Post-Modern Drunkard

The Lover You Have, Not The One You Deserve

: pomo_drunkard; February 16th, 15:10

Current Music:: Adele - I'll Be Waiting | Powered by Last.fm

The New York Post has reported that the inspiration for Adele's Grammy winning album 21 is an aspiring musician and actor who goes by the name of Slinky Sunbeam, who met Adele and started dating her after she became famous for her previous album, 19. The NY Post, with the Post's customary focus on properly sourcing and confirming their stories, just cites a "friend of the singer" in the article. This friend allegedly says that Slinky "is a seriously good-looking guy. He has a great body and likes to wear vests to show it off. And he has this crazy hair which reminds me of Jimi Hendrix."

I'll just repeat that. He likes to wear vests to show it off. Love is a many splendoured thing, but vests? What a putz. ANyway, their relationship failed when Slinky got involved with a Burberry model with the even more unlikely name of Morwenna Lytton Cobbold. Can we just all take a moment and appreciate that name. I want Morwenna Lytton Cobbold to date Benedict Cumberbatch. And then to marry and hyphenate their names.

Slinky, of course, is not remotely the first muse to be completely and utterly unworthy of the art they inspire in someone who is actually talented and not named "Slinky." There is a proud tradition of artists inspired by unworthy people.

Nancy Spungen
Julian Lennon
Sara Dylan
Pattie Boyd
Joan Baez
Edie Sedgwick
Leigh Limon
Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda (of Hyrule)

My friend Brian would also add Dave Coulier, and Mia Farrow's sister here, among others, while my girlfriend pointed out that Eminem's ex-ex-girlfriend Kim also didn't get quite the art she deserved from him.

These things just happen. I've had people in my life who, were I capable of creating great art, I would have done my best to create great art in their name, even though they weren't remotely worth it and in fact I didn't actually like them very much or have much in common with them, even. (To be clear, I never dated any of these people--this is not a passive-aggressive comment aimed at any ex-girlfriend or anything like that). You go to love with the lover you have, not the ones you might deserve.

An Ellipsis in Time

: pomo_drunkard; February 15th, 14:15

Current Music:: Jeff Tweedy - California Stars | Powered by Last.fm

Being a stickler for proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation is an exercise in futility on the Internet. There are simply just too many people out there who inexplicably believe they are capable of communicating via words while yet being functionally illiterate.

This is why I no longer spend any time in the comments on general Internet sites. That alleviates a lot of the pain. If you limit your online social circle to your friends, suddenly almost everyone you interact with is a college grad, or at least a reasonably intelligent college dropout. It weeds out the vast majority of the ALL-CAPpers, all the worst spellers, and the people who learned how to read via text messages, leaving us with only the highest caliber of terrible writers.

I'm not talking about typos. Everyone makes typos during the tens of thousands of words we type over the course of the day. There's a difference between screwing something up and being the type of person who is just screwed up.

These intermediate idiots can get close with their spelling, only mix up a couple of homophones here or there, and only use "lol" a couple too many times. There is, however, a terrible inexcusable thing that they almost all do to indicate that you can immediately discount what they say.

You will know them their trail of ellipses.

I hate these people.

The overuse of ellipses is primarily irritating because those who overuse them think they're doing something smart. They don't realize they're making their post or comment clumsier and uglier. These people insert superfluous ellipses everywhere they would normally pause in conversation, forgetting that there are at least three other forms of punctuation for that purpose: the comma (for pauses inside sentences), the period (for the pause that accompanies the end of a sentence) and the carriage return (for the pause that accompanies the end of a group of sentences). These have been around for centuries.

Rather than putting an ellipsis in everywhere a pause would go, people should realize that an ellipsis is used for two basic purposes: to indicate where something is missing or removed, or to indicate that something has been left incomplete. The ellipsis in both cases indicates absence or elision. If you use them in text, you are letting everyone know that your sentences are as full of gaps and spaces as your argument.

Even more important is that ellipses are used in dialogue to denote trailing off. If you use a bunch of ellipses in a comment, all literate people are naturally going to read it as you repeatedly trailing off like an indecisive Valley girl.

An ellipsis does have a purpose. But make sure you know what that purpose is. If you're omitting something, or trailing off, well, then...

And don't even get me started on semicolons.

