Originally published on January 31, 1997
I am forwarding these two recent notes I sent to Steve (who has been remarkably steady in recent days after months of little to say), only because since I've been so busy and completely absorbed by Bracken's project my own e-mail generation had dropped to almost nothing. I didn't want you to think I had blown you off or anything as vulgar or self-preserving like that.
Quite the contrary. I've been feeling guilty and depressed that you've written interestingly on several topics that I failed to engage because of my current workload, while simultaneously neglecting my own hefty writing project describing those sordid details of the changing of the guard here at the Dollhouse.
Steve meanwhile weighed in with his interest in hearing more about the book project. You did not, but hey, you certainly caused a stir at the Situationist camp a few weeks back that I thought you might still appreciate a few details while they were still warm in the oven.
After a month of working diligently for someone else I had a few general Mac housekeeping chores to manage, a major crash to weather, and I am now on my eighth day of flu sickness without antibiotic calvary persuading me that the end of this misery is yet in sight. So I face the hiss and boos of the faceless crowd as I admit that still the first line of the "Great Storm" ending 1996 has yet to find its way to page, although this Sunday, Groundhog's Day will mark the first month's anniversary of Tim and Julianna's exile from the Dollhouse fevers.
Speaking of anniversaries, what day exactly do you turn 31 in all your sass and bosomly anthem? Have you managed to seduce a frozen Swede onto your corporate tab? Would you tell me if you did? You wouldn't be pulling a Jack, now would you Landry, all bathed in secret lights and bold rationalizations while flogging community standards with one hand tied behind your back and the other on a stack of sci-fi novels, with nothing but your feet and your mouth to accomplish the dirty deeds, now would you Landry?
Of course I jest with you, but you know as well as I do that in the eye of the hurricane, few details are lost. It's out there on the swirl that conflict states its name and bends the rules to suit its own game. But have a swell Minnesota memory. Nothing lasts forever, not even a Green bay Packers grin....
Showing posts with label Dollhouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dollhouse. Show all posts
Thursday, September 20, 2007
WHEW! IT'S OVER!
Originally published on January 22, 1997
Well, it's finally finished. The Debord book is packed off to Portland. Took data to service bureau to have my Syquest media converted to Zip, and printed out a color proof of the cover. Nearly a month's worth of work is in the can. Now I can address what happened over New Year's, settle back into my own themes, but first I need to awaken afresh. I am tired, needing a night's rest. Tomorrow I shall begin the prologue promised those long brackenish weeks ago. The details will no doubt seem shallow now, since most of you no doubt have struck conversations of some sort or another with the exiled in the meantime, but I am urged by inner demons and outer banks of fair recoil to capture the essence of my own perspectives. Thus I presume all of you are still interested in hearing these details, despite their tardiness, free from kneejerk but far from the thunder of that distant hour.
GT
Well, it's finally finished. The Debord book is packed off to Portland. Took data to service bureau to have my Syquest media converted to Zip, and printed out a color proof of the cover. Nearly a month's worth of work is in the can. Now I can address what happened over New Year's, settle back into my own themes, but first I need to awaken afresh. I am tired, needing a night's rest. Tomorrow I shall begin the prologue promised those long brackenish weeks ago. The details will no doubt seem shallow now, since most of you no doubt have struck conversations of some sort or another with the exiled in the meantime, but I am urged by inner demons and outer banks of fair recoil to capture the essence of my own perspectives. Thus I presume all of you are still interested in hearing these details, despite their tardiness, free from kneejerk but far from the thunder of that distant hour.
GT
COMPLAINT AS A YELLOW VEGETABLE
Originally published on January 8, 1997
Landry, Landry, Landry, Landry, Landry...
Yesterday you were giving DC the fat finger of ho! ho! ho! I love my California lifestyle, and a mere 24 later it's I miss the things California can't even begin to hug.
I can sympathize, but from where I sit, stifled in a room in which I cannot trust another, it's either Steve dropping beers, Tim squawking about what a good boy he is, or Suzy, a mere voyeur, nary a creator among them sweating me out, and in the midst of all this east coast fog in some variation of Tourettes, I suddenly swear on a stack of thunderbolts that your busty orbit must be a thousand increments swifter than this slow comet to nowhere sane I ride.
No sex, no friends with whom I share a commiseration, no freaking inspiration but my own irredeemable past no one else can even appreciate due to generational bias or just plain selfishness. Even Len Bracken's $500 publishing job is beginning to run its course. He said he wanted to learn PageMaker, but it's me putting his book together one drop cap at a time. But that's okay. That five bill windfall blows away all but Suzy's saintly efforts these past few years as I've worked for free so long I hardly know how to break with the "tis better to give than receive" dead end trail of “do unto others before they do unto you” routines smothering me into a gray soul of nothingness ventured these past thirteen DC years that I have finally agreed to despise for the trouble they really were. That includes the Jack years and the Tim years synthesized into one long Eighties decade, collectively the Yellow Years, now over...
I have yet to begin writing the piece on the Great Rupture of Dollhouse Status Quo of 1996, but hang in there, dearies. It promises to be bold and bawky as a politician behind closed doors, and to be the most brilliant synopsis of where I stand on the issues I will have written to date. Take me at my word. Mine enemies have yet to become acquainted with the visionary depths and sincerity of homegrown wrath.
Digging living alone is one thing, Landry. Manipulating beyond the call of duty to achieve it or its converse is yet another. I've worn those boots, and cannot feel proud. What exactly is a Buck Down poem in your book, Landry? It's a damned shame he & I live two blocks apart and still have never met, although Howellnyms still sells him herbal resolve as far as I know. That shining beacon of brown shoe hero was cut from the herd several months back. I now claim no day to day friends from that bygone era. The Tim and Jennifer show closed the door on that whole scene forever. Sorry to be so harsh, but the crimes of personality perpetrated for so long upon Dollhouse sensibilities are finally being addressed. We simply want a more honest, less “disturbed adolescent” cast of characters in our lives, even if that means zero is the translator of vox populi.
I do not want to scream in quiet neighborhoods. I want to draw quietude into the neighborhood noises of confusion, criminality, corruption, and hatred. I do not want a revolution or two or many that paralyze the good ears along with the bad ears. I want a revolution asserting that revolution begins and ends with the broken mirror of self-adjustment. You can't preach Boasism where all cultural mores are globally relative, thereby equally important and then claim how exploited the poor natives are in some remote neck of the woods, unblemished by cabbage patch dolls or fast food chains.
Now don't get me wrong. Capitalism and scientific preference as practiced by rightwing multinationals is as evil as the night is long, because nary of us wants to return to the cave this fiscal war machine with its nuclear factor is promising us, but then do we, the hip to almost any cause, middle class Americans think that shackaninny West By God Virginny coal miners just a few nails and rotten boards away from the caves themselves should simply be content with their obscene lot because that makes them closer to nature and the way MOST folk lived only a few centuries ago before capitalism and the Industrial Revolution catapaulted us into the age of universal materialism on one hand and the brute recognition of both our rich and our poor neighbor's lot on the other?
Sorry guys, the Julianna Nope & Len Bracken influences rear their ugly trumpets once again. Loud-mouthed liberalism, I repeat, despite its formidable attempts to rectify not a few horrific excesses of the conservative “might is right” rollcall, is simply not the salvation of mankind its hydraheaded constituents would have us believe. The radical middle, inheriting grace and dignity from both ends of the spectrum and discarding the aggression and filth of each, is the only smart approach that 21st century humanity can endorse, a global plan for unification of the planet, sailing straight into a vigorous segregation if need be...
Segregation you say? Hey man, gaze about, the world IS segregated!!! Even as a much ballyhooed white male I cannot mingle among the young and beautiful cliques without suffering their abrupt arrogances. I cannot, by virtue of exclusionary practices of those I would solicit, freely engage in sex, an act many honored minds have stipulated as the driving basis of a healthy psychology itself, the will to life, in Freudian terms. I cannot even buy love with a coin of a different sort of razzle dazzle, although many characters can and do.
I cannot walk among certain so-called neighborhoods without enduring verbal or physical harassment. I cannot even admit publically my favorite singer and poet without illiciting attacks of generational bias or something worse. Whether right or wrong, segregation is a very real fact of life. Conflict of interests is the number one cause of misunderstanding and subsequent belligerence of rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, dim and bright, fashionable and drab, power ethnic and undergrowth the world over.
Admitting this, why is a political, economical, or ecological plan which looks straight into the eye of the beast, recognizing these cold but unchanging facts, suddenly dismissed as intentionally unworkable, unconscionable, hell, as fire-breathing fascism, incorrigibly evil in its very articulation? These few paragraphs certainly are not a plan, but they do beg the question: why does liberalism fail to meet the needs of the many while seducing the many to despise a more conservative approach to battling the primary nature and nurture questions that simply won't evaporate in the context of a increasingly dissatisfied population where liberalism has reigned supreme for nearly a century in the most powerful goods-generated civilization on earth?
It's not the goods that corrupt. It's the cancerous envy growing inside us that corrupts, and that envy is a product of a greedy right wing metabolism and an irresponsible unfocussed leftwing behaviorism, and that, my sweets, is the problem, and no revolutionary chant, crisis, or convulsion, and no liberal tax abolition or redistribution scheme will suffer the idiots who continue to misrepresent human nature and deny the importance of a clear-minded nurture.
