Week 46 (11)
Further
updates.
Saturday, 23:09
So we got started on that list by heading out to look for a rowing machine. Turns out rowing machines just aren’t all that popular, these days. Lots of treadmills and ab rollers, though. And we did see Harry Potter on a whim (eh) and managed to find a pair of black Converse Chuck Taylors for me, so.
The rest of the list that I was going to tackle today? Well. The utilities guys spray-painted where the utilities are, so we know where not to put a tree. And, the day being pretty much shot, we rented a Patlabor tape and I finally got to see American Beauty (double eh). Does that count?
Crickets
and spam.
Saturday, 11:43
So it’s been a couple of days. So sue me. This is going to have been a slow week. Life goes on.
Of course, I log back on this morning and get caught up and what do I find in my mailbox? udub3yzsgx@hotmail.com wants to sell me some Amazing Breast Enhancing Capsules; 5833176John is concerned that the stock market might currently be making me uneasy; navy2@uole.com has a question, but it turns out to be about whether or not I want to be my own boss (I am, but thanks for asking); Alex Brown and pbfmtmv5ydft3@hotmail.com want to help my either buy a home—thanks, guys, but I’ve just refinanced, and anyway, I’m not so sure I want to go borrowing money from someone named pbfmtmv5ydft3 (it’s nothing personal, pbfmtmv5ydft3); and Come See Me wants me to know that she just turned 19 and got a webcam. Well. You go, girl!
And that’s it? I go away for, like, half a week, and there’s just six lousy pieces of spam? Where’s the clix? Where’s the clamor from my screaming, desperate fans, wondering whatever’s become of me?
SFX: CRICKETS chirp in an empty, echoing auditorium.
Sheesh. To update, then: the Day Job came to an end yesterday, which, on the one hand, is of the good; there will be free time to do things I’ve been putting off. On the other: no steady paycheck. Oops. (Anyone need a graphic designer and copywriter who won’t relocate? Anyone who can pay well, that is.) Margaret Cho will be appearing here in December, but there’s also trees and a kitchen table to buy. I have a couple of essays I’m supposed to write, and a couple of stories I really ought to write, and I suppose I should do something about those darned James sisters at some point. There’s squirrels in the attic (again), and more window repair to do, and maybe I’ll just paint my office and see if I can figure out how to build bookshelves this next week.
(Of course, I might just spend all my time reading and lying about in my pajamas while enticing cats into my lap from time to time.)
Oh, and Momus is singing “Finnegan, the Folk Hero” through my cheap-ass speakers, which is singularly appropriate.
Maybe
not Canada.
Tuesday, 07:16
On the one hand, there’s suspension of attorney-client privilege, PATRIOT, and raiding any business which might have something vaguely to do with terrorism and are owned by furriners.
On the other, Canada lags way behind the US in the crucial field of pornography studies. (Link swiped from Pursed Lips, who in turn swiped it from someone else.)
(Yes, there’s Vancouver. BC, that is. But the collusion between rabid conservatives and libertarian liberals to fight for something, y’know, important, is awfully endearing.)
At least, the one I frequent. Which is still out of filterless clove cigarettes. How can a man be expected to pose properly without the necessary props, I ask?
Maybe that’s why I’m so fucking cranky.
Scene
from a party.
Sunday, 16:57
There’s two thirtieth birthdays being celebrated concurrently with a giant bottle of Jim Beam from 1971. It’s this big ceramic thing that commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of Bing’s Classic, some golf game or other they play down in Monterey—it’s got an absurdly phallic neck growing out of a belly like a flat ellipse on end, a symbolic testical sac stamped with Bing Crosby teeing off on one side and one of those wind-blown trees on the other and filled with really good bourbon. Some wag dubs it the Bing of Willendorf, almost in protest. (But it’s very suggestive of that, too. Y’all did realize that male and female genitalia are, topologically speaking, identical?)
—But I digress. At one point, mingling (the Spouse, feeling ill, claims she enjoyed the party vicariously by watching me “work the room”; I think she was having entirely too much fun being catty with the downstairs tenant and the scruffy cartoonist), I’m asked the usual questions by another guest. How do I know the hosts, etc. “Well,” says I, “I used to write about comics.” (Well. I still do. But I used to do it semi-pro, for the minor leagues.) (And that doesn’t begin to sum up the haphazard nature of it all, but someone’s turned up the Gorillaz and it’s a little too loud to do a riff on the whole process of driving him home from one of the Dark Horse guy’s parties and bonding over the anonymous snippets of music played during NPR news broadcasts and then running into him by accident at a grocery store almost two years later. Haphazard, but fortuitously so; it’s a great fuckin’ party.)
“So what do you do now?”
I shrug. Someone (the Gorillaz fan) has already used the line “I’m staggeringly underemployed,” and anyway, I’m not, not this week. But Lord knows I’ll use it later. “You know, the usual. Freelance writer, graphic designer, whatever.”
“So what do you write about?”
Blink. Blink.
I think I ended up mumbling something about “not really having much time to write for myself much at the moment” or something, and then noticed my beer was empty. Which the judge will allow on a technicality, but really. I’ve got to either do something about the inner Comstock or come up with a new schtick.
“You know what I spent today doing?” said the Gorillaz fan, at another point. She’s had maybe two days’ worth of paying work this week, and bitches about an utter dearth of cash, and is between novels (she is somewhere, at this moment, typing the first words of a new one. God willing, and the creek didn’t rise), and she has a really nice pair of two-tones. “Forging online communities,” she said, and there was a round of appreciatively snarked laughter. Sounds about right. —Christ, but I’m not liking this new old economy.
nicholas urfé
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