Spidercamp

chile wild with joy

This video may be my favorite. Around the two minute mark, it looks just like post-game celebration. This kind of retarded jubilation is something I've only ever seen crowds do about soccer. What a more worthy application this is of fervor and confetti. It makes me want to encourage my community to march on the fire department every time they save someone. Thank you, angels, for rescuing my brothers. It would be ridiculous, but wouldn't it be appropriate?

What does it feel like to come close to being destroyed in the dark, then come back to the world and hear your countrymen screaming their enthusiasm for your being alive? I think it was on the rescue of #3 that it occurred to me, this is being done with such kindness. After being drawn upward through a mountain, the first thing he heard was a group of strangers chanting and clapping for him. Then there was his wife, who could hardly let go. The second hug for this menial laborer, this man nobody ever heard of, was from his president, who beamed and said, Now you have come back to your life. Now your life can truly begin.

dumb things are stupid

It's called "The Event" and within the first minute of the pilot episode, a character on this show screams, "SOMETHING'S HAPPENING!" So it would be silly to expect subtlety here. The viewer should not smell the desperation so soon.

I've already decided I hate it, yet I'm going to keep watching. Why? Because of a sneaky paradox: Lost trained me to be better at watching tv, gave me a set of higher standards for how tv should perform, then went away and made me so lonesome for anything Lost-like that I'm willing to watch utter crap.

I hope very much that I'm mistaken, but when does any show's labored dialogue and condescending score (a seemingly peaceful family scene with sudden ominous violin music, and the surprise of what comes next is ruined) - get better after the pilot? This shit is only going to go downhill.

The Event is a cheat. My internet was all abuzz about how similar in tone it was to Lost. This is true only in the shallowest of comparisons: it has a big cast whose stories intertwine, it makes frequent use of flashbacks, and leaves the viewer wondering what the fuck is going on. Oh and there's that airplane that poofs out of existence, STOP IT, EMBARRASSING, at least tell me you sent JJ Abrams a thank-you note.

Because I miss Lost like I miss George Saunders' next book, I indulge in the junk food. I tried to like Flash Forward and Fringe. I even gave The 4400 a shot, forgive me. And I will watch The Event, for a while, because Lost made me a sucker for all things WTF.

But WTF is not enough. And even though Fitz and the limpy lesbian from ER and the hottie from Gilmore Girls co-star in this, giving me little gleams of enjoyment, ultimately I require more value from my entertainment, and I have confidence that on the whole, modern tv is getting smarter and smarter. Just not this time.

unexpected.

For three nights I have walked so long that I come home nauseous. I don't care.

Ten years ago I injured my left knee. Sometime after everything changed last August, I realized it no longer bristled with pain when going up stairs. I figured it was responding to having less weight on it, took this as an awesome side effect, and forgot about it until this week, when I realized the quieter but more frequent little twinges were also gone.

Understand, these twinges are something I've lived with for ten years. Nearly every time I've been up or down stairs, sat, stood, knelt, flexed my knee in any way, I've felt the proof of the damage. No big deal, not enough to impair me, just enough to remind me.

So I couldn't quite believe it. So I did a dumb thing: I took curbs, stairs, and hills too hard and too fast, on purpose. I swerved mid-step and came down weird and hard on that leg, on concrete. Essentially I did everything I could do to give myself a bad knee (and when I realized this, I cut it out, don't worry Mike) - and this knee that has quietly complained for the past decade, do you know, I could not get that fucker to say one word.

what makes me happy in my pants

For eight months I have been taking walks, at dawn or long after dark. In the morning you get dogwalkers, but not one other person in the subdivision shows his face after 10 pm. This surprises but does not displease me. I don't want to chat, I don't want to take my earphones out, I want to listen to this eight times in a row without being pestered.

In a twist of stupid, I guess I am destined to be surrounded by bunnies everywhere I go. If my spirit animal turns out to be a bunny I will be pissed.

Most rabbits I have seen on one walk: 19. Most in a row who have not run from me: 7. This number is growing (it used to be zero) and while I have no plans to gain their trust until I can curl up and sleep among them in the grass, NOAH, it's nice to know they are less afraid. Tonight, four of those seven were lined up neatly along the curb, parallel and perfect. They watched me pass without turning their heads. Even with the streetlight revealing them, they did not seem bothered, just interrupted.

