three a.m.

You know I don’t like those sentimental, "deep thoughts" kinds of posts, because most of them seem interchangeable and at some level, shallow and a little dishonest.  Like willful self-deception.  But tonight I’ve been watching home video from five years ago.  My roommate from undergrad is getting married this weekend (congratulations E&A), and I dug out the tape of video from the time we lived together.  I only taped a few nights in the first couple of years I had the camera (and none since then), but I caught the night that he hooked up with his soon to be wife.  We were drunk and he fell over backwards in his chair.  Not a little chair, either; it was a 1970’s lazy boy.  She stood over him and pulled him up.  That was the beginning, I think, if we had to mark the moment in time when their friendship took on a new dimension. 
(Here they are a year later — Van Horn, TX, 7-04-01)
Of course, everyone acts out a little on camera.  Or hides a little.  Acts different, anyways.  And I wonder, would things have turned out the same if I hadn’t got out the camcorder that night?  Would E have fell over in the chair?  Would he have stayed down?  Would someone have acted a little differently, not being taped, in a way that would have spoiled the special chemistry of that night, miffing the calculus of alcohol and music and jokes and repartee that led to uninhibited decision-making later on in the night?  Did this camcorder, a Christmas present from 1999, bring about a wedding?  Has it stopped any weddings?
Perhaps it’s a silly idea.  Anyways, it made me want to record stuff some more.  I like how uncomfortable people get when a camera is on them, how everyone suddenly feels a need to explain what’s going on, or be funny, or do something important.  Like a reminder — hey, this is your life!  Don’t we all need that reminder once a week?
Though it IS creepy to see yourself sometimes.  I barely recognized myself from 21 — psychologically, anyways.  (I looked just like I do now, but ten pounds thinner)  I would like to think that I was a little more complicated than I appeared, but I’m not sure.  I guess we don’t have to get into that philosophical question about the nature of the self over time — at what point do I stop being the "I" that I used to be — and how do I talk about it — the self as a trick of language?  Blah.

Maybe I like photos better after all.  There’s more room for the imagination in remembering your life.  Easier to project your NOW self onto your old image.  Here’s me at 19.  Would I do a few things differently?  Does that question even make sense?  Man, I’ve got to stop this.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Cooking curry with organic vegetables from Tait Farm — miam-miam!  Thanks, Courtney.

Reading: TC Boyle’s Drop City, Paul Auster’s City of Glass.  Drop City is about a commune in California (circa 1970) that decides to relocate to the Alaskan Bush outside of Boynton.  Funny and surprisingly good in the way that Boyle’s novels can be. 

Movies: John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen — a new top ten, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf only better.  For smart direction, good acting, and brilliant dialogue…well, I don’t want to hype it too much.  Marriage, fidelity, sex, the suburbs, etc.

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Fearless Hyena: Jackie Chan, back in the day.  A better than average kung-fu movie: I recommend it.  And who’s the hottie?

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Joel’s Testimonial — The Full Story

I’ve also been writing Joel’s testimonial en Francais — the first French writing I’ve done in nearly five years.  I had to look up a few words and I couldn’t remember hardly any of the grammar stuff (particularly de, a, aux, du, etc) or the conjugations.  I’m sure it’s all messed up.  The worst is that half of what I wrote wouldn’t fit in the alotted space — so I’m reprinting the full testimonial here:

Qui est cet mec mysterieux?  Qui
habitait au club de golf mais qui n’a jamais leve la crosse de golf,
sauf quand il avait des tomates pourries?  Qui se leve le cord pas
mal souvent, specialement les dimanches?  Qui repete a plusiers fois
“pocket slot” sans une explanation?  Un, deux, pocket slot…un,
deux pocket slot… Ce n’est pas facile suivre les routes de la
syntax dans le cerveau a Joel. Mais  je vous direrai ce que je sais.

Joel est ne sur une planete lointain
d’ice, au l’extreme bout de la galaxie (caroline du sud – sans
deconner). Joel est le produit d’un menage a trois d’une nature
religieuse, les auteurs de lequelle aient ete trois lezards geants.
Cet event a forme le Joel ce que nous connaisons, et lui a laissez
avec une aversion a la religion pour le restant de sa vie, un visage
longue, une vue reptilean, et (nous pourvoyons deviner) un service de
trois pieces formidable. 

Quand je m’ai fait le conaissance de
Joel, il a juste echappe de la caroline du sud, et il cherchait les
lacs de la straub, comme dans les histoires qu’il a entendu quand il
etait un petit lezard-garcon.  Un ne peut jamais trouver un ami plus
bizarre.  Nous sommes passes des bon vieux temps pendant les annees
dernieres:  volions les perles des jolies filles aux mardis gras,
faisions du coke et sentions des oignons a la bordel dans Chicago
(miam-miam), cassions les geueles aux hippies a la Californie…Ces
souvenirs me font pleurer une larme toute seul. 

