I know I haven't posted anything in a while, forgive me. Interpol's been on my tail since Milan, and I've only now shaken them off for long enough to add a blog entry. You know, sometimes being wrapped up in a deadly game of realpolitik cat-and-mouse and international cloak and dagger intrigue gets old. I long for the simpler days, when I was known by a name and not a number, when I could take my daughter to school without running the risk of taking her to her grave, and when I could instigate a coup d'etat in a small sub-Saharan nation without receiving a death warrant on my head. I guess it's quid pro quo for maintaining the new world order.
Anyway...
Last night, I took advantage of the inclement weather to sit at home, engage in a personal catharsis of sorts, and watch a little television. Perusing the googolplex (yes, that's how you spell it) of potential viewing options (god bless you DirecTV), I noticed that VH1 had interrupted their normal parade of the ubiquitous "Behind the Music" and replaced it with "100 Sexiest Artists". Being somewhat of an armchair art-lover, I tuned to the station to gain insight into the great masters of our time and times past. Would Hokusai finally dethrone El Greco as the sexiest artist of all time, or could a third "dark horse" (Van Gogh perhaps - minus the self-mutilation, he'd be a shoe-in) take the lead?
Alas, it seems I was duped. They were referring to musicians, and contemporary ones at that. I was about to change the channel when guest commentator and noted Don Juan Bill Belamy appeared, providing additional depth and context to the segment on Jewel (#40-something out of the aforementioned 100). Quoth Bill:
"See, Jewel is like: 'I'm sexy as hell,' and I like that."
You can imagine my shock: that line is directly plagiarized from the thesis of my art history PhD dissertation, except he replaced "Dali" with "Jewel"! Oh well, such is the ultra-competitive world of academia/pulp-television.
Also, this and this (related) are awesome (props to Alex and Greg).
By the time I realized what the little grey object was that had scurried across my floor, it was already gone, and all I could think of was this obscure Jamaican dub stylist I had heard of years before. Now I must decide whether to live in fear, or to lay traps. Maybe I could just get that cat from the roof.
The pockets of my homogeneous, innocuous, machine-crafted, flat-front chinos from Banana Republic are a goodly size. They are designed to hold several commonplace personal items contemporaneously, and include a small sub-pocket for loose change on the right side. Despite this generally sensible capacity, cumbersome and bulging are my pockets.
When I was a babe, I had no pockets. I did not, I believe, even possess pants of any kind. My mother kept me close by, and all the needs for external goods which invariably arose were competently fulfilled by her. Later, as I toddled about on shaky legs, I was clad in leg-dressings which made only the most meager attempts at doubling as storage devices. Later, as I began school, I found myself wanting of a place to keep my 0.5mm Bic mechanical pencil (you .7mm fans are fools), and later my Pilot Precise V5 black pen (you who favor the V7, be gone). Soon, the rough and small-hewn pouches could not cope with the wallet I was forced to carry, out of the necessity for constant proper identification and the transport of petty cash.
As I began taking the bus, I also began taking keys with me. By default, they wound up sandwiched between my wallet and pen/pencil. For a brief period in the 1980s, a scientific calculator nearly caused the rupture of my left hip-pouch as I toted it about my elementary school, though no one shall ever speak of this again, under penalty of torture. Exacerbating the dearth of space was my habit of being a pack-rat, with my waist-receptacles often doubling as waste-receptacles (my god... that was, without a doubt, the zenith of my punminship).
When I started to notice girls, I added gum. When I tried to forget them, I stuffed in books. When I began to strut about town, I crammed in a mobile phone. When I got a job, I somehow managed to squeeze in my access card. When my commute became too tedious, in went the iPod.
And sometimes, when the stress on the fabric is seemingly too much to bear, all I can think about is tearing the lining out of these pants, getting down on all fours, and letting someone else worry about opening the doors and paying for the meals. I really enojyed the freedom of movement.
And the thinly-veiled metaphors marched onward as the light decayed, their flesh burnt from the over-abundance of symbolism...
[What drama! Can the spoiled middle class whiner shoulder the Sisyphean burden of adult life? Can his less-than-burgeoning ability as an amateur purveyor of prose save him from the doldrums of responsibility-induced ennui? I dare anyone to find pretense-proof pockets deep and strong enough to contain the heaping mound of Rhinoceros feces that constitutes this blog entry]
A few months after I had moved into my apartment, I awoke at 5am to find the adjacent building ablaze. The fire consumed most of the structure, and the city promptly condemned it. A few days ago I went up on my roof to check it out. One could see inside quite clearly through the holes where there had once been windows. The skeletal remains of the supporting beams were charred, and some barely recognizable furniture lay strewn about several of the ex-domiciles.
There was one sign of life: a small grey cat. It sat quietly, perched on the counter of what looked to be a disheveled kitchen. Someone had placed a bowl of water nearby, and above the bowl they had tacked a sign. It read:
Hey human-
Got some food to spare for a cat that's down on his luck? In exchange, I'll keep the roof free of rodents.
[paw print]
I just hope the families that had to flee their homes in the middle of the night found a guardian angel too.
August has left us. Long live September. It's time for the weather to cool off, time to return to school (unfortunately, not for yours truly), and time to start assessing the state and federal tax implications of claiming that the 90 foot schooner you use to illegally transport refugees from Haiti is for "anthropological research".
But let's not forget the key event associated with the changing of the months: forking over 60% of my monthly pay to live in a sardine tin rife with erstwhile-ghetto chic. It seems at first to be a fair exchange - I pay a slight premium for living in a new building, having a dishwasher, and for the recent gentrification. When I ponder it further though, I realize that the additional fee I'm dolling out should be counteracted by the value of the further current and potential future gentrification I'm providing. Landlords always seek out tenants who are more than able to comfortably afford the rent, and these tenants, in a sense, provide a valuable service (to the landlords) by raising the property value of the neighborhood. Not only do the landlords refuse to account for this in the form of some sort of kickback to the residents, but they hike up the rent when it comes time to renew (beyond the amount dictated by inflation and market fluctuation).
I'm helping my landlord (as well as the other neighborhood landlords) to charge more, and I'm paying for it. As one of my coworkers put is so eloquently, people in real estate are pit vipers.
[I realize this is a biased viewpoint, and I've already thought of several counter-arguments that demolish this theory, but if you paid this much, you'd be bitter too (and I know many of you are)]
