This

He didn’t think his particular brand of loneliness was special in any way. He thought of it as something that was just a part of the human condition like waking up in the morning and having to pee. And yet, even knowing this, as he walked along the river listening to a dog bark somewhere, he couldn’t tell how far away in the dark, he found it hard to not consider his loneliness to not just be an essential part of the human condition but to be instead a particular type of loneliness that only he could experience. A thought pattern which made him lonelier still by confirming his original belief, that loneliness was both an essentially banal and unique condition at the same time, that feeling bad about it would be like feeling bad about having a nose, it was just a thing everyone dealt with, and yet, this reality did nothing to diminish the feeling itself, or so he thought.

He wandered by a koi pond, stopping to buy a few grains of fish food, or whatever it was and dropping it in, watching the yellow and blue and red backed monsters glide along beneath the surface of the green water. He disliked the feeling of the grains between his fingers and he regretted having bought the fish food at all. He would now spend the day smelling like an animal trough. What if he came across a beautiful woman? Perhaps he’d tell her he was a horse trainer. He scanned the area but only noticed a couple of women pushing strollers, families standing at the edge of the pond with a relative in a wheel chair. No one to impress. He threw the last few grains of fish food into the pond in a heap, and, just as he was to turn and go a monstrous golden koi surfaced, brushing the other fish aside as if he were a locomotive and they, mere rail cars, snapping up the food. He could see that the fish was probably metaphorical. But he could not see or hear what Melville had said about water, about it calming the soul. He was finding no peace in staring at the green looking bilge water. Melville obviously meant open water, something free. The fish and the open water were metaphors for the taking, of that he could be sure. He stood up, knees cracking, and walked away from the metaphors and towards a street lined with office buildings.

For how could a person, he thought, possibly hold all of the people he encountered in such contempt, without beginning to hold himself in contempt. He didn’t know if it was  uniquely human trait, or whether it was biological, though, come to think of it, he didn’t know if he thought of humans as mere biological manifestations of Darwin’s laws come to light, as cosmic dust from a very small point exploding infinitely, or as something special, essential. It sort of depended on the day. He’d had a Catholic upbringing, which had not helped him to figure things out at all. 

Then

He spent that summer studying in Paris at an American University. That particular night he was sitting near the Eiffel tower drinking a bottle of wine, studying the glittering tower above him, the women walking by, the clip of their heels on pavement, and the image of them burned on his retina like smoke drifting slowly at out of a room. It’s bad business to fall in love in Paris as most people know. Truth be told, it’s bad business to fall in love anywhere, but it’s particularly bad to do so in Paris. This is because the Parisians are notoriously rude to outsiders, and there is no one who is more of an outsider than a person in love. They take very little interest in anyone besides themselves, which, of course, makes lovers the worst sort of Parisians to be around. In short, it’s bad news to be around lovers for they tend to focus inwardly.

Paris had existed in his mind long before the plane had touched down at De Gaulle, and he’d spent an hour waiting for the train in the small grey depot below. Before he landed Paris had been an idea of faded grandeur, an expression of what it would be like to be in New York when Tokyo had reached its final ascension. Only better, because the Parisians were so damn proud where New Yorkers were just pushy and mean, and so as he walked the grand Boulevards of Van Haussman, that old rascal clearing out the mud and filth and charm of a Paris even older than the one in his mind, a Paris of winding streets and whores with consumption, he thought how the boulevards could just as easily have been used for ships, how he, as a child, had flooded the lawn by turning on the hose all afternoon to float his army men across the heavy clumps of grass, and how if one were to turn on a spigot in Paris, the liners would have no problem sailing down the streets with passengers plucking flowers from window boxes. 

