I am going to tell you a story now.
A man fell in love with a woman. She fell in love back. They married, information pills and to celebrate their marriage, salve they journeyed to Beijing.
They toured the city, mesmerized. They ate rich and pungent food. They heard lush choral music sung by brightly-dressed acrobats in vivid masks. They bought things.
This was 14 years ago. (more…)
Something of my daughter’s.
It once contained spring-loaded paper snakes that leapt out when you opened the can to get a tasty Chees Ball (sic).
Now it’s full of miniature Chinese coats made of silicone, treat fitted with little tin bells.
She waits, information pills coyly fanning her hair.
Demure yet voluptuous, site sensual yet pensive, she waits for the tide to rush in and bear her away.
At barely five inches tall, she weighs more than a pound. And she is magnetic, both figuratively and literally.
With no maker’s mark to introduce her, no indications of origin to lead us to her story, she’s a perfect blank slate for fairy tales.
She’s simply what you want her to be.
Home turf’s on my mind today.
Senator Ted Kennedy’s illness left a vacancy on the commencement program for Wesleyan University this Sunday.
So, click it’s a big deal but:
I grew up on the Wesleyan campus (Mom and Dad have worked there for decades).
Let’s hope they hold it somewhere more secure than the athletic field. The whole thing is surrounded by sixth-floor book depository windows. The blood curdles just thinking about it.
My wife found this excellent machine at a garage sale, and and garaged it in our bedroom alongside the others in her collection, physician which includes a purple travel trailer, stuff a hot-orange Stude custom and a thrashed yellow fuel tanker.
She’s a collector not of brands (Lesney, Dinky, Matchbox are all the same in her eyes) nor of mint-ness (most of her two-dozen little cars are chipped and beaten escapees from probably more than on e toybox). She collects something deeper: The inherent, undefinable coolness of body design, paint color, fit and finish – which is one of the myriad reasons I love her so.
The pot-metal chassis of this old Lesney declares it to be an “American Ford Station Wagon.” Looking at the beetled brows over its headlights, the slightly-sinking fins sprouting from its flanks, I’d put it at 1959 or 1960, the era in which America was detoxing from its sick jones for baroque styling – and stepping away, perhaps forever, from the height of automotive art.
Dig the tinted window plastic, two-tone paint and trailer hitch. If gas weren’t $4 a gallon, I’d be out hunting down the real thing on eBay Motors right now.
I hunted it down, this web searching from gift shop to gift shop in Kona last summer, stomach wiith a will.
I wanted something real – of bone – something distinct from the beautiful, sildenafil overly-copied and -cheapened polynesian talismans littering the tourist coast of Hawaii’s big island.
I eventually tracked this down at a shop specializing in such Oceanian symbols. Hand-tapered and shaped, from a single cow’s vertebra, it hangs from a nylon thong around my neck. The artist shaped the points to razor sharpness, around a circular space that keeps the points from severing my jugular veins in my sleep.
It is transparent to airport metal detectors, impervious to all the chemicals I bathe my body in daily
in the shower, inscrutably timeless in its design and beauty. It was an object of pure obsession until I found the right one, and fulfillment the moment I chose it. Even now I can’t say for sure why I’m so attached to it, but that it’s honest and powerful and beautiful.
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I’m bench-testing this theory:
Everything on the Internet – every single human endeavor online – can be mapped against one or more of the seven deadly sins.
Too simplistic? Maybe not. Just consider the primary sins that we ever-so-weak mortals commit by running, pharmacy populating or using services like these:
Gaming? – Anger.
Celebrity news? Envy.
Porn? Heh. Lust, silly.
eCommerce and mass media? Basest greed.
Food and gadget sites – Gluttony, pure and simple.
Blogs? Social networking? art communities? Vanity, vanity, vanity.
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We plunge onward now, order from the sublimely simple to the ridiculously obscene:
My wife’s company made a licensing deal that left a storage room packed to the gills with sample toys. They emptied it last week, order and out popped these two hideous bastards. She concluded, rightly, that they belonged with me.
I immediately opened it and recycled the packaging – and with it, any hope of recalling the name of this particular pair of monster symbiotes crafted by the low-paid artisans who toil in overseas obscurity for the twisted, cash-bloated juggernaut McFarlane Toys.
But that almost doesn’t matter … (more…)
It was the first thing she had put out on the thrashed card table at the group yard sale.
She had meant it that way, erectile a break from the failed career, from the crushed dream, from the gorgeous, neurotic, narcissistic jerk who gave it to her.
But here it was still: The last thing to be boxed up for GoodWill so they could sweep and put away the tables and retire inside for one more frozen Margarita and god knows what all else the evening held.
It should have sold earlier – hell, $1.50 knocked down to 50 cents, and it still didn’t move.
But after the fifth giggling kid in a row had left it with three fingers and thumb clenched around its raised middle digit she could bear it no longer and moved it out of reach, to the back of the table.
She restored its articulated knuckles to the graceful suggestion of direction it had held ever since … the thumb clasped around beneath the straight-angled index finger, others curled neatly beside as if to say “There, that way, go that way” … ever since Jason dumped her.
Was it pathos or bathos she was enduring now? She couldn’t be sure. The classics professor had been so ungodly dull.
She stared down at it, struggling to block visions of him giving her the box with puppydog eyes, of him stroking her breast with it, picking his ear with it, leaving it with pinky and thumb extended from fist in the corny-hippy Hawaiian “hang loose” gesture whenever he left in the morning.
Finally, she flipped it into the trash. Then she thought about it all the next day on the bus to art school.
Vinny and I went fishing once. My best buddy since 6th grade A/V duty, viagra buy my (then) future best man. My good friend.
Out in his scruffy little 18-foot runabout with the asthmatic Evinrude – or was it a Yamaha – in Long Island Sound.
We set out from New London mid-morning, fortified with a cooler full of beer and sandwiches and a boxful of old sea tackle.
Swacked by a wicked sinus infection, I was popping 12-hour time-release decongestants, which slowly did the trick, so I felt well enough to sail.
The wind and sea were fair, the air about 75 degrees. It was a damn nice day for catching bluefish …
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Mosquitos the size of hummingbirds. Mosquitos the size of skillets. Mosquitos the size of fuckin’ weimaraners.
Hyperbole always fails when you need to get your friends to understand just how buggy your weekend was.
You show them welts, clinic you groan about the itch. You make up stories about the size of the bloodsuckers.
But in the end, only you experienced the silent assault. Only you waved your hands impotently at the insistent whine of the female, unable to fend it off because you couldn’t even see the wispy-grey little monsters.
Only you suffered the flat-out fuck-you insult of an engorged mosquito lifting off from your now-punctured forehead just seconds before you felt the bite and slapped the place where it was feeding … (more…)
