Tamagotchi

I have never really told anyone about this, but I've always wanted a Tamagotchi...

Waiting for the rain

The sky is overcast up there far in the distance past the Interstate where you can’t touch the clouds, always out of reach, thick damp gray like cotton candy soaked in whitewash hovering above green hills on the horizon line like a bad omen open for divination, about to unload, discharge, pour down its truths elsewhere.

It’s closer to sunny here though, with large empty patches overhead, torn free from thinning mist-like cloud banks scattered all over by the wind. Those empty patches project intermittent circles of light down on the ground, over the tall buildings, wading erratically along jammed thoroughfares. Moving shadows are cast without rhyme or reason and go mostly unnoticed by the thronging crowds. Some of them brought along their umbrellas, just in case, when they left home for work.

There’s an overall melancholy in the air today, not really a sorrowful mood but instead a general slowness to everything, for action, attitude, buffering the self against volition or initiative: There should be lightning soon over there and with it the smell of ozone, the smell of wet, and the growing pervasive feeling one should have stayed home reading a book instead. But then, almost no one reads books anymore, so it’s a feeling devoid of purpose.

I remember one particular rainy afternoon at my grandmother’s house many years ago, going over the old books in the cabinet above her ancient armoire and coming up with, among several others, a copy of Through the Looking Glass that belonged either to my mother or to her siblings, complete with the ghostly Tenniel illustrations. I remember sitting down on the white plush couch with my back to the open window and the dark gray sky above, and devouring that book with a glass of chocolate milk, maybe cookies or freshly-baked cake as well.

I’m not the one to say that back then was necessarily better in any absolute sense, it did have its highs and lows just as everything else does except on rainy days candyglazing the past seems so much more tempting, easier to do and to come by, either by fantasy or force.

My ode to yesteryear

Thursday, November 17, 2011.
9:15am EST. Right now on my MSN Messenger contact list:

Ten persons online, seven of whom are girls: Five of whom I've slept with and the other two I swear on a stack of bibles I really, really, really tried to take home on any given Friday or Saturday night but they were just too mean to begin with.

Ahhh for the days of yore, right?

Hehh. I can't go home again but heck if I can't brag a little.

Again with the Bride of Frankenstein

Out of all the Universal monsters I'd say Dr. Frankenstein's Monster was always my least-favorite. There's just something about the big, slow, dim-witted hulking strogman motiff that has simply never appealed to me.

But then-- and this has happened many times over in the last what, three years or so-- you sit down to watch either of James Whale's Frankensteins, the first one or the Bride sequel, and man there's Karloff stumbling, wobbling, the big lummox, under all that makeup you'd swear it was a sickly green past the b&w... you stand corrected.

I mean sure, Bela Lugosi kicks major ass as Dracula-- that ethereal European accent from god-knows-where is just to die for, and just the way he walks about the set with that cape-- not even Batman does that to a cape. But then you're watching the Bride of Frankestein and the Bride hisses at the Monster, casts him aside, and he turns to Pretorius and says, We belong dead!--- Wanna see Bela Lugosi do it. No Dracula, no Wolfman, no Mummy, no Invisible Man, no Phantom of the Opera, no Creature of the Black Lagoon (a runner-up favorite, by the way, and overly under-rated).

The Bride of Frankenstein just has got to be one of my favorite movies ever: From that madcap first scene with Lord Byron you surely don't see coming to Elsa Lanchester's being onscreen as the Bride for what? Five minutes tops? But that makes an impression to last an eternity With all her goddamned chilling hissing-- Terrific movie, terrific movie.

The 11/11/11 post

Just for the hell of it, right? Just to make sure we got this down to paper.

I was eight on 8/8/88 + it rained only on one-half of this playground in the building I lived with my parents. That was pretty cool, because I’d often wondered until then whatever happened at the tail-end of raining, where wet stopped to give way to dry, the border, the transitional medium.

I was 19 on 9/9/99 and Jimmy and I were already in College and for some reason we were not working that day, or maybe we both were in-between jobs. So we went out to the comics shop and I bought a DC Comics compilation of sci-fi stories from the 1940s to the 1980s. There was one story in that collection that would eventually sort-of, kinda inspire me on the tattoo I’d get years, years later.

Then if you look up the post on this blog for 10/10/10 you’ll read of the e-mail I’d sent Cybill, strictly a friend then, and one in a rather cumbersome position at that (again, then), to thank for her company on the Bon Jovi concert we’d gone to together a few days earliers. Which sort of speaks volumes, I guess, on asserting that these days are fast indeed.

I’m 31 on 11/11/11 and I’m working from home. No, scratch that. I’m at home pretending I’m working but in fact I’m not doing much of anything simply because I’m way disappointed and upset with my dead-end job. Also because I’m kind of queasy today. Too many trips to the boy’s room this morning. It’s a good thing I stayed at home. From instant messaging Cybill’s asking if I’m feeling better. Yep, I type back. Then I ask her is she’s coming over tonight and she says of course she is.

‘A’ is for Abraxas, ‘B’ is for bullshit

Bryce had been telling us over sushi he’d do it with poultry his magic I mean and in the back of my head I kept zoning out, much to Cybill’s chagrin, because all I could think of was that zombie movie with Bill Pullman even though there’s like an ocean in-between the two crafts and I was probably just taking the easier way and allowing in stereotypes anyhow, preconceptions and prejudices. But suppose I go Buddhist, but to follow a fat deity? And I’m certainly not going Catholic only to molest little kids.
But see, there’s Bryce droning on and on of his craft and strange madcap rituals with chicken and all of a sudden my Bill Pullman figment phases out to this funny syndicated newspaper strip I must’ve read back in the mid-1990s I think it was Dilbert nononono, not that, it was from a Robotman strip, you know years before they made away with the Robotman and the strip was renamed Monty? And on that specific strip, memory hazes a bit right now sorry if I veer off somewhat from its actual content, but the Robotman was kind of chastising Monty on all the McNuggets he would eat and that some day the spirits of all the chicken slain would come back to haunt him? The sheer definition of Karma.
That’s the joke I was to tell Bryce but Cybill would probably throttle me because she’s sort of partial to Bryce after he gave her his old iPad before she went on PTO to South Africa so she could post the usual stuff on Facebook.

But point is Bryce does it with poultry and seashells, Jimmy does it by listening to old black men, long since departed, Cybill herself has a bracelet with Nazar charms dangling from it, allegedly to fend off the evil-eye, and her mother gave me this little medal of some Saint so I could keep it in my wallet because it’s supposed to be blessed or something and I’ve since had it misplaced, naturally unintentionally but that’s Magic for you.