

There's this book about metaphors called Metaphors We Live By. It talks about how we use stuff like the concepts of up/down or in front of/behind to describe stuff where those concepts don't literally apply. It says we use them so systematically that it seems like our brains just work that way. Like time, say-- we're pretty consistent when we describe some scheduled event as "coming up," or that golden oldie we heard on the radio taking us "way back." You see how it works. Nothing too philosphical or complicated there.


I heard some radio program about data compression. I was thinking about the kind called run-length encoding, in which strings of data that are repeated are replaced by some stand-in to save space. Like say you took the book of Genesis and said *="and it was good." That would save you a lot of room, because after all that stuff He makes, all He would say was *. You see how it works.


Well, then I was thinking how similar that kind of idea is to the way some people say we use metaphors. By thinking of different kinds of things using the same schemas, like using the in front of/behind schema for a road and for a calendar, maybe we are saving space in our brains. Not just saving space, but keeping things more organized and less redundant. So there it was, my first crackpot revelation of 2008: Data Compression is the new Metaphor.


I looked it up to make sure nobody had beaten me to the punch. Turns out people way smarter than me have been thinking about it since the late seventies. God damn, It's hard these days to come up with a brand new crackpot revelation.


So Saturday night I was talking to a stranger about how her cell phone won't break when she drops it. I said she had to drop it harder. I thought it would be funny to understand her as wanting to break her phone. I said "gravity is not enough." That sounded like a cool catchphrase. I was overheard, but incorrectly, by a short man who plays the pedal steel guitar. He thought I said "gravity is not a metaphor." That sounded like a cool catchphrase.



The discussion turned to the pinball machine against the wall. It was called "Night Moves." We wondered whether "Night Moves" the pinball machine might be named after "Night Moves" the Bob Seger song. I suggested that in "Night Moves" the Bob Seger song, Bob Seger is actually using sex as a metaphor for pinball. I thought it would be funny to say that.



Later I realized that although so many things are used as metaphors for sex, it's all but impossible to use sex as a metaphor for anything.


Go ahead, try it.

Dear 2008,

I've a bone to pick with you, young man. You are the future, and I think it's time you start acting like it. Don't look at me like that! Don't say you're not the future! Even if 1984 wasn't supposed to be the future after all, 2001 sure the hell was. If you expect me to wait around until 2010 you got another thing (or is it think?) comin'. So listen up. Here's a list of grievances. Oh, come on future, don't cry. Maybe I was too harsh. I guess you've done allright, what with ipods and laptops and innovations in automated meat processing facilities. But this year you gotta do better. You have 361 days (tough on you, being a leap year, isn't it) to address the following areas of distinct and painful lack, and if you cannot, you will be replaced by someone who can (current leading candidate: 2009).


-Hoverboards
-Flying cars
-Teleportation, at least of small inanimate objects
-Vertical lanes in which flying cars can move in addition to the usual horizontal ones
-Alien contact (with either a benevolent species or one bent on destroying us)
-Various new traffic regulations concerning flying cars
-An elevator to the moon
-A George Foreman grill that presses not just from the top and bottom, but also from an as-yet undiscovered fifth dimension
-Driver and passenger side airbags in flying cars
-Nanotechnology implanted directly in the cornea that allows the viewer to distinguish between Amish and Menonites
-New energy-saving fuel cell technology for flying cars
-A kind of new pop music that a.) doesn't suck and b.) sounds all weird and futuristic-like
-An island nation of intelligent, clothes-wearing bears, equipped with a viable, state-of-the-art armed forces as well as a world-renowned, largely seafood-based culinary culture
-A way to jump-start flying cars without all the hastle
-The return of prehensile tails in the higher primates
-Advances in personal fashion including something known as the "third eyebrow"
-The immediate cancellation of Everybody Loves Ray (in the future, nobody loves Ray)
-Back-seat Blu-ray players standard in selected high-end flying car models
-A new type of jar opener that appeals to old people and young people alike
-A new shape of New York-style pizza whose slices can be folded along some as-yet undiscovered fifth dimension
-In the future, it seems like there shouldn't have be any shitty food anymore. All food should be good now.
-Self-zipping pants
-A telekinetic device you can install in your lamps that allows them to turn on and off when you just think about clapping.
-A great peace-making between Glad and Ziplock brand resealable sandwich bags.
-A Number 3 pencil
-No less than seven noteable new peanut-derived inventions (this area has really slowed down since George Washington Carver, and I personally believe 2008 is the year of the peanut once again)
-A convenient medicine which settles the uneasy stomach some experience as a result of flying car travel
-A new method of melting cheese without all the muss and fuss
-A portable closet or pantry whose contents reside in an as-yet undiscovered fifth dimension without losing any of the utility or freshness we've come to expect from our three-dimensional closets and pantries
-A new tool to spread condiments with more efficiancy and more panache

