Stillwater

Cnn.com reports an Enigma machine is being sold online I think on Ebay. It´s one of those Nazi gadgets used to scramble secret messages into ciphers so the Allies couldn´t get them right. Apart from the sheer coolness of having WWII-era memorabilia at home there´s also the- -
And this is as far as I went today with a coherent text despite the use of the word “coolness” which some people will most likely point out that it´s gibberish, else uneducated at best. The point I´m getting at is, I´ve just begun daydreaming again and I´m surfing a brainwave or two on one large family-size figment right now because it seems that the only bright idea I´ve had for a post this entire week has to do with a metaphor weaker than those Superman-as-a-stand-in-for-Jesus-Christ ones in which simply put would go like, Gee I would like to buy an Enigma-like encoding machine that would turn gibberish into coolness so I could post here. So much for upping the ante.
Thus my premise lies stillborn.

On a completely unrelated sidenote I have just learned the coolest thing, the biggest difference between a damselfly and a dragonfly (insect). The damselfly rests its wings down along its back while the dragonfly simply keeps them open by its side.
National Geographic rocks in days like these baby and we´re oh! so about to get darker…

We are waiting in the wings still a week now to commence the re-engineering of our jailbreak.

Any other good books out there?

Hi.
Since the ingrown toenail-turned-1945 Hiroshima thing will probably go longer than expected maybe up to a month I´m grounded. It means no running around no exercises no fun.
…Which means, we´re back to reading a book a week.

That said, does anyone have a good book recommendation? Anything by an English-speaking author, preferably contemporary fiction but really anything ranging from the 1930s to today is acceptable.

Please e-mail me at mps186282@ig.com.br with your suggestions; thanks!

Squeeze

It´s like I was off to Peru once again and all of a sudden we´re following the railroad tracks straight across Bolivia from the Brazilian border en route to I dunno, Santa Cruz de La Sierra I think.
Guy sitting by my side is a decade-old best friend just fresh into Med School. We have been at odds between ourselves over this girl but it´s all gone now as from where he´s standing even though I haven´t got the whole bitter pill thing swallowed just yet; yet he tells me it´s all gonna be fine.
Despite the boxed protein bars in our backpacks he insisted on buying he´s also insisted on buying the one large bag of the vaguely-peanut-ish nut things in the convenience store at the gas station a few hours ago; he´s been munching on them like there´s no tomorrow and tearing the paper bag apart inch by inch.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I´m that guy from the X-Files,” he says as he licks another shred of paper and sticks it to the saliva-bound mural of paper scraps he´s been building over the large window besides him. “The one who eats the liver from his victims and hides in nests he creates out of digested paper.”
“That´s so gross.”
“It´s not. It´s cool.”
Another bit up the window. He´s got a palm up from its base blocking our view from the shabby villages and flatlands below.
An hour passes. Maybe two. Nobody says anything and he´s still not finished with either the nuts or the paper bag itself.
“Squeeze,” I say.
“What?”
“It´s the name of the episode. First season, episode three.”
“No f*cking way.”
“I kid you not, kemo sabe,” I smile doing Tonto´s voice from the Lone Ranger.
“You aren´t even that much into the show,” he calls my bluff. He know it because we have a mutual friend who stayed back home, couldn´t make it with us, who´s such an X-Files buff and knows the name to all episodes and stuff. “You can´t possibly know it.”
“I taped it over the pilot by accident.”
“So?”
“The pilot had Dana Scully… wasshername…”
“Gillian Anderson.”
“Right. Gillian Anderson,” I say with a snap of my fingers. “There´s this five-minute-or-so sequence in the pilot in which she´s in her bra and panties and has just discovered some weird marks on her skin which she thinks are scars from an alien abduction then Mulder checks them under candelight finds out it´s just mosquito bites…”
“So?”
“Oh she was so damn hot…”
“And you taped it over with the one with the liver guy?,” he gleefully asks.
“Yes. With the one whose antagonist´s nasty habits you have grown so fond of emulating for the last hour,” I tell him in scorn. “Just look at the mess you´ve turned our window you assh*le.”
“Big deal. Pullmann class my ass anyway,” he laughs. “What they think this is all of a sudden? London?”
“If this car´s London then you´re some goddamn Vergeltungswaffe-Eins.”
“Don´t throw this mock-German at me. You sound like Billy Madison in the tub playing with the bottle of shampoo you know? You so suck.”
“YOU suck!,” I get back at him in my best Adam Sandler impression.


Life is made of choices and 1998 has faded away and I had made a choice in the Summer of that year before I leaped on that bus and that train and over Lake Titicaca and in doing so I left a girl behind.
Straight off our first kiss just shy off the morning´s first light after a year of building it up. We kissed, I could barely believe it!! –Then off to Peru, what the heck was I thinking! Had I stayed.
Had I stayed she would´ve become my very first steady girlfriend a year before I met the girl who would´ve become my first steady girlfriend. That´s a question that has puzzled me for years you know? Like, downright HAUNTED me for years and the one true answer is this:
It would´ve been magical, pardon the cliché, and it would have lasted that December up to the first week of February before it was back to College for each of us and the spell would´ve fallen through, simple as that.


