balding angrily

Yesterday I received my first official rejection email for a short story I wrote.  It was from The Missouri Review, and the editor who sent it was very kind.  Having read and re-read the story many times, I’m aware of its faults.  Specifically, I have a problem with point-of-view.  I tend to want to write from what they call “third person limited,” meaning the narrator is supposed to be just over the shoulder of a particular character, seeing his, her, or its thoughts but no one else’s.  However, I keep slipping into other people’s heads.

I’m all for experimental art, and this idea of fluidly slipping in and out of different characters’ heads is interesting.  However, if I’m not aware that I’m doing that, it leads to sloppy and confusing writing.

So, I intend on re-working this story, giving it two distinct and deliniated points of view.  But you don’t want to know about all that.  You want to know about my bowel movements.  Well, I just got off of a week of high-pressured hell of the family variety; my brain isn’t working well.  I’m sorry I don’t have anything more spectacular than P.O.V.-talk.

Sorry.  This is another of those posts that’s just an update.

I will be entertaining my sister from Phoenix for the weekend, so I can’t angrily bald.  Even if I didn’t have host duties, my internet at home no worky.  If my ongoing trouble with AT&T DSL* goes much longer, I’ll blog about it in hopes of getting a free computer, a free Wii, or something.

*Why does every call to AT&T leave me feeling like a desperate loser?  I hang up and think, “Please call me.  Pleasepleaseplease.”  Then I forlornly stare at the phone.

This chandelier is located under the children’s section of the Ikea catalog. Why is Ikea encouraging insufferableness in our young ones? In a child’s room, this says to me, “I want my nanny.” In an adult’s room, it says to me, “I took the night off from my scrap-booking group and put this together. You like?”

Verdict: Ick.

I never understood brown paper bags as a lighting option. They appear on the edges of front lawns around Halloween, and they don’t go away until after the New Year. I’m sure Crate & Barrel borrowed some little-known custom from an Asian culture and told the U.S., “Look! It’s the same bag you used to bring your lunch to school! But instead of soggy tuna fish sandwiches, this paper bag is full of light!”

Ikea has done C&B three better. They grouped the bags in a little choir, colored the bags and stuck them on a wall. Now instead of spoiled mayonnaise, I think of Valentine’s Day “mailboxes” lined next to the blackboard. And mine’s empty. Thanks for the painful memories, Ikea.

Verdict: Boo-hoo.

Lighting should never have to do double duty. Either a thing is an uplight or a reading light. Not both. If we are really in need of a multi-function light, why not 3, 4, or 5 different functions? Why not create a Swiss Army Lamp? A decorative sconce, a chandelier, a nightlight, a desk lamp, and, for kicks, an overhead projector, all in one fixture. Why not? Because it would look like an electrical monster grafting itself onto the ceilings and walls of your living room. You would be frightened of such a light. Well, this uplight/reading light thing is the evolutionary ancestor to that monster.

Verdict: Run away.

With three negative reviews written, I had to find a light that I liked. This reminds me of a gift I got for college graduation, a carved wood piper with a wood dowel stuck up its ass planted into a section of a small tree trunk. It was a heinous little sculpture, and I hope to Jesus that the giver never finds my website. That said, this light reminds me of that abomination if it were flipped on its head, the piper replaced with a black bowling ball, and the whole thing given a polish and gloss. I like the result.

Verdict: Better graduation gift than carved driftwood.

This little fella’s name is Spöka. He or she has two siblings named Spöka and Spöka. When did George Foreman move to Sweden and start naming children’s nightlights for Ikea?

Verdict: I fucking love Spöka. He or she makes me pee my bed with glee.

Thank you, Keith for this post. You are always welcome here, you dirty centrist.

Today I interviewed a church pastor for a piece I’m working on about a church - in case you didn’t get that. I recorded the interview on one of those iPod voice recording doo-hickeys in a large atrium space with lots of reverberations. I listened to the recording on my way back from the interview. Apparently 2:00 on a Thursday is the perfect time to vacuum concrete floors. Also apparently, contemporary Christian music has a lot of ticky-ticky drum beats. And thirdly apparently, this interviewer feels the need to apologize for everything he does.

“I’m sorry if I’m taking up too much of your time.”

“I’m sorry if that doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m sorry if I’m swooning from your cologne.”

The pastor was very attractive, and his scent drew me in. I kept edging closer to him on the couch. I guess they train you in seminary to ignore the gay guy batting his eye-lashes and sitting in your lap when you are extoling the virtues of your church.

