That about sums it up …

crunch bar
Originally uploaded by roboppy.

The monotony, it’s too much to bear. Repetition can be good thing when you’re talking about music, poetry or exercise, but this, this has got to stop.

Every apple, every spoonful of cereal, every time we the people fall hard into a big fluffy snowbank: the same damn thing. We need change, dammit, and the sooner the better.

I’m not talking about bloody coup or neck-slitting junta here, just SOMETHING new. We are men, not machines, and a steady diet of the same blurs that line disturbingly well. I think you know what I’m talking about, and when the revolution comes, remember my platform:

As emperor of the land, I will banish all crunching sounds. From that day forward, apples will WHISTLE when we bite them.

The Hell Fruit
Originally uploaded by Gems from the Collection.

Life is good, but hadn’t a damn thing worth writing about happened in a little while. Here’s a batch of links to tide you over and make that workday whistle right by …

When people talk about art as a religious experience, they invariably invoke Michelangelo, Da Vinci, or Greek statuary, as though God stopped speaking to people hundreds of years ago and this art are well-read love letters from a long-dead romance. Fuck that. When I look at great sci-fi art I feel the earth slip away and get chills that radiate from the back of my skull all the way down my arms.

See if you can look at this incredible gallery from British pulp-mag artist Ron Turner without calling a tattoo shop.

Robotics engineers have invented a robot that can not only perceive rhythm but dance to it. From an article in the New Scientist:

Psychologists have shown that people are more engaging when they synchronise their movement to their voice or to the voice or movement of another person. Michalowski argues that robots will need a sense of rhythm if people are to accept them. “In the future you are going to be talking to some robot and just the ability of the robot to nod to what you are saying will make it easier to interact,” he says.

Check out this video of that cute little fluffy robot, dancing to Spoon. If marshmallow peeps could dance like that, they might appeal to our hearts and escape our gnashing jaws each springtime, surviving to populate the entire planet.

Way out, deep in outer space, cosmic bullets are piercing a giant cloud of space gas. There’s a cheap joke in there somwhere, but I can’t quite find it … Anyway, from Space.com:

Each bullet [image] is about ten times the size of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun and travels through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second—or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound … As the bullets plow through the clouds, they leave behind tubular orange wakes, each about a fifth of a light-year long.

The photo is like, the best Trapper Keeper cover ever.

True dat: 16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn

According to a number of sources, the I (Heart) Huckabees set was an utter emotional trainwreck. Director David O. Russell is widely reported to be brilliant, demanding and exasperating in equal amounts, and he and Lily Tomlin tangled like hell on the set. Defamer and WFMU’s Beware of the Blog have more detailed posts on the matter, both well worth reading. Even if you don’t read the posts, plug the headphones in and watch one of the best spontaneous displays of truly rotten behavior that I have ever seen:

Defamer posts:

Tomlin Vs. Russell: The ‘I Heart Huckabees’ Outtakes
Lily Tomlin On That Whole ‘Huckabees’ Deal

Happy Friday, people …

Great poems are diamonds and the words in them individual carbon atoms laid perfect and tight. William Goldman said in Which Lie Did I Tell that poetry is the ultimate form of compression. It’s true. I’m terrified to write poems myself, terrified because I know they’re giong to suck eggs and I need to hide behind a little benefit of the doubt.

I first read the following poem on the New York subway a few weeks ago. It was part of some ad promoting mabe a book store or something. I just read it over and over again, stunned at how the author could sum up aging, life, disappointment, idiocy and change so perfectly. That last line has reverbed in my head ever since.

Rather than crap on and on about it, here it is:

A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,

and four, and five, then she wants some meat

directly from the bone. It’s all

over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall

in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet

talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue

nothing. You did, you loved, your feet

are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.

My land line rang at 2 am. A tentative voice said, “Hello? I found this cell phone at the gas station in Bowie. Is this Jeff?”

For backstory: I drove to BWI from D.C. Sunday night. I’ve never been there before. Mapquest screwed me and I got ALL lost in Northeast D.C., several times. I was an hour late, and more frantic than I’d care to admit when I stopped at some gas station up in Bowie to ask directions. After I left the gas station, I got a few miles up the road and realized I didn’t have my cell phone. I freaked, pulled into the emergency lane and ransacked the car, then turned around and went back to the gas station. The attendant said there was no phone there, nobody had turned one in, nothing.