There´s this old picture at my grandmother´s house, it´s from a birthday party from when my young cousin turned six or something and I was seven years old. I´m wearing a The Clash yellow shirt in the party and I can´t for the life of me remember what the hell I was doing wearing The Clash apparel in 1987. I also remember a Midnight Oil t-shirt I had when I was eleven even though I would just get into the Oils in College and my mom denies the existence of both shirts to this day despite photographic evidence clearly pointing otherwise.
Fox Mulder himself couldn´t solve that one but the chorus from a Clash song remains, “You gotta let me know / Should I stay or should I go?”
We listened to that song in a nightclub in Cuzco, Peru as the DJ played it time and again, I was trying so hard to look tough to that blond girl we had met a few days earlier...


I´m knee-deep in a single choice tonight out of a recent phone call. They have teased me with an apple smaller than mine but with a glow so more golden. It´s squeezing the life out of me and sticking me to my desk at the office even though everybody´s long gone home now, it´s sticking me to the window out of my eyes, deep into myself, like the bits of paper drenched in my best friend´s spit from back in the train crossing Bolivia.
Spit, though, dries up pretty quick and that leaves me…


So many things have come undone since 1998.
I have lost so much. We have lost so much.


It´s dark outside and I should be going home right now.

Excerpts from 02 books

1.
“We´d set out at 3 a.m. from my mother´s house to make the Grand Canyon by sunrise. In the next five days we would cross the Rockies and the Plains (…) It was Bobby´s trip at heart. He would drive most of the time, and insist on stopping in stores that advertised “Homemade Jam” or “Local Handicrafts”, which, three times out of four, had been made somewhere in Asia. He would, with my credit card, buy over a hundred dollars´ worth of cassette tapes: the Stones, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen. He would play “Born to Run” over and over, until Clare finally threw it out the window on the road approaching Sandusky.”

From, A home at the end of the world
By Michael Cunningham (1990)

Thought you might enjoy. The bit about the girl throwing the Springsteen tape out the window just kills me. Life isn´t that much stranger than fiction, I suppose.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

2.
“To my mother, who liked the bit about the horse.”

From, Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency
By Douglas Adams (1987)

That´s the book´s dedication, really. I kid you not. Makes me laugh out loud every damn time. That´s who I wanna be when I grow up, you know? Douglas Adams, trailblazer. Smartest, funniest person on Earth.
He was that good.

Re: King of Atlantis (CONT´D)

Should have print-screen´ed it for posterity; got a scrollbar on the Lotus Notes for the first time in months!!
We so, sooooo rule the oceans it´s amazing... People are gonna write books about us one day you know. Or "graphic novels".
We are that good.

I wish them working hours would last forever.

King of Atlantis

There is one inexhaustible truth about office work; it takes my mind off wandering around and thinking crazy thoughts, it curbs my imagination and I love every minute of it. The vessels are packing and this is so cool it´s beginning to feel like it´s 2004 all over again; even though it feels like I´m perpetually a few bucks short of making some good money I´m feeding straight off the rush.

Being in the thick of it- we´re doing it like Aquaman- we f*cking rule the waves, baby…!

Armorball et Calvinball

Juggers was a movie released in 1989. You might never have heard of it because it was not the movie´s real name. It was called The Blood of Heroes but was also released as The Salute of the Jugger. Me and my friends though, we called it simply “Juggers” (pl.) for simplicity´s sake.
The movie starred Rutger Hauer (and Vincent D´Onofrio, as I have just discovered at the IMDB. I like Vince ´cause he so good as the loony cop in Law & Order) and was a very half-ass*d Mad Max-wannabe story set in the proverbial post-apocalyptic near-future, it was the tail end of the Cold War but it was the Cold War still, in which many clans and tribes of warriors competed against each other as gladiators in a game similar to football (North-American), only more violent.
It was love at first sight for us kids and we *had* to try it at home. Hence, that was how Armorball was born back in 1991, once the movie was put for rental on VHS.

Calvin & Hobbes had their Calvinball and it is my deepest belief that every kid should come up with a sport of his own. Most kids did, but in hindsight we were pushing “feat” level there. We made up a game- a sport- that lasted for about seven years from 1991 (first game) to 1998 (last game). We kept on playing until slightly after we had our drivers licenses, after we began going out with girls, we played until after we had graduated from High School; Armorball was that cool.

What we were trying to re-create in real life was the atmosphere of… violence and decay from the movie, straight into our homes but our mothers would never allow us because buddy, were we looking at a world of pain & hurt.
I had access to large quantities of industrial foam back then, the kind used to stuff couches and mattresses. It was light, flexible, free of charge, it was the raw matter of our dreams, we molded it into body armors and helmets held together with little faith and copious amounts of duct tape. You should have seen us; we were magnificent.
The gladiators from the movie also used sticks and chains which we readily replaced with the detached wooden handles from old brooms and some thick nylon cord- the weaponry was discarded after our first game when one of the kids´ heads was split open, this big bleeding slit running across his hairline to above the ear… it was that same kid who died in a completely unrelated car crash during International Women´s Day, 1998. We quit playing Armorball a few months after that; nothing to do with the kid dying.
Still his passing heralded darker times to come, childhood´s end, we were coming of age and the world was coming of age for us as well, the kid next door would let go of saving Calving & Hobbes newspaper clippings in his black binder, then College. Then here, then now. Then zero.

