Month: November 2010

My hobby

There are people who don’t understand drinking at all.  You can tell who they are because they say things like,”Isn’t it kind of cold for beer?” or  “I guess it’s okay, as long as you don’t feel like you depend on it” or “Yes, I had a Bahama Mama last weekend, and it was yummy!”

These people are drinkers in the same way as Thomas Kinkade is a painter:  there are enough superficial similarities to the real thing that the casual observer might be taken in — and yet, at the heart, there is this gulf which is vast.  Vast.

I think what people don’t understand is that your relationship with alcohol develops over time, just like in a good marriage.  At first it’s all infatuation and fireworks and throwing up.  But it’s only later, after many years of fidelity and forgiveness, missteps and recovery, that you and your drink can look each other in the eye and say, “Yes, I need you, and you need me.  And I’m all right with that.  Oh, I could live without you — I wouldn’t drop dead if you walked out of my life forever, and I know I could even learn to be happy without you.  But why would I want to?  You’ve been there with me through all the best times of my life, and all the worst, too.  Even when you couldn’t be there, like when the nurse was all, ‘You are 80% effaced; it is time to put that bottledown!’, you were notable by your absence.  Oh alcohol, I am a part of you; and you, pound by blubbery pound, are becoming more and more a part of me.”

What non-drinkers don’t understand is that the city of Boozopolis is a beautiful and variegated place.   Got a few hours to burn?  This bottle of gin looks open and accommodating, willing to let you take the lead, and no hard feelings if it’s just a quickie.  Bourbon is there to take your hand and let you enjoy your misery for a while.  Tequila is a great way to find out whether or not you’ve grown up in the last ten years.  Red wine becomes a river of conversation which appears insightful at the time, and makes room in your heart for all the terrible Irish music you’ve been denied all your sober life.  Or maybe you’re just thirsty?  Well, then, my friend, it is time to have a beer.

I’m not trying to preach, and I’m not trying to nag.  I’m just trying to say that an awful lot of you could be doing a lot more to pick up that glass from time to time, you know? I try my hardest, but I’m only one woman.

Well, what did you do on your weekend?

7 Silly Things that Make Me Laugh

–1–

Store brand cereal names.   When I was little, manufacturers of generic food didn’t bother trying to snare the thrifty shopper by putting grinning strawberries or wacky breakfast raccoons on the box — it was just a white box with black letters, stating the legal nomenclature of the grain product you were about to consume.

Today, however, they try and make it sound like it’s some kind of close cousin to the Real Thing, without infringing on any copyrights. Some of them just try to sound like the brand name, like Tasteeo-s instead of Cheerios.  Then some of them are just kind of disconcertingly descriptive:   Crispy Hexagons, Corn Spheres.  But some of them . . . some of them are just a cereal mystery, and they make me laugh.  And the greatest of these is Confruity Crisp.

–2–

Renita Jablonski from the radio show Marketplace.  I realize this makes me an eleven-year-old boy, but ever time I hear her name, my brain giggles like Beavis and Butthead.  See, cuz, it kinda sounds like Heywood . . . oh, never mind.

–3–

My three-year-old daughter says “who” when she means “what.”  I occasionally correct her, but it’s just too much fun to see her come into the kitchen, wrinkle her nose and say, “Who’s that smell?”  It’s your supper, that’s who.

–4–

The Howard Dean scream.  It just never gets old.

–5–

Sometimes, when my husband is changing a diaper, he puts the clean diaper on his head, and then pretends he can’t find it. Gets me every time.

–6–

That scene in 30 Rock where all the guys are sleeping on the couches, and one of them takes a bite of his sandwich in his sleep.  I can’t believe they’re still making that show!  It’s so funny, it should have been canceled by now (we’re up to season 4 on Netflix).

