5 Weirdnesses...

........ about me!

OK, today at work, it was a little slow at work, really -- I was all alone all day in a huge warehouse and it was weird because as soon as I got to work and disengaged the alarm, I realized I had forgotten my watch at home.
I NEVER do that!
I cannot live without knowing what time it is ALL THE TIME!
So, I was sort of disoriented all day, and I was feeling weird.
Then I started thinking about how generally weird I really am.
Here are 5 Weird Things About Me --

1) I sometimes drink the hot-dog water. You know when you boil wieners? Well sometimes, when the stuff cools off a bit..... I know. I should not have admitted this in any sort of public forum, huh? The guy drinks tepid pork-cylinder effluent. Yep! That's totally normal.

2) This is going to be very anti-Western-hemisphere of a thing to say, but I don't really enjoy watching TV. Plus, I have never bought a single television set in my life.... yet I have always HAD one. Different ones, like.

3) I steal other people's TV's. No, just kidding. Third weird thing about me -- when I was a kid I literally believed that gravy was something that grew in the garden, along with the potatoes. And not only this, I also believed that the spuds came out of the ground in some kind of pre-mashed format. With gravy... sort of on the side. When my parents enlightened me as to the real state of things, I was profoundly devastated.

4) I've carried the same wallet with me, everywhere I go, since 1983. That calculates to 26 years. In fact, our anniversary is coming soon. This is not even the weird thing.
The weird thing is that when I contemplate getting a new one, I get sort of nervous.

5) My skin has some sort of amazing aversion to drying out. My brother's hands are life-threateningly dried and chapped always, and he does not even do the intense physical work that I do on a daily basis. Everyone I work with wears gloves at all times, and their hands still get dried out because of the nature of the material we are handling. Yet mine? I wear no gloves, and have never had a problem. Go figure. Last Sunday I was speaking with three of my friends, we were having coffee, and all three of them [we are all "roughly" the same age] were complaining of horridly horrific problems with dry skin. Chafing..... and all manner of other profanity. I was like, "What the hell are you guys talking about?"

Hmmmm...... maybe it's a side-effect of all that hot-dog water in my system?

*********

Splash du Jour: Friday

If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
-- George Eliot, in Middlemarch --

Have a great Friday!
*******

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Please don't retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.
-- Anna Magnani --

Have a great Thursday!

Fictional Metabolism: Seconds, Anyone?

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.
-- Vladimir Nabokov, in Strong Opinions --

I wonder if I am a very good reader.
Admittedly, there have to be way worse ones. Readers than me. Oh, hell yeah.
I mean, I do give it a good try, I think. I try to thoughtfully read.

But if ol' Vladimir's words, above, are even half as ex cathedra as they seem -- yeah, I am a poor reader.
I just read and move on. Read and move on. Read and move on.
I have much the same approach to eating, I guess.
My relationship with food is not at all about lengthy contemplation. It's morseo about, "Hey, that plate was full a minute ago!"
And not only this. I'm not talking about SPEED!
I'm moreso, after reading [and rereading] the Nabokov quote, thinking about my entire thought process.
My thoughts.
I eat a great meal, and my mind is already on the next platter of grub!
I read a great book and........ well, you get the picture, right?
About "food" I am no connoisseur.
At least with books, I can take some comfort in feeling that I am somewhat selective in what I ingest.
But, I seldom reread.
Am I a good reader? A major reader? An active and creative reader?

<-- In her [very] recently released book, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, novelist Zadie Smith says, "The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etc. It's a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime."
Again, a provocative statement. To follow through with my food analogy, hmmm... I consider the following:
What if I did not [pardon me] umm........ DIGEST all the food I ate?
Just kept on cramming it in to my haggis-holder there!
Believe me, it's a lot of grub! On a daily basis.
I'd probably explode.
I don't joke around about two things:
Food and Books.
It seems to me that both of these incredibly astute authors are suggesting here that rereading is the elan vital of the truly literate reader.
With Zadie Smith's statement I would seriously have to ask myself..... "Which novels have I read and reread?"
I know that the novel that launched me into a life of literature-appreciation was Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Did I reread it? Yes.
And my favorite novel? Anna Karenina.
Did I reread it? Yes.
But most of the books I read?
No.
I read. I move on. I DEVOUR! I devour another. I'm gluttonous.

If I were to address Zadie and/or Vladimir 100% honestly, I would say that for me, personally, the novel I have reread the most -- the novel that probably defines my interests the most, the novel, the architecture of which,l I am most familiar -- is C.S. Lewis's wonderful 1956 book, Till We Have Faces.
I have read it at least four or five times, and I know I will read it again.
It is the myth of Cupid and Psyche, retold.
An amazing book about the distinction between pure and profane love.

Interestingly enough, C.S. Lewis himself was a man who also valued the art of rereading.
In 1947, he said, "An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only... The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness. The point has often been misunderstood... In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time... in literature. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the 'surprise' of discovering that what seemed like Little-Red-Riding-Hood's grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia."

Narrative lust. I like that.
The whole quotation makes perfect sense.
Everything right up until that last word, written in Klingon.

