Pet Cobra

A Place That's Nice And Peaceful

There's an almost constant breeze here. Sometimes it feels like a gale, sometimes it feels like a cat's breath. It's always there, even when it barely is, so much so that when it isn't, it takes a few minutes to figure out just what's wrong.

We all read The Catcher in The Rye. It was one of two books that had and still have the most influence on me, on how I put the words on the page. The funny thing is, nowadays I couldn't peel more than a couple of quotes off the top of my head, and vast passages of it are covered in fog. I read it once, in high school, and that was that. But it settled into my bones. You survive a lightning strike, you still feel a tingle on occasion. I haven't thought about Salinger for years. Yet when I heard about his death, it felt like I'd gotten word of the passing of a favorite teacher. That maroon cover, those gold letters. 

I suspect that J.D. Salinger was content, living away from the world as he did. He was 91. You don't like breathing, you check out way before that; maybe you put a gun in your mouth, or maybe the team of heart and lungs just stops playing - nobody wants to put out for a manager who's thrown in the towel. Perhaps he wrote every day. Perhaps he just played Wii. Perhaps he walked past me in an airport last month. His reclusivity was beyond the comprehension of most; ol' J.D. was a failure, many thought, a guy who blew every chance in the world to capitalize on his creation. But Salinger's hermitage was a triumph, in the age of Twitter, where nearly everyone who aspires to write (myself included) takes a cue from Mick Jagger: it's the singer, not the song. These days the writer's work isn't enough; we need to know them, as if reading their work wasn't all we needed. Salinger was an outline, a zephyr, a ghost who died twice. But in the end, he left all he needed to leave. 

Surfing Is For Squares

The next time I complain about any one of my surfboards, please feel free to hit me over the head with it. (Video found over at Surfy Surfy.)

Sea Movies- Stranger than Friction from www.KORDUROY.tv on Vimeo.

Teach Your Children Well

We drove twenty miles through a storm down a dark rain-soaked car-choked freeway, just to take a few pictures with the kids. Everyone was tired and hungry. And when we got to where we were supposed to be, we couldn't find the address. We walked around in the cold downpour until we saw a small, waterlogged cardboard sign, bearing an arrow and a code: NOH8. Inside the small, makeshift studio we found warmth, light and purpose.

 
 
 

(Photos by Beth. For more about the NoH8 Campaign, go here.)

Ahab

Our white whale flew planes into buildings, murdering thousands. We chase him round the maelstrom, through perdition's flames, and we will never give up until we have him. This, we are told, is Justice.

We've gone down a rabbit hole so deep that it's impossible to know up from down, eyes closed in a sleep so sound that blackness is projected against our eyelids as a blinding white. Perhaps we tell ourselves that the nightmares are just that, nightmares, and when we wake up and rub the sleep-snot from our eyes they'll be gone. They may never have existed. 

This article should bother you. It should disturb you. I'm guessing it will, even those of you who say that we're in a war and they had it coming (never mind that we, with a few isolated exceptions, treated the soldiers of humanity's most vicious enemies, the warriors of a mad Fuhrer and an equally mad Emperor, in a manner befitting our country, even as they beheaded and tortured our own). 

Ahab stabbed at that white whale, that monster, that thing that had robbed him of so much. He stabbed at it for hate's sake. He spat his last breath at it. And it dragged him down.

Postscript: Doctor Manhattan

The wind howls at me.

I howl back.

We are standing at the edge of the stone jetty. Stormy seas rage in front of us. The wind's in our face, hair, teeth. The ocean is full of rain, he says. Five-year-olds. They can turn a simple fact into something like a poem. The rain falls from the sky. It returns to the sea. It evaporates and is lifted to the sky. The winds blow in from the sea, across the beaches, through the valleys, over the mountains and deserts and plains, and back to the sea. The air cools, warms, is inhaled, exhaled, breathed, rebreathed. My howl is a note in a chorus of howls. A sound wave dissipates, but doesn't disappear. A tree in the forest falls and no one is there to hear it. But everyone does. The storm passes on and rains somewhere else, and that water ends up in a cistern, and then a still, and then a bottle, and eventually in the sweating glass on my desk. I take a sip. The vodka is viscous like the ocean in winter. I swirl it around in the glass and watch miniature waves crest and break on the sides, like waves against a granite jetty. It's comforting. Nothing ever ends.