In the tradition of The Rural Juror, I present the following list of titles that, strangely, make my mouth happy. Feel free to use them for your next project.

• Seaside Suicide - I see this as a Pat Conroy novel. A blonde, forty-seven-year-old, divorcée goes to her shoreline vacation bungalow to write her memoirs. She meets and falls in love with a local gardener that dispels wisdom, masked as planting tips. Interspersed throughout the love story are the memoirs she’s writing detailing her childhood abuse and its subsequent effect on her failed marriage. At some point in her past, she was considered a “suicide blonde.”
• Hornswoggled and Swaddled, Flabbergasted and Gas-Attacked, Clusterfucked and Up-Chucked - A trilogy of modern-day-dress fantasy novels that would sit comfortably next to a Piers Anthony series. Each novel concerns the adventures of a pair of unlikely heroes - sometimes human, sometimes mythical - that come together unwillingly but find themselves fast friends by the end. The pairs of words would be the names of the two unlikely heroes and also a point in the plot. For example, Hornswoggled would be a nasty, foul-mouthed giant that would be tricked by Swaddled, a kindly elf. At some point they would be bound with bandages to some sort of death machine.
• Chronology, Lounging - This is not so much a novel as a character-driven meditation. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the new millennium. Time/Space. Relativity. Free-Time. All explored by an office-worker, trapped in a dreary job, obsessed with the ticking clock. Masters Theses will be written about this book. It will be puzzled over for the next twenty years.
• Severance Reverberant - An attempt at a sequel to Chronology, Lounging. This will concern the physics of sound. The office-worker will quit his dead-end job and join a jazz ensemble. It will fail. It will be John Knowles’ Peace Breaks Out to his A Separate Peace.

The ball’s in your court, M.R.

Not really; it’s just a good sentence to start with. The biggest news is that I came very close to shitting a brick when my iPhone temporarily froze this morning. I upgraded to the 2.0 software. Because Apple’s or AT&T’s servers are handling numerous service orders this morning - and because when upgrading iPhone software my computer has to talk to those servers (probably sending my bank account balances, account numbers, and names of porn sites I frequent directly to George W.) - my iPhone went, “Bwuh?”

I railed against the system for ten minutes, throwing cutlery and juice boxes, and proclaiming Apple and AT&T the worst entities since the devil. Then my iPhone went happy-face, and I rubbed it and said “Purrrrrrrr.”

My cat has a boo-boo. She has some kind of puncture wound really close to her anus. Because of the adjacency of the two holes, we’re thinking that the other cat literally tore her a new asshole. (Jerry’s joke, not mine.) The vet said she’d be fine, but we’re still unsure how exactly she got the wound. The two cats occasionally fight, but they’ve never drawn blood.

We’ve noticed that in her advanced years, the wounded kitty has been less than cat-like - failing to correctly judge the distance between a chair-back and a window sill, jumping, and dropping down the gap. It’s fun to watch; I point and laugh as she pokes her head from behind the chair, looking at me as if to say, “Tell anyone and I’ll poop on your beard trimmer.”

Jerry’s theory is that she did this once and hit herself on the sharp corner of a metal planter we have next to the window. Poor kitty. The grossest thing the vet said yesterday: “I opened up the wound to let it drain.”

Main Street, Eureka Springs is a very strange amalgamation of:

• Gays
• Rednecks
• Harley riders
• Hippies
• Christianity gone wild

Next to a jewelry shop with a rainbow flag, attended by a skinny, goatee’d gentleman, sits a coffee shop attended by a woman with dreads unafraid to let her underarm hair grow free, which sits next to a shop with t-shirts with slogans like, “If you think this THIS is hot, wait until you feel the fiery depths of hell,” which sits next to a parking lot with four or five leather-chapped-and-be-jacketed, beer-gutted, handkerchief-as-headwear-sporting gentlemen leaning on their bikes and a Ford F-150 with a Confederate Flag in its rear window. You can see all these things in a two-minute span.

I had a pretty good time, and I have to give credit to Jerry and his sister. I took photos; you can view them in my flickr photostream.

Jerry and I are going to Eureka Springs this weekend, so I’ll be away from computers, the internet, fun. (When Google Maps tells you that your vacation spot looks like a vericose vein, you’re going to spend a lot of time staring blankly into the distance.)

I encourage you to stay, have a look around, and think of your favorite posts from this site. I’d like to compile a “Best of…” page. That is your assignment while I mope adjacent to old things. Hop to it.