–7–

Well, in keeping with the way things have been going around here lately, I hate this post and couldn’t finish it, but couldn’t do anything else until it was done.  I guess I should be grateful to have six things that make me laugh, but instead I was just hung up on how bummed I was that I put my beer on the back of the couch for a second, only to discover that the back of the couch wasn’t up against the wall after all, and so that was the end of my beer.  I hate that couch so much, I’m glad it got beer spilled all down the back and on its stupid confruity little skirt ruffle; but still, I had to clean up the beer.  It was a Corona, too!  Oh, anyway, so while I was looking for a towel, my husband said that fart jokes always make me laugh.  I don’t think this is strictly true, but on the other hand, we’ve been together for a while now, so I guess he would know.

Okay, okay, wait.  It does make me laugh when someone says “poot” instead of “fart.”  Poot!  That’s not even a word.

Oh, boy.  Well, check out our lovely hostess Jen Fulwiler of Conversion Diary for Seven Quick Takes, and find out how the normals are doing it.

So tell me: What are you reading?

It’s November, it’s dark, I have to scrape the effing windshield to drive to the dump, and life is only just barely worth living until March.  So let’s talk about books.

I’m just coming off of a long, ugly stint with Taylor Caldwell’s ridiculous novel Answer As a Man.  Oh, that woman is embarrassing.  What a waste of plot!  I think she took a writing class called “Show, don’t tell,” but someone told her it was Opposite Day.  I’d show you a passage of what she tries to pass off as character development, but not only did I already throw the book away, I dumped coffee grounds on top so no one would fish it out of the garbage.

Caldwell seems to have heavily consulted The Comprehensive Thesaurus of Tedious Irish Stereotypes.  For openers, she turned to the  entry for “bitter old man who loves and hates with equal ferocity,” and proceeded to copy out all the adjectives she thought the reader would understand.  And that, thought Caldwell, made chapter one.   I read the whole thing because — I don’t know, I guess it’s like getting on the merry-go-round.  It’s not as if you’re going to end up somewhere unexpected, but you already paid for your ticket, so you might as well sit there until the ride is over.

Then I picked up Watership Down, and promptly fell asleep.  I don’t know if it was that boring, or I was just too tired, but it fell behind the bed and I can’t reach it now, so that’s that.

Then I picked up Clockers by Richard Price. Okay, now we have a novel.    The narrator understands his characters, and they are real people, who might do anything.  They might be angry at themselves, or feel ashamed, or feel unwarranted pride, or not understand why they do what they do — but it all feels like real life, down to the last detail.

Here’s an early example:  Strike, a 19-year-old low level drug dealer, drinks vanilla Yoo-Hoo throughout the book.  He has a stomach ulcer, and the vanilla cools the pain a little.  This kind of detail tells you so much about the guy:  that he’s a child, that he suffers like a man, that he tries to heal himself, that real medicine (for the body and for the soul) is just not available to him. At one point, he finds himself in a bar, and not knowing what else to order, he asks for vanilla Yoo-Hoo.  The bartender offers him a glass of non-dairy creamer.  This is how the world treats Strike and his ulcer.

This book just bleeds sympathy.  For everyone, even the evildoers.  That’s what a great novel does:  it understands.  That’s what separates Dostoevsky from Tolstoy:  Tolstoy understood, all right, but as I get older, I see his contempt for his characters more and more, and it kind of takes the edge off.  Dostoevsky, though, the reader feels, is on his knees the whole time he is writing.

Richard Price (okay, I’m not saying he’s Dostoevsky or even Tolstoy.  He has really got something, though) doesn’t gush or manipulate or wallow, but the prose cleanly and steadily offers up real people for us to see.   This author is so confident of his skill, he doesn’t need to tell us everything we need to know up front — because when does that happen in real life?  We learn what the characters are capable of little by little, at the same pace as they learn about themselves.  I’m sorry I’m just too darn lazy to pick out passages to quote, but take my word for it, this guy knows what he is doing.

