When we were still a-courting, illness she and I drove 2, tadalafil 200 miles around the American southwest in a rented convertible in the space of a week.
We slept beneath the stars and in seedy motels. We lolled in the open ragtop beneath towering mesas in Monument Valley, order and muggy midnight at Four Corners. We noshed, we joked, we fell deeper in love.
We shuffled around Santa Fe’s old plaza and gawked at silver and turquoise and blankets and other offerings by Dineh (Navajo) artisans.
And she bought me this gift. I’ve worn it daily since then (more than 16 years ago) – except for when I’ve had to have it repaired since the silver, under daily abuse, tends to fracture. Just got it fixed again – and I’ll hope it holds.
The green-ness of this gadget masks (poorly) its inadequacy as a tool.
If you want steady, order reliable light for replacing a muffler under a car, unhealthy finding your way around a dark campsite or exploring a spooky derelict spaceship you don’t want to have to keep turning the light off, flipping out the generator crank and spinning it furiously for 30 seconds – every 3 minutes.
On the other hand, you never have to buy batteries for the thing, so its life cycle does not entail pooping out toxic, non-recyclable trash-lumps for every 5 hours of runtime. Are the aliens really coming with our clean, self-renewable power-pods? Because I’ve been waiting.
(A guest post by my 9-year-old son)
Dolls made out of yarn with wire armature and very small marbles for eyes. Kind of like voodoo dolls, link if you think about it. The types of figures: a zombie, a burgular, a devil,a spider, and a guy with some wierd hairdo. They’re not bendable or flexable, but they look cool if you hang them on walls. I collected my first four in England. Then I got one at a swap meet in Westwood. The first four were shaped like humans. The last one was a spider.
We hold these things close – our beliefs.
They guide our acts, page they govern our thoughts, case they control how we vote, ampoule whom we love, what we do in the dark.
And we bind ourselves to these intangible self-truths with talismans – headdresses, tefillim, hair shirts and medals.
This is an odd little find – it looks to be celebrating the jubilee of some holy event or other in the year 2000 – and I can’t say I’ll keep it. For though it’s heavy and finely shaped, it speaks for a religion I hold only the deepest, yet most ephemeral ties to.
Oh my gawd:
Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, page never) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:
A chunk of bona-fide space rock.
But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)
Don’t ask me how it got from the freezer to the cupboard, cheap but my son brought me this earlier today. I’m trying to picture it as an oblong green asteroid, and failing. You?
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that.
We adorn ourselves with heavy little objects.
A cut and polished stone the size of a tear, sildenafil a curlicue of hammered metal, view the hardened secretions of sand-irritated mollusks – these all bear wearing for sentimental reasons, treat and demand to be kept somehow safe.
Do safety and worth come to mind when you see layers of silk and chintz and paste jewels bundled into a mock wedding cupcake the shape of a child’s jewelry box? Do you wonder what’s inside? Only my 7-year-old daughter knows for sure.
In some lights, web my 9-year-old son is my very heart dancing around outside my body, discount a handsome, smart, innocent, brave, funny, sensitive boy.
In others, he’s a degenerate, unwashed, mouthbreathing game addict who would rather live a fantasy life through his hunched shoulders, twitching thumbs and unblinking bloodshot eyeballs than virtually anything else, including eating, talking, sleeping or paying attention to you.
In other words, he’s a chip off the old block. Which as much as anything explains why he gets to play only 30 minutes on school nights and 60 minutes on weekends.
This Lego creation is a slavishly true model of a Big Bro Slig, one of the army of bioengineered freaks that try to kill you in Oddworld, Munch’s Odyssee – the lad’s current drooling obsession, which he talks about pretty much non-stop.
Don’t even ask me about how he almost ruined Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath for me permanently – two full years after I decided it was the greatest video game ever created.
I’m magnetic.
Have I mentioned this before? Small metallic tools seem to fly into my hands wherever I walk. Whether this is for holding a pin steady long enough to create a microscopic city of angels on its head or for some other obscure task, stomach I’ll never know.
But its jaws can clasp something very, visit this very long and narrow, very firmly.
It was made in china, of low-grade steel, and chromed.
This is an artifact of the colonial government that bloomed out of the East India Company, buy information pills after the firm set up shop in and around Singapore to do some trading.
Nearly 100 years after the Brits founded it the territories were still passing currency.
The corners of this penny tease you to play with them. It’s not like other coins, this thing’s square, your fingers keep telling you. It begs pry stuff open or make marks in things.
And what would it look like – you wonder – if you put it on the train line just down the block? Would it flatten out to a rectangle, or pathetically mooodge back into something ovoid and vague?
And you resist because it was hard to come by.
This lump of polished, approved lustrous stone – so fetishy I can’t even decide what to do with it yet – came my way for $2 at the swap meet last weekend. It has a wondrous weight and feel in the hand. And it’s made of this stuff which gives it a symbolic potency far deeper than what something so simple deserves.