According to this guy on the phone, I must have left my cell phone on the counter when I went in that gas station to ask for directions. He came in a moment later “to buy my girlfriend a pack of smokes which I usually never do ’cause I don’t like her smoking” and found my phone on the counter. At that moment, I was two miles up the road, parked in the emergency lane and turning the car inside out, looking for my phone.

He sounded hesitant, a little scared. He apologized for taking so long to call, said he wanted to do the right thing, but he was scared he’d get in trouble somehow. He even blocked the number he was calling from “so if things go bad, I can’t be tracked.” He claimed his mom had taken the phone from him, and then he took it back. “I’d bring you the phone myself, man, but I don’t have a vehicle,” he said. Unfortunately, I don’t either. I asked if I could e-mail him. “I don’t hardly ever get on the computer, man,” he said.

“Maybe you could come out here and pick it up,” he offered. “It would take like fifteen minutes from DC, and I can see the road right from my patio.” The thing is, it would have to be at night. “My schedule, I can’t sleep at night, so I stay up all night and go to bed early in the morning. I do carpentry on the weekends, don’t need to work much because I stay with my mom. Maybe you could meet me at the job site in DC this weekend and I could give you the phone there?”

He swore he hadn’t been making calls on it, apart from one to see what the number was. Verizon said someone had made a call at 2:45 the day after I lost it. I told him I’d cancelled that phone, so even if he had been calling Africa at lunchtime, I wasn’t going to be charged. He sounded genuinely relieved.

“My mom, she takes our phone to work all day, and she brings it home at night,” he said. “Maybe call me tomorrow after 7:30 to figure out how we can give it back?”

I told him I was a little sketched out by just driving out to a problematic part of Maryland after dark to meet a stranger at his house. He claimed he totally understood.

We’re going to talk again tonight to figure out what to do, where to meet. I have a new phone already, I just want all my old numbers back. Something about this situation is ringing bells in my head, and I’m not sure why. He sounds legitimate, just handling this in a way that’s a little dumb.

I didn’t want him to incur any out-of-pocket expenses or hassle by mailing the phone to me, but something about meeting at night out in Bowie, MD, meeting a guy who waited 24 hours to call me, called me at 2 am and says he always sleeps all day and only works weekends … it’s not quite right.

SO I’m asking you, friends: what do I do? I want to believe that this guy is legit, but this whole thing is weird and I am NOT trying to get my ribs ventilated in a parking lot over a missing cell phone.

Please leave your advice in the comments …

We’ve all had annoying co-workers. A couple jobs back I worked in an office with a woman that used to ramble on and on, LOUDLY, into her phone about all kinds of crap — medications, family problems, her “cycle.” I used to fantasize about leaping over the cubicle wall and just elbow-dropping her, pro-wrestling style.

We’ve all had that dream, I think.

This guy lives it:

It’s almost definitely fake. As one YouTube commenter points out, security cameras don’t record sound. Probably fake, but real enough to be awesome.

I just got back from a nightmare trip to BWI (Baltimore Washington International airport), and managed to lose my cell phone while I was lost and wandering around Northeast D.C. looking for directions. This sucks.

Most of you that read this are my friends in some capacity, and have given me your phone numbers. If you are so inclined, please contact me via MySpace (click the Tron picture on the right) and share your numbers again. Or, just e-mail me.

Or, just leave your e-mail address and telephone number in the comments section. That should be a smart move that will work out great for EVERYBODY.

Daro and Pop-Pop, Summer 2004
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

Today was Nature’s apology for the spitting ice all over the place for the last few weeks. People in downtown D.C. were out on the sidewalks at lunchtime in full effect. Everyone was striding around and trying to look all important in their suits and “business casual” attire, punching away at their Blackberries in the sun and dreaming of chucking the whole lot into the storm sewer and just skipping work. It was ice cream weather, first we’ve had all year.

I stood in line at the sandwich shop, looking at the ice cream counter and crying my eyes out. Every time I think about ice cream, I think about my grandparents, who taught me the importance of eating it myself and sharing it with others. My grandparents have more cones behind them that they have to look forward to — as mentioned before, my grandpa’s got diabetes and congestive heart failure, and his kidneys are slacking on the job. My grandma’s doing awesome for ninety-four, but … she’s ninety-four. Every day is gift and for her, tomorrow is not a promise.

My grandparents are going to be gone soon. It’s both completely normal and utterly fucked up and in case this is not immediately obvious, I’m having a hard time with it. I was kind of embarrassed at first, crying like that in the sandwich line, but then I decided to just let it go.

