I mispronounced “consortium” in front of a consortium

I said it like “consort-ee-um” and the consortium rolled its eyes. I knew I had messed up, but how often do you get to talk to a consortium, so I kind of felt like “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”

I kept talking for a while but I was aware I had goofed. I think it’s because I read a lot and don’t talk to a lot of people, so I say things in my head that I don’t get a chance to say out loud and sometimes the wrong pronunciation sticks. Eventually I stopped talking because the consortium was just looking at me. 

It just looked at me, but I couldn’t tell if it was looking at me with interest or pity or what. This was at a New Year’s party, I should say, and I had to talk loud to get my voice over the crowd, and I thought maybe it hadn’t heard me and that’s why it wasn’t answering me, but then the consortium started slowly pivoting away from me, so I was like “oooohhhh-kaaaay”. It was moving very slowly and I felt like everyone was watching it move slowly.

Here’s a true thing, this is actually the truth: when I was younger, I knew the word “epitome” and I said it correctly out loud, but when I read it, I pronounced it in my head like “epi-tome” and I think my brain actually categorized these as two different words. I mean, I didn’t literally think these were two different words, I didn’t think that hard about it, but I definitely remember one day in high school, walking to Algebra II and having this realization that the word I’d been saying in my head when I read it and the word I said out loud whenever it came up were the same. I guess it doesn’t come up that often in conversation. The consortium was moving to a different part of the room.

I was over by the table with the crudités and the consortium was going over to a different area where some people were smoking. It bugged me for a while, to be honest! It kind of nagged me that I had done something wrong, like maybe I had offended it? I kind of go out of my way sometimes to not bother people. It was only later on the train when my friend Andy said, “What were you talking about with the consortium?” and I was like, oh, whoops.

“Nothing,” I said to Andy.

Andy lives in Carroll Gardens and I’m in Windsor Terrace, so he got off a few stops before me. The consortium had still been at the party when we left, and I hadn’t said goodbye or anything.

My phone was at like 2% so I had a while after Andy got off the train to just sit there and think about some things that I could have done differently, or maybe should do differently, in the future.  

Iris: A Hippo Story

In 1995 or thereabouts, I wrote a poem about a hippo and made it into a book for my sister. I don’t remember the specifics, other than once every five years I would remember to do something nice for her (also she told me once that she had read that Mikhail Baryshnikov told Lea Thompson that she was too stocky to be a ballerina, and I guess that stuck with me).

AND NOW HERE IT IS ON THE INTERNET.

I had read somewhere that with a children’s book, for a given age, some percentage of the vocabulary should be a little more advanced than that age, and since my sister was going into grad school at the time, some of the words in here are from a GRE study guide (the original book had a glossary in the back; here I put them in as comments — this was before the internet made this look as condescending as it does now).

To give you some idea of how much I know about anything, the illustrations were done by sketching them in significantly different styles in a sketch book, scanning these drawings in and printing them on standard printer paper, then WATER COLORING THE PRINTER PAPER (if you don’t know why this is a bad idea rest peacefully in the knowledge that it is a bad idea) and then going over that with pencil where I thought it still looked too bad. This perfectly yielded the amateurish yet extremely fussy look I was going for no just kidding I just don’t know how to do anything. Then I gave it to Kinkos and asked them to wiro-bind it because that’s the classy way to bind things.

I also gave a copy to a few other people, including my parents. My dad always liked it a lot, and I thought I would put it up here as a sort of tribute to him. There are a lot of things I would change about it now, but there are still some things I like about it. If you like it, find someone and be nice and/or funny to them, which is what my dad liked to do. XOXO

This is a thing I wrote

about cake vs. pie, and people coming over to my house, and my dad.

I should have called it These Indomitable Internet Friends Met Up To Decide Whether Cake Or Pie Was Better. But What They Discovered Changed Their Lives Forever but instead I called it "A Corroborating Opinion" because it agreed with the prior day's post about the same meet-up; so anyway, this is it.

Periodically

I think of a book I bought a long time ago that I thought was funny, and then I type about it and then I ask Splitsider if they want to publish what I just typed and three times now they've said "Sure."

2. ???
3. Profit

Anyway, this is the latest one, a writeup on a high school year book parody that National Lampoon put out in 1974 (but about a high school in 1964). PLEASE TRY TO KEEP UP.

I hope you enjoy this walk down yesterday's main street with me.