They did not have a ball in the movie, they used the skull from an animal of some sort if I remember things correctly. We chose it to go with an empty ice-cream plastic pot, which we would impale on a rusty metal tube with barbed wire spun around it. The whole barbed wire thing wasn´t such a great idea in the first place, especially when we were 11. We rapidly chose a ball -North-American football- instead (if not for the industrial foam helmet I´d probably had a huge scar on my right cheek).

As the years we went by we changed the rules, changed our gear, changed the places in which we would play, people came & people went. Armorball was kind of a staple for us kids in our hometown, all our schoolmates wanted in but our course we were selective as hell- people would inevitably get hurt playing so we´d always stick with the most level-headed pals we´d have… otherwise it´d all go down in fighting.
We would keep the armors but totally ditch our helmets. We started allowing punching and kicking first, then we pretty much abolished every previous rule against violence. As we grew up we also grew stronger and the sore lips and broken arms began. Two kids actually broke their arms playing Armorball in those seven years; one of them fell over his own arm and the other- we called him Harry because of the movie with the Bigfoot, whom he sort of resembled- was kicked over a large metal garden trash collector, it was so messy, lucky thing there his dad was a physician or something.
We´d always play on Saturdays or Sundays and the next Monday at school was to die for, everybody asking What the heck happened to your lips? How did you break your arm? Were you punched in the face? Did you get into a fight?

We took pictures of two or three games. I still have them to this day; there´s this one in which my cousin and I are so going at each other, him throwing a punch at me and I at him, almost comic book-style but so real, hurt so much in the ensuing week, and there´s the other shot with [name] on the ground holding the ball with everything he´s got as he´s being kicked in the head; it was so beautiful.
We stopped just shy of coming up with a website for Armorball. We never did. Let this be its record for posterity, so that the world knows, so that we never forget.

Barry Allen´s blues

The greatest story ever told is not the Bible. Neither it is that one from the early 1960s in which Superman splits into Superman-Red (wears red costume) and Superman-Blue (wears blue costume) and one of them marries Lana Lang and the other marries Lois Lane.
The best book you have ever read is not the one with the bit about the Mona Lisa and soon to be a movie with Tom Hanks (I hope so; damn airport literature´s everywhere these days!)

The food-court at the Shopping Center is the best place for people-watching. Get yourself something to eat and maybe a good book or a milkshake, sit down and open up your mind; the greatest story ever told is *their* story.
It´s a story told in clothing and body-language, the way girls smile to their boyfriends then turn gloomy and ghost-eyed once they´re off to pick up the food tray at the counter, it´s the way that old man in the blue suit & tie talks in his cell phone and you wonder just for a second whether he too is trying to reach Bhutan (the country), it´s how those old ladies never let go of the spoils from their recent shopping-spree in their plastic bags while eating greasy grilled cheeseburgers.
I love people-watching. Back in College they would frequently ask me if I was brooding; I was brooding a few times and up to a point and have the inclination to do so to this day & age but most of the time I was people-watching. I watched people in kindergarten, in grade school, High School, College, now at the office and will people-watch till the day I die.

The greatest story ever told- the greatest book you´ve ever read- it´s never about the plot otherwise Colleges everywhere would be pouring out papers on Jurassic Park or that book with the bit about the Mona Lisa (soon to be a movie with… et. al.). I mean, you can´t beat cloned dinosaurs, right? Thank god airport lit never gets their characters straight. It´s always about the character in a damn-the-plot kind of way.
Maybe it´s just me but I´m thinking back at random to say, ten or fifteen books I´ve read which I´ve enjoyed a lot and coming to think of them I´d only get the plot, what´s all about etc., by page 100 or something; that first push headway into a book is always made by the characters never by the story in itself.

Back at the food-court people-watching with the book and the shake- and I try to do this about once a month- everybody around you suddenly becomes a character, their lives and manners and there you are thinking, gee maybe somebody could write about all of them, I could write about them all, about each of them, there´s a book in everybody and maybe oh just maybe we´ll sell the rights to Hollywood and the one about the cute blonde girl two seats from me in the bus could become a summer blockbuster starring Jessica Alba? She´s hot.

People-watching is the closest thing I´ll ever get to being a serial killer choosing victims, I figure. No harm done there choosing characters though ´cause the book will inevitably end up in the large drawer underneath my bed despite the outcome.

If you should fall, would I fall with you?

The following topic came up at work today:
Suppose some old orbiting Commie space-relic from the Cold War, say some spy satellite or something, fell down to earth and crashed against one of our vessels berthed at the port of loading- Who would be responsible for the damage? Would the Carrier declare force majeure? Like, an Act of God?
But weren´t ´em Commies atheists?