Shunryu Suzuki said in “Zen Mind, Beginner Mind” that stopping a ripple on a pond only causes more waves. I think. I read Suzuki in college, back when I bleached my hair blond, wore overalls and listened to a lot of free jazz. A lot’s changed since then.

So I stood there, ordering a turkey on wheat through a face full of tears, just losing it. And then I remembered: I am trying, consciously, to write more paper letters. I’ve all but stopped using the mail, and it’s kind of a shame. I love getting letters from people, real ones, and I really miss it. So I’m trying to revive the habit.

Especially to my grandparents. I want them to know how special they are to me, what an incredible impact they’ve had on my life, and I’d rather give them this ahead of time than deliver a fantastic eulogy later. So I pulled out a Sharpie and a legal pad, and wrote them a letter about ice cream, and why they’ll always be associated with it in my mind.

It took a long time. I sat on a park bench in the sun, a grown man writing, eating, periodically bawling while a city full of suits streamed past talking about policy, briefs and whitepapers and totally ignoring me. Better that way, but weird all the same.

And now that I’ve written that letter and gone through those tears, I feel completely drained, but a little better. I’m going to sleep now, and when I wake up I’m going to send this thing, just as soon as I find a stamp.

I’ve typed that letter up and posted it below, if you’re so inclined. I feel kind of weird about it, telling the whole world like this. But ultimately, I want people to know how great my grandparents are to me, and I want to be able to click back, six months from now and read this and remember this day, too … over and over again.

Dear Daro and Pop-Pop,

I’m on my lunch break, standing in a sandwich line and staring at the ice cream case, thinking of you both. I think about you both a lot lately, and this ice cream is amplifying it, because I can’t look at ice cream without remembering two very, very wonderful experiences, both of which you created.

Pop-Pop, I can remember when I first learned how to eat an ice cream cone. I think we were at the mall, and at that moment, I had only ever had ice cream out of a bowl, with a spoon and someone nearby with a lot of napkins. I’d seen people on TV eating cones, seen older kids and grownups with them, but never had one of my own. I was incredibly excited, to say the least. I can remember you handing me that cone and me taking it in both of my little hands — it was so HUGE — and then having no idea what to do with it. I think I just started biting it from the top down, kinda like an apple. Man — if you thought I needed napkins before … I think I actually got ice cream in both ears.

You said “No, not like that. Like this,” and then paused. As a diabetic, demonstrating how to eat the cone would have been risky. “Lick the sides,” you said. I did, bottom to top. “NO, around it,” you explained. I tried, but made a bigger mess. You thought for a minute, evaluating the risk against the importance of the lesson. Then you said “here, let me show you,” and took the cone. You quickly, patiently showed me how to lick a circle around the cone, how to head off all the drips, how to take little bites off the top, and how to nibble the cone away, biting the bottom tip off and sucking the last bit of melted ice cream through the hole. Somehow you managed to show me this without eating the whole thing yourself. Every time I eat an ice cream cone, and sometimes when I don’t, I remember that lesson. I hope I get to turn right around and teach it to someone small one day.

Daro — do you remember Tilfred? He lived next door to you, and he was such a little pill. He tackled too hard and yelled too much, threw toys in the air and was quick to ball up his fists and use them. One afternon, me and you and Jess hand-cranked peach ice cream together and you let us invite one friend each over for dessert.

I picked Paul from two doors over. I certainly did not invite Tilfred. Nevertheless, as we all sat down and you scooped soft, sticky peach ice cream into our bowls, there was a knock at the door. It was Tilfred, who said “my babysitter said I could come and eat peach ice cream with y’all after dinner.” You invited him in and told him to get himself a bowl out of the cabinet.

This kind of blew my little mind. You’d taught me that it wasn’t nice to invite yourself places, and told me just that day that ice cream was for well-behaved children. That same day, Tilfred had thrown two of my Star Wars guys and one of my flip-flops into the oak tree out front AND invited himself over after supper. And here you were, rewarding the behavior with ice cream! I just shrugged, figuring the world had gone completely crazy, and handed Tilfred a spoon.

You knew then something it has taken me years to figure out: Sometimes all jerks like Tilfred need is someone to be nice to them … then they can stop being such jerks. Tilfred was never my best friend after that, but he did stop hitting me quite so much. 24 years later, your example is still a tough act to follow, but I’m going to teach it one day, too.