So

On the night they parted ways he took a walk by the Seine. The breeze was light and variable, the clouds low slung, shielding the light from the sky, reflecting back that cast up from below. He stood by the water and thought about his life, and it occurred to him that he desperately had to pee, that in no way shape or form could he make it to the nearest Mcdonald’s or whatever, that what he’d need to do was pee outside, in the open air, like a drunk, or a child. And this brought into his mind the backyard of his childhood, junipers and cumquats, blackberry vines gone wild. There was a small hidden corner in the yard where the children in the neighborhood had all gone to pee. It was a thing that none of them had told the adults, but it was a rite of passage, or, if not that, a sign that you were one of the group, and he remembered the long arcs of urine traveling over the branches of the juniper, their sly descent at the first splash. What he remembered mostly was the freedom that he’d felt, peeing outside into a bush, that it struck him as strange that at so young an age he’d already been aware of adult rules and expectations, and that the peeing had been an early flouting of them, a reminder of his essential independence. The fact of the matter was that he loved peeing outside. The act, when separated from fear of other hikers, or, God forbid, along the side of the road while his impatient father drummed the wheel was truly freeing. He didn’t have to aim at all. No conformity was involved in the act. It was simple relief. He wondered, as he peed onto the grass beside the Seine, if that old juniper still smelled like urine.

The regret was also wedded to our experience in time. There was no way for him to ever experience the evening, her smile, slight perfume, the feel of her shin against the small of his back, the same way again. The evening had passed, like all other evenings before it, blasé, boring, or intensely interesting, but now it was just one more small evening flotilla on the vast sea of memory, no longer set ablaze by being marked as the present. And there would be no way to travel back, no way to walk down that same street, to turn towards her with a smile and find an answer in her eyes. These things had passed, would pass, will always pass. And now he was left with the acute feeling of failure that always attends the completion of a majestic thing. He was certain that he’d be sad for weeks, and then the evening would slowly start to fade, the sails would stop gathering wind, and perhaps it might stay afloat in that deep dark sea of the mind, but it would come to mean less and less as the years went by, until it would seem like a memory of someone else’s, a thing that he’d heard once in a story. 

On Writing

S: You shouldn't write in there. It's full of paint fumes.
M: It's been weeks since I've written anything remotely good. I'm kind of hoping the fumes will help.

"The second girl, the one without skinny legs turned out to be the far prettier of the two. This was not entirely true. She had sea green eyes, and small dark circles under her eyes, that were really more indicative of a lack of make up than of some deep seated unhappiness, or so he hoped. She wasn’t really prettier but she was more interesting, laughed more quickly. He generally wasn’t fond of girls who laughed quickly and chalked it up as a weakness of character. That wasn’t at all true, though he believed it to be true about himself. No. He actually liked it quite a lot, and who wouldn’t. It implied, a laugh, a sort of intimacy, an acknowledgment of a thing shared, the joy of an exchange of words or ideas that nothing else really did. People can often travel through the world without really knowing themselves. This is not particularly more or less true of our protagonist."

Most of it can't properly take place on the page. It's a poor simulacrum, poor mimesis, whatever floats your boat. The idea is to create a world, or a portion of a world and then let these characters inhabit that world. There are a variety of theories, but the one that the real auteurs, and I realize that the term is usually applied to film, but the one that these guys subscribe to is essentially letting these characters inhabit the world. That's the type of word they use, inhabit. I suppose metaphorically speaking we're talking like standing in a doctor's office, or your aunt's or whatever, I'm realizing that the value is lost because no one has fish tanks. Anyhow, standing there and watching the fish swim around and like inhabit their world, and then going back down to the page and writing down what they did. The problem is that people are way more complex than fish and watching them "inhabit," kind of a bull shit word, the world is itself, kind of bullshit. Though, in some ways the metaphor deepens, particularly if you excel at glass blowing and have made your very own fish tank, ie the environment in which the fish are swimming. Except the difference with writing is, and stop me if I'm boring you, I hate people who go on forever against all odds, if I get lost on a mountain and have to cut off my leg and eat it to survive it's best to leave the search party at home, because I'm a goner. What was I saying? Oh, yes. The difference with writing is that the contours of the fish bowl are constantly in flux. It would be like watching a fish bowl that you could magically change with a wave of your hands, and then watching how the fish react to the changing environment. This broke down so long ago. The point is, it's not easy, and that's why I don't do it a lot. And neither is keeping fish alive, which is why so few people have aquariums I suppose. The metaphor will not go quietly into the night. 