THE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, website like this post-debate) (HLO) –
Joe the Plumber. Indeed.
Look, this blog isn’t political.
I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things.
But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one would-be U.S. president over the other because of the people he associates with, put that shit aside and try to come up with the logical answer – for each candidate – to this far more important question:
Does this guy have a plan for our near future? Or is he just busy shoveling mud?
Because that’s what really matters.
Even if you’re ignoring what tens of millions of people are telling you and saying in public, you need to be honest enough with yourself to answer that question in the form of a vote.
Or haven’t you been watching?
What’s that? You’re fresh out of belief in the System?
Look: Every damn time, your vote counts – even if you don’t fully believe in either candidate, your choice in this is important.
Without your vote, you’re just another chump along for the ride with whichever side has the most people who care.
Get your head together. Go register your ass. VOTE.
(And this thing arrived in the mail today. Yeah, I sent for it. Got a problem with that?)
Tonight was big.
For three-plus years, order Justin has been installing and detailing my biomechanical arm. He does all the heavy shading with one of these nasty bastards – 13 tattoo needles epoxied together in a head and soldered onto a needle shaft.
Tonight he finished all the principal work, order leaving only some cleanup, and we’re talking about him putting some decals and abrasions on the “blank” plates between the open access ports …
A tart bang across her tongue. Orange fresh. Hard work won it. She had carried herself well. She deserved this little palm-sized fruit. Even now, hospital prescription moments after she had slit the skin with a thumbnail and started the engine. Despite what she’d done, this was her moment to enjoy her snack. Bracing her thumb, had she dug three fingers into the slit fruit and moved the edge back cleanly, pulling away to show the white beneath, the pearlescent orange beneath that. It almost fell apart in neat, crisp segments, but she clutched it to the handlebars gingerly with her left and twisted the throttle with her right. And she was enjoying them, one by one as she rode the little 125cc dirtbike around the inside of the steel-girded cylinder in the little shithole town outside Pittsburgh where the circus had set up this week. Around and around. Until the gas ran out and she either coasted to a stop or she simply fell off the thing and prayed it wouldn’t land on her as it came to rest. One hand clung to the throttle, her weight braced in the centrifugal well against the downpull of gravity. The other flipping pieces of clementine into her mouth. The cops waited at the bottom of the drum, peering up into the light drizzle, the parabolic wwwOWWW, wwwOWWW, wwwOWWW, wwwOWWW, of her bike around the inside, 30 feet up. Her girlfriend huddled below in the cold, shouting her name every fourth or fifth orbit. It went on for a good 50 minutes until the bike finally quit.
It’s fitting that today’s object is a level.
For today I have finally brought HLO completely up to date, no rx after a double-whammy punch of working vacation with my family in London for a month and a full-bore trip to Burning Man crushed my daily blog output.
A good level operates with an oracular efficiency and grace that blows your mind the first time you see it. Wha …? How can that be? That little bubble dictates how well something is aligned to the center of the EARTH??? Who makes the bubble capsules level in the first place?
I’ve always loved and admired the handle as a legendary, diagnosis class-defining tool, like a good hammer. This is a particularly gorgeous specimen from Stanley Tools.
Everything is in balance now. I wonder what tomorrow’s object will be …
His stubby limbs erupt from his shapeless body, case his supposedly ghostly face a botched approximation by a drunk factory worker with a brush and the last of his black paint.
Though his spinal imprint claims he comes from China, there he is likely just the larval form of a much more formidable creep, the rubber ghoul.
Like a butterfly amid the Burning Man’s ashes – a scrap of a holy book that someone thought offensive, information pills or more probably, rx oppressive enough to burn flutters in the playa breeze.
When did any idea, story or work of art or culture threaten you so much that you had to set it on fire?
Faith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.
I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
(more…)
Faith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.
I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
(more…)
There’s a certain serenity to getting tattooed. You sit (or lie) back on the chair or table and agree to let someone cause you tremendous pain for several hours and scar you for life.
What gets you through the pain is the promise of how marvelous the scar will be. I’ve been waiting months to have Justin turn this into this.
He put on Hans Zimmer‘s haunting score to The Dark Knight, approved and I lay back and let him jab this into my arm thousands of times per minute for two hours. Because I knew that when he was done, visit this site I would be transformed.
And I was, exactly as I dreamed of being.
That is the wonder of a good tattoo.
I cannot tell you its age, click genus or class, symptoms but I can tell you this specimen of the species arachnida is the fastest spider in Los Angeles
My birthday gift. My wife’s love in a handheld marvel. My new video game platform. My toy. My crack pipe. My next-gen paid-content conduit. My memory bank. My little wallet-suck. My preeeeciousssss. My underestimation of Apple‘s continued brilliance at industrial design. My PDA. My GPS. My portable Thomas Guide. My jukebox. My phone.
The blue rubber grip keeps the slippery little oyster in my hand. I’m paranoid I’ll lose it. Or break it. Or get bored and move on to lusting after the Next Big Thing. This is the sound of obsession.