I’ve got to get back to work now, but please know that I love you both more than I can possibly explain. And despite all appearances, I actually was paying attention to you …

Love,

Jeffrey

Brenda Hughes of Savannah, GA was accused of throwing acid on her neighbors in an alleged hate crime. She claims she didn’t do it, and even has a special t-shirt that proclaims her innocence. And, even if she did do it, the acid wouldn’t have hurt anyone, she asserts, proving it on the TV news by putting some in her mouth. Have a look:

hostess experiment 012
Originally uploaded by kim in color.

“Cardio boxing” class is only marginally more like real boxing than a round of ‘Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.’ Still, it’s a decent workout. It feels more real than watching TV on the elliptical or “spinning” class, which is essentially a game of make-believe in a dark little room with incredibly shitty house musinc for a soundtrack. “We’re approaching logs on our mountain path,” the instructor calls out. “Turn your resistance up and power of those logs while I turn the music up … this part is so rockin’!”

But back to boxing class. Ridiculous as it is, I go. And I’ve gotten to where I look forward to sweating onto squeaky-clean wooden floors in a room full of synthetic tough guys. I spend my days silently in cubicle, dreaming of kicking someone’s ass without opportunity or skill to deliver on the dream. I’ve gotten good at throwing punches in a controlled environment without having the slightest idea how to do it in real life. Boxing class is to me what a wheel is to a caged rat: nowhere near to close, but the best thing going.

The first few times are terrible — you’re sweating and heaving for breath and the gloves are like millstones tied to your wrists. “My god,” I always think, “I am getting my ass kicked by an invisible person that is not even hitting back.” The invisible opponent always pummels my Fight Club fantasy pretty good.

My partner last week was new to the class. And without wanting to be overly cruel, it seemed like it was his first trip to a gym, period.

Usually, I’m into that. I like seeing people making a fresh start, going for a personal best. And usually, I love an underdog. Like any adult worth being around, I was picked on in gym class during my formative years. Seeing normal people, dorks like me taking the gym back usually gets me stoked.

Not this time.

This guy, he was awful. Awful at the class, awful as a partner. His punches were like Hostess sno-balls on a hot day, limp and sticky little things that fell short of the mitts. Like he was applying gold leaf to my mitts with each whining grunt. His hips swivelled and jerked rhythmically while he swung a limp series of uppercuts, hooks, jabs. Richard Simmons may be the only other man to to bring that sort of hip motion into a fitness environment. He was even bad at holding the mitts while I punched, fliching and dropping them so much that it threw my rhythm off, inspiring the instructor to bark at me. He flopped and sweated, gut heaving beneath his soaked shirt. His ponderous pigeon impression was giving him a workout but leaving me sweatless.

And the thing is, in case you haven’t noticed: I really resented the guy for it. Who was this guy, crapping up my workout, bringing this effete, pathetic indifference to the whole thing? I mean, it’s not like he would have gotten detention for leaving. The frustration built, blossoming into anger. I swung harder, hit faster, secretly hoping I could tag this guy in the face.

What is it about pathetic people? Why is it that the desire to help someone out is layered on TOP of the desire to just crush someone? There was something about this guy, something simpering and sad that I just wanted to grind under my heel, to smack and splatter like a mosquito fat with blood. I swear, I have no idea how professional therapists and counselors deal with people who are yes, hurting and in need of help, but also so crying out to be crushed by Darwin’s hammer.

And in that class, in that particular moment, I totally understood the bullies that used me for sport when I was a kid. I was a gawky dude with glasses and ZERO interest in sports. Add a short temper and no patience for idiots to that mix, and you’ve got someone who’s going to explode fabulously and predictably every time. Kids are dumb, every last one of them, and patient self-control is not something they aspire to. It must have been so AWESOME for those mouth-breathing bozos to bounce a kickball off of my head.

In that moment, in that frustration with that simpering, sweaty sack in front of me, I understood some old demons and was able to make a long-delayed peace with myself. Jesus himself said “Love your enemies,” and in that moment, I did, and I could feel my heart expanding to encompass the whole world. I understood bullies past and future, and understood the guy in front of me a little better — we’re just two schlubs who want physiques far better than the ones we get from our sedentary little lives. Even if his workplace dreams involved ice skates and perfect pirouettes and mine involve blood and concrete, we’re more similar than different. This expansion and understanding, it felt magnificent.

But pulling my fist back after the bell and hitting the his mitt with thundering thwack, jolting that sweaty cupcake off-balance … I have to say that felt pretty awesome, too. And now I understand why.