Friday Fun: Stormtrooper Lincoln

(from the labyrinthine mind of Mike Mitchell, whose work can be found here.) 

 

The Life

I love this. Great song and video: "Despicable Dogs" by Small Black. 

(Found over at The Adventure Life.)

Turn On The Lights And The Roaches Will Scatter

A history/geography lesson from hurricane-divertin' Man Of God Pat Robertson:

Robertson and others like him are, to many, the personification of modern Christianity. Yeah, I know, it's not right for us to judge the actions of an entire group based on the lunatic ramblings ("True story!") of a doddering old child porn afficionado ($5 says that it'll come out; we'll be watching the news one night and see video of the Feds carrying loads and loads of unmarked brown bags and boxes out of his Devil-proof fortress. Look at the guy. He's like a villain from an Alice Sebold novel.) "He doesn't speak for REAL Christians." But that's a pretty nice studio he's holed up in. And I'm sure his co-anchor/Depends Changer is pulling in 6 figures. So SOMEBODY is watching him and giving him money. 

Whispers of one hundred thousand dead. And in the twisted fantasyland where this man and many, many others dwell, the call goes forth: the dead brought it on themselves. Meanwhile, the silent majority watches and remains silent.

(You probably already know this, but the Red Cross is doing God's work in Haiti. Go here and give 'em some money.)

40/40: I Get Snipped, And Live To Tell The Tale

(ATTENTION, MEN WHO HAVE NOT YET HAD THEIR VASECTOMIES AND THEIR WIVES. PLEASE HAVE THE UNFIXED HUSBAND READ THIS POST ALOUD TO THE WIFE, BEGINNING WITH THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH.)

We begin the New Year with such high expectations. Months ago I began this series, documenting these small acts of intellectual and physical curiosity, things I wanted to have under my belt by the time I hit 41. One thing I didn't want to have under my belt: viable sperm. And so I scheduled a vasectomy, to be performed in the early days of January 2010.

The Narrative Thread Is Immune To Entropy

Today the Last Official Survivor Of Both Hiroshima And Nagasaki died. He was Official per the Japanese government, who keeps track of such things. The gentleman, last name of Yamaguchi, was 93. He'd witnessed 80,000 people die in atomic fire, went to his home town of Nagasaki to recover, and three days later got an encore. And lived for another fifty years after that. (Can you imagine if Twitter had existed back then? @yamaguchi Yo tweeps I'm back from H-shima, happy to say that I'm doing fine wait is that a plane OH WTF PEOPLE YOU GOTTA BE FUCKING KIDDING M)

What I've noticed over the past few days: the constant mess. Toys and clothes and dishes strewn about the house. I pick 'em up, they reappear, sometimes in the same place, sometimes in the sock drawer. The house has shelves and cabinets; we have chests o' drawers. They are irrelevant. Our four-walled Universe spins toward Chaos no matter how much shit we wash and rack and fluff and fold. This didn't bother me when I went to a job; the mess was almost a blessing after hours of databases and meetings. The workspace shall never know Ragnarok. The home? Might as well keep that Wagner playlist going.

Tonight I fucked around on Twitter for a few hours and accomplished little; the mess won today. I started this post, accidentally hit the wrong key and deleted a paragraph, started it over. On the TV, Sandra Bullock won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Actress. The Clippers beat the Lakers. You can still board a plane with a bomb in your tighty-whities. The Center isn't holding, there's smoke coming out from Asgard's windows. Still, a guy walks away from Hiroshima AND Nagasaki and lives to 93. There's a lesson in there somewhere.