[Final note: I will undoubtedly have screwed something up somewhere along the way in this post. Muphry's Law demands it. You get no points for saying, "You spelled 'elision' wrong" or something like that. Also, if you comment with a lot of ellipses, we get it. You're a very funny man, Sully. That's why I'm going to kill you last.]

Fighting the Good Fight

: pomo_drunkard; February 9th, 17:15

nihilistic_kid reminded me of the one of the greatest of all crazies in America: Steve Lightfoot.

Is it wrong to find someone's obvious mental illness so goddamn entertaining? Schizophrenia divorces people from reality, and causes them to find connections that aren't there, and so a schizophrenic's ramblings wind up being like a Salvador Dali painting, or a surrealist movie. It's obviously not so much fun for the person who it's happening to, but it can wind up being terribly entertaining for those of us on the outside of his diseased mind.

That, at least, is the question I deal with when I read about Steve Lightfoot. Lightfoot is the owner and writer of the pamphlet Stephen King Killed John Lennon, which he's been peddling for years, and the accompanying website. Lightfoot's theory is that Stephen King killed John Lennon at Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's orders, and that every subsequent president has been part of the conspiracy to cover it up.

He points at evidence printed months before Lennon's death about Stephen King that had the phrase "One Great Big Zippo Lighter…Perils of Pyrokinesis" Apparently, Lightfoot has never read Firestarter and knows nothing about the novel or why anyone would talk about pyrokinesis concerning Stephen King. Instead, he breaks down "pyro" and "kinesis" and says that this indicates the killer was firing while he was moving. Also, Stephen King looks like Mark David Chapman, if you reverse the negative and look hard enough. "I reversed the negative because Time reversed it to begin with, three months before the crime."

There's more, of course, but the most entertaining part comes on the footnotes page of his website.

For instance

Barrack Obama, (The Great Deceiver), I have come to learn, is absolutely trying to kill me after first setting the stage with a host of phony traffic tickets to explain away why it was that I was killed in a head on accident with a large truck someday in the future. George Bush did the same thing - minus the pre ticketing - in 2007 when I WAS almost killed when a woman ran a red light doing almost 60 mph.

The day after Hillary Clinton lost to Obama in 2008 she met in D.C. with the Bilteburger family. The one most of you dismiss as just conspiracy theory talk. She lost to Barrack because of a call I made to Rush Limbaugh exposing the fact that Bill secretly met with Stephen King in the White House just ten days before the Oklahoma City bomb went off. That was the end of her surge.

Or even

Barrack Obama IS the establishment president. A deceiver, like Nixon, who I think was pro Soviet to the core in spite of his claims to be a commie hunter.

But also

Israel lost all its legitimacy to build a state based on religion after they bombed Saddam Hussein's nuclear facility just weeks after Lennon was killed, suggesting that THEY may have had Lennon killed just for that reason alone

But anyway

I wish Ron Paul wasn't so far over the deep end with his platform that Americans would vote for him.

Take note, Ron Paul fans. When even a guy who thinks that Stephen King killed Lennon, Bill Clinton helped Stephen King bomb Oklahoma City, and that Nixon was a Soviet sleeper agent thinks your candidate is off the deep end, it's time to give up.

The Loneliness of Being Madonna

: pomo_drunkard; February 7th, 12:22

Current Music:: The Fratellis - Henrietta | Powered by Last.fm

It is completely unfair to single Madonna out for criticism on her age for performing during the Super Bowl Halftime Show. The Who, Tom Petty, the Stones, and dozens of other musicians have performed on that stage without the same level of critism that Madonna received for her performance.

The criticism seems to spring from the fact that Madonna didn't have the good graces to appear to be as old as, for instance, the dessicated mummy in the shape of Keith Richards that performed a couple of years ago. But Prince performed a couple of years ago without any complaints--they're roughly the same age, and while Madonna allegedly has her age and good looks preserved by fitness, mysticism, and clean living, Prince has had his good looks preserved by his harnessing of the vast amounts of sex energy produced by his music which are then collected in Minneapolis-based orgon accumulators. They're more or less the same, but Madonna alone has received criticism for this.

I say that her fitness and apparent youth is "allegedly" a result of her fitness and mysticism and healthy lifestyle not to imply that she's had work done. I think it's much more simple than that. There are either two options.