sacrifice

I never thought in a million years I'd say something like this, but I'm uncomfortable with all this hate and vitriol directed at Roger Clemens lately. There's so many names to choose from, but even top sportswriters are getting in on this Clemens feeding frenzy. I think I figured out why the discomfort. I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm starting to suspect the media of using Roger Clemens as a white-guilt sacrifice to the gods of equality who'd call them racists when they bashed Bonds. He's being cast in the role of a reverse "great white hope"-- The One people had been waiting for to prove all these 'roid allegations weren't racially driven.

I'm not saying he isn't well cast. In this role it helps, as it does Bonds, to come across as an asshole. Nor am I saying it is such a bad thing to offer up such sacrifices. The gods are insatiable. And I'm most decidedly not saying I am now, or have ever, talked about such things through anything but my ass. I'm full of shit.

"everything is not enough, nothing is too much to bear"

So sang the great Townes Van Zandt (and plenty of others in tribute) in his classic tune To Live is to Fly. When I first heard the line, it didn't grab me so much. It seemed like a moody, trite thing to say. But then I started to live with the song, and realized I wasn't getting as much out of that line as I think is in there. It all hinges on how you take those words "everything" and "nothing."

"Everything" seems on the surface to mean the totality of all things. So the sentiment "everything is not enough" means that even if you had all things, you still wouldn't feel like you had enough. You are insatiable.

"Nothing" seems on the surface to mean the negation of any particular thing. So the sentiment "nothing is too much to bear" means there is no single thing that is too much to bear, no straw that'll really ever break the camel's back.

So there's no single thing you can't bear, but even if you had every single thing, you still wouldn't feel like you had enough. Like I said, trite and moody.

But Townes gave me another idea. He made me think about how either word can take on a positive or negative meaning by using "is" and "is not" the way he did-- "everything is not...", "nothing is..." See, that's weird. "Nothing is"-- no it isn't! "Everything is not"-- yes it is!

Here's how it can still make sense:

"Everything" can be distributed among particulars instead of encapsulating a totality. So now the first line means "every single thing, individually, is not enough."

"Nothing" can be understood as the totality of absence instead of as distributed among individual things that aren't there. So now the second line means "total absence is too much to bear."

So now, no matter what thing you're talking about, it's never gonna be enough. But if you'd throw in the towel and choose nothing instead, well that is too much to bear.

Now that's a bind I can get behind.

the mysteries of "loverboy" probed

A great wrong was righted on Saturday, when a friend hipped me to this video I had somehow never seen before:





I've been thinking about it a lot since then. What the fuck is going on in this video? I'm not one to enforce some rule that things have to make sense. I could be happy enough just thinking of it as the "leftover cantina band," which is how it was described to me (we're talkin' Star Wars here). But I'm a naturally curious, analytical person. So let's probe.


Like anyone trying to understand some weird-ass video to a tune they don't know very well, I first looked at the lyrics. They seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the video, except for the fact that they are about someone wanting to be someone's lover, which is presumably the sort of thing that could happen on any given planet, in any given solar system, and so even moreso on what appears to be an Earth-like planet, with a breathable atmosphere, liquid water, and several humanoid and reptilian looking creatures coexisting in a bar-room environment.