On both sides of the political equation where humanity is an irrational number, neither side proves its solution. Something must be done, and history has shown only a heavy hand ever gets anything done. But of course revisionists of every flavor always love to point to the past heavy hand and call it evil, thinking what THEY are doing today is oh so very different than what has passed by already on this long treacherous hike back up the mudslide mountains of yesterday.
GT
"Don't ask me nuthing about nuthing, I just might tell you the truth..." —Bob Dylan
Landry, Landry, Landry, Landry, Landry...
Yesterday you were giving DC the fat finger of ho! ho! ho! I love my California lifestyle, and a mere 24 later it's I miss the things California can't even begin to hug.
I can sympathize, but from where I sit, stifled in a room in which I cannot trust another, it's either Steve dropping beers, Tim squawking about what a good boy he is, or Suzy, a mere voyeur, nary a creator among them sweating me out, and in the midst of all this east coast fog in some variation of Tourettes, I suddenly swear on a stack of thunderbolts that your busty orbit must be a thousand increments swifter than this slow comet to nowhere sane I ride.
No sex, no friends with whom I share a commiseration, no freaking inspiration but my own irredeemable past no one else can even appreciate due to generational bias or just plain selfishness. Even Len Bracken's $500 publishing job is beginning to run its course. He said he wanted to learn PageMaker, but it's me putting his book together one drop cap at a time. But that's okay. That five bill windfall blows away all but Suzy's saintly efforts these past few years as I've worked for free so long I hardly know how to break with the "tis better to give than receive" dead end trail of “do unto others before they do unto you” routines smothering me into a gray soul of nothingness ventured these past thirteen DC years that I have finally agreed to despise for the trouble they really were. That includes the Jack years and the Tim years synthesized into one long Eighties decade, collectively the Yellow Years, now over...
I have yet to begin writing the piece on the Great Rupture of Dollhouse Status Quo of 1996, but hang in there, dearies. It promises to be bold and bawky as a politician behind closed doors, and to be the most brilliant synopsis of where I stand on the issues I will have written to date. Take me at my word. Mine enemies have yet to become acquainted with the visionary depths and sincerity of homegrown wrath.
Digging living alone is one thing, Landry. Manipulating beyond the call of duty to achieve it or its converse is yet another. I've worn those boots, and cannot feel proud. What exactly is a Buck Down poem in your book, Landry? It's a damned shame he & I live two blocks apart and still have never met, although Howellnyms still sells him herbal resolve as far as I know. That shining beacon of brown shoe hero was cut from the herd several months back. I now claim no day to day friends from that bygone era. The Tim and Jennifer show closed the door on that whole scene forever. Sorry to be so harsh, but the crimes of personality perpetrated for so long upon Dollhouse sensibilities are finally being addressed. We simply want a more honest, less “disturbed adolescent” cast of characters in our lives, even if that means zero is the translator of vox populi.
I do not want to scream in quiet neighborhoods. I want to draw quietude into the neighborhood noises of confusion, criminality, corruption, and hatred. I do not want a revolution or two or many that paralyze the good ears along with the bad ears. I want a revolution asserting that revolution begins and ends with the broken mirror of self-adjustment. You can't preach Boasism where all cultural mores are globally relative, thereby equally important and then claim how exploited the poor natives are in some remote neck of the woods, unblemished by cabbage patch dolls or fast food chains.
Now don't get me wrong. Capitalism and scientific preference as practiced by rightwing multinationals is as evil as the night is long, because nary of us wants to return to the cave this fiscal war machine with its nuclear factor is promising us, but then do we, the hip to almost any cause, middle class Americans think that shackaninny West By God Virginny coal miners just a few nails and rotten boards away from the caves themselves should simply be content with their obscene lot because that makes them closer to nature and the way MOST folk lived only a few centuries ago before capitalism and the Industrial Revolution catapaulted us into the age of universal materialism on one hand and the brute recognition of both our rich and our poor neighbor's lot on the other?
Sorry guys, the Julianna Nope & Len Bracken influences rear their ugly trumpets once again. Loud-mouthed liberalism, I repeat, despite its formidable attempts to rectify not a few horrific excesses of the conservative “might is right” rollcall, is simply not the salvation of mankind its hydraheaded constituents would have us believe. The radical middle, inheriting grace and dignity from both ends of the spectrum and discarding the aggression and filth of each, is the only smart approach that 21st century humanity can endorse, a global plan for unification of the planet, sailing straight into a vigorous segregation if need be...
Segregation you say? Hey man, gaze about, the world IS segregated!!! Even as a much ballyhooed white male I cannot mingle among the young and beautiful cliques without suffering their abrupt arrogances. I cannot, by virtue of exclusionary practices of those I would solicit, freely engage in sex, an act many honored minds have stipulated as the driving basis of a healthy psychology itself, the will to life, in Freudian terms. I cannot even buy love with a coin of a different sort of razzle dazzle, although many characters can and do.
I cannot walk among certain so-called neighborhoods without enduring verbal or physical harassment. I cannot even admit publically my favorite singer and poet without illiciting attacks of generational bias or something worse. Whether right or wrong, segregation is a very real fact of life. Conflict of interests is the number one cause of misunderstanding and subsequent belligerence of rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, dim and bright, fashionable and drab, power ethnic and undergrowth the world over.
Admitting this, why is a political, economical, or ecological plan which looks straight into the eye of the beast, recognizing these cold but unchanging facts, suddenly dismissed as intentionally unworkable, unconscionable, hell, as fire-breathing fascism, incorrigibly evil in its very articulation? These few paragraphs certainly are not a plan, but they do beg the question: why does liberalism fail to meet the needs of the many while seducing the many to despise a more conservative approach to battling the primary nature and nurture questions that simply won't evaporate in the context of a increasingly dissatisfied population where liberalism has reigned supreme for nearly a century in the most powerful goods-generated civilization on earth?
It's not the goods that corrupt. It's the cancerous envy growing inside us that corrupts, and that envy is a product of a greedy right wing metabolism and an irresponsible unfocussed leftwing behaviorism, and that, my sweets, is the problem, and no revolutionary chant, crisis, or convulsion, and no liberal tax abolition or redistribution scheme will suffer the idiots who continue to misrepresent human nature and deny the importance of a clear-minded nurture.
On both sides of the political equation where humanity is an irrational number, neither side proves its solution. Something must be done, and history has shown only a heavy hand ever gets anything done. But of course revisionists of every flavor always love to point to the past heavy hand and call it evil, thinking what THEY are doing today is oh so very different than what has passed by already on this long treacherous hike back up the mudslide mountains of yesterday.
GT
"Don't ask me nuthing about nuthing, I just might tell you the truth..." —Bob Dylan
THE APPLE, THE WORM, THE DRIP
Hey Landry,
Jack was the one we all suspected was going to fly high, but somehow it always broke down with him. I don't know why specifically, although a major contributing factor in my mind is that crack thing he's got. A consistant need to pound drugs is obviously bad news for most gonzos. And like most gonzos Jack feels immune to these special dangers, and always feels like he can rise above any problems just in the nick of time. But time is merciless, and all I'm saying is I hope Jack steers clear of most of that garbage out there in his new start.
Yes, we had a little run in about that shit. He hasn't done it very often and I blew up so bad the last time to the point where he was obviously ashamed. If it happens again, I doubt I will give him a second chance. I just think it is throwing your money away in addition to being a waste of time. I am at a stage in my life where I just don't want to deal with that crap no how any which way, zero tolerance, no more turning the cheek in allowing lurkers to run roughshod.
Suzy and I are hopping the Amtrak up New York City this weekend to make the rounds with an old friend, Julianna Nope. Jack knows her at a distance. Up close, who knows anyone? We are each mere fractals of our true self.
Working on her doctorate in social anthropology—Jules just got notice of acceptance to Cornell—so she will be moving to Ithaca in upper state within a few weeks. The past two years at the New School have left at the freezeline of parental support, but this Cornell package carries with it an $8K annual stipend, so she’s set for pocket flash, but observes the town of Ithaca as an eerie hovel, full of strange hippy looking people, no strip malls, no 7-11s, nothing but a few docile streets, a couple of schools, and hills to kill for if one happened to be a skate punk. She’s not, however, and without a car, is already sweating the cold icy strides up and down those inclines, fretting she'll hate it, if she survives it.
Julianna is still rather gothic in appearance and outlook, can’t squelch the hipsterific riot grrrl stirring inside her, although she’s embraced an academic mindset, is quite the scholar, dean’s list et al, and seething to escape the stranglehold of her past. This weekend should be fantastic now that the heat wave in which we suffered 95-100 degree weather for three days straight has pissed off and new highs in the low 70s are expected. Her lower Lex Ave walk-up of course is slack on AC, and I suppose you don't have one either. I understand there are few of them on the SF Bay. But here at the Dollhouse climate control is ALWAYS a cool calculation.
Well, gotta go start some dinner. I’m blackening some salmon steaks tonight, although Tim is chewing top sirloin because he avoids seafood. The lad pays us a flat rate per as a dinner guest, so if living here boosts Tim's self-esteem and his sense of responsibility a notch or two as he claims and keeps him off heroin as he says it is doing, then I suppose we can all feel grateful that this particular opportunity knocked. His extra money helps keep us on monthly budget and out of hock, so it seems to be working all around, although of course I've had to stand firm on a few principles Tim would conveniently fail to understand, but I should brag in his name that these moments have been few thus far. I guess he's been here eight weeks on Friday. Jack only lasted three days when he returned from Germany, frying my patience before he bolted up to Diane and Adrian’s to squander his small forture with them.