The whole complaining about writing is a virulent trope anyhow. The only people interested in hearing someone else whine about how hard it is to write are other writers. And I use the term loosely, obviously. I hope that's at least clear. Anyhow, your average lay person, and I don't use the term in a derogatory manner, I think another way of putting it would be well-adjusted person, doesn't really give a damn to read about someone else struggling to create meaningful dialogue or a believable scene. It's a non sequitur for them. I mean, I get it. We wouldn't all love the grocery store if every clerk we encountered, or half of them, was talking about how effing hard it was to be bagging groceries. We'd say, "Thank you very much sir, but do you mind not crushing the loaf of bread." It would get supremely old. We expect of our workers that they do their job and preferably do it well. Anyhow, this latter lot wants, I'll admit fairly, just to read something stirring or interesting without all the interpolations about how hard it is to write something stirring or interesting. Or they think that writing isn't all that hard, and that if they sat down they'd churn out a book or two in a year's time that would be at least passable if not downright good. 

Which, let's be honest here: eff them. Because they're probably wrong, and will be spending incredible amounts of time talking with their new writer friends or boring old friends with just how hard it is to write something compelling and interesting and that sticks to a plot and has believable characters etc. Or, they'll be the type to press on ahead despite the obstacles and complete something so monstrously awful that only very close members of their family will read it and like it. Or, worst of all, perhaps they'd prove to be talented at it and not find it insanely hard but some sort of calling that had long eluded them, like hearing the hooting of an owl in the night, and walking out the front door and discovering him sitting in the tree outside your window. The metaphor is poor, but you see that's the sort of thing  you're constantly running up against, and you either have to dip back and fix the damn thing or press ahead. And if you're to fix the metaphor, it indeed it's a metaphor, about the owl, than are you going to correct all the grammar mistakes as well. What about restructuring the first portion of the argument so that the fish bit doesn't go on so long? You see? And if they're talented than that's just one more fish swimming in an ever decreasing aquarium, so, eff them. 

Of course, the whole mental self-loathing thing is the sort of thing that writers, again that term, let's be honest here, scribblers, kind of feed off. It is rare that extremely well adjusted and happy folks stay up half the night creating lives of unhappy people. But I digress. The real point is that scribblers scribbling about scribbling is their way of getting to feel productive without actually being productive. That is, in less they attain a certain degree of fame or notoriety, or through the vagaries of life some fame. Well then it is entirely possible to spend/waste a good deal of people's time writing about not writing. It's a noble industry with thousands of forebears. (I've no earthly clue about forebears, I want it to be forebearers, but I've sworn off Google for the rough draft of this particular scribble, and I'm now instead picturing four bears holding some sort of scroll with stylized Japanese calligraphy on it). I fear I've somehow muddled this evening up as well. Unintentionally, I assure you. If you cannot forgive me for wasting your time out of the goodness of your heart, forgive at least, the meanderings of a mind made strange by paint fumes, made dull by tiredness, and made empty by long practice. 

(A good deal of relevant stuff is left out of this piece, which is also the sort of thing that any scribbler must consider. It's tempting to include a history of scribbling, use words like textual and medium, talk about the vicissitudes of language or of thought represented as text etc. but a wise professor once told me that an essay can only be about one thing, and as this isn't an essay, but a piece of fiction, I'll take his advice this one time). 

Olympic Games!

It's opening night! I've kept Sadie awake, so she can enjoy the majesty that is the opening of the games. Except that I don't have cable, and I'll probably be watching an episode of Friday Night Lights. This is probably a good thing, because I watched the last Olympic games as if they were heroin. Oh, is there a 50 meter backstroke heat at six in the morning, Yes sir! I'll watch that in a second. Oh, is the heptathalon starting, do I know what the heptaphalon is, or how to spell it? Did I, prior to watching the intro think that it was actually an STD? Maybe, but now I'm really vested in who wins.

Are people rowing somewhere? How is our crew team looking this year? Is white water river rafting on? I can't miss it. Those guys are real athletes. Is rhythmic gymnastics on? Are girls twirling sparklers and jumping through them in a fashion deemed rhythmic? Yeah, I'll watch that. Are two dudes cycling around the velodrome? What the hell is the Velodrome? I'll watch that. Why do these dudes always wait until the last lap to go? Like, can't you just be faster than the other guy? When we were kids and we raced there was very little drafting. We were such amateurs. We should have been drafting.

