Where you been?
Out.
Whatcha been doin’?
Nothing.
Pretty much nothing, I suppose. Fiddling with this and that, desultorily, half-assedly. (Is it better to have a full ass or no ass? Didn’t David Chess already look into this? Like, last year?) Like Bean and Jake, I’m going through one of those “fuck tha humanz” mood swings. (You want a link? Here’s a fun one, 2 weeks old, courtesy a not-quite-as-old plug over at Unqualified Offerings. Yeah, I’ve been keeping up with my reading. Removed Where is Raed? from the linchinography Wednesday AM on the grounds that, well, no one knew where the hell Salam was; and who comes back to post that very afternoon, which I don’t find out till this morning? Which, I mean, yeah, I found out about it, and pretty quickly, too, but still. Loop outtage.)
Hmm, lessee: Friday, came home to find a large chunk of the downstairs livingroom ceiling on the floor in a puddle of water and gypsum dust. Nigh-immediately decamped to a farewell party for Johnzo and Victoria and got discreetly (?) smashed. —And I need to rescue my Sif Safaa at some point. I must say, there’s a certain je ne sais quois to the combination of Spitting Image video wallpaper and a toneless computer voice reading Roy-Orbison-in-cling-film smut over ululating Iraqi pop that, well. Facilitated said smashedness.
Saturday: went and bought a used reel mower because the new one I’d bought just over a year ago upped and died. (How do you kill a reel mower? You bend the handle beyond recognition, trying to push it through admittedly tall and wet grass.) —And I would have written about the joy and delight of buying a simple machine that works so well: solid, dependable, with a great adjustable-height widget that means I can cut tall grass like buttah with nothing more than muscle power, I would huffily have discoursed on Newfangled Crap Purchased in a Moment of Desperation at Home Depot Which Failed in the Course of the Humble Duties for Which it was Intended (though it did last over a year, and the grass was tall. And wet) versus A Solid and Dependable Piece of Fine Workmanship from Back in the Day When People Cared about the Products they Sold (and did I mention that neat adjustable-height widget?), and I probably would have reminisced about the utter loathing I had of mowing the grass growing up (as the eldest kid it was one of my many designated chores, the one I perhaps most loathed, or at least most loathe as of this writing): the way gas fumes and oil smoke and bruised, crushed grass mingle to make a nose-tickling stench which, when combined with dust and sweat and stifiling South Carolinian heat make up for me the signifiers of Summer, the Cruellest Season; I might have brought up the mighty oath I swore, struggling behind the ratty gas-powered mower that would kick the occasional bit of gravel or shredded branch zinging off the grass catcher with a retort like a TV rifle ricochet, the oath never again to mow the grass when I got to be old enough to say and do and live as I pleased, and how the reel mower has ended up a regrettable compromise with that disgruntled younger me, having all the elegance of any hair split by necessity; I might even have knocked off a tin-foil-hatted excursion into It’sallabouttheoilstan, muttering darkly about the advantage oil companies gain by convincing lawnmower manufacturers to make reel mowers today much more flimsily that reel mowers of yore, so that anyone who tries to kick the gas habit is sorely disappointed and comes slouching back to the guzzling fold—I might have done something with all of that but for the fact that a crucial plastic thingie snapped on the solid, dependable, used reel mower’s maiden excursion into the grass it was otherwise cutting like buttah. Luckily, I have a warranty on the reconditioned parts. But. Still.
Sunday, and I was laying out my weekly freelance website gig (remind me to tell you about that some other time), and we rented the X-Men DVD because Jenn hadn’t seen it yet and everyone’s buzzing about X-Men 2 (it has Nightcrawler, you see; the Spouse, an X-fan from much further back than myself, is a Nightcrawler groupie, sigh), and something about comic book movies made me go back to revisit perhaps the pinnacle of the misbegotten genre (as distinctly opposed, mind you, to movies based on comics): Batman Returns. —With which I am all too familiar: the summer it came out, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with (counts) five other people, one of whom I desperately did not want to spend any time with at all (love gone awry, long story, I do it every now and again as a party trick, as me the next time you see me). When one does not want to go home, and one has a flexible work schedule, and anyway it’s summer and hot and home has one over-worked air conditioner and the movie theater’s in the blessedly climate-controlled mall, and they’re showing a movie that not only has Batman but a blond woman dealing precariously with issues of empowerment and sanity (because one is still sifting through the ashes of another episode of love gone awry, the tragedy of a year prior that presaged the contemporaneous farce, which involved a [taller] blond woman dealing precariously with issues of empowerment and sanity, about which remind me to tell you some other time, and can I admit, just between you and me, that among the many little pleasures in this giddily glorious mess of a movie is the decidedly guilty shivery one when Michelle Pfeiffer pulls the derringer from her garter and picks up that broken, desperate giggle, and all Michael Keaton can do is wrap his hand around the gun to hide it and pull her close into the cold comfort of a kiss—Ladies! Gentlemen! Beware the White Knight, who thrills so keenly to see a damsel in distress…)— You spend a lot of not-so-discretionary income on half-priced matinee after matinee, is what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve seen those penguins march more times than I’ve seen the Millennium Falcon save Luke’s hide, and I was, what, nine when that came out? The point, though, is not to dredge up old memory-artefacts of cruel summers past, firing like the ghost-reflexes of a long-since amputated part, but to revel in the rich though neglected vein of political commentary that I keep forgetting is larded throughout the film, whether it’s Christopher Walken giving advice to his sock-puppet mayoral candidate Danny DeVito—“But to get the Mayor recalled, we still need a catalyst, a trigger, an incident. Like the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin”—or DeVito’s bleakly hilarious exhortation to his remote-controlled penguin army:
My penguins … We stand at a great threshold. It’s okay to be scared. Many of you won’t be coming back … Thanks to Batman, the time has come to punish all God’s chillun … first, second, third and fourth-born, why be biased? Male and female … hell, the sexes are equal with their erogenous zones blown sky-high … Forward, march! The liberation of Gotham has begun!
—From a movie released in 1992, mind; a little over a year after the last time we intemperately announced the liberation of Baghdad. Add to that the minor subplot involving manipulation of the energy market and, well, I’ll just leave any parallels to be drawn between monstrously vindictive sock-puppet politicians in the hands of cartoonishly evil plutocrats as exercises for the reader. So: my appetite for socio-political satire whetted, the freelance work yet to be completed, I dropped Shock Treatment into the VCR as a follow-up, and that, pretty much, was my Sunday.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Eh. Got the plumbing fixed. The leak that made the ceiling fall. Thursday? Here I am. Biggest laugh of the day? Stumbling over this old piece from languagehat on “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” which has added “barking scrotum monsters” to my rhetorical quiver. (How can you say something sensible and worthwhile about a political discourse one end of which is upheld by a crew that moniker fits so well? —Which brings us rather neatly back to square one: Where have I been? Out. What have I been doing? Nothing.)
—Actually, can I change my vote as regards the pinnacle?
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1992. And to think I had only known you for six months back then.
Remember crunchy-smooth-digital-analog? If Bush I was smooth-digital, then what is Bush II? crunchy-digital, that rarest of alignments? food for thought.
It was a pretty appalling summer wasn't it? Just stumbled onto your blog, glad to see life is treating you well.