When I moved in here, I had to shrink a house's worth of stuff into one room. I brought only the clothes I knew I would actually wear, with one exception, one pair of "maybe someday" pants. Nothing too special - grayish green cargo pants I'd had since forever, had never been able to fit into and never been able to throw away. I would try them on once a year or so and get sad about it. I don't know why I brought them with me, other than thinking that there was no telling how my life was about to change.

So tomorrow I take the scissors to these pants, because they will no longer stay up. I'll take them in at the seams and wear them for as long as I can, even though they give me a bit of a dumpy ass. I might keep these pants for a long, long time, because it's nice to be able to regard them from the other side. I don't have a lot of vanity and I don't talk a lot about these things, but what I have, I cherish fiercely, like you just don't know.

how to be happy

figure out what place lets you be the best version of yourself so far. lets you sleep. has some of your favorite people on the planet.

go and live there.

it has made me realize, with a physical pang, how deeply i miss the subway

"...he understood clearly enough that he was the accidental repository of the girl's baffled affection. She took to wearing handsome ribbons in her hair, and blushing furiously when her mother suggested that it was for Mr. Dressler's sake; and sometimes he would exchange with Alice Bell, past her mother's shoulder, a look of mournful understanding.

One morning she gave him a little flat package wrapped in blue tissue paper. When Martin opened it, he discovered a lock of blond hair. He was on the verge of saying something witty when he raised his eyes and saw little Alice Bell staring at him tensely. Without a word he nodded gravely at her, gently wrapped up the curl of hair, and placed it in his pocket."

Martin Dressler, by Steven Millhauser. It won a Pulitzer. One man's swoony true romance with late 1800s NYC commerce. Art deco wrought iron cable cars. Crisp weather. Hats. Delicious. I'd never heard of it. What's wrong with me?

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also:

"The museum was deserted except for a single heavyset man in a silk hat who walked slowly about with his hands behind his back."

i mean jesus christ don't you want a whole novel based on that sentence?

i like barbecue

any day where i get a beard rubbed up against me is automatically pretty good. yesterday this happened while the bearder was describing me as fanTAStic. in front of a room full of curious strangers. i can still blush! 20 minutes later a delicate young pharmacist looked at me over his glasses with his pale, pale eyes and said my new favorite endearment: "baby, you are no drug lord." a good day.

wendy rene - bar-b-q

the best agonizing book i have read in quite some time

Hank Stuever's Off-Ramp. It doesn't hurt for a good reason, it's not about war or dentists, it's just sloppy in a way that makes me claw at my face. Check out this sentence, which made it past the editors Henry Holt presumably employs:

"After the strippers leave, but before Andy's friend Gilbert beats up a guy named Robert (whom no one invited), and way before Robert comes back angrily with a group of his bros and way, way before a bigger fight breaks out in front of the Nuñez house, and certainly before someone breaks some guy's jaw, before any of this occurs, I left."

Stuever WHAT, you use "whom" but do not have a problem with "After the strippers leave... I left?" Tell me you are a time traveler and not just lame.

Also, dude literally says stuff like "I should make a birth analogy here." So do it. Don't tell me what your text should be doing, go crazy and actually WRITE it. Only don't. Birth analogies (re getting a couch through a narrow passage) are dumb. Mentioning one in passing is dumb, weak, and hipsterfuckedly self-aware. It's gross.

I'm guilty of this laziness myself. I have pages of text thick with temporary shorthand cop-outs: "remember to explain how she got the bike," "make this paragraph awesome." You don't see me sending it to a publisher in that state though. It's not a valid stylistic choice, it doesn't make Hank Stuever cute, it just means he is as retarded as me. I look for more in an author.

A book full of funny, touching anecdotes about couch surgeons, stormtroopers, and ladies with big Texan hair should not annoy me this much.

or hank

when i walk into the post office my name is Media mail! when i walk into the library my name is Five dvds! when i walk into the pub my name is Cakes! i wonder what percentage of these people know my other name, my wrong name. fuck it! from now on i am Five Cakes Media

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Sharam ft. Kid Cudi, ft. (?) Patsy Cline - She Came Along

The Hood Internet - Good Ol' Fashion Rump Shaker (Beastie Boys vs. Matt & Kim)

driving back from athens. very happy indeed

weezer vs. lil wayne - got money in the sun