Such are the crass ironies of a well-circulated life, eh Landry? Hope all this psychodrip suits you. It's what I do when I write, and when I am alone wrestling with my thoughts, or wife. My style often takes the form of a complaint. But in all honesty, I am that I am...
GT
Jack was the one we all suspected was going to fly high, but somehow it always broke down with him. I don't know why specifically, although a major contributing factor in my mind is that crack thing he's got. A consistant need to pound drugs is obviously bad news for most gonzos. And like most gonzos Jack feels immune to these special dangers, and always feels like he can rise above any problems just in the nick of time. But time is merciless, and all I'm saying is I hope Jack steers clear of most of that garbage out there in his new start.
Yes, we had a little run in about that shit. He hasn't done it very often and I blew up so bad the last time to the point where he was obviously ashamed. If it happens again, I doubt I will give him a second chance. I just think it is throwing your money away in addition to being a waste of time. I am at a stage in my life where I just don't want to deal with that crap no how any which way, zero tolerance, no more turning the cheek in allowing lurkers to run roughshod.
Suzy and I are hopping the Amtrak up New York City this weekend to make the rounds with an old friend, Julianna Nope. Jack knows her at a distance. Up close, who knows anyone? We are each mere fractals of our true self.
Working on her doctorate in social anthropology—Jules just got notice of acceptance to Cornell—so she will be moving to Ithaca in upper state within a few weeks. The past two years at the New School have left at the freezeline of parental support, but this Cornell package carries with it an $8K annual stipend, so she’s set for pocket flash, but observes the town of Ithaca as an eerie hovel, full of strange hippy looking people, no strip malls, no 7-11s, nothing but a few docile streets, a couple of schools, and hills to kill for if one happened to be a skate punk. She’s not, however, and without a car, is already sweating the cold icy strides up and down those inclines, fretting she'll hate it, if she survives it.
Julianna is still rather gothic in appearance and outlook, can’t squelch the hipsterific riot grrrl stirring inside her, although she’s embraced an academic mindset, is quite the scholar, dean’s list et al, and seething to escape the stranglehold of her past. This weekend should be fantastic now that the heat wave in which we suffered 95-100 degree weather for three days straight has pissed off and new highs in the low 70s are expected. Her lower Lex Ave walk-up of course is slack on AC, and I suppose you don't have one either. I understand there are few of them on the SF Bay. But here at the Dollhouse climate control is ALWAYS a cool calculation.
Well, gotta go start some dinner. I’m blackening some salmon steaks tonight, although Tim is chewing top sirloin because he avoids seafood. The lad pays us a flat rate per as a dinner guest, so if living here boosts Tim's self-esteem and his sense of responsibility a notch or two as he claims and keeps him off heroin as he says it is doing, then I suppose we can all feel grateful that this particular opportunity knocked. His extra money helps keep us on monthly budget and out of hock, so it seems to be working all around, although of course I've had to stand firm on a few principles Tim would conveniently fail to understand, but I should brag in his name that these moments have been few thus far. I guess he's been here eight weeks on Friday. Jack only lasted three days when he returned from Germany, frying my patience before he bolted up to Diane and Adrian’s to squander his small forture with them.
Such are the crass ironies of a well-circulated life, eh Landry? Hope all this psychodrip suits you. It's what I do when I write, and when I am alone wrestling with my thoughts, or wife. My style often takes the form of a complaint. But in all honesty, I am that I am...
GT
Monday, September 17, 2007
BREAKING ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE
Originally published on December 27, 1996
A note to newcomers. Steve and I work this ruthless game of acronymics which simultaneously insults and delights us as we plug in words to match or extend our given initials. Another variation on this passionate and rich wordplay is the psychology-based or habit-driven puns we derive from a combination of two people's names who share a discernable time-revealed psychological or sociological habit. For instance, to pull a STIM (a combination Steve and Tim habit) might be spilling a beer in a no no situation, or since Gabriel is not so free from this ghastly flaw himself, we might call that "pulling a GAST!"
There is the STOO (Steve, Tim, and Sue), say anything do nothing approach to sliding past a particularly debilitating lethargy. Or in Sue and Tim's case, the SIM, responding to a question with a self-evident answer while missing the point of the question entirely.
A GOO (Gabriel & Sue) work til we drop modis operandi fat ass config. If Tim were ever to develope this habit around the Dollhouse we might redub this event a GOOTS. A STAB (Steve & Gabriel) qualifies as fast as lightening, smartest in the room, analysis a million ways to Mars approach to daily murmuring. A JENSET (completely in love with themselves, immensely and publically proud of their own physical prowess, beauty, and sense of fashion). We can extend this into a STACK (Steve, Tim, and Jack), a tendancy to usurp, and add Gabriel with his barroom boorishness to that mix, and you've got simply a GASTACK, or a SETSTACK might indicate a fast-talking never say die 'tude. A JOO (Jack & Sue) can be summed up as the cult of the secret fucksters. And on and on. Of course we can all say "we pulled a PETER..." once or twice in our lives.
This game originally evolved to its brutally hybrid level one afternoon down in the basement as I was chatting with Steve and Sue. Tim was elsewhere, but I had fallen into a strange habit of late in saying Tim when I meant Steve, saying Tom when I meant Tim. It was wild, creepy, megahaunting thing, and explainable perhaps only with an example taken from baseball history.
Occasionally, and it's happened enough times in history to not beg disbelief, including to this writer in his own youthful baseball days, that a player suddenly can't throw the ball in the particular fundamental routine he had long ago mastered. Most recently a young catcher on the New York Mets named Mackey Hatcher suddenly could not return the ball to the pitcher without doublepumping his arm. His throws to the bases, say to second on a steal attempt was not affected, but over a several year period this phenomenon continued to plague Hatcher's game. Somewtimes it goes away as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared. Hatcher eventually lost his starting job to another catcher, and unfortunately I don't know what happened to his career since Hundley replaced him.
However, I developed a similar affliction when trying out for second base on a new team after our family moved to a new town in a different county where nobody knew my name or past stardom. I threw the ball fifteen, no exaggeration, feet over the first basemen's head every damned time I fielded a ground ball. It was preposterous, daunting, downright wicked and demonic to this hopeful infield candidate. I knew at fourteen that I had somehow, for some mystical reason beyond my grasp, succumbed to this strange affliction I had read about somewhere as I voraciously consumed all sports data I could plow my eyes through. But I really wanted to win that second base job. I did not want to get stuck in the outfield, which is where I ended up, so this was no pretend thing. I was a star athlete the previous year, and would do okay this summer, but during this spring tryout this mysterious baseball fluster swooped in and blew any opportunity for infielder status I had in front of these strangers in the new town. Needless to say, none of these kids or the adult coach were hip to this odd baseball phenomenon, and I knew there was no need to explain it. A second baseman is worthless if he can't thud the first baseman after a groundball is hit his way, even if it isn't his own fault.
And so here again in another life, I was experiencing this rather strange onset of a similar type of failure. Why I suddenly could not look at Steve and call his name was baffling. I had known him for a couple of years, and Tim a decade, Tom even longer, but the phenomenon never failed to appear during this period of mixing their names. Some deeply disturbing psychology robots must have been poking and probing the hardwired Gabriel much the same way search engine robots work the Internet, upsetting my throughput. This game of ours was destined to be willed into existence. For on this particular afternoon as I was looking right at Steve and Sue and referring to in a quite obvious way to Tim, I stumbled over S-T, stuh, catching myself, switched gears, finished with I-M, and STIM was born because at that very instant Gabriel and Steve both realized the communication or literary genius of the tongue slip, and Sue followed in a little slower, but we all shared a great meglomaniacal guffaw since the reference I now forget could have just as easily been describing Steve. Well, we spent the next few hours racing up and down the possibilities like a rabid dog trapped in a narrow dog run. Once again, genius had won out over routine expectations.
So where were we?
A note to newcomers. Steve and I work this ruthless game of acronymics which simultaneously insults and delights us as we plug in words to match or extend our given initials. Another variation on this passionate and rich wordplay is the psychology-based or habit-driven puns we derive from a combination of two people's names who share a discernable time-revealed psychological or sociological habit. For instance, to pull a STIM (a combination Steve and Tim habit) might be spilling a beer in a no no situation, or since Gabriel is not so free from this ghastly flaw himself, we might call that "pulling a GAST!"
There is the STOO (Steve, Tim, and Sue), say anything do nothing approach to sliding past a particularly debilitating lethargy. Or in Sue and Tim's case, the SIM, responding to a question with a self-evident answer while missing the point of the question entirely.
A GOO (Gabriel & Sue) work til we drop modis operandi fat ass config. If Tim were ever to develope this habit around the Dollhouse we might redub this event a GOOTS. A STAB (Steve & Gabriel) qualifies as fast as lightening, smartest in the room, analysis a million ways to Mars approach to daily murmuring. A JENSET (completely in love with themselves, immensely and publically proud of their own physical prowess, beauty, and sense of fashion). We can extend this into a STACK (Steve, Tim, and Jack), a tendancy to usurp, and add Gabriel with his barroom boorishness to that mix, and you've got simply a GASTACK, or a SETSTACK might indicate a fast-talking never say die 'tude. A JOO (Jack & Sue) can be summed up as the cult of the secret fucksters. And on and on. Of course we can all say "we pulled a PETER..." once or twice in our lives.
This game originally evolved to its brutally hybrid level one afternoon down in the basement as I was chatting with Steve and Sue. Tim was elsewhere, but I had fallen into a strange habit of late in saying Tim when I meant Steve, saying Tom when I meant Tim. It was wild, creepy, megahaunting thing, and explainable perhaps only with an example taken from baseball history.