I personally own FIVE separate copies of Till We Have Faces.
Hey!
No one keeps just one frozen hamburger in the freezer!
*********

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Well folks, it's happened again. This time at Heathrow Airport. A pilot was pulled off a United Airlines jet before take-off because he was drunk. Why is this happening? Here's how drunk the guy was. He was pulled off a United jet, but he was a Delta pilot. That's a bad sign.
-- Jay Leno --

Have a great Wednesday!
*********

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

First lady Michelle Obama was on Sesame Street today showing children how to plant their own healthy vegetable gardens. Then the kids said, "Forget the vegetables," and they barbecued Big Bird.
-- Conan O'Brien --

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

There’s always been this hunger for fantasy. The world has always been awful, the world’s always sucked, mostly because of the things people do to one another. All you have to do is read the Bible. Just read Job. . . A mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.
-- Micahel Chabon --

Have a great Monday!
********

A Piece of Sunset: A Saturday Poem

A Piece of Sunset

There you are, washing the egg-flipper.
No. Not somewhere else, but right here,
same world I inhabit. Same walls.
Same bills. Same toilets. Same children.

A few strands of your hair fall forward.
Others remain tied. Rinsed forks clatter
like castanets, defying anything domestic.
Strutting a fandango -- you aren't here.

I lean in closer to hear you humming,
nearly falling in the sand at your feet. I know
that song goddammit -- a piece of sunset
made you squint. And I remembered.

c. Ciprianowords, Inc. 2009

Splash du Jour: Friday

Have a great Friday!
******

My Discovery --

It is always exhilarating to "discover" an author one has not read before.
I've mentioned this concept of "discovery" before, in my bloggations.
The author was doing perfectly fine long before I came along to "discover" him or her.
By discovery though, I guess I mean -- you know how there are certain books that you have seen time and again, and something about the book has intrigued you, but you just never picked it up?
Well, I finally "discovered" Michael Chabon.
Have wanted to read this book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for a long while now.
And recently I snagged this book for next-to-nothing at a used book sale.
In one morning [I priced it all out] I managed to nab almost a half-a-thousand dollars worth of books......... for $57.00.
Gotta love those used book sales!

I am only one-sixth into Chabon's world here, but I think I am involved enough in the story to say this thing is going to be a dandy worthwhile adventure. Tonight at my local Starbucks, certain portions of the novel had me spewing coffee through several of my facial orifices.

It's New York, in 1939.
Two Jewish yoots [<-- as Joe Pecci might say]... Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, are trying to come up with an innovative new comic book character. Something to top this upstart Superman fellow, who has every kid in America hurling their hard-earned dimes at whoever will provide them with the latest installment.
[Apparently, at this early stage in his career, Superman did not yet fly, he just jumped real good. His initial reaction to free-basing kryptonite, perhaps?]
Anyhoo, Joe and Sammy are fledgling artists with a few connections to the publishing world, and they have a deadline. They must come up with a plausible, yet incredible new superhero...
They laughed. Joe stopped laughing.
"I think we have to be serious," he said.
"You're right. The Lion. I don't know. Lions are lazy. How about the Tiger. Tigerman. No, no. Tigers are killers. Shit. Let's see."
[They go through a panoply of potential animal-based super heroes, even Mandrill-Man -- "with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents."]
You can hear the synapses firing, as they walk down 25th Street -- you can smell the brain cells burning --
"He turns into ice. He makes the ice everywhere."
"Crushed or cubes?"
"Not good?"
Sammy shook his head. "Ice," he said. "I don't see a lot of stories in ice."
"He turns into electricity?" Joe tried. "He turns into acid?"
"He turns into gravy. He turns into an enormous hat. Look, stop. Stop. Just stop."
[They stop]
It dawns on Sammy [he is the brains of this dynamic duo...] it dawns on him that, when it comes to super hero creation, the "why" is more important than the "what".
[They resume walking...]
"How? is not the question. What? is not the question," Sammy said.
"The question is why."
The question is why."
"Why," Joe repeated.
"Why is he doing it?"
"Doing what?"
"Dressing up like a monkey or an ice cube or a can of fucking corn."

Right about then an impressive display of nostril-forced Grande Americano created an eerie mist around me and my table.
I felt it was time to mop things up and move on. Time to come home here and write about this wonderful book that has already proven to be worth more than it's full price, never mind the two measly dollars I doled out for it.

Hmmmm.... if I were a Super Hero -- what would my special power be?
Super-Miser!
Unwilling to pay anything more than 1/10th of the bar-coded price!
IN A SINGLE BOUND!

*******

Splash du Jour: Thursday

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own -- the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, unencumbered before him.
All that he has to do is write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain words -- "My Heart Laid Bare." But this little book must be true to its title. No man dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.
-- Edgar Allen Poe, 1848 --

Have a great Thursday!
*******

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Everyone's talking about the election results in Maine. They voted for medical marijuana, but against gay marriage. I think voters were worried that guys would get so high they'd accidentally marry each other.
-- Craig Ferguson --

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

It's what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
-- Oscar Wilde --

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Prize, is on the show. I wish he were here last night. I could have used the help. During the show, the climate went from bad to worse.
-- David Letterman --


Have a great Monday!
*******

This Is It / Creation of an MJ Fan

Truthfully, I have never really been a fan of Michael Jackson.
Until last night.
I went to see this movie.
Now I want ALL of his music on my iTunes!
If "This Is It" is playing anywhere near you, go see it.
Seriously. It is incredible.
You will see a side of Michael Jackson you did not know existed.
And if, unlike me, you already knew it existed -- well
you probably saw This Is It on opening night.
Last night convinced me, he truly was The King of Pop.
Not was.
IS.

******