[SFX: drum roll for the awful joke]

[Curtains, then out]

Jerry´s pal, Jon Bon Jovi

Now, Jerry absolutely hated Bon Jovi and I really think I hated Jerry. I really think I hate Jerry to this day even though we haven´t seen each other in years and he never lifted a finger against me.

Jerry was one of those kids whom excel at stuff. I was never particularly good at anything and Jerry would make crowds swoon with the piano, would play night and day, would make her mother who taught writing at our school but was a lousy teacher at that (for writing needs not teaching / it needs reading / period) so very proud and would get scores of girls because of the accursed piano.
I have come to understand & even accept how I lost the most gorgeous girl I´ve been with [a true goddess wearing human flesh!] to my best friend because he had this electric guitar and would play those riffs kind of like Mark Knopfler while doing his best/worst Sting impression on Money for Nothing, not really good but good enough to get the girl away from me and into his arms on the balcony of the ballroom during their Graduation… Guitar equals power just like a car, that´s a given.
But a piano? C´mon Jerry this isn´t the nineteenth century for cryin´ out loud! Men don´t use handkerchiefs anymore!

My cousin was Jerry´s best friend and I was pretty close to my cousin in those days so Jerry and I we ended up being fast friends, only not quite. Things were amicable between us to the point that there were sleepovers at Jerry´s, his mom´s living room while we were all drunk (things to do on a High School weekend other than getting drunk? None!); his mother the lousy writing teacher was ok with that. The piano towered above us fallen kids like a pagan idol mocking my deepest beliefs in… well, things in general.

On a sidenote Jerry´s real name wasn´t Jerry, that was his nickname which I suppose was taken from Tom & Jerry even though he did not look like a brown mouse. Weird thing there ´cause I´m always boasting I have a rather good memory but I can´t for the life of me remember why we called Jerry ´Jerry´ in those days. Maybe because of Jerry Lee Lewis? Gee how lame is that!

Crazy people don´t like people who pretend to be crazy just to get some attention and being mildly odd myself I felt this very strong urge to punch Jerry on the solar plexus every time he started behaving like the eccentric piano-playing kid genius everybody thought he was. Contrary to myself Jerry was a fraud only the piano thing was for real, while I have always been for real though the rest of it never amounting to much more than a fraud in itself.

Come Jerry´s birthday wow we´re sure to have a grand great idea or two- -
I still can´t understand that weird influence that Kurt Cobain or Axel Rose had over the kids back in the 1990s, was never into that Grunge stuff just maybe except for one only Soul Asylum album but everybody else was heavily into Nirvana & co. and despite the piano Jerry was too. Grunge people drank beer and smoked pot and sure as hell despised “cute” stuff like the then-recently-revived, re-christened teenage heartthrob Jon Bon Jovi so for Jerry´s birthday the guys chipped in for this glossy Bon Jovi poster which was huge, it was gargantuan, it was about three or four time the size of a regular movie poster, etc- big focus on Bon Jovi´s face then descending just a bit to show his Superman-tattoo on his arm, etc, all very manly in an extremely gay way, at least for a 15 or 16 year old such as Jerry.
A Bon Jovi poster wasn´t enough so we got Jerry´s older sister, which was kind of cute and very brainy and whom in hindsight I should have definitely asked for a date or something, to sign the poster for him. She wrote in very girlish penmanship- all fancy and stuff- “To my very best friend and #1 fan, Jerry”, then signed J.B.J and kissed it twice in bright red lipstick.
As it is on detective-themed TV shows and superhero comic books, it´s always an inside job so Jerry´s sister let us in his bedroom while he was out probably taking boring piano lessons and we hung the poster on the wall over his bed.
Coming to think of it we might have super-glued the poster to the wall, which didn´t make his mother very happy because the paint would all come off once the poster was removed the following day and all that but you should have seen Jerry go at Bon Jovi, scraping fingernail against paper then plaster then Bon Jovi´s face and Superman-tattoo falling apart…


This is everything I have to say about Jerry, friend to my cousin.


I met Jerry a few years ago on the bus to work. He had just returned from a season abroad in Europe or something, playing the piano, still behaving like a phony assh*le.
I should have punched him right there, on the bus, except I didn´t.

Falling into Hell

Just for the record there should be a *law* against people getting out of your life. Friends lovers family even that weird Scottish neighbor from back in early ´00 who´d give those great parties and fill his place with emaciated junkies and girls in thick leather boots.
Guy kind of looked like John Lennon.

I also miss chatting with brainy girls in ponytails over cheap wine and playing stupid board games late at night while very drunk then everybody passing out in the living room till somebody said Anybody in the mood for pizza? and we were all out for pizza- the whole ensemble of lost souls- together- always for one last time- the perfect night- before the lost souls are found and the gig is shot, the kindred undone forever.


