happy sexyween

My life is pretty much over at this point because I am never going to recover from the stinging inadequacy I now feel at not having been the inventor of this spectacular Halloween costume:

SEXY HULK HOGAN

Yeah.... 

Next year, I am totally going as Sexy CM Punk. It'll be like regular CM Punk, but with boobs (if you can call them that....) and heels. And a dress. See, according to the rules for Sexy Halloween, regular CM Punk is not sexy but I, dressed as CM Punk, would be sexy.

And why?

Why?

That's right. Because I have a vagina.

I don't hate you, John. I don't even dislike you. I like you a hell of a lot more than I like most people in the back. I hate... this idea... that you're the best... because you're not. I'm the best. I'm the best in the world. There's one thing you're better at than I am, and that's kissing Vince McMahon's ass. You're as good at kissing Vince's ass as Hulk Hogan was. I don't know if you're as good as Dwayne... he's a pretty good ass-kisser... always was and still is. Oops... I'm breaking the fourth wall. [waves to the camera.] I am the best... wrestler... in the world.

Also: yes, it's true. I have a favorite WWE wrestler. Who knew?

I have no breaking point, and all you have to do is look in my eyes and realize I have laughed in the face of temptation time and time again. I have never tapped out to society's attempts at peer pressure. You try to stick a beer in my hand with the same commercials that have hypnotized all of you people, and that sell you all your narcotics and things you're addicted to. Well, I'm harder than any alcohol you can drink, I'm straighter than any line you can snort up your nose, and I certainly can hurt you a lot faster than any pill you put on your tongue.

You know, I hate the word "humbling" because people are always using it wrong. Here is a PSA for stupid musicians and actors: one is not humbled by winning an enormous prize. But I am definitely humbled by CM Punk's straight edge speeches. He is like a caricature of me at my best/worst. Except with more muscles. And taller. And.... less.... clothing...

Q: How does one Sexy-Halloweenify a figure who already struts about in go-go boots and leather briefs with dangly fringe, and who makes a living touching oiled men all over? 

A: If we take Hulk Hogan as an example, apparently one actually adds more square inches of cloth to achieve increased sexiness, in addition to the addition of the requisite vagina, of course. 

Clearly this overturns all previous attempts to conceptualize the Sexy Halloween costume paradigm.

And I know, trust me, it's hard being straight-edge, it's hard to live a straight-edge lifestyle. It's extremely difficult to be me, but what concerns me now is that none of you realize how much more difficult it is to live the life... that you all live. I'm positive nobody in here takes into account the long-term consequences of alcohol on your liver. [Smattering of cheers from audience] See, and you cheer that. That's nothing to cheer. You drink because it's fun, right? [Audience cheers a little louder] Eventually, it's not gonna be fun anymore when it spirals out of control and its no longer... it's no longer fun. Sooner or later, you're just drinking to feel normal. And then there's the smokers. You know, I don't know what's more disgusting–is watching a smoker pollute his/her lungs with over 4,000 foreign chemicals, or having to listen to the smoker convince themselves that they can quit whenever they want to. It's... it's hard to quit, I know, it takes a very strong person to quit, but an even stronger person never would've started smoking in the first place. [Audience boos] I didn't want to come out here and be the bearer of bad news, but let's face facts: chances are pretty slim that any of you here will ever get the monkey off your back. You'll never be able to pry the cigarette from your lips, or find the self-control to pour your drink from your glass, or the self-respect to take the pill out of your mouth. See, it starts, and it can't happen without learning how to say "no" to temptation, and that's why I'm out here. I'm out here to challenge you before it's too late. Please, learn how to say "no" to temptation, learn how to say "no" to your vices, learn how to control yourself.

I especially like the story (posted on his LiveJournal, mind you) of how CM Punk was pulled over by the cops, who then wanted to search his car with a drug-sniffing dog. Punk goes ballistic at this perceived insult to his drug-free history and and starts shouting "WHAT DO MY KNUCKLES SAY? WHAT DO THEY SAY?????"

CLOSE ENOUGH

october in pictures

Cleaning the desktop, filing shit away. Here's what I found or re-found this month and saved, in rough chronological order.

(I always find this kind of thing amusing. It's fun to think about what comes out between the lines, with an assortment like this.)

click to enreaden

Oh, and a song. I saved a song:

The Mountain Goats - Cry for Judas

speaking of confirmation

Little-known fact: my not-so-secret Catholic name is Jane Frances de Chantal.

She was/is my patroness. (Expecto Patronus!). I chose her myself, which is a comfort to me. I still like her an awful lot, which means the me of now is not so very different from the me of then, even if our trappings are disparate.

