Originally published on October 11, 1996
Today's Sue's 47th birthday. She's still asleep. I ache all over with a variety of old age outa shape self-abuse seasonal change ailments. Sinus. Pinched nerves. Left earbuzz half death and in a state of perpetual ringing caused at the Zodiac Mindwarp show in London [in '92]. Brain tumors. Colon cancer. The works.
Richard is leaving today on his way to Philadelphia to visit an old friend berfore returning to Georgia. It's been a rather enjoyable three days, but I think we've gone as far as we can go. He'll be seventy in February, has a classical art fetish, and knows little about the 20th century other than what he can remember from yesterday's news, although he has recently redeveloped his fondness for the Beatles. He gave us a nude he painted. The model is a Southern Baptist virgin schoolteacher he likes to tell for the laugh, although he actually paints from pictures in magazines or photographs he has taken. In this case, the former method was used. His style is impressionistic much in the fashion of Renoir, whose works the two of us took in at the Phillips Collection earlier this week.
I'm rather peeved that my fancy monitor hasn't arrived yet. If it doesn't show today, Apple's three week delivery projection will have been proved bogus. Meanwhile, the 8500 just sits on the table unattached. Of course, I recall your PC sat in the box for quite some time before you developed the right combination of enough interest, nerve, and need to string it all together...
Appreciated your last letter as usual.
Everybody's beginning to stir, so I 'll sign off and join them...
Love,
Gabriel
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Sunday, July 01, 2007
TEST TUBE SOCK HOPS
Originally published on December 5, 1996
Thumbs up. Nuff said. I wouldn't change a word of it. Thanks for the input. Love to stay of top of things, even if it's standing up rather than sucking silence flat ass on my belly. Glad you're coming. Just give us exact details when you get them, and I'll keep things moving on this end. Everybody's gonna be whipped in yahoos when they hear of your decision. That's all it is. It about decisions. And followthrough. Sorry Frank. We'll plead the fifth and muster up with the bloated roughy Jennifer and learn to live with the details of the coy...
Certainly a frenzy is brewing and I'm taking names...
GT
Thumbs up. Nuff said. I wouldn't change a word of it. Thanks for the input. Love to stay of top of things, even if it's standing up rather than sucking silence flat ass on my belly. Glad you're coming. Just give us exact details when you get them, and I'll keep things moving on this end. Everybody's gonna be whipped in yahoos when they hear of your decision. That's all it is. It about decisions. And followthrough. Sorry Frank. We'll plead the fifth and muster up with the bloated roughy Jennifer and learn to live with the details of the coy...
Certainly a frenzy is brewing and I'm taking names...
GT
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT
Originally published on October 17, 1996
Just when one thinks that it would be easier to drain all the seven oceans of salty fish nip than to squeeze another drop of self-pity from the story of my life, then boom, another couple of notches later, feeling like shit on a stick is the highest compliment I can pay myself...
This morning while taking out an armful of corrugated cardboard recycleables, I broke my left foot, again! I'm beginning to feel like a sad parody of Tim and his annual collarbone. The foot snapped lengthwise with characteristic audible clarity. I was stepping from the house to the front porch and my unfastened sandles slipped to trigger the occasion. Ten minutes later, wincing on the sofa, with vigor and gruff I jump up at Sue's notice that a man is foraging through our big blue plastic, metal, and glass curbside recycle bags. Once at the door I yell that rather than plunder the dozen or so smaller bags neatly packed inside the big blue ones he should just take off with the whole shebang.
He was an older, maybe sixty year old black man, well-attired, did not exude the aura of a lifelong wino (would it matter?), but he immediately shot back that he wasn't gonna leave a mess. He was merely taking a few cans. I stared in dreaded white silence for ten to fifteeen long seconds before telling him to go ahead. I watched him scavenge for coke and beer cans, leaving the glass wine bottles and plastic milk jugs behind as he rummaged for parts of a penny. I took a bag of cans to the plant once and got nine dollars for what must have been a thousand crushed cans some years ago, never again.
Ah, as I write this, the truck pulls up and regards the trash, and rather early today. Two pickups ago, they missed our whole street altogether. Dutiful citizen on even numbered years, I called Publics Works for a rescheduling. Three days later the trash was snagged, after I was told to leave the stuff at the curb indefinitely until pickup. Neighbor Chisley did not, and so had quite a mess two weeks later the next time. However, without too much gross exaggeration it is safe to say we sprawl along the curb other Tuesday more than the whole side of this block of Eighteenth Street combined. The scavenger in good news to the scafflaw followed his word, and the curb was nice and neat after he left, so I guess my starring role as the Billy Goats Gruff foul-toothed troll who lives under the bridge to the 21st century is safely undisturbed.