As the video begins, Billy Ocean seems to be folded up into a floating, shiny, prismatic pyramid, kinda reminiscent of that mirror-plane thing Ursa, Non, & Zod, those bad guys from Superman, got exiled in. As the beat begins in earnest, there is some sort of space explosion high above some planet, and then we cut in to a view of a fast-moving horse on a beach (maybe it is that same planet that had the explosion?). Wait, the horse looks like a pony, and the rider looks like a little person with a wizard hat. Wait again-- it's a god-damned lizard man! Now he dismounts and enters what looks from the outside to be some kind of natural cave. But on the inside it's a rolicking, dark, smoky bar-room party. In the center of the dance floor is another prism thing, only this one looks like an octahedron or a dodecahedron. Is it where the music is coming from? I don't know, but here comes the Billy Ocean prism, and now it's floating above the dodeca-prism, it seems like they are interfacing in some way.


Wow, that looks just like the chick from Dark Crystal talking to that alien.



Now the Billy Ocean pyramid unfolds, and here's Billy Ocean. Except he's not here. I mean, he's in his own world, in the same scene he was in before. I don't think he literally comes out of the prism, I think maybe his music does, though. But not for long-- now Billy Ocean is in space again, and for a second I could swear he was playing drums. Did Billy Ocean play drums? Anyhow, next thing I know, he folds up again, only now instead of a pyramid, he folds into a prismatic cube. Why?


Back in the cantina, the lizard-man plays a few hot synth licks, and gets some dirty looks from some people, including a TV-headed robot, someone who looks like Jaba the Hut, and someone who looks like Uncle Travelling Matt.



Holy shit! Lizard dude shot the dude Dark Crystal chick was talking to, and now he's kidnapping her! Wait, she is going willingly. I think she likes him. She must be the one who Billy Ocean is talking about when he says "I wanna be your lover," only Billy Ocean is talking from the point of view of the lizard-man.


As the lovebirds flee the cantina, the prism box is floating around and three Jawas are on their knees like they are praising it, like they are testifying, like maybe Billy Ocean is their God. Now the lizard and the girl ride off into the sun on the same pony, on the same beach.


What in the fuck?


Well, let's think. Prisms. Prisms show many facets. Maybe the video is about how the universe has many facets, and it is showing how in one corner of the universe there is this dramatic scene unfolding, but when looked at from another angle, that is exactly what happens when Billy Ocean sings in that dark room. Born in Trinidad, raised in England, his influence is truly universal.


Maybe Billy Ocean is that lizard-dude, but in disguise, you say? Then how come the prism comes in there, too? I don't think he is the same as the lizard guy.


Maybe it is planet Earth, only way in the future, and Billy Ocean travelled through time in that prism, and is continuing to rock the party even after he should have been long dead. This, I think, doesn't matter. Different planet, our planet in the future, whatever-- that trick can never work again after Planet of the Apes.



Here's what I think-- I think Billy Ocean is some sort of God. Like a hero-god, though. He is there to see that this lizard-guy gets his lover. He is like an angel. He busts in on the planet just in time to help out. How does he help? I don't know, he sets up a sweet groove, maybe, and that makes it easier for the lizard. Maybe the Dark Crystal chick loves the groove. In any event, he somehow watches over the process, and then his godliness is supported by those Jawas all testifying outside.


How about this-- in the future, or in space, maybe instead of angels getting their wings when they do good deeds (you know, like in It's a Wonderful Life), they get to advance to a shape with one more side. Maybe they start as a tetrahedron, then they become a cube when they do some good. So maybe that other prism in the cantina was even more advanced, since it seemed to have maybe 8 or 12 sides. Clearly, the final goal for these angels would be to have infinitely many sides, which if you know a little calculus makes them all but spheres. It's all kind of like the social structure in that book Flatland, only 3-D.


How about this-- George Lucas and Jim Henson had some leftover sets, props, and costumes from Star Wars and Dark Crystal, and the director got a deal on them.


How about this-- it's autobiographical, metaphorically. Billy Ocean came from Trinidad, via England, to make people in the U.S. fall in love. He is an outsider who makes insiders hook up. Maybe it is a cry for help. Maybe it is a statement of purpose.