First: Madonna has used her vast wealth to shop at the very same art dealer that Dorian Gray shopped at. My theory is that this painting walks among us as Steven Tyler, aging instead of Madonna. This explains why Steven Tyler looks more or less like the villain from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ten seconds after he drank from the false holy grail.

The other, more likely explanation is that "Madonna" is not actually a single person, but a title, like "Dread Pirate Roberts" that is handed down every ten years to a new person who then takes up the role and carries on the tradition. This is why "Madonna's" music evolves so completely and abruptly from time to time. This also explains why none of Madonna's relationships ever last all that long. Different versions of Madonna have been interested in different people. The Sean Penn Madonna was eventually phased out for the Warren Beatty Madonna, who never even got to meet the Guy Ritchie Madonna.

Frankly, I'm mostly just impressed the newest Madonna was able to perform the hits of all her predecessors. That, more than anything, is the real story here.

Stu's Heart Monitor: Week 1

: pomo_drunkard; January 17th, 15:11

Current Music:: Sinéad O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U | Powered by Last.fm

Sorry. I hadn't noticed that my previous post hadn't actually posted until nearly a week after I wrote it, so though it looks like I'm updating y'all on something that I wrote only mere minutes before, this is actually from quite some time later.

I've been wearing this heart monitor for a week now. It's the size and shape of an old Blackberry, which means that I am forced to wear it on my belt like a tech bubble day trader. But it's way less useful even than an old Blackberry. The display is very low resolution black text on a gray background. It doesn't show the temperature, or the time. There are no games. It doesn't even have Snake. Forget about playing Angry Birds--though, to be fair, I'd be a little wary at losing at a game on a device that's wired up to my heart.

What the device does is make incomprehensible noises and display inscrutable messages. I can tell that it's communicating with someone sometimes, because occasionally my computer speakers make that weird clicking noise you get when you put your cell too close to unshielded speakers. Occasionally the text on the heart monitor will change from "Monitoring" to *2 or *4, but none of the literature included with the device or available online will tell you what *whatever means. Frankly, I worry that my heart is running off of MS-DOS these days. I'm steeling myself for the day I look at the device and all it reads is "Abort, Retry, Fail?" or just "General Failure."

Two nights ago, I was drifting off when the heart monitor started making a piercing arrhythmic series of beeping noises. I woke up in a panic, my Fight, Flight or CTRL-ALT-DEL response running at a fever pitch, but by the time I got a light to see what was on the screen, it'd stopped, and had resumed displaying a gnomic "Monitoring." My heart was pounding like crazy, but that could have been anything from an incipient heart attack to sheer garden-variety sleep panic.

I can tell you that I'm a treat to sleep next to.

All in all, this heart monitor compares unfavorably to an iPhone.

Totally Clipped To My Heart

: pomo_drunkard; January 17th, 14:44

Because my heart palpitations have been getting more frequent, but only at night, I saw my cardiologist last Monday. He had a collegue, an electrocardiologist, sit in on the meeting. Because the heart palpitations are infrequent, and tend to happen only at night, she recommended one of two options.

The first, which she brought up just as a possibility, was that I come into the hospital for tests. The test would consist of them artificially inducing the heart palpitations and studying them while they happen. She explained this was mostly done with people who have severe but infrequent palpitations where they think they're going to black out and die. The idea of coming into the hospital and voluntarily having severe palpitations induced, even under the watchful eye of a crash team, did not appeal to me.

The second option was to wear a heart monitor. Basically, it's a stripped down version of the Holter monitor that I'd worn before. Only two wires, which can be self-administered, and a small wireless device that I can wear on my belt which communicates and records any heart irregularities I might have to my doctors. So there's still a possibility of a tragic misunderstanding with someone who sees me trailing wires underneath my shirt, leading to to my death at the hands of overzealous NYPD (and won't that be an exciting graph for the doctors to see wirelessly transmitted to them), but it looks less like I'm trying to smuggle a tapedeck than the Holter did. Except instead of 24 hours, I'm to wear it 30 days.

What it should look like

As you can see, you attach the electrodes to the chest and side of your Oscar statue. Acting Awards are preferred, but in a pinch, you can substitute one of the technical awards instead. Absent either of those, you can slather Michael Chiklis in gold paint and attach it to him. Or, if you lack all that, you can attach it to yourself. Since I lack both Oscars and Chiklis, that's what I did.