Opposites Attack

Hi!
I wrote this thing for a kind-of online book club for Videogum commentors about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: MOBFD | Opposites Attack

(other write-ups will appear next week, and then no one will talk about this book again for twelve years)

OMISSIONS: Some really great sex scenes were omitted, at the request of those who are now married or involved. Also removed was a fantastic scene—100 percent true—featuring most of the piece's primary characters and a whale. Further, this version reflects the omission of a number of sentences, paragraphs, and passages. Among them:

SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE: Reading him made me speak and even think like him – only DFW and Thomas Pynchon had previously done that.

AND THEN A LITTLE LATER: And then this great, great takedown in the New York Times that I still go back and reread sometimes and about which movie Napoleon Complex once used the F word at me. ON THE INTERNET WHERE IT STAYS FOREVER.

AND THEN STILL LATER: Donnell Alexander read from Ghetto Celebrity, a book that was slated to be one of the first books published by McSweeney’s, and he paused – maybe in mid-sentence, sure, why not  –  and looked at the crowd and said, “I just realized this isn’t a very McSweeney’s style book.”

There were non-white, non-male writers, though, I think? Amanda Davis springs to mind and Zadie Smith hung around the main office for a while. I guess there were a few ladies, but two of the ones that seemed most striking at the time –

(1)   Lucy Thomas, whose slice-of-life stories (collected in “Jokes told in Heaven About Babies”) become distracted and undercut their own narratives with non-sequiturs, and
(2)   Elizabeth Klemm whose “Mr. Squishy” reads like if Infinite Jest was a short story
–        turned out to actually be by dudes (Eggers and David Foster Wallace)

IN THE "BACKLASH" SECTION: Issue 16 of McSweeney’s in 2005 came with a free comb (a throwback to the Galapagos haircuts?), and when I bought it, the employee at the McSweeney’s store rolled her eyes when she showed it to me.) 

AND SOMEWHERE TOWARD THE END:

Thorn: When I first got your book, um, in the mail, when I asked for them to send it to me, because I’d heard it was quite funny, I was worried that it would be another one of these McSweeney Asshole Books, where it’s just a lot of unnecessary verbiage …
Hodgman: You mean it’s not?

Thorn: …Well, I, you know, I mean to some extent it is, I don’t mean to underplay the McSweeney aspect quality of it. But were you worried that it would just fall too deeply into that kind of house style of McSweeney’s?

Hodgman: I wasn’t worried about that because McSweeney’s was the venue that allowed me to explore this voice and this subject matter to begin with. I mean, obviously without McSweeney’s, I never would have written “Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent”; I never would have developed, I think, this sort of, this particular voice of the eternal authority who’s also kind of a blinkered idiot. But more to the point, McSweeney’s gave me this sort of excuse to write funny, because before that I was writing serious short stories that had some comic stuff in it, but McSweeney’s was, as a literary journal to publish serious fiction against experimental fiction against sheer absurdist comedy, I mean, it was very liberating for me. So if it had only reached people who appreciated McSweeney’s, I would probably be pretty happy, because (a) I owe those people a lot as it is and (b) I think there are quite a few of them, you know, who dig it. But I also felt going into it, that I wanted the book to reach as many people as possible and it would be inevitable and I think not unreasonable to compare it to McSweeney’s. I had no idea what that audience might be and I did suspect that it might just reach those people who are already attuned to that McSweeney’s style, who would like it but I’m glad to say that it has reached those people and a little beyond too.

[and then later]

I am lucky, I suppose, that I’ve evaded the McSweeney’s Asshole Book label because I know that there are people out there who, no matter what the quality of the work and no matter what the particular point of view of the individual author they just hate hate hate McSweeney’s. It just really bugs some people. And I guess the worry I had was that the book would find its way into the hands of a journalist or a reviewer who felt that way and simply because they would associate me with something – that I believe in – but because of that, they would be mean about it. And luckily that hasn’t happened. Until right now, actually. So thanks. 