How about this-- it's autobiographical, literally. These things happened, in just this sequence, to the real Billy Ocean. He's seen things that would blow our minds. He's been places we can't imagine. Nobody believes him when he talks about it, so he made a video. It's ok, Billy, I believe you. I mean, come on, is this the smile of a guy who's crazy?

full disclosure

Lest anyone get the wrong idea about me, I feel like I better make the following Embarrassing Confessions:

-I don't get what's so great about the Clash
-I think Paris Hilton is hot
-I'm starting to like the New England Patriots
-I've watched and enjoyed Project Runway
-I never saw The Warriors until last week
-Born in the USA is still my favorite Springsteen album
-I never really got Doonesbury
-I don't get what's so bad about 5150-- it's at least tied for my favorite Van Halen album
-Words can't describe the anger, sadness, and deep feeling of the world letting me down I felt when I first saw my fondest childhood memories sullied in this fucking commercial
-I still think The Wall is way better than Dark Side of the Moon
-I don't get what's so great about Sweetheart of the Rodeo
-I love Hardees Thickburgers and eat one once a week
-Sometimes when I see a commercial for a new product at Taco Bell, I get excited and get in my van and drive to Taco Bell and order the new product (even though it always ends up tasting like every other new product at Taco Bell)
-I don't get what's so great about Easy Rider
-I don't get what's so great about Bitches Brew
-For that matter, I can't seem to get into any jazz from about 1968 and later
-I don't get what's so great about Frank Sinatra

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

simon and garfunkel are their names.

My balls, that is.

a wager

Say it ain't so, George. Cody McKay? Larry Bigbie?? Fernando Vina?!?



Ah, but at least there's a corn in the turd-- now I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I have bigger balls than Roger Clemens and Miguel Tejada. Wanna bet? I could probably fit seven of Barry Bonds' balls into just one of my balls-- even if I first put one of Jose Canseco's balls inside one of Roger Clemens' balls, then put Roger Clemens' ball-stuffed ball into one of Barry Bonds' balls.* But I'm not here to point fingers, and I'm not here to stuff hypothetical shrunken balls into other hypothetical shrunken balls. No, what I'm here for is to compare ball size, and the smart money's on mine. So go ahead, lay down your bets. Yes, put down some smart money. On my balls. Put money on my balls.


* Much like the Turducken.

wait, maybe sad was always funny

sad is the new funny

If you need further proof, watch some holiday commercials.

the

I was gonna write an entry that was more or less this, only not as good. Instead I will write about "the," that lil' dynamo of a word that can make words like drive, shot, and fumble take on the horrible, horrible meanings they have to Clevelanders, not to mention Akron-born Missourians who grasp at Cleveland sports teams in an always and necessarily doomed attempt to balance a perceived lack of hometown rootedness ("just 'cause you don't got roots don't mean you can't root, as my grandpa said," as I hope my grandson says).


The the I'm talking about, I am finding, is hard to define without showing up itself in the definition. I heard that's cheating. So I can't say "When something is the something, it's not just any something, but it's the something," even if you know just what I mean. Maybe it means the something in question is the most paradigmatic, the most representative, the most all-encompassing single example of an entire concept. Maybe it means the entire history of that idea was leading up to this particular realization, which isn't just the most perfect so far, but is that perfection itself. I bet if I knew more about philosophy, I could find names for these feelings. But forget it now, we can be lazier than that and just say "the" means what we all think it means when we say "the" the way I'm talking about using it.


It can apparently be re-applied to some things, so it doesn't necessarily bring with it any kind of singularity-- hell, Michael Jordan has two of "the shot" himself. But there are degrees of crowdedness in the hallowed lists of the's: Dwight Clark and Willie Mays are the only two duking it out in the big leagues for the catch, but think of the millions of people who, since 1990, have been purported, at least occasionally, to be the bomb, or for that matter, the man, now, dog. It can confuse your Itunes when some of those files are tagged Beatles and some The Beatles. I don't know which one of these internets hooks up my blog to your computer, but I know it's on the internet. I'm runnin' out of steam here, but there must be something to say about this:

sometime in the next twenty-five days...

