May 2006
I'm a big baby – I used to be a baby, or rather a baby once existed who grew into, who physically transformed into, in lurid spurts, with believe me no intent whatsoever, a larger and muskier person, and that larger p
May 2005
Bad ideas – It's extremely unlikely that an entity or tiny being who whispers poor advice has taken up residence in my auditory meatus, one side or the other. There must be some other explanation for the many bad
Bedside manners – B caught a bug, resulting in a nightmarish tumult at various stops along the alimentary canal. Maybe some kind of food poisoning, maybe just one of the countless virulent agents nature supplies for th
Disagreeable old man – I hope in a few decades to become a truly world class Disagreeable Old Man. It's a role I think I was born to fulfill. I even think I'm capable of contributing something new to the personality type. F
Inviting postures – In my ideal world, sitting and reading a good book with my legs crossed and a slight frown on my face would be a posture of sexual availability as unambiguous as a baboon wiggling her swollen red ass
Marching band – I used to be troubled by my sexual attraction to marching bands but now I've come to terms with it, whatever it means exactly to come to terms with something. Marching bands. Okay it's not really marc
Metamorphosis – I am rumpled today. The world is a frightening place and there are few places to hide, which makes my antagonistic relationship with my bed especially depressing. Insomnia. My bed should rightfully be
Proctofoam – Your pantry is making me sick. Your cracked wheat, your pulled pork. I shouldn't look at this when I have such a hangover. Your staples are ludicrous, how can you live this way? Like I should talk, al
Shooting star – I saw a shooting star and I made a wish. The shooting star turned out to be a plummeting 747, trailing burning jet fuel before it plunged into a residential neighborhood two towns over, a town previou
Still better than most minerals – Anyone who speaks of the consolations of love has obviously never been in love with me. On the other hand, the rewards can be extraordinary, especially in comparison to freshly minimal expectations bi
May 2004
A mouthwatering selection of perfectly roasted meats – The other day we got a voicemail message, an attempt to place a collect call to us from someone in jail. I wonder who it was. Who do we know that might be a candidate for arrest? There aren't as many
Advice – Since self-assessments of all kinds are notoriously inaccurate and untrustworthy and so-called "objective evaluations" and "honest opinions" about you by others are never objective and rarely if ever
Bank terror, then book kismet – I had to go to the bank to close an account and open a new one, similar but different. There were good reasons for this, which I could keep straight so long as I hummed them to myself en route in a so
Biography – One way I might attempt to impose a false but reassuring structure on the turbid miasma of emotional states, pseudo-events, and scattered thoughts that constitute my life is to imagine that one day so
Cheerleader – The human ego is like the apex of a pyramid of cheerleaders, the blond girl at the top with the sparkling teeth and the megaphone embroidered on her chest who acts as if she just appeared way up there
Contract – After months of exhausting negotiations, life and I have an agreement in principle and just need to work out the language and a few of the details. I'm confident we can have something on paper within
DebaseCon 2004 – I would like to get together in one room all the boys I had desperate crushes on as a teenager, to see what kind of adults they've become. Of course the odds aren't good that they've turned into anyth
Dining in – Over the course of a normal day how much time do I spend being a human being, in the sense that I'm engaged in activities which are uniquely human? I don't know but I'll tell you, usually not when I'm
Dining out – I like restaurant booths made of quilted vinyl, either red in the diner style or darker, like in a steakhouse. I like when the vinyl has a rip or two that's been fixed with electrical tape, and when t
Enter the room – I keep the door to this room closed at all times. When I enter it in the morning it has a somewhat expectant aura about it, or maybe like I walked in just before it reached the punchline of a joke it
Good morning – I certainly hope mirrors don't collect the images that appear on them in some sort of pitiful archive of sad, tired, defeated faces, bizarre self-hating contemplations of revulsion, prolonged displays
Horizontal panic – There's the insomnia where I simply can't fall asleep. This is bad, but it's a kind of bad which doesn't exactly sneak up on me, it's a familiar kind of despair. Then there's the other insomnia, the o
I'm sorry, I don't remember – My memory is terrible, it always has been, and when I say terrible I mean it's capricious and unreliable to a degree that might be unusual, selectively awful or good with no pattern or reason, or mayb
Incoheroism – Here's the neologism that will sweep the nation, you heard it here first. This term refers to ostensible acts of heroism in which the motives of the "hero" are muddled at best, even morally troubling.