Anyhow, so I quit the Olympics this year. Besides, I heard from Romney that the Brits were going to screw the whole thing up anyway. I mean, look at how they did running the country that we're all rooting for? Pretty terrible. That's why we threw all the tea into China or whatever happened a hundred years ago when the North seceded. The point is, no country that drives on the wrong side of the road has any business running the Olympics.

Besides which, now that all my facebook friends are a bunch of dirty liberals I spend the whole day reading about how terrible America is, and how we should help all these other countries and not just give them cheap cell phones, and I have to feel bad about my nationalistic zeal, about rooting for the ole USA in every event (excluding things like Usain Bolt running or Roger Federer in tennis where my rooting is like that of  a small child who changes teams at halftime depending on who is ahead, which is to say, it's fun to root for greatness). This holds true in the greatness category, but one of the most fantastic moments of my high school  years, (a lot of Dark Wizard was played, no judging) was watching Keri Strugg land on one leg and throw up her arms and jump straight into my warm and emotional teenage heart.

Anyhow, this year I won't be cheering with ritualistic zeal for American athletes and feeling guilty about it. I won't be manically changing channels to watch people do skeet shooting at one A.M. I'm going to miss the Olympics this year. Be sure to tell me what happens. And remember, USA, USA!!!!!

Driving past home

When I was getting close to home today, I realized that I was a bit early, that we had a sitter until six. And so, instead of driving home right away, I circled the block for fifteen minutes or so, listening to August and Everything After, feathered by the moonlight. I thought of movies I'd seen where people drive around the block for a while, trying to ward off if just for a moment, the responsibility of any given day. I didn't know if I should feel guilty or not. If I was to interpret some deep meaning of this quiet circling of the block.

When I got home I sat down on the floor and read her a book. She told me that the animal with the long neck was a giraffe. She looked at a picture of a tiger and gave off a growl that she's somehow taught herself, a tiger's growl that's so good that it nearly matches my own adult's growl. Halfway through the book she climbed up on the couch and stood behind me. She wrapped her arms around my neck and said, "Duderoom, duderoom, duderoom, dooom, doom" approximating the galloping of a horse. I stood up and we galloped around the house, swinging round the table, pausing briefly at the mirror to admire her smiling face, her laughing eyes, her wild hair. When we reached the couch I dropped her. She sat up and said and signed "more."
"Daddy's tired," I told her. "Bring me a book."

She pulled out blueberries for Sal and carried it to the middle of the room. "Sit," she said, and so I moved from the couch to the carpet, and we curled up together to read a book about picking blueberries on a mountain.

Her sitter told me that they'd went into the backyard earlier in the day and picked the blueberries from our small bushes. I know that she understood the symmetry of closing the day with "Blueberries for Sal" that she understand narrative movement, closure, and continuity, I imagined that one day she'd understand herself, why I drove around the block for fifteen extra minutes today listening to songs from my own youth like the frayed rope spun round an oak to hold up a tire, yellowed in the yellow light of summer's past. 

Reading between the lines

So, we're talking guns and celebrity. That's right, an entire sentence of links. Let's give you the gist of it if you're not an avid external link clicker or as you otherwise might be referred to, anyone who has ever browsed the internet. Let's begin with celebrity. What the hell do we do with Holmes? I've seen numerous articles trying to suss out just how we should treat the killer. The main question seems to be whether we should pay attention to him at all, if we're not giving him exactly what he wanted and inspiring other copy cat murders. Maybe.

Here's why they are doing it though, human nature, money. I'm more interested in Holmes than the victims because I can imagine being a victim. I can't imagine being Holmes. So I, and I think a whole hell of a lot of other people, are trying to figure out just what drives a person to do something that morally and spiritually reprehensible. In short, that f-cked up. We can't fathom it. And we want to fathom it. We want to understand something so foreign. At least I do. I don't know if it's for some great reason, as though understanding the motives or mindset would allow me or anyone else to stop something from happening in the future. I think it's just a deep fascination with the human psyche, one that should theoretically be like my own, but is apparently radically different.