This guy is gonna kill some heroes for lots of people. Before that happens I want to make some fearless predictions:


-Lots of pitchers, I bet, will be on there. Especially ones who were hurt (see Paul Byrd or, for that matter, Rick Ankiel). And I don't just mean the ones with that obvious 'roids look to them. In the category of my own worst fears, I have a dread that Chris Carpenter is gonna be on there.


-Lots of people you never heard of will be on there. And that's good. I've heard the argument put forth that it's even worse for someone like Bonds to do steroids, since he was good without them. To me, that's bullshit. The guy who uses roids and squeaks by should be dealt with the same as the guy who uses roids and hits 73 home runs.


-Either some doctors are gonna have to come out and truly stand behind the idea that HGH really does help in recovery from injuries (right now the only legal uses are for unusually short children, AIDS, and adult growth hormone deficiency), or that mythical excuse is gonna get blown wide open.



These are just predictions. I know that HGH isn't the same as steroids, and I know it was not yet banned by the MLB (though illegal in the USA) when some people took it. I also know it is a thorny issue when you come to performance enhancing drugs, and there are always new ones that aren't yet banned cropping up on the medical horizon. I don't even really know where I stand on the morality of it. But I do know where I stand in one respect: there needs to be a fair way to regulate, and with the humongous amount of money and resources available to MLB, the most obvious solution is simply to have mandatory random drug tests for every player, period. And just for the PEDs, mind you, I don't care about all the coke, weed, meth, crack, or even acid they might be taking, I don't think the MLB should concern itself about the baseball versions of Ricky Williams types. To me, random mandatory testing is the only way to avoid the witch-hunt scenario some people are against. It doesn't discriminate on talent, it gets the greats and the squeakers-by alike, and if we could get the MLB not to warn players when their turn was coming, it might even work.

the corn in the turd

People, life is bound to hand you a lot of turds. But sometimes those turds at least have little kernels of corn in them. You always have to look for the corn in the turd. I didn't make it up. It's something we've been discussing a lot around my household lately, with a good friend having moved last Sunday. He and his dog are gone and I will miss them-- there's the turd. But there's some corn in that turd, too, like the fact that I get his old room.


I'd like this saying about the corn in the turd to spread beyond my own sphere. It's a much more honest way to look at what is sad in life than what those other adages have to offer. Think about it-- I've never really seen a silver lining behind a single cloud; when I walk down a dark street, it's generally the case that there is no sunny side to keep on; at least 30 or 40 percent of dogs never do have their day; never once has even the most carefree hippie's deep-down disposition been "all good"; the negative has a way of being resistant to elimination, while accentuation of the positive often results in the grotesque; the sun is actually less likely to come out tomorrow on a rainy day than on a sunny day, and often there is no next time.


Compare the corn you might find in a turd to any of these old rose-colored glasses adages. Even if the turd does have its corn, it's only a handful of kernels, and they've already been eaten once, and are now covered in shit. This is not the kind of corn you go out of your way to find unless you are already unavoidably in the turd. This is not the kind of corn that can lift you up and reverse what has happened to you and put you at peace with your world. This corn makes no promises and offers as little in comfort as it does in nutrition. But this corn is honest about the turd it lives in, and so I find this corn far more appealing and befitting a world as ready to hand out turds as ours is. So remember, next time life hands you shit, you gotta look for that corn in the turd.

the flow of meaning

Yesterday I hit upon a new high horse to ride in my ongoing battle against my favorite straw man, the academic music critic. I had been feeling uneasy about dissecting Morton Feldman's 2nd string quartet-- whether I had any right to "decode" it a particular way, why anyone should care how I hear it, whether it mattered what the performers or Feldman himself thought-- the usual fears of a grad student (honestly, go ask some, we are pathetic). I thought to myself, this music spews out an inexhaustible flow of meaning. Things keep happening, and new ways to make sense of them keep arising, each sense-making strategy working for some amount of time before being frustrated and receding, possibly to rise again later on. How can I put a stopper in this flow of meaning and talk about how the music means at any point?