Et ou est-il maintenant?  Il a retourne
a sa planete natal.  Quel ami.  Vas-t’on, lezard-garcon.  Je ne te
oublierai jamais.  Personne  ne peut pas te oublier.

(For those of you who don’t do French, it’s probably just as well.)

And now, I’m off to grade instruction sets. 

Artsfest is here.  For those of you who haven’t been to State College during Artsfest Weekend, here’s what you’re missing:

• streets lined with stands selling overpriced paintings, pictures, furniture, didgeree doos, funnel cakes, strudels, meat-on-a-stick, monster burgers, footlong corndogs, and so on.
• people, people, people, everywhere.  This isn’t so bad.  There’s kids playing in the area that has hanging buckets that dump water on their heads.  There’s the old fat crowd that drips sweat, complains that there’s no parking, and blocks the sidewalk.  There’s the bored husbands, looking at their watches while their wives look at twenty dollar earrings made of painted cardboard, or three hundred dollar glass bowls.
• obnoxious nightlife.  Everyone comes back into town this weekend to get plastered.  They were lined down the street to get into the bars at six pm tonight.  As I write this, I can hear the people at the fraternity next door singing "nah nah nah nah, hey, hey-ay, Gooudbye.  And now their chanting something — sounds like a kegstand.

It’s fair to say that I hate artsfest, particularly since I can’t escape it this year.  It brings out the worst in me.  I want to shout obscenities at the kids with their hats on sideways, standing in line for an hour to get into a shitty, crowded bar.  I want to steal a didgeree doo, and use it to violate the fake hippy selling leather bound journals for upwards of a hundred dollars.  I want to set fire to the SUV’s parked along the street, bomb the fraternity next door, gouge out the eyes of people ga-gaing the three thousand dollar digital photos that some amateur made with photoshop.  I want to grab the smug bastards working and shopping at A&F by the scruff of the neck, and scrub the pavement with their faces.  That would make me feel a little bit better.

I know I can’t keep this level of contempt up for long — I don’t have enough energy.  But today I saw two young guys on Beaver Avenue wearing nothing but diapers.  That’ll fuel my biterness for the rest of the weekend.

Who’s reading good books out there?  Let me know what.

I’ve started The Goldbug Variations, Richard Powers, but I keep putting it down and reading other books instead.  I don’t know why — it’s a good book, but I can’t read more than 10 pages of it at a time.  A molecular biologist in the 1950’s is in the race to crack the genetic code.  He falls in love and slips into obscurity.  Twenty-five years later, another young couple becomes interested in figuring out his story, and begins researching him.  It’s slow, playful, inventive.  Ignore the description on the back cover:  "…Strand by strand,these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire."  Powers must have been pissed about that.

So while I’ve been not reading that book, I’ve read Life of Pi, which I recommend to everyone as a fun read.  I’ve read the reviews where people talk about how this is really a story about storytelling and its spiritual elements, but everything you really need to know about the book is on the cover: One boy, one tiger, and one lifeboat, in the middle of the ocean. 

I also just finished Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry.  It’s about how a strapping young nobody from Dublin becomes an IRA terrorist in the early twentieth century.  There’s a lot of head cracking and cussing, plenty of sex, and a healthy dose of class hatred.  It’s like reading James Joyce but more fun, because the prose never becomes wholly indecipherable.  Gripping, sad, funny.  Henry has sex with a woman who leaves nipple-made pockmarks in his forehead.  How’s that for detail?  I’ll be reading more of his novels. 

Next up, I don’t know.  Maybe back to GB variations, or I’ve got a coulpe of TC Boyle novels sitting around.  I’m trying to get my hands on Kazuo Ishiguro’s new one, Never Let Me Go.  Recommend me something.

So State College has the biggest volunteer fireworks show in the nation, or something like that.  Went down to the Center for Sustainability to see the display, threw down a blanket two or three hundred yards from where the rockets were being shot off.  Some boomed and bloomed like flowers, some wiggled and spun their tails like electric sperm, and a few showered down golden sparks like so many coins (ah!).  I could feel the big ones in my chest, we were close enough.  And the whole time I kept wondering: where did all these hippies come from?  Because the granolas were out of the woodwork, doing cartwheels, grilling boca sausage, peeing in the woods, etc.  There must have been a hundred, I tell you.  I never see these people around town — perhaps they’ve been holed up doing drugs and being all anti-commercial…And is it just me or is their something sexual about fireworks displays?  In a bad way.  Maybe because there’s so much build up and preparation, then fwick, it’s over.