This is all largely immaterial though, a perversion in and of itself, an exercise of the mind, the sort we resort to after tragedy rather than the exercise of the heart or the soul or the consciousness if you must that the victims families are embarking on. It's too late in the hour I know. I should protest the use of guns, or decry people trying to take away our freedoms. I should blame the media for covering it, or accuse them of trying to cover things up. In Afghanistan we use drone missile strikes to root out terrorists and sometimes miss and kill villagers. I don't want anyone to have guns or missiles or nuclear weapons, but we do. I want everyone to be relatively well adjusted and to live out to the proper end of their days, but we don't.

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

      A penny for the Old Guy

      I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

      II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

      III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

      IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

      V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

How I can make the next century the greatest American century

I posted an article from The Atlantic earlier that talked about the essential silliness of claiming that the next century will be an American one. Let it be said, I only intended that article in regards to Obama and Romney. Neither of whom are ready to take America to the stratospheric and God intended heights that it was intended to scale and rule over with all the strangeness of Greek gods of old.

Romney, Bain, need I say more? You can't ship a bunch of jobs overseas and claim to be the progenitor of another amazing American century. You can't pass Obama care, (that's right, I'll refuse to call it health care and let the media dictate the terms in which I speak. I'll now be referring to the Roosevelt deal as opposed to the New Deal, and if you don't as well you're probably not an American) and claim to be bringing American values into the next century. As we all know the early American founders, or deities as I call them, would never have approved of a system where everyone got health care. I mean, these guys didn't want that for the poor. Why? Because all poor and people who aren't white males are pretty much lazy and need to pull themselves up by their boot straps like the founding fathers did. Do you think they got those wigs for free? No. They busted as- for those things at least as far as the history on the go that I'm exporting like an American exports democracy to the Middle East...poorly.
3) Romney is a Mormon. I don't know how you feel about that, but I've read in nearly every major east coast rag that people are uncomfortable with this. Have you ever been to Salt Lake City? It's creepy. Where are all the bars and general state of decay that should be a part of every city? I think it's fair to say that the city should be dirtier and that a city that is that clean must be hiding something evil like the Stay Puft marshmallow man in its depths.

Obama

First off, he's a Kenyan communist, which means that he's actually trying to bring American down from the inside. A lot of people would refute this claim, but they're all liberal folks who also desire the downfall of America. I don't know what else needs to be said, however, he hasn't started any wars. How do you keep American domination without starting a bunch of wars extremely far away from our home front? How do you expect people to respect you if you're not arming military juntas and then later installing them as dictators who will hate you. What's the point of being in America if you don't have your hand in every jar of honey possible, like Winnie the Pooh on crack?

Secondarily, he's always talking about helping the middle class. Like most people I'm entirely suffering under the illusion that I'm not in the middle class and that my hard earned tax dollars aren't going to things like roads, governments, etc. but that they are going straight into the greedy mouths of people who hate freedom. Why don't you talk about the rich people, like me. Graduate of a creative writing program working at an academic library. What's in this paltry middle class that you speak of for me? I paid my dues and got a largely useless degree at a couple of liberal arts schools. I was born to rule. Help inspire me! Down with democracy!

Me

See, that's the sort of hard assed, not based in fact rhetoric that I'm willing to bring into the next century. I'll start a war with Australia, bunch of criminals anyway, just to show that I'm serious. I'll make English the mandatory language for anyone living in North or South America. I mean, it's called America for a reason. I'm willing to disregard all of our past historical atrocities and gloss it over as a grand old time being had by all. I won't let things like morals or reality get in the way of a good narrative.

I'm simultaneously willing to move us forward while hearkening back to some imagined good old days that never existed. I'm willing to do things like drill indiscriminately, and harpoon a bunch of whales if that's what it takes to keep us ahead. I'll make being an environmentalist illegal, and I'll outlaw any new standards for motor vehicles mileage. Because, the first step to downfall is admitting you have a problem. I'll make some kind of huge drill that will allow us to drill into the center of the earth and extract its gaia strength to power an army of robots. If you're not with me, you're a communist fascist! Rhetoric 101. I'll see you at the polls.