That's when it hit me that I, like my straw man critic, was approaching the problem the wrong way. I don't have to stop up the flow of meaning in order to describe it. Instead, I can talk about how meaning arises, how it moves, what shapes it takes, what currents flow through it, where it penetrates, how deep it is. I can describe meaning in the act of meaning.



But isn't that solipsistic? How something means to two different people is just as different as what something means, isn't it?


Hell no. How something means to someone is a much more accountable notion than what something means to someone. When you're talking what, you get into all those "What this song means to me is..." sorts of situations, you get some obstinate refusal to exit subjective experience, you get all these "I hear it like this" kind of things, and they can get heated. Eventually some consensus is reached, a solid dam is built up in the flow of meaning, and often a small village or huge city is erected around the ensuing lake of meaning. Of course, those damn lakes, those damn damn lakes, they can get a bit stagnant, their beds aren't the kind that've been shaped by water for eons, they don't move in any unpredictable ways after they stabilize, and of course, you can't drive your boat through the damned damn.



My straw man is asked what something means, and as an answer he gives a damn. I don't give a damn. I don't want to stop up that flow of meaning. I want to catch it in the act of meaning. I want to describe it as meaning arises. I want to talk about the means of it's meaning. And that's a more objective pursuit. If you want to talk about the means of something's meaning, you need to talk about that something in a lot of detail, you have to describe with nuance how the actions and aspects of that something give rise to a flow of meaning, then to look at that flow of meaning, and to see if there are patterns, ways it tends to go, currents and counter-currents. But shit, no need to stop it up and make a stagnant puddle. Gotta leave it open. Like instead of a damn, maybe a giant, thinly latticed net that lets everything through, but whose ropes are sensitive to the vital stats of each subsection of the flowing river of meaning. So you get an idea how it moves, instead of stopping it up just so you can say more certainly what it is.


That's all.

The Internets

I was thinking about these internets. They are getting huge. I mean huge. Doesn't it blow your mind? I don't want to sound like an old man or something, but holy shit everybody.



Yesterday, that person who comes by six days a week to put a bunch of trash in a little slot in my door brought us the yellow pages too. Yellow pages? Wow, remember that? That was a different time. Now, again, I know I'm starting to sound like an old man here, but let me explain. What has been blowing my mind about the internet has a lot to do with those yellow pages.

I'm sure I'm the millionth person to have this revelation, but the hugeness of the internets has changed how we find information. The search is what I'm talkin' about. Yellow pages? You know how long they'd have to be to cover every subject on the internet, even to list just the top few sites for any subject? You said it. Long as shit.

There are a few ready-built reactions to this. One can be amazed and stand in awe of this information superhighway, or one can decry the internet as some sort of lowest-common-denominator cesspool, which, after all, is probably built and maintained for the most part by people procrastinating doing something else. One can see it as a way forward for liberty and freedom, or one can see it as the beginnings of a Big Brother sort of thing. I figure whichever way you look at it, you gotta admit it is a giant world of culture, of cultural information and cultural traces, maybe cultural trash at times, maybe more the leftovers and refuse of culture, but culture nonetheless. And I for one am someone who takes culture seriously, wherever I find it. So when I think about how huge these internets are, and I realize that it's all culture on there, it tends to blow my mind.


It's vast and confusing and complicated out there in that "series of tubes." Too intricate for something like a yellow pages to be of much use. That's why searching has gotten better and better. But even just searching isn't quite enough in this huge, huge world. Searching can tend to be either too directed (do you really trust those top few ad-type hits on a given search?) or too neutral (i.e. unpredictable) with regards to quality or taste for lots of people. Enter all these "social bookmarking" kind of business, enter thousands of people writing blogs, etc. Now you can search the searchers, so to speak. Find ones you agree with, or disagree with, or sometimes agree with, but ones you can get to know and trust. Like a good music reviewer who you don't always agree with but who writes with enough personal opinion that you can get an idea how you would feel about the record from how they feel about it.


Hey, man, sure this is all trite. But I don't care, because these internets are huge, my friends, they are gigantic, and they blow my mind. I mean, they blow my mind without my having to notice anything about them other than what is plainly there, without looking too close or thinking too hard.