Lots of profanities, obscenities, and violence in this book.  But I don’t think it’s disgusting, and so far, it’s not depressing.   The tone isn’t marinating in that inexplicable, sadistic animus against the reader, like so many modern novels (The Corrections, Geek Love – -why do I read these things??).  I’m about halfway through, and have high hopes (if you’ve read it, please don’t give anything away!).  I have a hard time putting this book down.  Great plot, incredible dialogue, twists and turns, and the author never takes the easy way out — but it’s all so natural.  Really amazing skill.

So what are you reading?  Do you plan to finish it?  Is it a book to be tossed aside lightly?  Or should it be thrown with great force?

All politics is local politics

I have this newspaper picture framed:

The article, which I believe ran in what was then the Monadnock Ledger, went like this:

Junkyard owner Daniel Kingery can strip used cars, but he can’t host strippers, according to zoning board members.

The board on Tuesday rejected an appeal by Kingery, who sought to run a strip club in his junkyard by calling it a “cultural facility.”

He had been told by the town’s code enforcement officer to close his club on Route 202 North.

But Kingery argued his business is a cultural facility, like a musuem, which is permitted in a rural zone.

Town officials said there’s nothing “cultural” about strippers dancing in a junkyard, and the zoning board agreed.  They ruled Kingery’s business has no place in a rural zone and is banned by an anti-pornography zoning law that voters adopted last month.

The board said Kingery offered no evidence that his club is cultural, and that is was clear from his testimony that it was sexually oriented.

Kingery said he would appeal to Hillsborough County Superior Court.

In the picture, he’s attempting to make his case by reading the dictionary entry for the word “cultural.”

And that is why I’m not going to vote today.

 

 

 

Okay, okay, so I’ll vote today.  But I’m not going to like it!  I’ll tell you why.

It’s because you and I are the people on the zoning board.  We have a day job, right?  We’ve been working all day, and we really just want to go home and have a burger and a beer and watch some stupid TV.  But it’s an election year, so purely out of an inescapable sense of civic duty, we put on a clean shirt and head out to the town hall.  And there we sit in a cold, metal folding chair, listening to Dan Kingery read the defnition for “culture” out of the dictionary.

Maybe you’re the Sipowicz-like guy in the foreground, with his orthopedic sneakers and his forbearing face of stone, willing to listen forever as the guy buries himself in his own b.s.  Maybe you’re the stringy old man with the work shirt and the razor-sharp part in his greasy old hair, who’s participating mostly out of spite.  Maybe you’re the wounded-looking matron who’s heard this kind of nonsense one too many times, and just wants to sign a petition for a new wheelchair ramp in front of the library and go home.  Or maybe you’re the trunk-legged old bat at the end of the row, who’s happily drawing kitties in her notebook as the meeting goes on and on and on.

Point is, this is you, the voter:  the one with the decency to show up one more time, drum up a little faith in the system, donate a few more hours of your precious time in case someone has something useful to say to you.

And you know who the politicians are.  They’re all Dan Kingery.  Doesn’t matter how you vote — this is, more or less, who you’re voting for:

The guy didn’t even wash his beard before coming to the meeting.  He didn’t even put on his best flannel shirt.  The Dan Kingerys who want your vote have already set up this hideous junkyard in your backyard, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that — but now they’re trying to bring in strippers, too.

Because there’s two things he believes:  that he deserves to get what he wants, and that everyone else is some kind of idiot.  Their only plan is to make this county a little bit crappier, but they won’t be satisfied with that — they have to try and make it seem like they’re doing you a favor, too.

Man, I wish there were a way of giving someone, like, a stink vote.  Like: okay, you get my ballot, but you need to know that you are not fooling me for one second.  You need to know that I will vote for you because your stench isn’t quite as stenchy as the guy from the Stench Party.

But just because I voted for you, that doesn’t mean I think you smell all right.  You don’t get my trust, you don’t get my support, you don’t get my approval.  All you get is my stinking stink vote.

I’ll vote, I’ll vote!  Now leave me alone.