Goodnight Moon: Some Continuity Errors

1. On the “comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush” page, the brush and comb look like they are about four inches apart, but on the “goodnight light” page (and others), the comb is practically touching the brush.
2. Before and after the “goodnight mittens” page, it shows a pair of socks next to the mittens on the drying rack (or whatever), but on this page it shows just the mittens by themselves with no socks.
3. In prior (and subsequent) pictures of the “little house”, the door on the house has a doorknob but on the “goodnight little house” page, the door is missing the doorknob.
4. Prior to my owning this book, my apartment had an “office”.
5. The picture of the kittens immediately prior to the “goodnight kittens” page depicts the kittens playing with yarn, as does the subsequent picture, but on the “goodnight kittens” page itself: no yarn.
6. Prior to my receiving a copy of this book in a gift set of other books by the same author, I would just go to Amazon and buy a bunch of things whenever, but now I think a lot about how much food costs.
7. Before I had this book, it seemed impossible to me that I would ever have said to someone I loved: “You know, a percentage of me is still a penis”; or: “I’m confused how your having had an episiotomy a week ago prevents me from getting a bj now?” although maybe we can all admit singing “Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and a bj” is objectively funny divorced from the context. 
8. Before the appearance of this book in my home, I didn’t immediately assume strangers I saw on the street were actively attempting to cause harm to people close to me as I walked with them or pushed them in a stroller and then in my head jump off from that image of them (the strangers) potentially hurting my family into playing out scene after scene of my violent retribution, like recent-Korean-movies levels of violence, against these strangers, who in these scenarios that I am imagining would meet with staggering and disturbing consequences at my hand, but in a complicated inversion of what you might expect, this results in the people in my apartment building and just in my general neighborhood looking on me with a new respect instead of pity and this is also mixed with a kind of sexual desire from some of them, but subsequent to my receiving this book, all that, but plus I also oscillate between pity for myself and contempt for myself and how every mundane choice I make is ultimately insufficient, like a perverse Choose Your Own Adventure where every decision leads not merely to a death but to a specifically unimpressive death, the choices I’ll make for the rest of my life spread out before me, forming a polluted, qlipothic tree, on every branch a sour, rancid piece of shit fruit that if this were an overexplainy political cartoon would each be labeled with things like “inadequacy” or “disappointment” or “even the moderate successes in his life can be chalked up to the mere happenstance of his being born into a white middle class family and the entropy that that afforded him” and know that even this pity/contempt is practically a working definition of triviality compared to some of the nightmare stuff that many, many other people legitimately have to deal with, and even my acknowledgment of same just heightens the privileged position from which the solipsism feeds on itself, which just makes the whole feeling of bullshit inadequacy collapse into itself like a melting Klein bottle.
9. On the “goodnight noises” page, it sort of looks like the brush no longer says “bunny” on it.

It's All in Books!

If you like looking at things, here is something I wrote about a Late Night with David Letterman book from 1985:
Inside the Almost 100% Successful 1985 Late Night with David Letterman Book

I am as shocked as you to see it contains a short "interview" with Merrill Markoe and less shocked that it has a reference meant only for Voyagers! Superfans.

By the way, you look really pretty today!

The Do Monkeys

On Tuesday, arriving in the mail, was – and I use was and not were because it was an entity, a big package, a self-contained TV dinner gestalt – was the Sea Monkeys, all in a shrinkwrap-wrapped package that looked like it could survive being mailed from pretty much anywhere to pretty much anywhere else. When I opened it, I was surprised to see the one packet labeled not Growth Food, but Manna. The Growth Guarantee in Writing was signed and stamped, something no ant farm had ever offered. The whole thing had cost $1.25 plus 50 cents to mail plus another 50 for the rush order, cut out from the back pages of an Avengers; it had taken several issues to get an Avengers that didn’t have the ad on the verso page of actual content (I could have just bought a second copy, it occurs to me now). The Avengers “fight the foes no single super hero can withstand” and one thing about them is they’re more often than not referred to by their real names instead of their super hero names: everyone just calls the Scarlet Witch “Wanda”; the subtext is that she is “The Scarlet Witch”. I would one day have enough of subtext; the Sea Monkeys seemed initially free of it.

The Year's Best Book

...of 1977! 
#switcheroo


SO: I waited for another indie band to act out a sitcom for a while and it didn't look like it was going to happen, so instead here is a write-up I did on a book edited by Anne Beatts and John Head about the first two seasons of Saturday Night Live on Splitsider. 


IT IS DEFINITELY WORTH SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 98 CENTS AND $82.78.

Everyone who reads this write-up gets five dollars!
xoxo

Someone should really update this blog or something

...thought the pirate who then proceeded to dig for BURIED TREASURE!
(still got it)


Hello; here are two recentish things that are not here, but rather elsewhere:

• A frankly inconsequential piece on Kavalier & Clay: "Tell, Don't Show"
• A short write-up of a Yo La Tengo show which comprised an entire episode of Seinfeld over at Splitsider

(And, of course, there is my other blog.)

(I guess)

XOXOXOXOXOXOOXO 

LOVE YOU! MEAN IT! 