Occasionally, and it's happened enough times in history to not beg disbelief, including to this writer in his own youthful baseball days, that a player suddenly can't throw the ball in the particular fundamental routine he had long ago mastered. Most recently a young catcher on the New York Mets named Mackey Hatcher suddenly could not return the ball to the pitcher without doublepumping his arm. His throws to the bases, say to second on a steal attempt was not affected, but over a several year period this phenomenon continued to plague Hatcher's game. Somewtimes it goes away as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared. Hatcher eventually lost his starting job to another catcher, and unfortunately I don't know what happened to his career since Hundley replaced him.
However, I developed a similar affliction when trying out for second base on a new team after our family moved to a new town in a different county where nobody knew my name or past stardom. I threw the ball fifteen, no exaggeration, feet over the first basemen's head every damned time I fielded a ground ball. It was preposterous, daunting, downright wicked and demonic to this hopeful infield candidate. I knew at fourteen that I had somehow, for some mystical reason beyond my grasp, succumbed to this strange affliction I had read about somewhere as I voraciously consumed all sports data I could plow my eyes through. But I really wanted to win that second base job. I did not want to get stuck in the outfield, which is where I ended up, so this was no pretend thing. I was a star athlete the previous year, and would do okay this summer, but during this spring tryout this mysterious baseball fluster swooped in and blew any opportunity for infielder status I had in front of these strangers in the new town. Needless to say, none of these kids or the adult coach were hip to this odd baseball phenomenon, and I knew there was no need to explain it. A second baseman is worthless if he can't thud the first baseman after a groundball is hit his way, even if it isn't his own fault.
And so here again in another life, I was experiencing this rather strange onset of a similar type of failure. Why I suddenly could not look at Steve and call his name was baffling. I had known him for a couple of years, and Tim a decade, Tom even longer, but the phenomenon never failed to appear during this period of mixing their names. Some deeply disturbing psychology robots must have been poking and probing the hardwired Gabriel much the same way search engine robots work the Internet, upsetting my throughput. This game of ours was destined to be willed into existence. For on this particular afternoon as I was looking right at Steve and Sue and referring to in a quite obvious way to Tim, I stumbled over S-T, stuh, catching myself, switched gears, finished with I-M, and STIM was born because at that very instant Gabriel and Steve both realized the communication or literary genius of the tongue slip, and Sue followed in a little slower, but we all shared a great meglomaniacal guffaw since the reference I now forget could have just as easily been describing Steve. Well, we spent the next few hours racing up and down the possibilities like a rabid dog trapped in a narrow dog run. Once again, genius had won out over routine expectations.
So where were we?
ONE FLU OUT (WHEN IN ROAM...)
Originally published on December 27, 1996
Read your incredulous note in the wee hours this morning after a full day of Bracken's breath yesterday, finishing up his Debord photoscanning. Ninety-nine pictures of Frenchy fried brains in all...today we work on converting his text to Mac format, and probably some PageMaker work will do us until after the New Year.
I will be busy with work, guests, and doctor's appointments until after the new year so I guess I'll see you down the road in 1997. Had enough of this say anything, do nothing camp for one year, if not a lifetime. In other words, try these on for size SAST. Stay Away Steve Taylor. Sick And Steve Tired. And between the two of us, you won't be missing anything you haven't already mastered.
Our limosine plans are now quite iffy. Our friend, the owner, was rushed to the hospital Christmas Eve, spent the whole next day having tests run to no conclusive end. He was released sometime yesterday. Still no solid lead on a driver, but Sue has a maybe up her sleeve. Since you cannot resist playing coy with details on your end, I think we should simply disengage. In Dollhouse vernacular, I am pulling a Blumstein of 1986 (sic) by disinviting you for that holiday drive in the jingle jungle jangle which may not even happen anywaze, and ALL activities sandwiching the wild duck. You deal with the consequences on your end. I'll deal with them on this end. Hey, that's the way we've been playing the game all this time anyway, right? Very little teamwork, a whole lotta garbage mouth, promises, vows, big plans, narcissistic meanderings, hip to hop to hap flap we go, to ground zero where nothing ever happens but an effort to cheat the chatter of reality. Can't play that man. That seems to be your game, and I just can't deal with it for the next few weeks, hey even months. As for you seeing Jennifer, if she wants, she can meet you elsewhere, but I am commandeering control of the Dollhouse at this point in time, and as SAST, you simply can't seem to commit to anything but the moment, and then the moment's gone...
You want me to toss the ball around with you in the coming months before Howrey hits the diamond in the rough? Well, I will honor that commitment even as you struggle with pecking order on your side of the moral equation. Meanwhile I am still GT. Yesterday I invited Bracken to join us at the cage. Len's quite the sportsman himself, although I think his game of choice is the game of hoops. But now you hint that you may not even break spring training wind as you may spin off to web wonderland in the taunting twists of fate we both can appreciate for its razzle and its dazzle, but only one of us will be worn to a frazzle chasing the dreams of the other. And I think we know who that person is. Good luck, and get well, Steve, of winter aches and gains, and this enfilading brain seizure gripping your soul, a hellava ride, but one always threatening to spin outa control...
Sometimes friendship is only a foul investment in the trickle down nonsense of time's ruthless monopoly. Sometimes it is GOD.
I drugged up last night with a handful of pills and a swallowful of green death as I too felt the oncoming freight train of disease approacheth. This morning I am groggy but clear minded on the issues. Read this note twice, read it five times if you must, but read it clearly. Gabriel is marking SAST up for insubordination, NOT FOR SPILLING BEER TWICE, NOT FOR ALL THE FAIR ARGUMENTS YOU PLACE UPON MY NECK, HEY, NOT FOR ANYTHING YOU HAVE OVERTLY ACHIEVED, BUT, BUT, BUT, FOR WHAT YOU HAVE COVERTLY IGNORED IN THIS SHORT AFTERMATH OF THE PLANNING STAGES OF THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER THING...
Sorry we won't have the opportunity to meet Della, but then, DID WE EVER?
I too am resolved to take better care of myself, starting RIGHT now. Hence all these doctor's appointments. Hosting the Steve Taylor Straight Past Sunday Show at the Dollhouse DOES NOT improve my chances for achieving this goal. Sorry my take on world events differs so much from your own; the harsh dovetones of this note are not easy for me, because you are very dear to me, but fact is stronger than fiction, and fiction is what we seemingly feast upon to help ourselves get through another speeding mist of mindswirl. So please, do me this favor, leave me alone. Let ME play it by ear, hearing nothing and all things simultaneously in damned well due time to prove whether or not I can survive your toying serpentlike silences. Bracken will soon be gone, as well may Shipman in the beckoning future of Dollhouse fates. Needless to say, there are plots and counterplots already in the works. Meanwhile I will light a candle to wedge into my ass for all eternity for each of my adversarial friends, each who believe in their deepest of competitive souls that they possess something of vigorously vital interest to me. That's just not so. I cannot sustain the conflicting desires of conflicted minds without losing my own endowments to the howling winds of inconstancy. I might even boast that I have history on my side in these abrupt appraisals, my friend. You play it by ear, so now hear this: STAY AWAY STEVE TAYLOR BECAUSE GT IS SICK AND STEVE TIRED! Is that enough SAST for you? Maybe these are my fevers making themselves known in words today. Test them as I know you shall, but be aware, not a line on this page is bogus.
Read your incredulous note in the wee hours this morning after a full day of Bracken's breath yesterday, finishing up his Debord photoscanning. Ninety-nine pictures of Frenchy fried brains in all...today we work on converting his text to Mac format, and probably some PageMaker work will do us until after the New Year.
I will be busy with work, guests, and doctor's appointments until after the new year so I guess I'll see you down the road in 1997. Had enough of this say anything, do nothing camp for one year, if not a lifetime. In other words, try these on for size SAST. Stay Away Steve Taylor. Sick And Steve Tired. And between the two of us, you won't be missing anything you haven't already mastered.
Our limosine plans are now quite iffy. Our friend, the owner, was rushed to the hospital Christmas Eve, spent the whole next day having tests run to no conclusive end. He was released sometime yesterday. Still no solid lead on a driver, but Sue has a maybe up her sleeve. Since you cannot resist playing coy with details on your end, I think we should simply disengage. In Dollhouse vernacular, I am pulling a Blumstein of 1986 (sic) by disinviting you for that holiday drive in the jingle jungle jangle which may not even happen anywaze, and ALL activities sandwiching the wild duck. You deal with the consequences on your end. I'll deal with them on this end. Hey, that's the way we've been playing the game all this time anyway, right? Very little teamwork, a whole lotta garbage mouth, promises, vows, big plans, narcissistic meanderings, hip to hop to hap flap we go, to ground zero where nothing ever happens but an effort to cheat the chatter of reality. Can't play that man. That seems to be your game, and I just can't deal with it for the next few weeks, hey even months. As for you seeing Jennifer, if she wants, she can meet you elsewhere, but I am commandeering control of the Dollhouse at this point in time, and as SAST, you simply can't seem to commit to anything but the moment, and then the moment's gone...