Despite this leg drop injury I refuse to rush to the hospital, unmoved by the indignity and the expense of THAT trouble. If I hadn't heard the snap, crackle, and pop at the time of the 265 pound stomp and roll I'd even doubt it was broken. I can even put steady weight upon it, and feel arrgglike pain only when I bend, drag or rest it in a bezier curve along the sofa. But the icy and instant numbing at impact and consequent prickly twinges further identify my condition. Ooh well dearies, fortunately it wasn't my ankle or heel. I still have a fine pair of wooden crutches I inherited for $30 from my last left foot catastrophe in September, 1993. The blood vessel knot and prickly numbness will no doubt subside in a few days if I don't aggravate it by jumping for joy if that Apple monitor ever frickin' gets here. Sue suggests the doctor. Says we've got insurance. Uh, workman's comp for injury on the job? I just ain't inner rested. Who will putter around doing the countless manipulations it takes to keep a hint of order around here? Who wants to lug around some ridiculous cast for six weeks. Oh I know. We'll hire a nanny...
Nausea. Sartre. Simpletons and Simon Magus. Surely I am blessed among men...
Oh course soon after writing this note I receive another nasty reply from my next door neighbor Blumstein, who types, (obviously from his workstation on the job, a job he wished upon me as often as the spirit moved him:
It was interesting to discover he cared, even if it took the form of a Blumfisted flame.
GT
Just when one thinks that it would be easier to drain all the seven oceans of salty fish nip than to squeeze another drop of self-pity from the story of my life, then boom, another couple of notches later, feeling like shit on a stick is the highest compliment I can pay myself...
This morning while taking out an armful of corrugated cardboard recycleables, I broke my left foot, again! I'm beginning to feel like a sad parody of Tim and his annual collarbone. The foot snapped lengthwise with characteristic audible clarity. I was stepping from the house to the front porch and my unfastened sandles slipped to trigger the occasion. Ten minutes later, wincing on the sofa, with vigor and gruff I jump up at Sue's notice that a man is foraging through our big blue plastic, metal, and glass curbside recycle bags. Once at the door I yell that rather than plunder the dozen or so smaller bags neatly packed inside the big blue ones he should just take off with the whole shebang.
He was an older, maybe sixty year old black man, well-attired, did not exude the aura of a lifelong wino (would it matter?), but he immediately shot back that he wasn't gonna leave a mess. He was merely taking a few cans. I stared in dreaded white silence for ten to fifteeen long seconds before telling him to go ahead. I watched him scavenge for coke and beer cans, leaving the glass wine bottles and plastic milk jugs behind as he rummaged for parts of a penny. I took a bag of cans to the plant once and got nine dollars for what must have been a thousand crushed cans some years ago, never again.
Ah, as I write this, the truck pulls up and regards the trash, and rather early today. Two pickups ago, they missed our whole street altogether. Dutiful citizen on even numbered years, I called Publics Works for a rescheduling. Three days later the trash was snagged, after I was told to leave the stuff at the curb indefinitely until pickup. Neighbor Chisley did not, and so had quite a mess two weeks later the next time. However, without too much gross exaggeration it is safe to say we sprawl along the curb other Tuesday more than the whole side of this block of Eighteenth Street combined. The scavenger in good news to the scafflaw followed his word, and the curb was nice and neat after he left, so I guess my starring role as the Billy Goats Gruff foul-toothed troll who lives under the bridge to the 21st century is safely undisturbed.
Despite this leg drop injury I refuse to rush to the hospital, unmoved by the indignity and the expense of THAT trouble. If I hadn't heard the snap, crackle, and pop at the time of the 265 pound stomp and roll I'd even doubt it was broken. I can even put steady weight upon it, and feel arrgglike pain only when I bend, drag or rest it in a bezier curve along the sofa. But the icy and instant numbing at impact and consequent prickly twinges further identify my condition. Ooh well dearies, fortunately it wasn't my ankle or heel. I still have a fine pair of wooden crutches I inherited for $30 from my last left foot catastrophe in September, 1993. The blood vessel knot and prickly numbness will no doubt subside in a few days if I don't aggravate it by jumping for joy if that Apple monitor ever frickin' gets here. Sue suggests the doctor. Says we've got insurance. Uh, workman's comp for injury on the job? I just ain't inner rested. Who will putter around doing the countless manipulations it takes to keep a hint of order around here? Who wants to lug around some ridiculous cast for six weeks. Oh I know. We'll hire a nanny...
Nausea. Sartre. Simpletons and Simon Magus. Surely I am blessed among men...
Oh course soon after writing this note I receive another nasty reply from my next door neighbor Blumstein, who types, (obviously from his workstation on the job, a job he wished upon me as often as the spirit moved him:
Gah Bree Elle,
Why is it that I have to guess at you breaking
a limb. Why make me assume such nonsense
rather than just say it out straight 'I broke my
GD left femur!' Don't assume anyone in your
audience knows all the details so you can
discuss such as old news.
But the reality is that if you did break your
leg, whichever left and/or right, you should
get it professionally set before it heals in
an obnoxious way and must be broken again
to correct it thus fucking it up even more.
God I hate martyrs...
Blum
It was interesting to discover he cared, even if it took the form of a Blumfisted flame.
GT
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