The Dog Party

Brief Introduction
Or: What We Were Doing When The Dogs Came In

I had a book when I was a kid called Go, Dog, Go.
At the end of that book, a bunch of dogs have a “Dog Party”.

I actually got to see a kind of Dog Party, and this is basically that story.

My sister was doing a word jumble and I was about to watch something on television when our two German shepherds (Abby and Pepper) came in.

They looked at each other and then the older one, Abby, said, “We want to go for a walk.”

We didn’t know what to think! This was the first time we had heard her speak, but we decided to go along with them. 

(To clarify, we’d said “Speak” to them before, but this was to get them to bark. We had not asked them to speak when Abby asked to go for a walk.)

I took Abby’s leash because I was older, and my sister took Pepper’s leash, since she was the smaller dog. Pepper was not the brightest dog in the world, but she meant really well, and you could tell she really looked up to Abby.

We took them for a walk. I was afraid that we were going to miss an important show, like The Krypton Factor, the American version, which was hosted by Dick Clark, and which I had been dying to see, but the longer we walked, the harder it was for me to remember what show it was we were going to watch. My sister said, “You know how to speak English?” and Abby nodded.

“What other languages do you know?” she said, but Abby just gave her a weird look. I thought maybe Abby had learned English from listening to us or maybe television and wouldn’t have any idea that there were other languages. But then I thought of Godzilla movies. And I kept trying to remember what the show was.

“What show were we going to watch?” I asked my sister. She shrugged. I got the feeling that she didn’t really watch television for herself or to improve her understanding of the world, but rather to spend time with me. I thought maybe what I was doing seemed inherently cool to her, because I was older (in the same way Pepper looked up to Abby, maybe). I was still thinking of these things, when we came to the Ditch.

Congratulations Matthew Broderick!

On having the lead in the longest running production of Equus in history!

Boo, that joke.

Ha ha, Library of Congress, you just acquired THIS!

SUCKERS.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, etc.

Towering over them all is Nicholas Sparks and he is naked, typing, his small fingers lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to Gena Rowlands, huge and tan and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He types a movie for Miley Cyrus and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, Nicholas Sparks. He has typed sixteen books and his fingers are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He types in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, Nicholas Sparks. He is typing, typing. He says that he will never die.

The Closet Origamist

I’m interested in the Wild West; I am something of a “buff”, and I’ve been wondering lately about the “Dead Man’s Hand”. As in: I know it’s aces and eights, but I couldn’t find anything about the kicker (n.b. the kicker is the fifth card), or if there even was a kicker (Hickok could even have discarded it; source: The Poker Encyclopedia; Allen, Hayes), and I know that ghosts are always bitter little clowns (Ghosts: if you are reading this, I would be happy to be proven wrong!), but I decide to pay the 40 bucks and do that service where ghosts take you back in time to see stuff and explain the context.

This is still a new service and there are kinks to work out, for sure. My experience with this has been that the ghosts won’t ever go back to their own moment of death; they just want to look at stuff that happened after they became omniscient, so I settle on the ghost of Davis Tutt Jr, whom Hickok killed in 1865. I calculate this should give me about 10 years of context.

He comes the next night at 1am (ghosts always show up at midnight in the time zone they died in). He says, “Scroooooge just kidding it’s Davis.”

I tell him what I’m interested in and he says, “What are you, a ‘buff’? OK, let’s go,” and then he takes my hand, which is the only part of the ghost you can touch, and we are flying through the air. The wind blows through his gunshot hole and plays the tune “Kingdom Coming” by Henry Clay Work (which was a popular song in the Old West (source: Popular Songs of the Old West; Gibbs, White); to which he sings along :

Say, darkies, hab you seen de massa, wid de muffstash on him face

It makes me uncomfortable!

But the way in which I am made to feel uncomfortable by this masks the barfing that is typically concomitant with time travel by ghost handshake and the next thing I know it’s 1866 in Springfield, Missouri and so points for Tutt there. “This is where the railroad came through,” he says, “I just missed it by a few years.”

I tell him he didn’t miss it, actually, due to he was a ghost and therefore omniscient, but he tells me there’s a very confusing period after you die where there’s a lot of vengeance and you miss a lot.

“Sorry, I’m not King Ghost, PhD or whatever,” is what I should say but instead I say, “OK, What I am interested in is the Dead Man’s Hand.”