As sung by the Pogues in A Rainy Night in Soho, "We watched our friends grow up together / And we saw them as they fell / Some of them fell into Heaven / Some of them fell into Hell"

Overcast

1. Went for a hat trick in fiddling with an ingrown toenail last night. Third time´s the charm & now my toe´s the size of Jupiter and all bleeding and sore and I´ve popped a zillion anti-inflammatory pills apparently to little effect.
Of course jogging probably doesn´t really help but I´m not stopping.
C´mon, an ingrown toenail´s a girl´s thing...

2. I really really really hope my workmates not prone to answering their own phones would all die bloody deaths maybe swallowed by lava or eaten by giant man-eating ants or spiders. I also hope they´re all sterile because I do not want my kids to live in a world populated by the kids of people not prone to answering their own phones.
Those pricks!

3. On that subject: Haven´t cracked a single joke about the proverbial planet ruled by spiders in a long while.
This is a thermometer for bad (worse) things to come.

4. Still on that subject: I think I don´t want to have kids anymore, how bad can that be? I mean, on the other hand I´m still kind of marveled at young parents with their toddlers at the mall every now and then. I think it´s pretty cool but strictly in a "there but for the grace of God" kind of way these days.
Come on, it *is* my call isn´t it?
If I were to have a child though I´d like to have a girl and I´d name her Svetlana.

5. Received a phone call yesterday that left me thinking. Ellipsis?

6. Won´t be able to see the March 29 solar eclipse from down here. That sucks big time.

7. On the slightly-brighter side of being s*domized by a syphilitic bear I have to do my taxes this weekend.
…Which is pretty much all I have to do this weekend with the possible exception of getting my hair cut, which is not saying much when it comes down to me, thanks for those genes dad.

8. I can´t for the life of me remember when Catwoman began wearing her traditional golden-age purple costume, the one with the skirt with the slit and the green cape. I think it was in 1946.
That kind of thing always makes me mad. For instance, the other day a friend of mine asked me if I knew who was the first super-villain Batman´d ever fought which is a given to most people that it´s Hugo Strange only it isn´t, it´s either the Monk (if you´re talking about a super-powered villain) or Dr. Death (just a gimmick-villain with a cornball name). Either way Dr. Death predates both the Monk and Hugo Strange.
By the way, Dr. Polaris (Green Lantern foe) pre-dates Magneto (X-Men foe) for about a year. In your face, Brody!!


The skies are usually lighter in Metropolis. Hence the one term usually associated with comic books, Escapism.

Superboy

We should buy candy & leave it over somebody´s desk [a girl´s] unannounced, every now and then, just because.

Teenage love, retconned

Freudian Remembrance Day is a popular day at the blog so what the hell. Was having lunch with some people from work and well, I´m not really sure how the story came into play but all of a sudden I was remembering a dream I had a week ago; there was this gorgeous green-eyed girl I knew back in High School [it´s always about girls we knew back in High School, isn´t it? Such is the power of Freudian Remembrance Day!] and she was a bit shy. No, she was *very* shy and there was simply no way I could get to her: Keeping up a conversation was a struggle. Making it last say, four minutes was a feat.
Then she moved closer to home, one tiny block away and I thought that was it, some superior conscience high above the clouds had rolled the dice for me, snake-eyes for the devil, the good guys were sooo gonna score.

The good guys didn´t.

The good guys didn´t and looking back in a “retroactive continuity” kind of way He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe were the ones to blame.
Retcon is the term used in comic books to explain, alter or further explore a previously-established event, for instance, when they were re-launching the Wonder Woman title back in the mid-80s the character had been completely re-booted. “So Wonder Woman´s story starts now,” that´s what it was said. “Forget everything that happened before”.
“But what about say, her adventures with the Justice League?,” asked the fans in distress.
“Aww, consider it as if the Black Canary [another super-heroine] had filled her place,” was the publisher´s answer.

Now, it happened way back in 1997 and I was 17 years old, it was one year later than the idyllic, ideal age for teenage love which is 16 in my book and in John Mellencamp´s songs and apparently to the morphogenetic field as well; and way too many years after He-Man had packed his bags and shoved it over his battle cat and wandered off into the sunset with GI Joe and all those ninjas-with-uzis flicks with Michael Dudikoff

This is how it happened, pre-The Wonder Woman reboot: After much much much effort- and we´re talking effort on an Herculean level here, “stamina of Atlas” and all that- I got her to invite me to check out her new place and of course we were all living with our parents back then but that never mattered to us at least not when we were 17 because once the living-room door had been opened and you were told to come in, it worked oh just like with Count Dracula- -
And.
She.
Had.
This.
Very.
Very.
Very.
Cute.
Neck.
Milky-white skin and dark brown hair falling down in a pointy-tail, a frame to those thin ruby lips and green kryptonite eyes she was a statue in marble to us superboys, from her pedestal all access was denied.

I think her mom served us milk-shakes or something and that´s the beauty of teenage love, because as chocolate milk or cake is pouring down from all over, from ever-smiling mothers in blue aprons the kids can´t take their minds of their pretty daughters in jeans and sneakers.