You want me to toss the ball around with you in the coming months before Howrey hits the diamond in the rough? Well, I will honor that commitment even as you struggle with pecking order on your side of the moral equation. Meanwhile I am still GT. Yesterday I invited Bracken to join us at the cage. Len's quite the sportsman himself, although I think his game of choice is the game of hoops. But now you hint that you may not even break spring training wind as you may spin off to web wonderland in the taunting twists of fate we both can appreciate for its razzle and its dazzle, but only one of us will be worn to a frazzle chasing the dreams of the other. And I think we know who that person is. Good luck, and get well, Steve, of winter aches and gains, and this enfilading brain seizure gripping your soul, a hellava ride, but one always threatening to spin outa control...
Sometimes friendship is only a foul investment in the trickle down nonsense of time's ruthless monopoly. Sometimes it is GOD.
I drugged up last night with a handful of pills and a swallowful of green death as I too felt the oncoming freight train of disease approacheth. This morning I am groggy but clear minded on the issues. Read this note twice, read it five times if you must, but read it clearly. Gabriel is marking SAST up for insubordination, NOT FOR SPILLING BEER TWICE, NOT FOR ALL THE FAIR ARGUMENTS YOU PLACE UPON MY NECK, HEY, NOT FOR ANYTHING YOU HAVE OVERTLY ACHIEVED, BUT, BUT, BUT, FOR WHAT YOU HAVE COVERTLY IGNORED IN THIS SHORT AFTERMATH OF THE PLANNING STAGES OF THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER THING...
Sorry we won't have the opportunity to meet Della, but then, DID WE EVER?
I too am resolved to take better care of myself, starting RIGHT now. Hence all these doctor's appointments. Hosting the Steve Taylor Straight Past Sunday Show at the Dollhouse DOES NOT improve my chances for achieving this goal. Sorry my take on world events differs so much from your own; the harsh dovetones of this note are not easy for me, because you are very dear to me, but fact is stronger than fiction, and fiction is what we seemingly feast upon to help ourselves get through another speeding mist of mindswirl. So please, do me this favor, leave me alone. Let ME play it by ear, hearing nothing and all things simultaneously in damned well due time to prove whether or not I can survive your toying serpentlike silences. Bracken will soon be gone, as well may Shipman in the beckoning future of Dollhouse fates. Needless to say, there are plots and counterplots already in the works. Meanwhile I will light a candle to wedge into my ass for all eternity for each of my adversarial friends, each who believe in their deepest of competitive souls that they possess something of vigorously vital interest to me. That's just not so. I cannot sustain the conflicting desires of conflicted minds without losing my own endowments to the howling winds of inconstancy. I might even boast that I have history on my side in these abrupt appraisals, my friend. You play it by ear, so now hear this: STAY AWAY STEVE TAYLOR BECAUSE GT IS SICK AND STEVE TIRED! Is that enough SAST for you? Maybe these are my fevers making themselves known in words today. Test them as I know you shall, but be aware, not a line on this page is bogus.
Monday, August 20, 2007
IT ALL ADDS UP, SUBTRACTS DOWN
Most excellent letter. Every note sounded to perfection!
I think you are coming around to wherever the line meets its maker. Thank you for noticing my lead. Am disturbing the peace upstairs today. Want to put some sleeper of sorts back into that corner. One ficus tree has major bug infestation spreading a jelly substance up its leaves and a thimbleful smudging that far north window. The other one had the beginnings of that rot on some newer sprigs nearer the trunk but I think by pruning them I might have chased away the culprit. As far as my life goes I don't claim to be any great shakes. I am merely following up on what feels most natural at any given moment. Just like yourself, Sue, Tim, and nearly every other grain of sand from here to as far as the mind can predict.
eRighteously in pursuit of a point of view, I was in persistent boil last night. Mostly over Tim, Steve, and Sue in that order, debrewing & stewing coursewise the baseball game Sue had channeled onto all TVs on the middlefloor much to my sour delight by the time I returned from Hechinger's with dirt and manure, a few more seeds, and a bulb to stick in a socket, knowing a kissup she denied, once twice, three times a cock crow. I ranted. I puffed. I rolled over.
But I feel blessed with knowledge and vision today despite an occasional stumble that's kicking down some doors and cleaning off some dirty windows just to SET things straight, shaking it up all the way from Eden down through the skulls and quills of the crack and the rat, and the latest bull edicts leftover from a question of the quick smack and the do nothing fats. It ain't easy on the middlefloor. Opened some doors. Closed some others. But you know how it goes. A good captain knows limits of his own ship.
I'm taking a room on the middle floor. Hope to get a day bed or something sane back there. I want to live in all the Dollhouse, work it, and make it suitable for the right number and right combination of people, you know, the imaginary band, and an occasional guest. Still have this afternoon that middlefloor rear window cleaning chore. Will shake up the books as we know them, but I'll come out feeling swell, not better in ages. May divorce Sue, most likely will not, since I told her I'd never leave her even if I had to yell all the time, which is precisely the force of habit she doesn't like, but let me tell you one thing, it is easier for me to do soooooomething, then yell about feeling nearly alone in my quest, than it is tooooooo convince others they should also try it.
Greener pastures? Yeah, no. Nod to sleep. Hear the winds. No TV. Close enough to hear the back gate coerced. The middle TV becomes mine in this shakeup. I control its passion, its loss. Night watchman, part owner, 40 Dollars and cents. All alone (dancing with myself). Others have retired to their own quarters. and so I would then see my guests on a need to know basis. And tell them to bug off when I'm just not in the mood. Sue and I no longer one mind. Eghads! What would become of life? Sue would say we've never been of one mind, and I say that's exactly how I solve the equation. I've already solved for X, and now I must solve for Y.
Sue and I, forever linked, but there is more where that came from, and I must keep up this struggle for the Dollhouse's best interests. Garbage in, garbage out. Looking for an angle, Steve? It's all right here. It's right here in me. I told Len Bracken that yesterday. Me and the rest of you. Tom knows I say it, Rounthwaite, Swartout. Williams, they all know it too. Am I great strikes? No, but I don't strike out a whole lot either.
My current unhappiness stems (uh, he said stims) from the slow pace at which I work. I stay busy all the time, but it never seems enough to do all that needs to be done. I love everything I am doing these days, even the gazing. My impatience with myself is exacerbated by the sandgnats of my generation buzzing all around my head and my toys, my time and my noise. But that's what in the end is called life. I just wish I had more privacy on the one hand, and a larger, more productive staff (or as they say in the rock and roll cruiser), the fab four or five, even six or seven motivated chaps righteous enough to launch this happening idea centered around the Dollhouse of course (well, the Stadium-Armory commercialization project would do wonders for these urges, but that's another archive my head keeps curling up in bed with better left to other paragraphs).
Bottom line, I'm ready for change. Watch the sailors sail. Tim without a job? Can't fathom his presence around here the same way he sees it. His intuitive lack of inspiration can also be painted as an intrinsic lack of discipline because nothing stands in the way of a Tim Shipman goodhour feasted with breaking soundbarriers and a loaf of goatsheadsoup with a chosen few gathered in His honor. I want to see Tim achieve these goals, but he ain't there yet as best I figger.
My own 24 hours a day are rather sacred to me, and I've always felt that way, but I have given them freely much too frequently to events I chafe while performing, and isn't this the root of all evil, as both Tim and Len Bracken would conspire to have me believe, and so I do also believe. And too, you would have no intellectual recourse but to throw another log on that fire of poor response as well. You have been chafing and moaning for months now. Sue is the same way. Hey, it's most people's nature. Yet faulty reckoning folks every inch of the way have no choice but to HEAR and SEE me rebelling against nonsense while they cling to and celebrate their own while all I dare to do is EVERYTHING. I do not celebrate bullshit.
When I finally cave to that stroke or that brain seizure and am in a twinkling of a cobra's eye made a vegetable, the false friends will soon enough scatter after the scorn and the laughter has faded to yet another dull memory. They always do. I can make most of it happen already in a flash. Even as we all slurfishly wait for the big one to fall into our lives.
Life creeps into our souls. How do we handle this creeping sickness? We begin to crave roles in which we can play the exemplar or the idiot. Messy! Yet it seems it can only be AFTER then (after the man with a thousand plans said Norko) that the My will versus Thy will way of life can finally produce results of a lifetime's toil, especially now as we all begin to recognize ourselves as the double-edged sword that rips its up-to-the-minute reports into our handheld brains. And in that time as always the scatterers will themselves be scattered.
Guess I should toss this one up on the wires. Dirty windows are calling.
I think you are coming around to wherever the line meets its maker. Thank you for noticing my lead. Am disturbing the peace upstairs today. Want to put some sleeper of sorts back into that corner. One ficus tree has major bug infestation spreading a jelly substance up its leaves and a thimbleful smudging that far north window. The other one had the beginnings of that rot on some newer sprigs nearer the trunk but I think by pruning them I might have chased away the culprit. As far as my life goes I don't claim to be any great shakes. I am merely following up on what feels most natural at any given moment. Just like yourself, Sue, Tim, and nearly every other grain of sand from here to as far as the mind can predict.
eRighteously in pursuit of a point of view, I was in persistent boil last night. Mostly over Tim, Steve, and Sue in that order, debrewing & stewing coursewise the baseball game Sue had channeled onto all TVs on the middlefloor much to my sour delight by the time I returned from Hechinger's with dirt and manure, a few more seeds, and a bulb to stick in a socket, knowing a kissup she denied, once twice, three times a cock crow. I ranted. I puffed. I rolled over.