Tutt shrugs, which is weird when ghosts do it because they can actually shrug their shoulders through their ears: “Look over there, then,” he says, and we’re in a back room where Hickok and Sempronius Boyd, who was the judge for Hickok’s trial (source: Encyclopedia of American Government, 1850-1899; Herringsworth), are playing cards. Boyd has tens over nines and calls; Hickok does some weird legerdemain and reveals four Jacks. Boyd frowns and then leaves and later gives the jury mutually exclusive instructions in Hickok’s conviction, which leads to his acquittal. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the Dead Man’s Hand,” Tutt says. Like a big pronouncement, like he’s earned the 40 bucks. Then he says: “If the jury had gone the other way, we might all have been spared ‘The Daring Buffalo Chases of the Plains’.” Like a joke, but if this is meant to be a joke, I don’t know what the joke is. We jump.

Now it’s 1869, and Hickok is playing cards with Bill Mulvey, which I didn’t know he had done that (he will shoot Mulvey in another week or so; source: Calamity Bill, Rosa). Mulvey lays down a ten high straight, and starts to collect the pot, but then Hickok does another hand gesture and shows that he has a flush. I don’t get to see what it is a flush of before we jump again.

Now we’re in a hotel room and Hickok is folding playing cards into little angular birds. Tutt elbows me, which I don’t notice at first because ghosts? Bad at elbowing. “One for every person he told George Ward Nichols he killed,” Tutt says, putting his shoulders through his ears. We jump to when Hickok shoots Mulvey by bluffing him into thinking there are more people there then there actually are: “Don’t shoot him, boys!” Hickok yells. Mulvey hesitates and Hickok guns him down, startling some meadowlarks upward. I remember the collective noun for birds is a “flush” and we jump to Abilene to see Phil Coe unfolding a bunch of the folded up cards (and being a grouch about it) so he and Hickock can play a game. “I don’t know why this is my job,” he says.

He (Coe) holds up a bird he is about to untessellate and says he once killed one just like it. Hickok says, “Did it have a pistol? Was it shooting back? I will be.” Pretty much unprompted! Coe will soon be Hickok’s last gunfight victim, I know from books, although “gunfight” is stretching it in this case. When they play, Hickok’s hand beats Coe’s two pair. It is either three of a kind or four of a kind. It can’t be five of a kind, obviously, but at one point it does look like that; we jump a few more years ahead.

Hickok has pretty bad trachoma and his lashes fold inward like a flytrap as he writes a note to his wife Agnes whom he abandoned not long before. He signs off:


With wishes even for my enemies, I will make the plunge and try to swim to the other shore.


He folds the hotel stationery into a little envelope with a “pull here” tab. Tutt and I hold hands; we jump.

And here at last we are on August 12, 1876, in the Dakota Territory, specifically in the Black Hills, specifically in Dead Wood, specifically in Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon. Hickok sits with his back to the door. I peer over to see his hand: an ace of clubs, an eight of spades, a four of hearts, a Jack and three of diamonds. So, basically, nothing? I don’t get it. Hickok will soon be shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall. I tell Tutt, “I don’t get it.” Tutt waits until McCall comes in, then we zip back to present day. Tutt’s bullet hole whistles and Tutt sings:

It mus’ be now de kingdom coming, an’ de year ob Jubilo

And we’re back in my room.

I would like it said that Tutt was courteous to me, and that is why I ranked him A+ and I know people are cheesed off at me for not ranking him lower, because that was the last A+ he needed to move on to the Afterlife. What I am saying is I am sorry for other “buffs” who may have had questions specifically for him (I hope you all “have wishes even for [your] enemies”! Source: above letter), and I will try to answer anything I can if you email me. I’ve gotten a few emails about parting words, and Tutt’s parting words were answering my question about my not “getting it” about the Dead Man’s Hand.

“What’s not to get?” Tutt said, “He’s famous. But who will remember Sempronius Boyd? Who will remember Coe? Or me?” which I would say is empirically ridiculous, given I just spent 40 bucks on him, but maybe he meant, “Who, other than the ‘buffs’?” And then he said his last thing before his body spread out through the room and then turned into basically the air in the room; he said: “That’s how it is with guys like him: even when he folds, he wins.”

The Brooklyn Lady Bloggers

To be clear, in the sex dream he had about the Brooklyn lady bloggers, he only had sex with one Brooklyn lady blogger, and it was in an implausible sex position, and yet the sex had been good enough that she subsequently chose to not blog about it.

But aside from that one (and it is not the one you are thinking of, probably) there were all the other Brooklyn lady bloggers in the dream, including some that were just made up for the dream, and were just representative of as-yet unknown Brooklyn lady bloggers. There was that one from Fort Green, and that one from Carroll Gardens, and that other one from Carroll Gardens and that one from South Slope, and then some unspecified Brooklyn lady Bloggers.