Mitt Romney

Let's talk about Mitt Romney. It was either that or stool samples, so I chose the easier course. How much does it matter if Romney has offshore accounts in terms of his role as President? Honestly, not very much. It matters about as much as it does whether Bill Clinton enjoys his interns or not, which is to say, though neither is particularly laudable (I realize we're talking about two separate type incidents, but I'm just going merrily along) it doesn't have any particular effect on how he'd govern our country. Dirty liberals can't have it both ways. Now, if you want to cite him as hypocritical or out of touch, maybe, but I have a hard time believing that anyone who runs for President these days is not hypocritical or out of touch. They are, after all, human beings.

That's why it doesn't particularly bother me when I heard about Romney's time at Bain. It's essentially a non-sequiter that's being treated as though it isn't. I doubt that Romney, despite what he might have done at Bain, is going to set about shipping a bunch of American jobs overseas. He's not an idiot, just out of touch. I mean, being a politician is about changing positions. For instance, The New Yorker had an interesting article about the origins of the individual mandate. It turns out it came from the Republican party. In fact, it was presented as an alternative to Clinton's health care plan. The point is, it went from being a Republican initiative to a sign that our constitution was eroding. That doesn't seem possible, but it is in the world of politics.

Anyhow, the only thing to take away from Romney's time at Bain or his tax return is that he's very similar to other folks who have made a lot of money. It certainly doesn't make him unfit to be president. By the same token we could haul Obama in for not closing guantanamo bay or not pushing through something even more useful than the individual mandate.I'm not here to fire bomb the guy; it just seems to me that the whole conversation is one big non-issue that is turning into a large issue because politics, complicated as they are behind the scenes, are almost incredibly banal on the national scene. We don't want our politicians to say anything remotely interesting, or controversial, because this is the sort of thing that happens. Thus, we'll all get to hear about how great America is from each of the candidates for the next few months along with some quality personal attacks. The main point is, I need to get back to watching Game of Thrones. At least the politics there end with some real excitement.

Dream Big

We're having a boy. We're going to do this really cute video where Sadie tells you, but she botched the job. I'm pretty sure it was because she felt like he was already stealing a little bit of her thunder. Anyhow, the real joy of this situation is for Sadie. She's in the clear. I can now hang the wreck and ruin of my failed dreams on the tiny arms of my baby boy. He's probably going to play professional basketball and be a staff writer for the New Yorker. I realize I could set the bar higher, but I don't want him to fail.

Stephanie asked me if I wanted him to be like me, and I said, "of course. But an actually successful version of me." Nah, he'll be fine. He can just run around and do whatever he wants. Who cares if he's athletic or smart? I just want him to be happy...is the sort of thing that weak willed parents would say. I've read excerpts from the tiger mother, and I know that he should probably be dribbling the placenta left-handed in the womb if we have any hope if him getting a scholarship to an Ivy. I'm from the west coast, so I don't really know what an Ivy is, but I know that people out on this coast want them, and so I do too.

I'm thinking his first novel, "Thirty five shades of green" should be out by the time he's fourteen or so. I'm hoping it's accompanied by a retrospective of art work from his tweens. I think a short break is probably in order before he goes on to win the fencing championship at the Olympic games, taking gold in a decisive match, before heading off to an Ivy, briefly getting lost in the shrubbery before emerging as an oil magnate hell bent on the destruction of middle class values due to his east coast elitism. At this point we're probably talking a gubenatorial run, during which, I, as his campaign manager, will spend time slandering his opponents record at financial firms.

After a few years in the governor's office I'd like to see him move into the Senate, where he can advocate for French literature, the wonders of Malbec, and general elitism much to the chagrin of non Ivyer's.  I then foresee a failed run to become President of the United States followed by a path back to glory four years later with movie rights optioned to Sony Pictures Classics. Anyhow, we've got some plans.

It's a ?

If you're like me, you're wondering exactly what I'm talking about. I mean, did we adopt a pet hamster or something? I hope someone warns us that they like to crawl beneath stoves and die. Either that, or my mom flushed him down the toilet or fed him to our pet owl, Aristotle, and then lied about it. Anyhow, as it turns out we're actually having another child. Don't worry. It's the first I've heard of it as well. If anybody is a second child, and they wonder if they were treated as special as their older sibling, I'm hear to tell you that you weren't. You were old news. It'd be like getting a paper telling you that Obama won the 08 election sometime in 2010.