It's so great to see you, I mean it! – Tender effusions can just as often mask deadness of feeling as express genuine affection, which is why my kneejerk response to such outpourings is usually one of quiet suspicion. I'm constantly scruti
Let go – After a nearly-unanimous vote my brain's quorum decided to fire my personality's longtime publicist. From behind an imposing oak desk a shapeless blob of gray matter seemingly lit from within by blink
Limb frenzy – I am trying to concentrate on the book I'm reading but my legs are doing their crazy thing again, this maddening restlessness bit they like to do simply to sabotage my fragile contentment, the obnoxio
Midnight confessions – On the way to a midnight movie one of my favorite songs came on the radio, "Midnight Confessions" by The Grass Roots. When I was a kid I was addicted to oldies radio and this punchy little white soul
Plant – I've got my little bunker set up almost how I want it, it just needs a few more homey touches. I'm thinking of getting a plant. It then becomes a matter of somehow not killing the plant and not allowi
Pleasure craft – I've been getting interested in boats lately. I never cared about boats at all until I moved to Portland, now I find myself looking more closely at them. The idea of boating appeals to my disinclinati
Portland's Ona Munson – I've become interested in actress Ona Munson, who was born in Portland. She was Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind, but I became entranced with her after seeing her performance as the mysterious and
Readings in autobiography – I've just polished off The Stain is Gone But the Question Remains. As soon as I finish Bitter Quarrels With Salty Men it's on to Added Inducements: A Love Story. These narratives are problematic becau
Rumor control – Despite what you might have heard, it is absolutely untrue that I used to lipsync to old Nancy Wilson records under the name Fairy Similitude at that notorious Latino drag bar called Esta Noche in the
Scatterbrain – Of course I missed the Jonathan Raymond reading at Powell's last night, big loser that I am. Readings make me uncomfortable but it's important to support authors, especially ones who are promoting fir
Some typical daydreams – Here are a few things I've wanted to do in the last 24 hours: Console a grieving friend with facial expressions alone, offering comfort while at the same time giving my eyebrows a much-needed workout
Two automobiles – My aunt, my mother's half-sister, had a green Datsun 240Z. We'd listen to disco or Parliament and she'd tell me stories of notable family car accidents. She had a round suede purse with dangling suede
May 2003
And then there's Maude – Last night (or rather this morning) I was watching a cheesy History Channel show about epic catastrophes, featuring grainy footage of spewing volcanoes, pounding hurricanes, awe-inspiring tsunamis, ea
Coffee-addled racing thoughts, an arbitrary selection – One phrase I really like the sound of is "socket wrench", although I'm basically indifferent to the object it describes. Tools are fetish objects for some people. Accompanying my stepfather to the Cra
Crazy time – I am taking double doses of two kinds of antihistamines, and trying to spend most of my time in my air-filtered bedroom. This is doing a better job of keeping my allergy symptoms down to manageable le
Dancing with Granny Gaunt – It was one of those dreadful family reunions, where as a child the main objective is to avoid being made to dance with Granny Gaunt, her palsied talons clutching you, the loose skin of her neck way to
I can't hear you – One lesson that's very hard to learn, to really learn, is the one about not listening to cretins. Everybody brings a unique set of experiences, values, and biases to any conversation or exchange or ju
My skylight – Felix has been tackling the problem of my allergic misery. He is in his element, now that I've become, in a sense, a problem that requires a solution. He's rolled up his sleeves and tackled the proble
Qaffeinated questions – Occasionally I like to amuse with shameful admissions of ignorance. For some reason this happens most often when I've had too much caffeine and not enough food. I just blurt and blurt! Here are a few
Riffing on allergic rhinitis – I am rheumy! My eyes water, they itch, I resist the temptation to scratch at them with fingers that, let's face it, could've been anywhere. Even so, it appears I've damaged a blood vessel in my right
Story of the eye – Eyeglasses and I have always had a very uncomfortable relationship. The dislike is mutual. I only had to start wearing glasses in my twenties, and I never really got the hang of it. They give me pound
The Age of Moisturizer – I read in a magazine that some emotions I regularly experience are in fact jejune. This was announced with an air of trendspotting, the leading edge of feeling I suppose. This might present a problem,
The most terrible eczema – I was sitting on the couch reading (you could even say engrossed in) Renata Adler's 1976 novel Speedboat. I am weeping openly, not from emotion (the book is actually extremely funny) but from springti
Tiny terrors – Yesterday James and I watched part of a Discovery Channel show about army ants. The Discovery Channel and Animal Planet have become the mondo nature channels, it's like old PBS nature documentaries do
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