If you strain really hard, I can kind of picture myself as wearing Darth Vader's chestplate. It's basically a Holter monitor, after all.

But it's hard...I'm only able to do it the same way that every roll of wrapping paper or umbrella automatically becomes a lightsaber. Which is to say, I recognize the absurdity of it all, even as I just try to get by.

Anyway, only 24 days left of wearing this thing.

Books This Year

: pomo_drunkard; January 12th, 11:05

35 books for me this year, which is the fewest books I've read since I started recording these things. In my defense, I read some long ones, but mostly, I blame the fact that I got a New Yorker subscription, and spent my commutes listening to podcasts for a couple of months.

It's very clear from this lists the ruts I got into. Started out with food, moved onto crime fiction, stayed there for awhile, and then moved into near future science fiction and hung out there most of the time, with a couple of forays into other books that caught my eyes.

It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten - Abandoned, not worth your time
American Fried, by Calvin Trillin - Recommended to the foodie
Alice, Let's Eat, by Calvin Trillin - Recommended to someone who couldn't get enough of the previous book
Third Helpings, by Calvin Trillin - Recommended to someone who couldn't get enough of the previous two.
Lush Life, by Richard Price - Highly recommended
Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins - Not good, but easy to read, and compulsively readable.
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins - Worst than the previous book, and less compuslively readable.
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins - Oh well, maybe the movies will redeem them.
Pronto, by Elmore Leonard - Highly Recommended
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry - Highly recommended.
Riding the Rap, by Elmore Leonard - Recommended
Clockers, by Richard Price - Recommended
Out of Sight, by Elmore Leonard - Highly recommended
Freedomland, by Richard Price - For Hardcore Enthusiasts Only
The Night Gardener, by George Pelecanos - For Enthusiasts only
Killshot, by Elmore Leonard - Recommended
Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard - Highly recommended
Bicycle Diaries, by David Byrne - Abandoned, not worth your time
Tishomingo Blues, by Elmore Leonard - Highly Recommended
Sam and Twitch by Brian Michael Bendis [Crime Comics] - Very Highly recommended
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman - Extremely disappointing
The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles - Recommended
A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin - You know if this is for you
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - Charles Yu - Very disappointing
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, by Robert Charles Wilson - Fair to middling
The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy - Highly recommended
No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July - No one belongs on my bookshelf less than Miranda July
LaBrava, by Elmore Leonard - Recommended
The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobsen - A long preamble to a Jewish joke that I put aside before a punchline could be hinted at.
Market Forces, by Richard K Morgan - SInce I couldn't reread "Altered Carbon" again so soon, I read this. Read his other stuff instead.
Trade of Queens, by Charles Stross - The final book in his Marxist fantasy sci-fi series. Not great, but good enough for me to recommend the entire Merchant Princes series.
11/22/63, by Stephen King - Recommended, but not unreservedly. The ending is predictable, and clumsily handled, but with a great coda to make it all worth it.
Rule 34, by Charles Stross - Very recommended. Good near future sci-fi. The moment where it becomes clear why the book is written in second person (seriously,it's not remotely as irritating as that sounds) was the greatest revelation in print of the year.
Reamde, by Neal Stephenson. - Recommended. Not as well plotted as Cryptonomicon, but good present day sci-fi.

Mirror Universe Stu

: pomo_drunkard; December 28th, 2011

Current Music:: Eleanor Friedberger - My Mistakes | Powered by Last.fm

There is a man on the other side of the country, in Washington State. He shares my name. He is only three months younger than me. He smokes, but only socially. He drinks, but only socially. He is married, with no kids. He dropped out of college. We've never talked and never met, but he doesn't know his email address all that well, and since he has the same name as me, and my email address is [firstname.lastname@gmail.com], he sometimes gives my email instead. I get receipts and messages for him occasionally.

And yesterday he decided to try to cheat on his wife.

I know this because he used my email address on his MySpace account and Adult FriendFinder account, and the confirmation email from AFF included his password in plaintext. His password is "fuckthis123." Did I mention he dropped out of college? I find that tidbit about him the least surprising thing that I learned from his Adult FriendFinder account.