But I feel blessed with knowledge and vision today despite an occasional stumble that's kicking down some doors and cleaning off some dirty windows just to SET things straight, shaking it up all the way from Eden down through the skulls and quills of the crack and the rat, and the latest bull edicts leftover from a question of the quick smack and the do nothing fats. It ain't easy on the middlefloor. Opened some doors. Closed some others. But you know how it goes. A good captain knows limits of his own ship.
I'm taking a room on the middle floor. Hope to get a day bed or something sane back there. I want to live in all the Dollhouse, work it, and make it suitable for the right number and right combination of people, you know, the imaginary band, and an occasional guest. Still have this afternoon that middlefloor rear window cleaning chore. Will shake up the books as we know them, but I'll come out feeling swell, not better in ages. May divorce Sue, most likely will not, since I told her I'd never leave her even if I had to yell all the time, which is precisely the force of habit she doesn't like, but let me tell you one thing, it is easier for me to do soooooomething, then yell about feeling nearly alone in my quest, than it is tooooooo convince others they should also try it.
Greener pastures? Yeah, no. Nod to sleep. Hear the winds. No TV. Close enough to hear the back gate coerced. The middle TV becomes mine in this shakeup. I control its passion, its loss. Night watchman, part owner, 40 Dollars and cents. All alone (dancing with myself). Others have retired to their own quarters. and so I would then see my guests on a need to know basis. And tell them to bug off when I'm just not in the mood. Sue and I no longer one mind. Eghads! What would become of life? Sue would say we've never been of one mind, and I say that's exactly how I solve the equation. I've already solved for X, and now I must solve for Y.
Sue and I, forever linked, but there is more where that came from, and I must keep up this struggle for the Dollhouse's best interests. Garbage in, garbage out. Looking for an angle, Steve? It's all right here. It's right here in me. I told Len Bracken that yesterday. Me and the rest of you. Tom knows I say it, Rounthwaite, Swartout. Williams, they all know it too. Am I great strikes? No, but I don't strike out a whole lot either.
My current unhappiness stems (uh, he said stims) from the slow pace at which I work. I stay busy all the time, but it never seems enough to do all that needs to be done. I love everything I am doing these days, even the gazing. My impatience with myself is exacerbated by the sandgnats of my generation buzzing all around my head and my toys, my time and my noise. But that's what in the end is called life. I just wish I had more privacy on the one hand, and a larger, more productive staff (or as they say in the rock and roll cruiser), the fab four or five, even six or seven motivated chaps righteous enough to launch this happening idea centered around the Dollhouse of course (well, the Stadium-Armory commercialization project would do wonders for these urges, but that's another archive my head keeps curling up in bed with better left to other paragraphs).
Bottom line, I'm ready for change. Watch the sailors sail. Tim without a job? Can't fathom his presence around here the same way he sees it. His intuitive lack of inspiration can also be painted as an intrinsic lack of discipline because nothing stands in the way of a Tim Shipman goodhour feasted with breaking soundbarriers and a loaf of goatsheadsoup with a chosen few gathered in His honor. I want to see Tim achieve these goals, but he ain't there yet as best I figger.
My own 24 hours a day are rather sacred to me, and I've always felt that way, but I have given them freely much too frequently to events I chafe while performing, and isn't this the root of all evil, as both Tim and Len Bracken would conspire to have me believe, and so I do also believe. And too, you would have no intellectual recourse but to throw another log on that fire of poor response as well. You have been chafing and moaning for months now. Sue is the same way. Hey, it's most people's nature. Yet faulty reckoning folks every inch of the way have no choice but to HEAR and SEE me rebelling against nonsense while they cling to and celebrate their own while all I dare to do is EVERYTHING. I do not celebrate bullshit.
When I finally cave to that stroke or that brain seizure and am in a twinkling of a cobra's eye made a vegetable, the false friends will soon enough scatter after the scorn and the laughter has faded to yet another dull memory. They always do. I can make most of it happen already in a flash. Even as we all slurfishly wait for the big one to fall into our lives.
Life creeps into our souls. How do we handle this creeping sickness? We begin to crave roles in which we can play the exemplar or the idiot. Messy! Yet it seems it can only be AFTER then (after the man with a thousand plans said Norko) that the My will versus Thy will way of life can finally produce results of a lifetime's toil, especially now as we all begin to recognize ourselves as the double-edged sword that rips its up-to-the-minute reports into our handheld brains. And in that time as always the scatterers will themselves be scattered.
Guess I should toss this one up on the wires. Dirty windows are calling.
SEALED FATES ANONYMOUS
Originally published on May 15, 1996
You wrote:
Hope you don't consider this an invasion of your privacy, but while checking some screen names for work, I was curious to check on what your whole list of handles was.
I wrote:
Well Steve, I suppose you are entitled to quote a tired old windbag recently heard around the Dollhouse, "Hey it's MY JOB!"
And to paraphrase old Delmore Schwartz, "and in jobs begin responsibilities!"
DS was one of James Laughlin's original wonder boys, a saber-rattling drunk, poet, and hapless mad Jew, perhaps in that order. Sent several women to suicide and sanatariums. Betty Sue, however, earns her stars and stripes, a remarkably strong if somewhat unmotivated woman. Pride of roof over head is the most dominant consoling factor, when analyzing my relationship to her remarkably strident loyalty, but I'm getting off track and still staring through dirty windows. Delmore wrote a short story that brought him a vigorous measure of fame from peers and critics called In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Glad you picked up The Recognitions. Wish you'd complete it, but my life is not yours, and you must follow your own pace I believe. No beer, wow, me neither, but then I have a an excuse. I'm too old, tired, and cranky already. Alcohol dries up the brain fluids. I often feel the chemical blahs, and must liquify with other chills to balance the death wish with the lust for living alternately flooding these low energy reserves with sleep and excitement for what's happening now at the Dollhouse, at odds with any remaining residue my own dreams and responsibilities can provide me.
Love to share, hate to waste. Not greedy, just discerning. If the guilty and the innocent share the same bedpan in the afterlife, why am I arguing this over that in the present one? To this question I have only one response. Because I am headlining with G.O.D.
Yes, THAT goo oh dee, my imaginary punk rock band - Gather Or Divide, G.O.D.
GT
You wrote:
Hope you don't consider this an invasion of your privacy, but while checking some screen names for work, I was curious to check on what your whole list of handles was.
I wrote:
Well Steve, I suppose you are entitled to quote a tired old windbag recently heard around the Dollhouse, "Hey it's MY JOB!"
And to paraphrase old Delmore Schwartz, "and in jobs begin responsibilities!"
DS was one of James Laughlin's original wonder boys, a saber-rattling drunk, poet, and hapless mad Jew, perhaps in that order. Sent several women to suicide and sanatariums. Betty Sue, however, earns her stars and stripes, a remarkably strong if somewhat unmotivated woman. Pride of roof over head is the most dominant consoling factor, when analyzing my relationship to her remarkably strident loyalty, but I'm getting off track and still staring through dirty windows. Delmore wrote a short story that brought him a vigorous measure of fame from peers and critics called In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Glad you picked up The Recognitions. Wish you'd complete it, but my life is not yours, and you must follow your own pace I believe. No beer, wow, me neither, but then I have a an excuse. I'm too old, tired, and cranky already. Alcohol dries up the brain fluids. I often feel the chemical blahs, and must liquify with other chills to balance the death wish with the lust for living alternately flooding these low energy reserves with sleep and excitement for what's happening now at the Dollhouse, at odds with any remaining residue my own dreams and responsibilities can provide me.
Love to share, hate to waste. Not greedy, just discerning. If the guilty and the innocent share the same bedpan in the afterlife, why am I arguing this over that in the present one? To this question I have only one response. Because I am headlining with G.O.D.
Yes, THAT goo oh dee, my imaginary punk rock band - Gather Or Divide, G.O.D.
GT
Friday, August 10, 2007
DOLLHOUSE CHARMS
Originally published on October 13, 1996
Anecdotes on the grill, hip-hugging and pressure cooked people sprawled about the deck with all sorts of psychoses just a spoon feed away. All told, it seems everyone left with a pleasant evening under their belts after chortling on cheese dip, assorted dishes and the chow din of new acquaintences.
Bob and Peter had never met. Michelle was new bird. Allie announced she was moving in with Bob, saving $800 a month, helpful since she too is leaving Columbia Research for greener pastures, that is to say, her hunt for that illusive green card, saying that CR has a long record of hiring aliens but dropping the ball on green card sponsorship.
The gathering began late, which of course threw off my own psychological equilibrium for most of the early part of the day since I had hoped for an early start, early end, but things softened and turned to a generalized sense of fun once Peter and Michelle arrived sometime shortly after 1730hrs.
The afternoon heat chilled rather quickly, finally underpinning the autumnal ambience to the other seasonal changes visible in the sheets of orange-brown leaves blanketing the backyard matched by the brilliant, cascading angles of the fading sun.
Bob was cheerful all night long. He and Peter gloried in their common interest in comic books and Japanese animation. Allie unloaded her greencard woes in her horrible English tongue which is less a mumble than a slippery slur of half-formed syllables. But she too was cheery, even as the night pushed late into the mind, curled into her chair, snuggled into sweatshirt sleeves intent on listening to the banter of the boys.
Michelle didn't talk much, not that she's shy or inarticulate, but with a full deck of notorious chatterers on board, she politely played it safe. She's a psychology major at Purdue, and was markedly endearing as she also curled in her chair, tilting her head in such a way as to communicate an adoration for Peter whenever he took to the common soapbox.
But she's no mere fawn. Peter had burned some bacon earlier that afternoon, and when Sue suggested the microwave was a saner choice for the chore, Peter of course started in with his own variation of Shipwreck rationale.
