3-11-03, 7:21 PM -
At the laundromat:
"An' Rosa, she say you are fat!"
"She don't say that."
"She do, an' you gonna have to take her out."
"Who she say that to?"
"She...um...she say it to Carlo for real."
"She don't say it to Carlo for real."
"Okay, if you wanna let her get away with it..."
"She know I will fuck her up, why she say that?"
Quite.
Been busy as fuck since my last missive (and friend, that's busy). In fact, me & Paul completed the first mixing session on my album. Three songs down, six to go. Yes, it's every bit as momentous as it sounds. In fact, I plan to have an MP3 up on the website within the next couple of weeks. Maybe Old Man Winter will have retreated to Australia by then.
God DAMN, but it's been a long winter. And this isn't just Texas weenie boy talking. The natives are cursing louder than me, I can assure you. Of course, they're better at loud cursing up here. They've been doing a lot of it, too, what with a transit fare hike ($2.00? Hell, that's Dallas level...) and the Broadway musicians' strike gumming up the works.
You might think that a musician would support his brethren, but Broadway might as well be Disney as far as I'm concerned. Let 'em rot in hell, or at least stop that confounded racket for a coupla days.
Still at Bigass Bank, surrounded by Theatra, Affirmatia, and Confrontatia:
THEATRA - "This pizza is cold."
AFFIRMATIA - "You tell it."
CONFRONTATIA - (on the phone) "I don't care how long you been working there, I need a manager! Don't make me call back."
T - "And I said I wanted one piece of tomato on my salad..."
A - "That's right, girl."
T - "But this one has two, and the dressing is too warm."
A - "You know it is."
C - "Do you hear what I'm saying to you? You better believe I ain't putting up with this shit."
A - "I heard that."
So as you can imagine, I spend the days with NPR on the headphones. Which isn't much comfort, actually. UN bickering, countdowns, buildups, carrots on sticks, pomp & bloody circumstance...
On the train home every day I continue to read up for my Six Day War book, due in two months. As I read about international pressures, troop deployment escalations, and militant ideological zealotry, it's difficult to keep the line between the past & the present from drifting a bit. Given that that particular crisis has yet to resolve itself, I'm hard-pressed to cough up any optimism about the present one. The dick's been pulled out, & it's gotta do its thing or come home blue.
You know, I believe there is a God, but I wonder sometimes if we'd be better off if no one believed in him. Richard the Lionhearted was a real peckerhead, lest we forget.
Anyhow...
Some potentially good news I've been keeping quiet on for fear of a jinx: My friend Nancy and her friend Rodney may have fixed BLOG.
BLOG, you say? Allow me...
In 2001, a few months after heatedly terminating my employment with X, the World's Most Fucked-Up Dot-Com, I was invited to to its corpse-picking sale. The beast had at last gone belly-up, and there were plenty of giblets to gnaw on. With a mere $150, I procured a Pentium II and a decent monitor, not to mention the nabbings from the keyboard/mouse grab bag. I wheeled my winnings out to the car on two comfy office chairs, which I kept.
I may have tweaked the Karmic Regulator's nose a bit with that, however, because a few months later, the computer completely froze up. And I do mean froze up. As in "I done froze up the tractor, Maudine, get Jethro."
I passed it from techie friend to techie friend, and no one could even figure out what had gone wrong. Like most illnesses I get and most equipment failures I encounter, I had the one that no one had ever seen or heard of before. I get all of my problems from a special agency, engineered especially to either test my stubborn optimism or force me into proclaiming insanity, I don't know which.
The closest theory anyone had was that I had put it too close to my studio power amp, which apparently gives off bloody great wads of electromagnetic fuck-all and should really be wrapped in a gigantic red decal that warns naive users that maybe they should secure the thing in an underground bunker before turning it on and frying their shit all to hell.
Anyhow, my friend Nancy was the last one I left it with, and I told her that once she reached the inevitable conclusion, she should just give it a decent burial, given that you can't really flush such things down the toilet. And bury it she did.
Or so I thought. Apparently relentless in her desire to beat the accursed thing, which for various reasons has been dubbed BLOG, she brought it to her techie workplace for techie forensic analysis. A squad of techie eyeballers looked it over and found that, in the absence of an old priest and a young priest, BLOG was irrevocably fucked.
Enter Rodney, King of the Techies. Bored one day, he dared to delve into the mystery of BLOG. In the dark of night, as lightning crackled above and the wind cried "Mary", a switch was pulled and BLOG was alive. ALIVE. ALIIIIIVE!!
Well, mostly. The thing's still fighting acceptance of a modem, but otherwise it's kickin'. Like I said, I'm trying not to say too much for fear of a jinx, but I guess this many paragraphs has probably thrown the jinx gods into motion already. Please, BLOG. Don't die on me now. The old Model T is sputtering, & I need ya. You'd do it for Randolph Scott.
Speaking of old things, I have NEVER received so much mail as I have on behalf of one James Joyce, whose work I lightly smeared in my last letter. I mean a LOT of mail. The uniform recommendation was that I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, proceeding thence to Ulysses for further edification. Well, fine, I will. Given that you all choose to read my ravings, I have high opinions of your taste.
I sure am conceited for a guy who has two pairs of holey shoes and lives in someone's spare bedroom, scribbling self-important screeds and listening to that new song by the Russian lesbians. Tatu, I think they're called. Seriously, my brain is hooked on that song. It's like T'pau meets the Bangles. I have no idea why I would like that, but I do. The Wifely has dubbed it the ABBA Effect. No matter how much the artistic snobbery protests, I sing along.
But the dryer beeps, and home I must go. Quick, before Carlo shows up. I will say this, though. Rosa is wrong. And I betcha Carlo'd hit it.