I didn't look into this intending to stalk the guy. I just wanted to find out an alternate email address so I could contact him and let him know that he should be much more careful in the future, and maybe learn his fucking email address since it's maybe the most important string of alphanumeric characters out there if you want to find random people to fuck you without your wife ever finding out. Somehow I don't think a guy too incompetent to set up his cheat-on-his-wife account is going to be a kind and attentive lover, but this aspect of adultery on the down low is new to me, so who knows?

So of course I'm a little irritated about this. I spent a good hour looking up to see if I could find any information on this guy that would enable me to contact him, and I struck out on that, so I'm thinking I should send him a note or something. I'm wondering the best way to do that. The first thing that's sprung to mind would be to set change his profile in a way to mock him.

Perhaps something like, "I'm Firstname Lastname, and I'm too stupid to know my own email address. I accidentally used someone else's email and sent him my password instead. I can't be trusted to have an affair with. I can't even be trusted to drive a keyboard properly, so I should be thankful that I can at least get porn off the internet and be thankful that no one has bothered to tell my wife yet, who doesn't deserve an asshole like me. A/S/L?"

Really. I don't think it's too much to ask for a guy to have his email address memorized.

So now I'm receiving MySpace and Adult FriendFinder messages intended for him. What should I do with it?

Won't Get Screwed Again

: pomo_drunkard; November 22nd, 2011

A year and a half ago, I went to a wedding with my girlfriend, and got struck down by Lupus while there. My joints ached, and so I wound up spending a portion of a lovely weekend in Santa Fe in bed. I'm not saying this to win your sympathy. By now, you should be used to my whinging about Lupus. It knocks you on your ass. You just lie in bed, avoiding putting any weight on anything resembling a joint.

It's the next part that's special. On MTV2, while I was lying in bed, was a marathon of the first season of Jersey Shore, which my girlfriend discovered about thirty seconds into the first episode. She --and by extension, I as well--watched the entire nine episode run of the show. It was the worst thing Lupus has ever done to me.

I'm going away to Raleigh-Durham for Thanksgiving (why? Just because, that's why. I don't feel the need to explain myself to you), and I've learned my lesson. I am currently loading things up on my iPad to watch in the case of extreme emergency. Steve Jobs may have been a shit of a human being, and he may have benefited from child slave labor, but he also built a device that will keep me from having to endure the Jersey Shore or its ilk ever again. I can live with that.

Food V. Drink

: pomo_drunkard; November 18th, 2011

Current Music:: The Mountain Goats - Sarcofago Live | Powered by Last.fm

Back ten years ago, when I was backpacking my way across Europe, my priorities were very straightforward. I wanted a cheap bed in a central location near all the sightseeing locations, and I wanted easy access to copious amounts of alcohol. If I was feeling particularly adventurous, I'd try to drink an appropriate alcohol to where I was (grappa in Athens, Raki in Turkey, wine in France, etc), but I wasn't picky. To be drunk for cheap, ahh, that was the thing.

Now that I'm a real adult, rather than a kid just out of college pretending to be an adult, things have changed. I've been planning a trip to Raleigh-Durham for the Thanksgiving weekend, and just yesterday I realized that the only trip planning that I'd been doing has been food related. I know what BBQ places I'm interested in going to, where the top ten nearest Chick-Fil-As are to our hotel, and two or three of the best rated restaurants in the Triangle are located. We're only going to be there for five days, total, but I have at least ten restaurants on the list. Only yesterday did I start to look at what else there might be to do in the areas.

It's a definite switch from the days when my biggest concern was whether I'd be stuck in an HI hostel, which has curfews and doesn't allow drinking on their grounds, or when my biggest problems were a full bottle of wine and a broken corkscrew.

In fact, my Raleigh-Durham trip issues are a good reflection of my day-to-day life, it turns out. I'm writing this at 12:29pm at work, which is during the two hour period before lunch at 1pm whenI start to think about what I'm going to do for lunch, culminating in my actually going to lunch. It's all very dramatic. I'm not sure when in my life the amount of money I spend on food wound up surpassing the amount of money I spend on booze, but that pivot point in retrospect probably is as good as any at marking when I finally turned into an adult.

Of course, it also probably marks me as a foodie, which I admit probably makes me insufferable to be around to many people. The Stu who spent his 20s drunk in a hostel would likely beat me to death with a bottle of good scotch.

I still try to drink the good stuff, at least.

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