Michelle surnamed Carnes as in Kim no relation, immediately backed Sue as Peter mumbled off into that land of geez, can't I ever be right about something, even when I'm wrong about nothing spin cycle. Maybe not. Perhaps I'm being ever slightly unfair for the sake of a short line of bull.
Admittedly, I wasn't there in the kitchen, although at one point I nearly bolted from my chair to race upstairs as my complaint-driven pathos peeled back the stench of newly formed carbon gathering in my ever sensitive nostrils, but Sue witnessed to me later, and I have no problem imagining that when she said he started explaining something about hot grease and the natural water in the bacon combining to blacken it, he was pulling a big time, uh, well you know what I mean.
This a been a banner weekend. Had a swell time on the bay feasting with the three Spence dolls plus Pitch. I'm sure this topic has come up before but I forget your opinion on crabs. I would imagine Philly to be a great place for the critters, even while somewhat overshadowed by the world famous Philadelphia cheesesteak culture.
My friend Kenny Sacks, now in Seattle . . . I just timed out to ring him, but got the machine, formerly of Philly, still raves about how much he misses the Philly steak of his youth. His mom once had promised to ship him a crate of the whole steak-n-cheese enchilada, bread, meat, cheese from a local distributor just to ease his homesickness and taste bud deprivation after he moved out there a couple, well, maybe three years ago now. Don't know if that panned out, but it was a nice motherly gesture.
His mom is a dear, a small hairspray-blonde Jewish cabana queen who looks and talks like she just stepped out of a Seinfeld episode. She kept trying to feed us sweets from the fridge. One year our colleague in the fantasy baseball league wimped out in getting our Phillies tickets. She bailed us out with her influence, calling the front office, seating us in the best seats we'd ever had over the four games Sue and I had shared with the Nuthouse Gang, right near home plate just a few rows up and a few seats down the first base line behind the net.
Peter and Michelle are gone for the day. They'll sup at his parent's house tonight, and she'll fly back to Indiana tomorrow afternoon. Peter got a call this morning suggesting he's still in queue for a job interview at, I think, one of the places he's interned. That's timely, since we mildly roasted Peter the last hour of last night's gathering focussing on his need to find a job because neither he nor we are rolling in web business yet, and in order to really be worth his ambition in GSIS stock, he needs to improve his own skills and speed with practice, not on my time and dollar, but on his own.
No feelings were unduly trampled, and I feel the exchange was blithely enlightening, as he admitted that he has often been chastised for a lack of speed and creativity in his work, and is hoping to improve on these fronts in time. I'm committed to helping him where and when I can, but he must certainly begin to pull his weight in some area, and for now that appears to be simply paying the agreed upon rent, and then working to improve his skills in areas that we both can exploit so that he indeed can become a healthy factor in the growth potential of Graphic Solutions Ink Systems and CYFII, his own company. In other words, we're each still operating in good faith.
GT
Anecdotes on the grill, hip-hugging and pressure cooked people sprawled about the deck with all sorts of psychoses just a spoon feed away. All told, it seems everyone left with a pleasant evening under their belts after chortling on cheese dip, assorted dishes and the chow din of new acquaintences.
Bob and Peter had never met. Michelle was new bird. Allie announced she was moving in with Bob, saving $800 a month, helpful since she too is leaving Columbia Research for greener pastures, that is to say, her hunt for that illusive green card, saying that CR has a long record of hiring aliens but dropping the ball on green card sponsorship.
The gathering began late, which of course threw off my own psychological equilibrium for most of the early part of the day since I had hoped for an early start, early end, but things softened and turned to a generalized sense of fun once Peter and Michelle arrived sometime shortly after 1730hrs.
The afternoon heat chilled rather quickly, finally underpinning the autumnal ambience to the other seasonal changes visible in the sheets of orange-brown leaves blanketing the backyard matched by the brilliant, cascading angles of the fading sun.
Bob was cheerful all night long. He and Peter gloried in their common interest in comic books and Japanese animation. Allie unloaded her greencard woes in her horrible English tongue which is less a mumble than a slippery slur of half-formed syllables. But she too was cheery, even as the night pushed late into the mind, curled into her chair, snuggled into sweatshirt sleeves intent on listening to the banter of the boys.
Michelle didn't talk much, not that she's shy or inarticulate, but with a full deck of notorious chatterers on board, she politely played it safe. She's a psychology major at Purdue, and was markedly endearing as she also curled in her chair, tilting her head in such a way as to communicate an adoration for Peter whenever he took to the common soapbox.
But she's no mere fawn. Peter had burned some bacon earlier that afternoon, and when Sue suggested the microwave was a saner choice for the chore, Peter of course started in with his own variation of Shipwreck rationale.
Michelle surnamed Carnes as in Kim no relation, immediately backed Sue as Peter mumbled off into that land of geez, can't I ever be right about something, even when I'm wrong about nothing spin cycle. Maybe not. Perhaps I'm being ever slightly unfair for the sake of a short line of bull.
Admittedly, I wasn't there in the kitchen, although at one point I nearly bolted from my chair to race upstairs as my complaint-driven pathos peeled back the stench of newly formed carbon gathering in my ever sensitive nostrils, but Sue witnessed to me later, and I have no problem imagining that when she said he started explaining something about hot grease and the natural water in the bacon combining to blacken it, he was pulling a big time, uh, well you know what I mean.
This a been a banner weekend. Had a swell time on the bay feasting with the three Spence dolls plus Pitch. I'm sure this topic has come up before but I forget your opinion on crabs. I would imagine Philly to be a great place for the critters, even while somewhat overshadowed by the world famous Philadelphia cheesesteak culture.
My friend Kenny Sacks, now in Seattle . . . I just timed out to ring him, but got the machine, formerly of Philly, still raves about how much he misses the Philly steak of his youth. His mom once had promised to ship him a crate of the whole steak-n-cheese enchilada, bread, meat, cheese from a local distributor just to ease his homesickness and taste bud deprivation after he moved out there a couple, well, maybe three years ago now. Don't know if that panned out, but it was a nice motherly gesture.
His mom is a dear, a small hairspray-blonde Jewish cabana queen who looks and talks like she just stepped out of a Seinfeld episode. She kept trying to feed us sweets from the fridge. One year our colleague in the fantasy baseball league wimped out in getting our Phillies tickets. She bailed us out with her influence, calling the front office, seating us in the best seats we'd ever had over the four games Sue and I had shared with the Nuthouse Gang, right near home plate just a few rows up and a few seats down the first base line behind the net.
Peter and Michelle are gone for the day. They'll sup at his parent's house tonight, and she'll fly back to Indiana tomorrow afternoon. Peter got a call this morning suggesting he's still in queue for a job interview at, I think, one of the places he's interned. That's timely, since we mildly roasted Peter the last hour of last night's gathering focussing on his need to find a job because neither he nor we are rolling in web business yet, and in order to really be worth his ambition in GSIS stock, he needs to improve his own skills and speed with practice, not on my time and dollar, but on his own.
No feelings were unduly trampled, and I feel the exchange was blithely enlightening, as he admitted that he has often been chastised for a lack of speed and creativity in his work, and is hoping to improve on these fronts in time. I'm committed to helping him where and when I can, but he must certainly begin to pull his weight in some area, and for now that appears to be simply paying the agreed upon rent, and then working to improve his skills in areas that we both can exploit so that he indeed can become a healthy factor in the growth potential of Graphic Solutions Ink Systems and CYFII, his own company. In other words, we're each still operating in good faith.
GT
Saturday, July 07, 2007
TAKING A CHARGE IN A ZERO SUM MOMENT
Originally published on May 29, 1996
Hey Ben—dialing for symptoms and synonyms has me spinning doughnuts around my memory. You wrote:
Caught up in words as they are. "Work" means "making money" and free-time is meant to be for recreation. In Germany, in the mid-eighties, when unemployment was a popular discussion, one heard of the "human right to work". This was twisty. I wonder why people need someone to tell them what to work, although they need some money I anticipate. Well I'd welcome NO WORK...
Yes, mt German friend. My wife's mother recently lectured her on the topic. With this common interpretation sharp on her peacewhittling tongue, she was of course probing with ages rich mother-in-law cynicism MY own twisted state of NO WORK. Meanwhile, I acknowledge that I appear to jealous acquaintences quite blessed among men for lack of a regimented work burden, or entitlement, depending one one's perspective. My wife has been convinced finally that I am best kept at home in the privacy of my whirling mind and Dollhouse, near her cold indifferent fingers but warm toasty heart. I admit I feel rather insecure anywhere else, and tend to drink myself into an explosive reproach to the bickering myths of strataculture every time I step out into the bustling city of lights, armed with little but the urgency for escape from any number of circulating yet dreaded theories of night which haunt me.
I am rather, yes, busy making a contortionist's name for myself, or else in the minds of my severest critics, busy hiding names and nuances behind barstools and bushel baskets of cloudy arguments where lightning strikes swiftly and severely against the surface of old arguments whose welcome is long gone, you pick 'em, as they say in the sporting world of betting chances against the winds of the great guffaw.
With only slight exaggeration, I work every waking moment. My wife complains that I cannot find rest, which is only partially true, a fuzzy subset, if you will, within a greater set of misguided certainties and regimented responses we are taught but must toss away as foreign to our means of survival. Fuzzy logic, or educated guesswork, informed interpolation, however, is the grace the unequipped will never face, and for their ignorance they will perish with their lessening winds. My dreamstates are work, are tools, are kids in teh sandbox and I embrace them just as most do at the movies peering into someone else's dreams and ideological documentation.