Nah, I'm kidding, each moment is just as special the second time around. That's why there are always those movies about second loves, and the emphasis placed on the second kiss. It's just one of those things that we really focus on. Forget the first man on the moon, who gives a damn? Who was the second? I mean, look at the history of the United States. We don't care that Columbus didn't actually discover it. We care that he did it second, and that's why we revere him, not because we're a Eurocentric people who kicked off the ostensibly indigenous people groups. Or, like at the Olympics, which are coming soon. Nobody cares who won gold. Everyone is always like, yeah but who won the silver? 

The point is, everything is special. Do I plan on dressing the child in Sadie's clothes regardless of gender? Of course I do, but that's only so I can remind myself how cute Sadie was at that age. I'll probably discontinue the practice by the time he/she reaches high school, or at least at the point that Sadie stops being adorable, which might be never. The other day she told me she had to go potty and then went upstairs and peed on the floor. It's like rooming with a frat guy, the way she pees on the floor and goes on spouting semi-incoherent egocentric statements all day. The main difference is that she's three feet tall and adorable. But somehow I've gotten off track and am talking about Sadie. Don't worry second child, rest assured that I was really blogging about yo...sorry, I had to sneak upstairs for a minute and look at how cutely your big sister was sleeping. 

Changing the world one blog at a time

M: Her first poop of the day was solid. And yes, this is what parenthood has done to the level of our e-mail discourse.

M: (kicks her)
S: Why are you kicking me while I'm down?
 M: I was helping you.
 S: You were helping me by kicking me while I was on the ground.
M: It's really a matter of interpretation isn't it? 

Every time we're trying to learn to count it always goes: one, two, shree, four, six. I don't know why I can't convince the child that five exists. Maybe I'll hid five's existence from my child, and then write a book about how it changes one's perception of the world if they don't know that the number exists. Let me know if you'd buy it. If enough people respond I'll consider making the change. I'm also willing to hide the existence of Burma, submarines and dinosaurs bones for the right price.

So, this blog is partially about what it means to have a child, but I'd say that it's primary reason for existence is to educate people on fashion. So, let's move on to some of the summer trends that we'll be seeing.

Pants: You're going to see a lot pants this summer, mainly because a lot of jobs make people wear them even though it's often 137 degrees in places like Washington, DC. Some of these pairs of pants might be super awesome, and have things that look like a bunch of bullets all over the front of them.




If you're thinking, come on Andrew, how can you call this a fashion blog and only tell me that people will be wearing pants? Look again at those pants. Aren't they awesome? Are you too good for pants? George Washington wasn't too good for pants, and he, formed a country, refused kingship, fought for liberty, both threw the Boston Tea Party and later formed the Boston based chapter of the tea party, outlawed vampirism, and planned to build an awesome city in the middle of a swamp.



Look at that guy. He knew how to sport a pair of pants. And George Washington, like me, knew a great deal about fashion. He knew that he looked like a bad ass in full on red pants, so he didn't worry about the fact that he might be mistaken for a British sympathizer, filthy redcoats, he'd often prance around the room minus the blue coat just so everyone could appreciate how good he looked in red.

This season I see red pants, and pants with machine gun clips or whatever on them as being super popular, or maybe like, shorter type pants worn over a pair of tennis shoes that are light blue or something. I mean, mustaches are back, so I"m pretty sure that dad jeans can't help but follow right after.




The corpse of Abraham Lincoln wore 80's type jeans in the biopic film they just made about his life, "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter." A lot of people have tried to claim that it's not based on historical fact, but as we all know history is always written by the winners. I think if we look at the history of this great country through the dialectical model of our choosing it's pretty safe to say that we can not only conjure up a legitimate history for Abe Lincoln, but that we can probably follow that up by starting a new program, specifically designed for vampire studies, so that people who accidentally get PhD's in literature have one more fake topic to talk about. Okay, enough about fashion. I've got to e-mail about the consistency of stool.