Dedicated to the Memory of Norman Mailer

I posted recently about Sarah Silverman f*cking Matt Damon.
Now it turns out Jimmy Kimmel is f*cking Ben Affleck (in grand fashion).

Amazing Stories

Does anybody else remember the TV series Amazing Stories? It ran from 1985-1987. It was a Steven Spielberg creation. Each week featured an independent story and included guest stars like Harvey Keitel, Gregory Hines, Kevin Costner, Keifer Sutherland...Dom DeLuise, Gary Coleman...all the great actors of our time.

I remember the episodes brimming with drama and mystery. They were like television storytime crack. My family eagerly gathered around each Sunday evening to watch them. The theme music still excites me. Through the years, the series has come up in conversation. The one episode our family always remembers featured a WW2 plane damaged in battle such that the landing gear was broken and the gunner was trapped down below. The gunner was a likeable daydreamy lad, if maybe soft and wimpy. He ended up saving the day by frantically drawing huge puffy cartoon wheels on the plane; they appeared when it landed and everybody lived. Magical.

My parents gave my brother and me the first season on DVD for Christmas. Sadly the two episodes I've watched have been COMPLETELY LAME. In No Day at the Beach, a sweet but dim and unworldly WW2 soldier is witnessed by his squad heroically killing enemies after an amphibious assault on Italy, thereby saving their lives, only to realize afterward that he actually died before they got off the boat you guys, omg, it was his ghost! In the so-bad-it's-good Hell Toupee, a toupee crawls from one person's head to another compelling them to murder lawyers.

I am disappointed. I declare a moratorium on revisiting childhood loves. They will only be tainted by adult cynicism and sophistication.

This also applies to food. I ate some Cheese Whiz recently. Turns out it's gross.

Knock Knock. Who's there? Middle Age.

Behold a conversation between my Gentleman Friend and a Friend with whom he used to party really hard a lot until the break of dawn:

Gentleman Friend: Hey man! Great to run into you.

Friend: Yeah man! What have you been up to?

Gentleman Friend: Not a lot. I subscribed to a CSA box [Fn1], it's awesome, I love it, last week I got a ton of kale and chard and apples and pears and potatoes and also purple cauliflower!!!

Friend: Sweet. I moved in with my girlfriend. We might get a second cat.



[Fn1] CSA = Community Sustained Agriculture

Parents.

I make fun of them a lot on here. I can't help it. They do a lot of funny things. But I also think they're awesome and I feel lucky I got such good ones and I love them to pieces. Look at the cuteness!!!



That's them on the Golden Gate Bridge last weekend. I'd been sick for a few weeks, and it was a nice weekend, and when they left it made me surpringly emotional. They love me in a completely unselfish way, nobody but one's parents do that, and I watched them sacrifice financially for us growing up, and it was always clear we were their whole life, my dad worked his ass off but never mentioned it, and my mom has endless patience and cheer, and they're getting so OLD!, and soon my mom will stop being beautiful and my dad will stop being strong, and they're going to die, and one will die before the other, and the remaining one will be lonely because they're still in love and I catch them kissing alone in the kitchen, and my dad grabs my mom's ass when he comes home from work, and when they're gone I'll have no safety net, I'll be alone, which I basically already am, which we all are, which is depressing, and it makes me sad, except not really, because they're supposed to die before me, and they don't feel sorry for themselves, in fact they're incredibly happy, and they know I love them, and it's all okay and maybe actually beautiful.


So I reconciled myself with their inevitable aging and loneliness and death. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it are completely different. I read "Meet Me in St. Louis" in Jonathan Franzen's How To Be Alone the other night and it triggered a random cathartic cry:


"My mother had long ago reconciled herself to staying in the house while her children fled to the coasts. We invited her to move to one of the coasts herself, but the house was her life, it was what she still had, it was not so much the site of her loneliness as the antidote to it...For the last week or so before she was hospitalized, my mother couldn't keep any food down, and by the time I arrived her refrigerator was empty of almost anything but ancient condiments and delicacies. On the top shelf there was just a quart of skim milk, a tiny can of green peas with a square of foil on top, and, next to this can, a dish containing a single bite of peas. I was ambushed and nearly destroyed by this dish of peas. I was forced to imagine my mother alone in the house and willing herself to eat a bite of something, anything, a bite of peas, and finding herself unable to do so. With her usual frugality and optimism, she'd put both the can and the dish in the refrigerator, in case her appetite returned."