But back to the idea of work and money. My wife pays nearly all the bills. This is true. She feels the burden of her job, of course, but she brags about what it brings her in prestige and buying power of argument and freedom when dealing with the host of projects at our command, insecurity or not. If I bring in a dollar, I give it to somebody else, usually her, or to the computer industry. I am an accomplice within the digital revolution, a footsoldier, an enlisted tattooed man, a homefront evangelizer as I peer beyond the garbage and confusion from my Dollhouse perch which serves me well.
Surrounded by mediocrity and predjudice, the greatest practitioners of liberal slander slither all around my disguise. My sockets burn sometimes with the urge to fly somewhere I can explode past meaning into the netherland of pure synchronicity. And this rainy season meanwhile is driving all the Dolhouse yard bugs inward, ants and cockroaches multiplying themselves and immigrating to my turf as if they "owned the joint". Fighting against the corruption of the material is the only fight worth dying for, but dying is a losing cause. I hate dying.
WORK IS ENERGY. Money is a contaminating conversion and byproduct, safe only in proper prospective, because money corrupts everyone who surrenders to it. Opinions are always made about money. Even the most discrimating poor among us, myself included, gaze upon it and are corrupted with envy and violence in strident persuasion to obtain it, or saddled with an indifference that leads us into wretched arguments for obsessive compulsive choices as concrete and ugly as money ever was.
Pure work frees man from the analysis of money. Am I a hypocrite for pointing this out? Am I a hypocrite because I love to spend money? Am I a hypocrite because I have argued, successfully it seems, to remain at home, supported by a woman who is hardly Artist or fraud, simply to allow the chips to fall where they may? Am I a hypocrite because I am aging, ugly and fat, conspiring to destroy faith in humanity's surge to crawl up from the tidal mud known as the Anti-Hip instead of being that dazzling, thin, strategically well-placed well-pocketed and quasibeautifully hip? The trickledown economies of Art and Finance are not dissimilar; as Ezra Pound's crackling contentions about art, economics, and war, and William Gaddis in his terrific novel—The Recognitions—have revealed.
You have postulated Ben, that "people get occupied in a way, they forget to handle NO WORK. You know that, I suggest, but do you also know that contemplation, the force of passivity, I mean not producing, maybe on a journey? Oh, yes, you are a gardener too. Many people have to work, to ease their artificial bad conscience."
If I say I am a writer, or a painter, am I less so because no mote has called me up on the telephone to offer me a job or a contract? Am I any less a gardener if no one has offered to snap a polaroid of my roses or send me on an all-expense paid holiday to the Alpines to discuss breeding techniques. Does it matter whether I eat poorly like the beast I resemble, or whether I eat like a fat French chef buttering his own bread in Paris? The human right to work and the human right to be hip are not too far apart on the GT scale of impossible tasks among so many and so stupid a population always electromagnetic & naked in the catbird seat, but ever so snobbishly none the wiser...
But we, despite our best attempts to avoid or embrace these symptoms bunkered down in stodgiven ratios of human production and consumption, radix fuzzy but still redicking and drunk from the fountain of fair green idealism, we too succumb to the same pitfalls in one flavor or another as any other poke even as we like to feel superior and just a bit more enlightened in comparison. We struggle against struggle not knowing how to slip the knot that binds us.
Basically Ben, I feel most people desire everything they think they can handle. Most of us don't know when to start OR stop the false lures of desire outside the domain of self-interest. The few who know the ropes either play them to bizarre lengths or avoid them with the meanest of miseries. The rest of us argue ourselves straight into a double-edged niche, and so it becomes us, our sentence for which parole is repeatedly denied, despite any makeshift theories to the contrary, we or some other highly paid or dollar dead genius devises for us in teh meantime.
GT
Hey Ben—dialing for symptoms and synonyms has me spinning doughnuts around my memory. You wrote:
Caught up in words as they are. "Work" means "making money" and free-time is meant to be for recreation. In Germany, in the mid-eighties, when unemployment was a popular discussion, one heard of the "human right to work". This was twisty. I wonder why people need someone to tell them what to work, although they need some money I anticipate. Well I'd welcome NO WORK...
Yes, mt German friend. My wife's mother recently lectured her on the topic. With this common interpretation sharp on her peacewhittling tongue, she was of course probing with ages rich mother-in-law cynicism MY own twisted state of NO WORK. Meanwhile, I acknowledge that I appear to jealous acquaintences quite blessed among men for lack of a regimented work burden, or entitlement, depending one one's perspective. My wife has been convinced finally that I am best kept at home in the privacy of my whirling mind and Dollhouse, near her cold indifferent fingers but warm toasty heart. I admit I feel rather insecure anywhere else, and tend to drink myself into an explosive reproach to the bickering myths of strataculture every time I step out into the bustling city of lights, armed with little but the urgency for escape from any number of circulating yet dreaded theories of night which haunt me.
I am rather, yes, busy making a contortionist's name for myself, or else in the minds of my severest critics, busy hiding names and nuances behind barstools and bushel baskets of cloudy arguments where lightning strikes swiftly and severely against the surface of old arguments whose welcome is long gone, you pick 'em, as they say in the sporting world of betting chances against the winds of the great guffaw.
With only slight exaggeration, I work every waking moment. My wife complains that I cannot find rest, which is only partially true, a fuzzy subset, if you will, within a greater set of misguided certainties and regimented responses we are taught but must toss away as foreign to our means of survival. Fuzzy logic, or educated guesswork, informed interpolation, however, is the grace the unequipped will never face, and for their ignorance they will perish with their lessening winds. My dreamstates are work, are tools, are kids in teh sandbox and I embrace them just as most do at the movies peering into someone else's dreams and ideological documentation.
But back to the idea of work and money. My wife pays nearly all the bills. This is true. She feels the burden of her job, of course, but she brags about what it brings her in prestige and buying power of argument and freedom when dealing with the host of projects at our command, insecurity or not. If I bring in a dollar, I give it to somebody else, usually her, or to the computer industry. I am an accomplice within the digital revolution, a footsoldier, an enlisted tattooed man, a homefront evangelizer as I peer beyond the garbage and confusion from my Dollhouse perch which serves me well.
Surrounded by mediocrity and predjudice, the greatest practitioners of liberal slander slither all around my disguise. My sockets burn sometimes with the urge to fly somewhere I can explode past meaning into the netherland of pure synchronicity. And this rainy season meanwhile is driving all the Dolhouse yard bugs inward, ants and cockroaches multiplying themselves and immigrating to my turf as if they "owned the joint". Fighting against the corruption of the material is the only fight worth dying for, but dying is a losing cause. I hate dying.
WORK IS ENERGY. Money is a contaminating conversion and byproduct, safe only in proper prospective, because money corrupts everyone who surrenders to it. Opinions are always made about money. Even the most discrimating poor among us, myself included, gaze upon it and are corrupted with envy and violence in strident persuasion to obtain it, or saddled with an indifference that leads us into wretched arguments for obsessive compulsive choices as concrete and ugly as money ever was.
Pure work frees man from the analysis of money. Am I a hypocrite for pointing this out? Am I a hypocrite because I love to spend money? Am I a hypocrite because I have argued, successfully it seems, to remain at home, supported by a woman who is hardly Artist or fraud, simply to allow the chips to fall where they may? Am I a hypocrite because I am aging, ugly and fat, conspiring to destroy faith in humanity's surge to crawl up from the tidal mud known as the Anti-Hip instead of being that dazzling, thin, strategically well-placed well-pocketed and quasibeautifully hip? The trickledown economies of Art and Finance are not dissimilar; as Ezra Pound's crackling contentions about art, economics, and war, and William Gaddis in his terrific novel—The Recognitions—have revealed.
You have postulated Ben, that "people get occupied in a way, they forget to handle NO WORK. You know that, I suggest, but do you also know that contemplation, the force of passivity, I mean not producing, maybe on a journey? Oh, yes, you are a gardener too. Many people have to work, to ease their artificial bad conscience."
If I say I am a writer, or a painter, am I less so because no mote has called me up on the telephone to offer me a job or a contract? Am I any less a gardener if no one has offered to snap a polaroid of my roses or send me on an all-expense paid holiday to the Alpines to discuss breeding techniques. Does it matter whether I eat poorly like the beast I resemble, or whether I eat like a fat French chef buttering his own bread in Paris? The human right to work and the human right to be hip are not too far apart on the GT scale of impossible tasks among so many and so stupid a population always electromagnetic & naked in the catbird seat, but ever so snobbishly none the wiser...
But we, despite our best attempts to avoid or embrace these symptoms bunkered down in stodgiven ratios of human production and consumption, radix fuzzy but still redicking and drunk from the fountain of fair green idealism, we too succumb to the same pitfalls in one flavor or another as any other poke even as we like to feel superior and just a bit more enlightened in comparison. We struggle against struggle not knowing how to slip the knot that binds us.
Basically Ben, I feel most people desire everything they think they can handle. Most of us don't know when to start OR stop the false lures of desire outside the domain of self-interest. The few who know the ropes either play them to bizarre lengths or avoid them with the meanest of miseries. The rest of us argue ourselves straight into a double-edged niche, and so it becomes us, our sentence for which parole is repeatedly denied, despite any makeshift theories to the contrary, we or some other highly paid or dollar dead genius devises for us in teh meantime.
GT
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