Quotes from her:

"I write because I cannot refrain from doing so; for this morning I am more wearisome to myself than usual. My interior state is so gravely defective that, in anguish of spirit, I see myself giving way on every side."
-Letter to St. Francis de Sales

"What do you want me to do? I like sick people myself; I'm on their side."
-Upon being criticized for accepting old and sickly people into her order.

"Should you fall even fifty times a day, never on any account should that surprise or worry you. Instead, ever so gently set your heart back in the right direction and practice the opposite virtue, all the time speaking words of love and trust… after you have committed a thousand faults, as much as if you had committed only one. Once we have humbled ourselves for the faults God allows us to become aware of in ourselves, we must forget them and go forward."

six songs - part 5: the funeral song

Q5: What song would you want at your funeral?

This feels like a bit of a silly question. Or an arrogant one. Who I am to dictate what other people listen to in order to do whatever it is they're trying to do at whatever gathering they may or may not have after my death?

Still... I think I've had a strong "Ohhhh, play that at my funeral" urge about two songs:

1) "Tsukamori no Taiju" (The Huge Tree in the Tsukamori Forest) from My Neighbor Totoro. I prefer this version over Path of the Wind, actually.

2) "Comptine d'un autre été: L'après-midi" (Nursery Rhyme of Another Summer Afternoon) from this scene in Amelie:

I was happy that someone else separately picked out that second song for me as well. It is always nice to be seen--even if momentarily--as you think you are.

...but, ultimately, it's hard to predict what people will need to listen to after someone's death. Those are songs that make me think about my own death, not necessarily appropriate songs for you, afterward. After the most tragic death in my family, we listened to "Crocodile Rock" and danced crazy like kids, laughing through that peculiar combo-haze of pain and endogenous opioids--who could have foreseen that? Who could have known that's what we'd need, in that moment? Well, I wouldn't have seen it coming, personally.

After another death in my circle, I spent a lot of time alone watching this video:

Dave Gahan - Kingdom

I still watch it a lot.

If anybody wants religious music, I always liked John Michael Talbot. Esp. Lilies of the Field, The Pleiades and Orion. Or Holy Darkness by Dan Schutte. I still need tissues for that one. (Remember crying in the pews, Mom? Pew-cryers forever!) Or the Golden Sequence (Veni Sancte Spiritus), the Taize version. They play that one at Confirmation, as well as Pentecost and Easter Vigil--to my recollection.

But if I had to pick just one song to dedicate to those remaining, right now I'd pick this:

Loreena McKennitt - Night Ride Across the Caucasus

in a simon belmont mood

Still taking a needed break from more meaningful things. Here's some serious nostalgia-botting:

"Dance of the Holy Man" from Super Castlevania IV (Level 1-2)

Favorite parts: climbing the collapsing stairs, the clock tower, the haunted library where some flying books attack you and other flying books provide a platform for you to stand on.

This game got too scary for me about halfway through, so I'd have my big brother play and I'd watch. Aaaand that's how I learned all my swear words.

KONAMI!

the end

In the back of my mind, I spent the last half of the book practically praying that DT Max would not finish this on a hopeful note.

Just let him die, Max. 

Or rather:

Let him just die.

I didn't want any "Wallace may have passed away but his work lives on forever in the hearts and minds of all the lives he graciously touched." Can we let a titanic figure sink without inflicting on ourselves the dysphoric juxtaposition of Celine Dion in tulle crowing claptrap over the wreckage?

Max delivered.

Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.

backing off a wave and going to the city instead

I'm holding off on publishing my other explicitly DFW-related ramblings for now. I keep noticing new bits to incorporate or else deep flaws in what I've already written... and I don't feel ready for sharing.

Also I am considering taking another extended computer-retreat (as in, retreat from the fucking computer), as I did around this time last year. I would not begin this right now, but soon. Stupidly, it only just occurred to me today that this is the season when the worst of the Bad Thing occurred (or it has occurred to me before and I've only forgotten it). The similar sights & sounds, smells in the air all combine into an icky tincture that fills me on the sly with a frenetic, angry energy that would be better used as fuel to drive honest work than to swim in circles on the interwebs.

---


Misc. thoughts from the past couple days:


1) Sometimes the right way out of a bad pattern is just to do something--anything--different. Have an opposite day. When the spirit says "GO"... maybe dig in your heels, suspiciously, and say "No."

Unless that's what you always do. Then you should do something different.... er... consistent. :-)


2) If you were ever religious, you were actually God that entire time.

I mean... let us for our purposes here define "God" as a being that offers you psychic strength, succor, and increased verve, under certain prescribed conditions.