High school was a haze, a maze, it went by so fast and its last year was a moment hanging in time, frozen and time had stopped but it went by so fast and all of a sudden it was a leap from chocolate shakes to graduation day and I think I never saw her again but I did, except that one time not too long ago, I was driving though my hometown past the old place where I lived with my parents then past her place then past herself, look, yes that was her. She was walking down the street, etc., I should have stopped but life had gone by so fast…

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That was the Pre-Wonder Woman reboot.
The Post-Wonder Woman reboot version went on like this; this was the dream I had about that girl about a week ago. This is the retcon with the MOTU which the post all about, at least before it became this topsy-turvy nightmare of spontaneous prose. Okay, what I mean is, if you were all for half-assed poignant memories for bygone High School days the text pretty much ends here.
What follows is our customary nonsense but I promise in the end it all comes together.

There is no beginning in a dream. You are drifting flying falling saying goodbye to the pillow and the little pool of drool on the bedsheet then it´s off so somewhere else and it´s 1997 all over again and boy, you´re dreaming.
A familiar place opens up before you, it´s the lobby of her building just past the heavy iron gate and (!) Kobra Khan is at your side, Skeletor´s snake-man henchman from the old 1980s He-Man cartoons and you he´s saying,

“No idea where everybody´s going tonight,” he says very matter-of-factly, and a conversation develops between the two of you, it´s all about tonight, Saturday night, oh holiest of nights. Is it a barbecue? The club? The bar? Again? Hopefully it´s a party at the pool over at Frenchie´s, his parents´ place is *the* place for those things, girls love ´em parties at Frenchie´s.
Enter the green-eyes girl in pointy-tail and jeans & sneakers. Kobra Khan knows you´re on it, you gotta get this girl, and for an evil snake-men from Eternian he´s actually pretty cool about the whole thing, he lets you act, he backs off, the show´s all yours buddy.
- “C´monnnnn I´ll give you a ride”
- “I so want you to come”
- “Of course you won´t be alone in there, you know me and that´s gonna be enough”
- “All I´m asking is for one shot, let me prove it to you I´m one of the good guys”

She´s the sun and your wings are wax, she says No to no matter what you say, Icarus falls. The snake-man sneers.
You open our eyes.

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Now.
As silly as it sounds I really had that dream last week or so. It was not a metaphor nor anything but the point is…

A wise man… whowassit? Gore Vidal?… has once said that the human memory works in a way that we do not remember the events per se, but merely our last memory of said events.
Kind of funny thing going on with that, for I guess the next time I think of [girl´s name], I´ll think of Kobra Khan.
He *was* there after all. Black Canary in lieu of Wonder Woman in the Justice League and Kobra Khan as my old High School buddy.

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If I get to live forever and with a decent word processor by my side, I´m gonna write about everyone I ever knew.

There was, for instant, that friend of my father whom had this really awful wooden duck on top of his dinner table and one weekend many many many years ago dad and I actually stole the duck and took it to a secluded spot and emptied the magazine of a 7.65 on it… Shred it to splinters…

Etc.

Concerning the placement of a star; also the author, the dork; and does anybody know Bruce Gordon´s phone number?

[SUBTITLE: The dorkiest move ever attempted by a grown man]

The tattoo plan is running in full gear. I´ve pretty much made up my mind, yes we´re getting one and it´s gotta be a blue, 8-pointed star because I happen to like blue, 8-pointed stars and dragons are so not my thing. I mean, everybody does dragons; tattoo-wise there are more dragons than pandas out in the world which kinda proves that one seminal point that not everybody´s a dragon-person but everyone loves pandas.
The penchant for a tattoo spread out on one´s back is something to be considered but not here. Exhibit A calls for being a man for chrissakes if you´re gonna go the very dumb & irresponsible way and get yourself a tattoo in the end, heck, bottom line is at least I wanna see face-front the crazy thing I´ve just done. I have thought of the front of my left shoulder, which kinda led to the following dialogue:

ME: “I´ve been thinking about getting a tattoo.”
ROOM-MATE #1: “Yeah? What are you getting?”
ME: “A blue, 8-pointed star.”
RM#1: “That´s a girl´s tattoo you know.”
ME: “It´s not.”
RM#2: “Oh it sooo is a girl´s tattoo. Like those ones the girls get on the front part of their shoulders or something.”
RM#1: “Damn true. [Girl´s name] upstairs got this huge blue, 8-pointed star on her back.”
ME: “Is she hot?”
RM#2: “Oh she´s very hot! And where are you going to…?”
ME (cutting right in), “…I´ve been thinking of a lightning bolt as well.”
RM#1: “A lightning bolt´s pretty cool…”
RM#2: “Like the Flash´s logo? With the white circle behind?”
ME: “Naww. More like a wide, flat-topped Art-Deco yellow bolt, sans circle, like Captain Marvel´s.”
RM#1: “Who?”
ME: “Shazam.”
RM#2: “…The genie with the flying camel?”

A blue, 8-pointed tattoo is a symbol of deep personal significance to me and I´m not letting it go. I must, though, put some very hard-thinking in the possibility of something dark and gloomy rooted in the collective subconscious of mankind which is a blue, 8-pointed star being a girl´s tattoo and apparently I´m the only person in the free world not aware of it. So there.

