mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

loaded guns and ladies of the night

Hey everybody, let's put on an avant-garde show!

Extra arms will not solve your problems.

Yesterday I had a bit of a getting-home adventure, because I wanted to go directly to pick up my new glasses,* which necessitated getting off the train at Bryn Mawr and then taking the surprisingly speedy Peterson bus over there. It was snowing big slow flakes. At the bus stop I stood under the awning of an abandoned Edgewater building and tilted my head way up to watch the snow proceed ever so slowly through the streetlamp's chicken-broth-colored circle of light. There was a tiny sliver of moon out too, pale and wobbly as milk, so it was! A most! Unkosher! Sky! Since I have just compared two of the sky-elements to chicken soup and simultaneously to milk! For crying out loud Mimi, what is next with you? Snow croutons?

The slow snow and the skinny stabbing moon (when the moon takes your life like a sharp pointy knife, THAT'S A-MUURRRDERRR) combined to make the sky feel like it was shimmery and closer to my face than normal, and that made me have a brief fleeting nostalgic wish to be on LSD. Some of you might think that is a rather sick wish to have while looking at nature, but: sit down, step off, y'all don't know. Snow. In motion. Streetlights. Etc. It would have been lovely. But who has time for twelve-hour drugs anymore?

Also at the bus stop I decided that I believe in the existence of “Midwestern nice.” Even in big, relatively grimy, relatively violent places like Chicago. We have this chatty thing going on. We can witness shootings and police beatdowns and stand around in the street for hours talking about it to total strangers. We really do let old ladies on the bus first. We give our unused bus transfers away to each other, and I have witnessed a man go from one end of a subway car to another holding a pink scarf and asking if anyone had dropped it, and someone had and was grateful.

A tiny bite of book talk: I was not impressed with Palahniuk's Lullaby. I am kind of tired of him, actually. This book was so small but had potential to be much larger. He postulates the existence of a culling spell, some words that could be spoken to make people die, a plague transmitted through sound, and envisions the hysteria that could ensue. Society turning information- and communication-phobic. People with earplugs in 24-7. Television and radio outlawed. Piles and piles of burning books. Palahniuk postulates this—get ready—in about three paragraphs. Scattered throughout the book. The rest is like this small domestic tale of four people trying to track down and destroy all copies of this spell, and their personal demons and power struggles (since some of them want to hang on to it), etc. It is kind of a disappointment, to be given a glimpse of what could be a big interesting speculative book and then go back to a more prosaic thing.

*I nearly forgot about this fake footnote. I picked up my new glasses. There is not much noteworthy to say about this except that I now have a choice as to whether I want to have roundish black wire glasses on my face or pointy brownish/reddish plastic glasses on my face. Today is a pointy plastic day. I had my old pair adjusted while I was there, because they were all loose on my head and sliding down my nose all weirdly, and the poor optician lady had to tighten screws and bend wires and even add entirely new earpieces, and she said “You sure have a little head.” MIMI THE PINHEAD! STEP RIGHT UP TO SEE THE FREAK OF NATURE!

I used to have a postcard of this Zinc Dance In Brooklyn and I don't know what happened to it. I was happy to see it again online. I was even happier to be reminded of the phrase “zinc dance in Brooklyn.”

My favorite part of Manfred (link leads to the middle of the poem)

There is a power upon me which withholds
And makes it my fatality to live –
If it be life to wear within myself
This barrenness of spirit, and to be
My own soul's sepulchre, for I have ceased
To justify my deeds unto myself—
The last infirmity of evil.

He missed the best one! Best quote from the movie version of Naked Lunch, hands down: “Tom, I've brought you a new typewriter which conveniently dispenses two types of intoxicating fluids when it likes what you've written.”

Some Things My Dad Used To Always Say, And If They Have Some Reference Or Precedent I Have Not Yet Been Able To Track It Down:

His hat was filled to the brim with head.

We now join the freeway, already in progress.

If we lived there [often pointing to a ditch or a barn], we'd be home by now.

[after eating something spicy] I am going to be thirsty all night.

Be good, kiddo. If you can't be good, be interesting.

Turtle party wagon!

YOU LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY, UNFORTUNATELY

There sure is a lot of homoerotic N'Sync fan fiction on the Web. It is possible to stumble upon quite a lot of it when looking for other things. Surprising.

LIES I HAVE TOLD SPONTANEOUSLY THAT OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVED

1. I told a really stupid girl in college that my plans for the summer involved working on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation.

2. I told a different really stupid girl in college that I had killed someone once. “It was sort of an accident,” I said. “I don't like to talk about it.”

3. I told a guy at a bar that I was once hospitalized because I stuck an entire ballpoint pen up my nose and it punctured a sinus. (I have no idea how this came up. It's not true.)

4. I told my seventh-grade gym teacher that I could not play soccer that day because it was a religious holiday for my family, and that we were Rosicrucians. He wasn't quite sure so he let me go to the library for that period, but he did call my mom that night. Damn.

PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHICAL QUERY AND A FUN PARTY GAME BESIDES

Ask people about immortality. Would you want to live forever? Most people say no. They say no because it would be too depressing to watch your friends, your spouse, your kids grow up and die before you. But wouldn't it be nice to be there for them their whole lives? And couldn't you, after a (who cares how long, you're immortal) suitable interval, make new friends, spouses, babies? It would not mean you loved the old ones any less…there are no guarantees that your family won't die ahead of the regular, mortal you anyway, right? You could travel and learn every language and change careers hundreds of times and experiment with completely different lifestyles: hobo, hard-working executive, crazy club kid, stay-at-home mom, starving artist. A deal-breaker would be this: You wouldn't want to live through any sort of mass human extinction (it seems obvious to me that humans are only one phase of life on this planet), because that would just be crazy lonely, and crazy uncomfortable if there was a new Ice Age or terrible dust storms all the time, and while immortality might be a bit of a lark as long as there is human civilization and culture around, you do not want to be the only living creature sitting in a cave and waiting around for millennia for some eukaryotic life forms to emerge. And then have only fungi to talk to for the next ten million years. But the other kind of immortality, the kind with the hanging around and seeing where this human-culture-carnival-ride is taking us, does not sound automatically unappealing to me. Which probably makes me a weirdo.

Maybe it is not the “being alone” thing that these appalled-by-the-thought of immortality people fear, but the fact that being immortal means they would have to come up with reasons to care. It is much easier to say “life is precious” if you know it will be over soon. The mystery is that so many people DO say “life is precious, because it is short,” and then they waste huge chunks of it being unhappy in their marriages and jobs and watching television. Whereas if you were immortal you could waste an entire decade watching television and it would really be no big deal.

Okay, immediately after typing this I (1) managed to bang the bony part of my wrist on a metal door handle, which hurt like a motherfuck and it is even starting to swell a little bit, and then (2) one hour later I mysteriously became severely dizzy and had to lurch to my office bathroom to vomit, which was horrible and which also makes me very very sad because I have broken my streak, of not vomiting in more than ten years, so uh, I am going to go now. Sad Mimi.

—mimi smartypants makes American Gothic look like a honeymoon.