Given that:

A) There is no scientific evidence to suggest that God or any other such being actually exists as a spiritual entity outside the imagination of human beings.

and

B) You did subjectively feel the "presence" and comfort of God, in your mind, without the aid of any foreign substance, and you did receive the aforementioned psychological benefits.

...then

C) Your mind itself possesses (or possessed) the capacity to "simulate" the effects of "God" under certain conditions.

Furthermore we observe that this potential can be locked and unlocked in the same individual.

What, precisely, is the key? Is it just a set of personal behaviors? The right combination and you're back in? Or is it dependent on environmental factors that are not within the individual's power to control?

Not a new idea or anything. It's been on my mind for years and it has been on our collective mind for centuries. But I haven't actually tried very hard at tinkering with it in my personal life, as least not with sustained effort. So I've been doing some conscious research into other people's attempts. And now I'm trying out a few things of my own fabrication. Which I will never again mention if they are all failures, of course.


3) Along the same lines. Is it possible to simulate belief in God effectively* without also simulating the promise of heaven or some other form of continuation or non-obliterational endgame?

Furthermore, is the distinction (between the presence of God and the promise of heaven) actually even important, in the practical sense? I am thinking it might not be, with the right behavior set. But I don't know.


This looks like a high-flown runaround, an empty exercise in bullcrap, I'm sure. Don't mistake me for a purist, though, or a snob. If I were personally able to approximate this end through easier/conventional means (I have tried--long story), I would no longer waste my time on the question of how to live without crutches. The idea would still intrigue me, I admit... the notion is a pretty one. But I think I've reached the point at which one recognizes--in this case, with a jolt--how vital it is simply to get better, stat.

Speaking of pain...

Earlier this year I was hospitalized for an emergency body-part failure and surgery. It's not really important what failed, just that I'd be dead right now if it weren't for modern medicine (I'd have died already as a kid for similar reasons, like so many of us, so now I'm doubly not-even-supposed-to-be-here-today).

Dante's lament

Anyhow, in the hospital I found out that I don't respond to morphine (this isn't very unusual; I just found it an interesting experience to go through); it doesn't actually decrease pain whatsoever for me, just makes my skin crawl and my already-rock-bottom BP drop off a cliff. For reasons I don't understand at all, I do respond well to hydromorphone, though (Dilaudid). I'd never taken anything like that before, so I was shocked when the injection actually removed all my pain--not just the physical, but the psychic pain as well.

My first thought was "So this is why people do heroin..."

My second was "So that's how much I carry around, all the time."

It wasn't until the omni-present burden was lifted momentarily from my back that I realized I am not just a wuss, that it really weighs a fucking fuck-ton.

Man, that was a shining hour--one I'll remember for the rest of my life.

The next dose wasn't so powerful. And the third barely worked at all.

I mean, I don't wanna get all Terence McKenna on your asses here. A great many substances just aren't worth the risk and shouldn't be messed with (in my opinion as a callow watcher-of-many-dabblers). But the only answer to the "great question" is that life is comprised of a series of--ultimately--meaningless stimuli, a great many of them painful. And that pain is magnified according to the perceptual and analytic acuity of your noodle.

So.

Waste it in pain, or do what you gotta do and live.

---

Without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived; though even if these were false, it would still be true that I loved false things. For how could I justly be blamed and prohibited from loving false things, if it were false that I loved them? But, since they are true and real, who doubts that when they are loved, the love of them is itself true and real? Further, as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not wish to be. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?

     -St. Augustine, The City of God

---
*By that I mean to hack yourself into functioning as if you believed in a real God or god-substitute via conforming to a set of behaviors meant to approximate the benefits of religion/spirituality, while remaining actually unconvinced/non-believing, AND that this mimicked/approximated belief results in sustainable increases in joy, motivation, childlike/mindful contentment, as well as decreased negative affectivity. Apologies for the ungainly sentence. I am going to go eat a sandwich.

the urge to rearrange

JK Rowling today on Charlie Rose:

"The urge to write often comes from the urge to rearrange reality, the world we're in."

(I scribbled that down on the fly, will have to check for precise accuracy later.)

I don't often like to comment on physical appearances, because they don't mean the same thing to me as they seem to mean to other people... but I think Rowling is just exquisitely beautiful, inside and out, especially the older and wiser she has gotten. Obviously the blonde color is fake, as are the soft, elfin curls she's wearing today on the show... but it's all just a pageant anyhow... costumes, beauty, clothes, the way we present ourselves. It all feels false and drag-like to me, everybody's self-presentation. I just like the way she's doing it. It suits her personality so well (sharp, brilliant, lovely).