Still, the thought of a tattoo (regardless of the imagery) does not come off that easily and neither does the tattoo itself. As a very bright person I have, of course, devised a very bright plan so the whole thing´s foolproof:
I would keep on my left shoulder the sketch of a star done with a permanent marker, only re-touching it every two days or so, just so I´d get the feeling of having a picture etched in my skin for well, a pretty long time.
Genius, eh?

Not quite. As it goes a permanent marker, one would reason, was hardly developed for such a use and after say ten or twenty minutes into the foray I noticed the paint had all come off in my t-shirt, oh, me sweet beloved yellow t-shirt I loved you so very much and have sacrificed you in my vain pursuit for a girl´s tattoo…
Dorkiest thing ever or what! We´re going for the world-record here, people!

God damn it.
Guys in prison are getting tattoos all the time, it just can´t be that tough…
The same thing could be said of anal intercourse in jail, though, and I think I´m pretty sure the tattoo´s as far as I go in that aspect.

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Blue, 8-pointed stars aside there´s some other cool stuff up in the sky. There´s a full solar eclipse coming up on March 29th in the Southern Hemisphere and from what I hear people down in Brazil will get a nice view of if.
Paging Dr. Bruce Gordon, paging Dr. Bruce Gordon… Bruce, buddy, no matter what you do stay away from crazy islands in the South Pacific. Unless you´re there for a Midnight Oil concert. “Huuullo Diablo Island!”
I love Midnight Oil but I just don´t see Eclipso getting involved in aboriginal causes in Australia.

Uh. Eclipso is an obscure 1960s comics character. He´s like this would-be world conquering super-villain entity who takes up residence in the unwitting body of Dr. Bruce Gordon, solar physicist, his arch-enemy. The cover gimmick was, “Eclipso- hero and villain- in one man!”
Just so that you know.

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And for the record, "I´ve never seen you look like this without a reason...", et. al.
It was on the radio a few minutes ago!

Book review for week 09

Today it´s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by this North-American writer called Dave Eggers. AHWOSG was Egger´s first book, published in 2000 and imagine that, it´s your very first book and all of a sudden you´re a finalist for the Pulitzer! Not only that, but a sh*tload of magazines and newspapers & stuff named Egger´s book as Best of the Year.
It is not fiction, though.

It´s the story of Dave himself then in his early 20s and his kid brother (about 10 or so) once their parents have both died of cancer within 30 days or so of each other. Dave is left with his kid brother. They move to California and try to begin life anew.
There´s not much a plot per se, it´s real life and you cannot demand a “beginning, middle and end” to life apart from birth and death. The book then is about the duo´s routine, the way they try to cope with this really horrible thing that happened, and ultimately balancing being 20 in the mid-1990s and responsible for raising a child.

It´s a gut-wrenching book and will have you crying before page 35 (I think he had me in pg.33!!), which is a feat regardless of the reader´s own track record.
It´s a very amusing book and will have you laughing out loud straight off its title page, with many jokes thrown in along the copyright notes and etc.

The whole feel of the book is, guy was probably going for a “great American novel” kinda thing but wow, ended up overshooting it by a landslide… which is very good in a sense that he perfectly gets the Zeitgeist, it´s the best description of life in the 1990s that you´ll ever see. But it is also… not bad but different... during a certain part of the book because it raises false hopes upon the reader; part of the book is dedicated to Might Magazine, which was published by Eggers and his friends during the period (a magazine aimed at people in their 20s), so at least during this part the reader will probably feel a little lost at sea, wishing for the bits about the younger brother to come back real soon.
…not that that part is bad (it´s in fact very interesting and has tons of real-life famous persons as guest-stars), but it certainly lacks the emotional overdrive which is a constant for the remainder of the story.

That said, I´m downright unable to say anything negative about the book. Guy has struck gold out of his own life and the book truly IS a work of genius.
Were it fiction a review would sure be easier and flow better, but it´s not. It´s not really about the story per se, but the way in which it´s written, the language, the self-conscious narrative.

Trust me on this one, it´s the **BEST** damn book you´ll have read this year, bar none.

The post in which we resort to name-calling

I was watching a re-run of To Gun on TV a few days ago for like the 368th time and it got me thinking, all that “Maverick” and “Goose” and “Merlin” and “Hollywood” and stuff. I mean, try hard as a grown-up *not* to view things in a different light now that Contra is just a bad, old video game not some awkward political incident and people have realized the risqué nature of all those Pet Shop Boys albums they owned, ah the 1980s gone bust, and here we are left wondering just how the hell has Top Gun survived. It did. Ferris Bueler´s Day Off did too, but that´s like The Catcher in the Rye of our generation. If Top Gun were a book it would´ve been… oh brother. I had something going there for a while now it just slipped. I´m open for suggestions, though. Oh wait. I still haven´t enabled comments on this blog have I? No. So in a sense, and it´s not what I originally had in mind (which I´ve forgotten so I´m thinking as I write this down) Top Gun could really be like; wait, you´re so gonna throttle me because of this one, The Picture of Dorian Gray. No sh*t, honest-to-god, get past all the very-gay-though-thankfully-never-explicit overtones (which Top Gun arguably has more than PDG) and you´re left with one damn good, gripping story. Can the political statement, the most important thing in the world´s a good story. Give me good fiction any day-- I´m in heaven.
But really. That Val Kilmer character “Iceman” is just too creepy in the movie. What´s that all about anyway?!