Ooof. Ambushed and nearly destroyed indeed.

Lived in Bars

Not the newest video with the kids on the Facebooks, but it'll either be a lovely trip down memory lane or an introduction to your new favorite video. Everybody wins!

It was a dead baby.

The baby entries in the dream dictionary were kinda interesting and amusing. So many kinds of baby dreams apparently: regular babies; forgeting you had a baby; about to have a baby; crying babies; starving babies; extremely small babies; dead babies; dipping a baby in and out of water.

Hold on. Back up. Dead babies?!? This reminds me of a story.

After high school, my friend Gina went to the same college as a weird guy from our school. Let's call him "Holster." I remember him having a loud monotone voice and putting Vaseline on his face and staring at my legs in math class and allegedly putting a safety pin through the skin of his penis during water polo practice or something. I think his parents both worked in the sciences. The kid was born to be awkward.

Anyway. Gina somehow heard that Holster had been dubbed the "weird guy" in his dorms. Apparently one night, a bunch of co-eds were sitting around laughing and spinning yarns when Holster appeared in the doorway. He looked pale and shaken. They stopped their jovial conversation and asked him what was up.

Holster: You guys, I was just walking down by the beach, and I went into a cave, and inside of the cave.....I saw..... a dead cat.

Co-Eds: Oh damn. That's harsh Holster. Sorry man....

Holster: (Silence)

Co-Eds: (Resume laughter and fun)

Holster: You guys. You guys! I mean....... it was a dead..... baby.

My turtle baby.

Weird dream last night! A turtle was crawling on the ground, and it had extra adorable chubby arms and legs, and I realized it was a baby and I should be careful picking it up because the shell was soft and malleable and -- lightbulb moment! -- its fontanelle. Once I got it into my arms, it was nice that the baby was a turtle because the flat part fit against me and my hand had molded nicely into the shell to form a good grip.

Here is what a dream dictionary suggests:

Turtle - To see turtles in your dream, suggests that you will make slow but steady progress. You need to slow down and pace yourself. Alternatively, it indicates that you are sheltering yourself from the realities of life.

Baby - To see a baby in your dream, signifies innocence, warmth and new beginnings. Babies may symbolize something in your own inner nature which is pure, vulnerable, and/or uncorrupted. Babies may represent an aspect of yourself that is vulnerable and helpless.

I've had the flu and felt the need to "take care of myself" and "slow down," so this clearly and totally fits! I'm also an Aquarious if readers have further brilliant insight.

Sharon Olds

I like her. Her poetry is always very visceral and body-oriented, but I like this one in particular for its focus on love as friendship and support system and raw unromanticized domesticity including but not limited to apparent mutual bathroom use, which for some reason sprung to mind after I saw Juno on Valentine's Day:

True Love

In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes muted exhausted, crushed, the whole
body of sex-surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

I also like this one:

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the
the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

She also wrote this letter to Laura Bush declining an invitation to attend the National Book Festival.

Dropout

Happy Valentine's Day!

Aack!

I love to hate Cathy comics. Her interests include: trying on swimsuits; eating cake; stressing about the office; playing with her dog Electra; battling with her mother; and worrying about her love life. The stress from all of the above causes her hair to frizz out by the last frame in each comic.



I started to write my own analysis but then I found this really good one by The Comic Strip Doctor. I copied parts below:



Cathy (by Cathy Guisewite) is widely regarded as the first comic strip that spoke to a generation of working, struggling women in a voice that resonated as one of their own. In the mid-1970s, Guisewite was a successful advertising copywriter with typical insecurites about her love life, her relationship with food and her weight, and the hassles and stresses of work. She doodled little characters expressing her angst on letters to her mother, who pushed her to submit to syndicates.



When the strip first appeared in 1976, women's rights were being newly asserted both in the workplace and in the arena of relationships. The character of Cathy was a young, single, independent woman with the same fears, uncertainties, and challenges as an entire generation. Guisewite again.