I've spent so much of my life chameleon-like, playing different roles while wearing different costumes. Watching her makes me feel even more solidified in my wish to find the skin that really fits me, and finally play myself.

Haha, first world problems.

more consumption-spurred ramblings: joy division, dfw

This album art is actually graphical data from "80 successive pulses of the first observed pulsar."

I first found Joy Division by entering the word "disorder" into a file sharing service at age 19, while in a major funk. I downloaded* the resulting song and it stuck with me. It was exactly what my whimsical fingers had ordered. Appropriately enough, it was the first song on their first ever album.

I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand, 

Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man? 

These sensations barely interest me for another day, 

I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away. 

It's getting faster, moving faster now, it's getting out of hand, 

On the tenth floor, down the back stairs, it's a no man's land, 

Lights are flashing, cars are crashing, getting frequent now, 

I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, let it out somehow. 

What means to you, what means to me, and we will meet again, 

I'm watching you, I'm watching her, I'll take no pity from you friends,

Who is right, who can tell, and who gives a damn right now, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling, 

I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling, 

Feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling.

I didn't learn that Ian Curtis had killed himself until 2008--several years after that little file-sharing foray-- when I had an older acquaintance who was really into Joy Division and went rattling on with band facts whenever he was depressed, which was increasingly frequently, especially after another mutual acquaintance of ours actually went and offed herself.

There's no particular well-thought-out point I'm winding toward in delivering this random life history factoid. I guess JD lyrics--especially combined with the dysphoria of the accompanying music--remind me of the way DFW wrote during certain periods of his life. And he and Curtis did die by pretty much precisely the same means, I guess, although that juicy bit wasn't really on my mind when I started out writing this. Maybe it's just that when I get to thinking about mortality and shit I tend to gambol around with mini shades-of-Proust until disappearing with them into my own belly button.

Anyway.

I never got to be a big fan of Joy Division specifically because of that aforementioned dysphoric feeling--sometimes it's just too much noise on top of the noise I've already got going on, especially at the life-junctures during which those types of lyrics most appeal to me (New Order is far more accessible--probably a common fan refrain). But I always felt that their songs were a good approximation for how it felt to be me, inside my own poor head.

This part (p. 60) of DFW's bio reminded me of that feeling... the feeling conjured up by art that strives to recreate in the consumer/patron/user the feeling of the original, described experience:

Minimalist stories gave the reader little experience of what it was like to be assaulted the way in real life their characters would be. They were effectively unease recollected in tranquility. While Wallace certainly knew what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the stimuli of modern life--indeed his response to them when under stress was more extreme than anyone knew--this was not his stance when he recreated experience. As a writer, he was a folder-in and includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America.

Bolding mine. I love that phrase: "unease recollected in tranquility." Good job again, Max. You're a stand-up chap.

That impression of bombardment--or total immersion in disorder--is certainly present in Infinite Jest.** It is just more tolerable to me because it isn't auditory, that's all.

Joy Division - Disorder

---

* WHOOP WHOOP HELLO INTERPOL!!!

**Especially in the parts regarding the Incandenzas--particularly Hal and the tennis school--which are (to my recollection) also the parts that Max suggests may have been thought up or even partially composed around the period discussed in the above passage. I guess it's there with the Ken/Kate saga as well, but I don't actually feel that overwhelmed at being bombarded with everything I love (and a half).

excerpts from ELSIAGS: speechlessness, addicts, irony

I've now reached the part where we're the same age. :-)

Page 144:

"...he explained to Franzen, he was no longer an artist:

The problem's details are at once shameful to me and boring to anyone else. I always had great contempt for people who bitched and moaned about how 'hard' writing was, and how 'blockage' was a constant and looming threat. When I discovered writing in 1983, I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I'd not dared hope for from anything.

"He added, "I have in the last two years been struck dumb. . . . Not dumb, actually, or even aphasic. It's more like, w/r/t things I used to believe and let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams."

---

Page 156:

"America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied."

...

"Irony, as Wallace defined it, was not in and of itself bad. Indeed, irony was the traditional stance of the weak against the strong; there was power in implying what was too dangerous to say.... But irony got dangerous when it became a habit... He continued:

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing... [I]rony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

"That was it exactly--irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say. For Wallace, perhaps irony's most frightening implication was that it was user-neutral: with viewers everywhere conditioned by media to expect it, anyone could employ it to any end. What really upset him was when Burger King used irony to sell hamburgers, or Joe Isuzu, cars."

[My note: See again the essay "The Joke's on You" by Steve Almond, to which I linked on 7/23; this reminds me of it.]