…And here I was thinking I´m this big genius for the Top Gun comments above but I´ve just realized I´ve seen someone else on TV saying something to that effect, I just don´t recall whether it was Tarantino or Kevin Smith. So there for justice.

Aaaand back to the callsigns (Maverick, Iceman, et. al.)
Here´s a very silly list without a purpose in which the author, well, lists a series of names he´s thought up about subjects most diverse:

1 . The name I´d give myself if I were my own son, but without having intercourse with my mother: (of course!)
ERIC VON RUTGER,
and believe it or not I once tried that line on a girl back in High School and it actually worked, it was one of the cutest girls I´ve been with to this day, and all because of a silly made-up name.

2 . The name I´d call myself if I were a p*rn actor:
HUNTER CHIPMUNK

3 . The name I´d give to my dog: (to be applied strictly for German Shepherds)
THE PROFESSOR

4. The name I´d give to my dog: (for all other breeds)
BUCKET

5. The name for the one book I´ll never get down to write:
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE KRALLIAN GALACTIC EMPIRE, which doesn´t mean anything and would work quite well with any subject whatsoever. You know, the Krallian Galactic Empire as a metaphor for world peace, teenage love, economics, etc.

6 . The name I´d give to my own country, if I were to become the ruler of my own country:
CREAM OF TARTAR

7 . The name I´d call myself if I were a super-hero:
THE BREAK-EVEN MAN! Boy, that´s a time-tested classic…

8 . Back to my fictional, made-up country form item #6, here´s the name of its monetary unit:
KRELIG, plural: Kreligs.

9 . Still on that rather silly (sillier?) subject, here´s the name for my metric-scale stand-in:
KRELIG, plural: Kreligs, also valid for measuring Temperature and Time. I´ve never been really comfortable with having different units/names for measuring stuff, so I´ve decided it´s so much easier to come up with one single name for everything. Think about it because it actually makes (a little) sense.

10 . Last but not least and you obviously saw it coming, my own callsign if I were a “Naval Aviator” like the characters in Top Gun:
STARDUSTER, though I´d never be a wingman to Val Kilmer´s character. The beauty of this Starduster thing is, it´s the same name I created to myself back when I was a kid and I think that´s very… positive. Reassuring. I dunno.
I mean, guy goes the distance and it´s like fifteen? Twenty years later or what? and he actually remembers how´d he call himself if he were a character in a movie. Blogging is one big egotrip that´s for sure, so I´ll let this one stand as a test for my own character. This kind of thing speaks tons about a person, you know?

If I were a girl, I´d marry me because of that one... :-)



[Oh c´mon, don´t give me that look! Top Gun *does* have a plot. It´s just not very… linear or coherent I guess. Anyway, I really should be posting a review about the Dave Eggers book I finished reading last night instead of this crap. Maybe later today, after lunch, who knows… Terrific book, though. Better than Top Gun.]

The “I`ve never seen you look like / This without a reason” post

I was jogging earlier this week under a scorching sun, it was 11:00 and all of a sudden I came upon something which I thought would make for a great post, which was basically a pun between the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and Kraven the Hunter (that old Spider-Man foe from the 1960s).
Now, here´s the clipped version of that joke, which I´ve realized is just awful: The Noble Truths are all about that suffering is inherent to life itself because people crave stuff, so it´s no wonder Kraven the Hunter actually shot himself in the end with a name like that (!), et. al.
Lamest joke ever, I told you-- It was so much funnier when I thought it up, by the way.
This post is not, therefore, about Kraven the Hunter nor about the Buddha. It is a post about craving, though.

Without further ado, then:

1 . It´s so hot in here; this place does not have a working air-conditioner and I have to wear a tie, which is basically a. Clothing for clowns or B. Clothing for old people who must hide their beer bellies when trying to score with younger girls from the office.
I mean, really. Let´s look back at the one great grand lesson History´s taught us when it comes to tying stuff around one´s neck: Person loses control of one´s own sphincter and sh*ts himself, then dies. That said, cui bono? Who profits?? What is the advantage in wearing a tie???

2 . Internet access, e-mail and pretty much everything related to technology this side of electricity itself has been on the frizz for the last couple of days. It´s gonna be a miracle if I get this one posted.

3 . Still stuck with “I`ve never seen you look like / This without a reason / Another promise fallen through / Another season passes by you”; still unable to get to the chorus.
Been like that for a week now!!

4 . I´m currently bored beyond all belief and I **really** wish something different would happen for a change. I mean anything. In life. In here. Out of here. Now. Then. Tomorrow.
Will anybody in the audience get my cell phone to ring in the middle of the night only to tell me of anything new?!

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On a completely unrelated sidenote, I´ve been thinking of getting a tattoo.