"I get way more feedback from people who say that they love Cathy because she's not afraid to admit that she doesn't have it all together every day [...] they say it's refreshing to read Cathy and know that there's somebody else out there who's still hauling around a 40-pound purse full of dreams."



Bathing suit doesn't fit? Cathy's got your back. Mom driving you nuts? Cathy's been there too. Men just don't understand you? Oh, Cathy -- it's you and me against the world. And so every petty dilemma in a woman's life, every mundane struggle and boilerplate annoyance, suddenly became an "AACK!"-worthy crisis.



Since 1976, the role of women in society has changed dramatically. An entire new generation has arisen that doesn't give a second thought to working for a living, for example, or more broadly, taking responsibility for one's own happiness and fulfillment. The average marriage age is older than ever before, as young people -- and young women, in particular -- are realizing that they don't need to define themselves in terms of their role in a relationship. Women of today's generation are every bit as comfortable with technology as men. And yet Cathy AACKs her way through her job, her relationships, and her shopping obsession, puzzling over Irving's "male brain" and turning every visit to the mall into a sweat-soaked, cookie-fueled, nuclear-grade emergency.



The central relationship in Cathy's life is her love/hate affair with consumption. Like many women, Cathy suffers from a poor body image, and struggles to conform to society's unreal image of ideal femininity. She wages seasonal battles with the latest trends in swimwear, formal dress, and shoe fashions; she also fights herself internally, rarely motivating herself to exercise but often guiltily binging on snacks. Her endemic weakness for food, apparel, and tchotchkes makes her unremarkable at best and pathetic at worst.



And yet this sad figure is held up as a beacon of commiserative hope for women? Cathy's weaknesses reinforce whatever stereotypes they are intended to bolster sympathy against. By saying to women, "Don't worry, I feel bad about my weight too," Cathy is saying, "Feeling bad about your weight is something that women do," and excluding positive, healthy thoughts from the realm of "what women do." By saying, "Ha ha, sometimes I buy too much stuff, just like you do," she is saying, "Shopping compulsively is a trait of women in general," and excluding those who exercise self-control as not real women, or at least not "normal" women. Because Cathy is a "normal" woman, and to be a "normal woman" in Cathy's world, you have to obsess about your thighs, hate your mother, carry around a precious little dog and marry a doofus.



The aforementioned doofus, Cathy's husband Irving, is a shallow foil for Cathy's various neuroses. Like the ever-present Saleswoman, more about whom below, Irving exists mainly so that Cathy's readers can sigh knowingly, say "Oh, men!", and put the comic on the fridge for their longsuffering husband to read. Irving likes golf, gadgets, and against all odds, Cathy herself, despite the fact that she is a shrill, bitter harpy. Her one redeeming personality trait is her silence on how abjectly dull her husband is.



Irving was Cathy's long-term boyfriend for many years, until Guisewite decided to reintroduce Cathy to the dating world; then, after a string of cardboard beaus, she decided to marry Cathy off to expose a rich new vein of comedic material. Re-enter the longsuffering Irving, the "nice guy" with no identifiable personality beyond his general "maleness" -- in other words, an aversion to housework, an impatience with shopping, and an affinity for gadgets.



...



The Saleswoman character is Cathy's nemesis. Never named, never personified except by her attempts to batter Cathy's willpower, she typically tries to push a product on Cathy that Cathy doesn't need. Cathy's resistance is therefore an act of heroism against the Establishment.



But any sign that this self-control is a redeeming character trait on Cathy's part, or that it's part of Guisewite's campaign to empower or encourage the Modern Woman against the tantalizing forces of consumerism, is obliterated as soon as Cathy reverts to Stereotype Mode.



Can Cathy have it both ways? Is she the modern, Empowered Woman, or is she the giddy girl who can't pass up a shopping bargain? Guisewite appears to remain on the fence about which female stereotypes she wants to indignantly shatter and which she wants to giddily indulge in. Equal pay for equal work, but can't we gals still go shopping? Can we diet away from our cake, but still eat it too?



Guisewite may be exploring this contradiction by painting her character as conflicted, but a more likely explanation is that the entire "shopping" construct is merely an artifice for a series of lame gags, and that there is no character development happening whatsoever.