After the sex part, the dream shifted to a general appreciation of all of the Brooklyn lady bloggers, and the “plot” of the dream was that he was in the initial stages of dating one of the as-yet unknown Brooklyn lady bloggers, but this dating involved hanging out with all of them, as they traveled in a group. They were not individually solipsistic but if considered as a collective noun, then they were (in the dream).

In the dream about the Brooklyn lady bloggers he got off a few good bons mot. One was about how he was trying to sit next to the Brooklyn lady blogger that he was just starting to date, but this necessitated moving the other Brooklyn lady bloggers around to other chairs. But the Brooklyn lady bloggers were subdivided into groups of BFFs, so he had to shift these concave polygonal groups of Brooklyn lady bloggers around in a way that was partly like a sliding tile puzzle and partly like getting a couch into a small apartment. At the resolution of the problem, when he at last sat by the Brooklyn lady blogger that he was in the initial stages of dating, he said something funny about chess that all of the Brooklyn lady bloggers thought was quite good, although he does not play chess in real life.

Later, he and the Brooklyn lady blogger he was dating, and the other Brooklyn lady bloggers, including the one that he had had the good sex with in the beginning were all at an AIDS benefit. That was a weird part! What was that about? Shortly after, he was in the lobby of his office building, trying to convince his manager to get the law firm where he works to give a corporate donation to the AIDS charity, so at least you could say there was a call-back to that weird part of the dream. The Brooklyn lady blogger he was dating hung back by the revolving doors while he discussed this with his manager. In retrospect, this was the only time the Brooklyn lady blogger he was dating was separated from the other Brooklyn lady bloggers. Maybe it was because his subconscious was making him choose between doing actual work when he was in the office and surfing the internet all day. Oh man, nobody likes a preachy dream! Let’s get back to the sex part!

But just kidding, because the vast bulk of the dream took place after the sex part, and the Brooklyn lady blogger with whom he had had the sex was a minor character for most of the dream, and honestly the truly pleasurable part of the dream was the part where he was in the initial stages of dating the lesser-known Brooklyn lady blogger, and it was that feeling when you meet someone new and it seems like: OK everything can just stop changing now and we’ll just stay like this because nothing about this person is annoying me yet.

But the introduction of a real person from his life (the manager) seeded the clouds of reality and he started to remember pieces of his actual life that formed a mosaic and the mosaic said that he could not actually date the lesser-known Brooklyn lady blogger, since in real life he had been married for some time, and had an eleven year old daughter, whom he loved, God he loved her, but who at age eleven was probably perilously close to becoming a blogger herself, though not in Brooklyn (they live in Norwalk). How would he even know for sure? He uses the internet but he is not good at it.

At this point he woke up, and despite the sort of abrupt ending, it was some time before the overall pleasant feeling wore off and during the next few weeks he could recall most of the details of the dream. The sex part of the dream seemed increasingly preposterous with the progression of time, but made sense in a way because it had been with the Brooklyn lady blogger of whom he had been the longest aware. It was like a Farewell Sex Act immediately prior to the onset of the new relationship with the lesser-known Brooklyn lady blogger, and the fact that it had not been blogged about made all the other Brooklyn lady bloggers think, “That must have been some good sex!” and this open secret inside the collective gave him some confidence with which he was able to pursue the lesser known Brooklyn lady blogger, and to state it again, there are some feelings that maybe can be summed up as “confidence” although that would seem to be selling the feeling short, feelings which his brain has tenuously correlated to post-thunderstorm sunlight, bourbon, certain bacons, the album “Star” by Belly, the smell of the inside of the cabinetry in the kitchen of the house he lived in during the mid-80s and the “good” caramels his mother kept there, which he was not supposed to eat, some feelings related to just getting to know someone that still seems amazing and brand new to you like an unscratched scratch-off card, that is like the light violet color of rubbing alcohol on fire, the way it burns but does not hurt you: that feeling stayed with him for several weeks afterward.

I'm just posting this here to remind myself that when I am older it is my intention to try to be at least 10% this wicked

Look I took something that I once thought was sweet and funny and beautiful and made it crappy because irony

I privately say to you, old friend, please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming sad faces:

:(:(:(:( ):):):):

Good Reads

ARRRRRGH

This is AGONY. The thing's been over for like hours. Just put something up there. ANYTHING to make me stop thinking what I'm thinking.