"God willing and the creek don't rise"

I don't know if you've ever heard that old expression, but my grandparents and parents say it all the time. I recently took a journey down to Shannon County, MO, where my grandparents' families are from. When they were growing up, the saying was a lot more literal. When it rained hard, the creek rose, and they couldn't get to town. That seems pretty clear to me, but now I'm not so sure, given some sources I've found on the internets (such as this one) that take the "creek" part of the expression as referring to a native american tribe known for harassing west-bound travellers. Then from etymology to current usage, I don't quite agree with the definitions provided here, either. Now I'm no expert, but if I were, I might paraphrase the old saying with something like "barring any unforeseen obstacles" or something like that. For a remote, rural, and religious family in the Ozarks, God and the creek were two very real obstacles to be reckoned with.



There were other obstacles, too. My grandpa's family had a truck with disfunctional brakes. When they drove to town, they had to coast down some big ol' hills on some thin passageways through trees that we might hesitate to call roads today. So, God having willed it and the creeks having stayed at a ford-able level, they'd drive that way to town, but on the way back there was a hill that was too high and steep to coast down safely. So they had this tree they'd cut down, and they'd tie it on a long rope or chain to the truck at the bottom of the hill, then drive up and over, dragging the tree up as a counterweight to their descending truck.

Not all obstacles come in deity or natural-phenomenon form, either. Language is another barrier. I'm not talking words themselves, but specific usages. Take this dialog between a waitress and one of my great uncles on the occasion of his first-ever trip to a restaurant, for instance:

Uncle: (orders something)
Waitress: How do you like your eggs, hon'?
Uncle: Oh, I like them a lot. I eat 'em most every mornin'.
Waitress: No, I mean how you like your eggs cooked?
Uncle: Oh, now that's the best way to eat 'em, if you ask me.

Now, I know these stories seem implausible, but I have every reason to believe they're true. And I know it's trite, but it blows my mind to think about how much we take for granted today as compared with the world these stories tell of. Last night a violent storm tore down trees and knocked out power all over St. Louis. I wanted to find out about the damages, but there was no TV, no internet, no nothin'. I turned on my car radio and lots of the local stations were out as well. Hell, the Eads Bridge even closed for a while because some of a building fell on it. Now, that's not quite the same as the creek rising, but it's sort of close.

Hmm, that was supposed to tie things together and wrap 'em up a lot better than it did. Well, shit, as my grandma says, ain't that enough to gag a maggot? Well now that's a whole 'nother story for a whole 'nother time.

the fabled catbird seat

St. Louis native John Goodman was the first person I ever heard refer to "the fabled catbird seat," talking to his character's brother in Raising Arizona. Well, that's not really true. I most likely wasn't paying attention when I saw the movie, and I never really heard it until a friend kept saying it and I asked what it was. I had a vision that looked something like this:

My friend had no idea what it meant. Hmm, I thought, this is the exact reason the internets exist. So I looked it up, and had to amend my mental image:


Turns out the catbird is just a kind of bird in the South that tends to pick really high branches to sit on, according to this little investigation. The phrase may have originated down south, but it's currency in the north was assured by none other than legendary Brooklyn Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber, who heard it playing poker (which does sound to me like the perfect time to use it) and added it to the list of colorful phrases that so endeared him the public (here's a nice discussion on that).

Here's where it comes full-circle for me. I first (maybe) heard the phrase from John Goodman, a hometown hero from my current hometown. It's entirely possible that John Goodman first heard the phrase from famed humorist James Thurber, a hometown hero from my ancestral/fake hometown of Ohio, who wrote a short story called "The Catbird Seat" (cliff notes here) in 1942.

Turns out The Catbird Seat is also an indie record label/podcast/review site, a rabble-rousing political intrigue & exposé site, and even the personal web log of a youth minister's wife and mother of two. One thing is clear: wherever it came from, this phrase is here to stay. In a world such as ours, what with its neverending panorama of rising and falling idioms, with phrases flashing in the pan for just a year before they fade from favor and consciousness, "the catbird seat" is truly sitting in the fabled catbird seat.

cheez popcorn & colt 45

That's all.