Logically consistent within that premise is our earlier assertion that Cathy's main import has been to elevate the mundane, typical bothers of daily existence into a sort of pseudo-operatic cacophany of global prosecution, in which every personal tic and foible has the booming quality of an Aristotelian tragic flaw, and every interaction with one's husband, mother, boss, or dog is a clash of titans. Department store dressing rooms become gauntlets of terrible trials, and bikinis must be tried on with one hand while the other defends oneself from the fierce, flaming arrows of The Entire World Against You, your plaintive, bellowing "AACK" reverberating forever in the Halls of Eternity.



You see, everyone alive today has problems. Of every sort. Some of us figure out how to get past them and not let them take over our lives. For the rest of the world, I suppose, there's always Cathy.



...



Divorced by time and progress from whatever socially progressive message it may once have had, Cathy lives on as a cutesy, tape-it-to-your-cubicle strip that gives voice to the myriad ever-present annoyances that seem so very important but are really no more than the normal bumps on the road of every day. By doing so, it has encouraged a culture that treats every slight as a mortal wound and every bother as a tragedy; it echoes (or is echoed by) the petulant cry of a nation that can't develop, say, a healthy resistance to advertising, or a stable relationship with another human being based on compromise and understanding. What was once a novel voice of understanding to a generation finding its way is now a shrill whine that grates on the ears of a new generation.

I am sick and tired.

Fuck you, WWTDD. I am finishing a nasty cold, and when I saw your post today about smacking pregnant J.Lo., it really chapped my hide. You previously said that "the good news is there's still time to find Jessica Alba and start punching her in the stomach before her perfect body begins it's terrifying metamorphosis." I can excuse your jokes about pregnant women being fatties (because I love real comedy) and I can excuse your judgment of women's bodies generally (because we're here to please men). But enough with the references to violence against pregnant women! I feel like I've seen this all over the place lately. It's uncool.

Seriously. I read a somewhere that if a woman becomes pregnant, the most likely way for her to die is murder. By the baby daddy. There is a statistical convergence between pregnancy and homicide. [Fn1] I assumed it was just because we inconvenience men by providing a nurturing womb for the sperm they happily shoot into us. Nope. Apparently we also deserve punishment for becoming unattractive (from the sperm that they happily shoot into us). It's so fucked up! We already have to walk around knowing men constantly judge our attractiveness like that's our primary value. If we're unattractive, we're figuratively fucked. But if we're attractive enough to be literally fucked, they kill us? What. The. Fuck.

Fuck.

[Fn1] Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001: "A pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause." And the actual numbers are probably even higher. Why? Because law enforcement has only recently started tracking the pregnancy status of murdered women.

Mom's Corner

Parents are the cutest!

Mom: it'll feel good to celebrate and extend your birthday with your lovely presence in a few weeks!! it'll also feel soooo good to give you a big huuuggg!! XOXO to my favorite daughter!

Linda: Is there any type of restaurant or food that you and dad want? Any preferred activities?

Mom: can we see the knife bowl katy got you? can't picture it. dad didn't get to golden gate park yet...can we get a good, long walk there? he'd like to see haight ashbury too, i think. sometime (doesn't have to be this trip) i'd like to walk across the g.g. bridge too. i like any kind of food!!! how about a mediterranean place? french is always good. maybe dad has more preferences. i suppose it would help you if we were more exact?

Dad: I did not say I would like to see haight ashbury. What have you been dropping or smoking? [Fn1]

[Fn1] My father would like everybody to understand that he was around in the 60's, okay?, and he was cool, man, and he understands that drugs can be both dropped (acid!) or smoked (the grass!).

Eli Manning

Throughout the game yesterday [Fn1] I kept thinking "How old is Eli Manning?!? He's just a baby!" So I Wikipediad him. His age is uninteresting (27) but did you know ELI'S HOBBIES INCLUDE ANTIQUING IN THE OFF-SEASON WITH HIS MOTHER AND FIANCEE, whom he's been dating since their days together at Ole Miss? God bless you, Wikipedia.



[FN1] The 15 minutes I was not watching the Puppy Bowl.

Sarah Silverman is f*cking Matt Damon

I go back and forth with Sarah Silverman. Love her when she's mean, not so much when she makes poop jokes. This video's good, though. By way of background: Jimmy Kimmel often ends programs by saying "Our apologies to Matt Damon, we ran out of time tonight..."