There are two kinds of folks in the world, not eliminating the possibility and probability that there exist other kinds, and perhaps other sorts of kinds (of folks). There are people who are unfailingly good about bringing out their accumulated garbage the evening before garbage day and then rolling the garbage can back to the spot (where it accumulates their refuse until the next emptying day) the next day after it’s been ferried away by the garbage people. There are also the kind of people who will do it occasionally if the moment arrives when they realize that garbage day is tomorrow and it’s time to take the garbage out. These second group’s garbage cans may well stay at the bottom of their driveway, or if they don’t have a driveway, outside the front door of their apartment or living space, for a few days, maybe even until or past the next garbage day.

We are not so much poisoned, needing an antidote, but the poison and the antidote. The antidote may seem like the poison, and quite often the poison, the antidote. But the poison may verily be antidotical and the antidote poisonous, if not applied in the proper and timely manner. Some dive deep down into the sea of the poison while others wish to and then there are those who apply the antidote and live safely for the short period before eventually succumbing to the poison. Most apply a bit of the poison to themselves for a smidgeon of the excitement, followed by the long draughts of the antidote. Few are those who engulf themselves in the poison until the very last moment when they pull themselves back to the safety with a few small drops of the potent antidote, approaching closer and closer to the limit each time.

What if he thought of listening to music the same way he thought of reading books? It’s strange how he would ordinarily think of an afternoon listening to music as somehow inferior to one reading a novel. Why shouldn’t he devote lots of time just listening to songs, over and over. They both carried the danger of becoming a totally passive activity. They both should be thought of as input, which if absorbed productively, will produce output which is different from the input and which machinically perpetuates the creative flux of it all.

He would watch people talking around him, get a sense of what they were saying, and then sort of let them keep going, watching their facial expressions, but not really registering what they were saying, because he was thinking through his own notions, and all of a sudden he would realize that he had been listening to the person speak without paying attention to what they were talking about, and that it didn’t matter, because he’d used what they’d talked about in the first few minutes of talking to him as a foundation for his own private flights of fancy. What right did they have to his attention? Just because he’s looking at them, nodding his head, he’s under an unspoken obligation to pay heed to what they’re going on about?

He had plans for the next few months. He liked the idea of finding himself through writing. He thought it was possible. But more so in the way of finding out what your body is capable of. He thought that that was what “finding out who you are” entailed anyways – finding out what you and your body is capable of. That is something that always comes not just as a surprise but as an opening out – when you realize you’re capable of not only engaging in an activity you didn’t see yourself capable of approaching, but mastering it. This sounds like some boilerplate self-help inspirational bullshit, but I would be surprised if most people experience this more than a few times in their life. I’m not talking about what the self-help manuals are usually talking about – going skydiving, quitting smoking, etc. Or am I? I might be churning out sentences that would feel more at home in an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet. To return to where this paragraph seemed like it was headed when it began, he liked the idea of finding out what he was capable of writing i.e. was he capable of writing a long fictional work? Was the answer to his question that he must simply embark? It seems that he is beginning to write fiction by writing fictionally about himself writing fiction. He was from this perspective representative of a type, not distinctive. Was he writing to be distinctive though? If he was honest with himself, he would admit that his writings were attempts to fit himself into a mould. To find out what you’re capable of through writing, however, you need to really push yourself, that is, be capable of really pushing yourself. Henry Miller, as I remember, wrote that he had written 1,000,000 words before he began his first novel. That is five and a half years of writing 500 words a day. Before he became Henry Miller.

A splinter had dug itself underneath his pinkie finger’s nail. The end of his pinkie finger felt warmth. He wondered what would happen. Would the splinter eventually emerge? Would his pinkie be infected? Would it be amputated? Hell, was his demise imminent? Questions answered: I dug into my nail with clippers until the splinter was sufficiently vulnerable to ejection, grabbed a hold of it with tweezers, and tweezed the motherfucker. The tip of my pinkie finger now feels a bit raw. But I know that I overcame pain and intense discomfort to accomplish something that was good for my body in spite of itself; cleansing. My pinkie fingernail is now jagged, ragged, haggard. The base is forming, and I must vigilantly insist upon adding to it each day. Making more connections, looking the connections over, correcting the connections, making disjunctions where there were connections and then forming new connections with the disjoined. There are lots of things going on underneath us, to which we may not be as disconnected as we commonly assume. We are surface creatures, and it is only natural that we often involuntarily prize the exterior over the interior. Of what sort of connection do I speak? There is the obvious one: gravity. We are pinned to the face of the earth by an invisible force, and would consider it an herculean, nay, deific feat should one of us jump even so high that their lower extremity were to reach the height of their upper extremity, i.e. that their feet would be at the level of their head, we, so very far below, at the extreme depth of the troposphere. We are simultaneously at the extreme peak of another level: the level of the compact, the strata of the earth, from the crust to the core. We are not so much surface creatures or the equivalent of deep-sea creatures of the open air, but in between, in the mean, between the interior and the exterior, hovering on the barrier between the two. We are at the juncture; we may be the first creatures to wonder at what happens underground. The other day, I was waiting outside of a supermarket while a friend was inside shopping, and noticed a police car which went to the drive-through window of the bank which was located in the supermarket’s parking lot. It looked strange there- police cars are supposed to function as police cars, not as vehicles of civilians who share our quotidian needs. They are supposed to be there to act as the authority, not as one of us who happens to have a job which gives them authority over the rest of us. But sitting there in the drive-through of the bank, he looked like a civilian, his car could have been any car. He looked vulnerable and out of place.

OK so you know how the googilluminati read all your gmail emails and then from their secret laboratory beam advertisements to you based on the information contained in all the responses to your classified ads for casual encounters on Craigslist? Well, I also use emails to go back and forth with other like-minded people I’ve met on/in various message boards and chatrooms, lamenting the dearth of the taste of bacon in my life. And so today, thanks to our future world leaders, I was beamed an advertisement for a wondrous product called Bacon Salt, whose rallying cry is,  “Everything should taste like bacon.” EVERYTHING. They are absolutists who take an idea (the taste of bacon = gustatory pleasure) and bring it to its logical conclusion. I passionately support this product and the concept behind it – who would deny that everything from red wine to toothpaste to casual cunnilingus to bacon itself should taste more like bacon? – and so will put a free advertisement on my blog, in the humble form of a link:

http://www.baconsalt.com

I would also like to throw the idea out there to make a unisex bacon-scented perfume, which could be called something like Swine Flou.

Here is one more reason to be glad we have a new administration in Washington D.C. The Israeli government is now lamenting the fact that the Obama Administration is expecting a freeze on settlements. Anyone who wants actual peace in this region (relative peace, that is, war is everywhere) knows that the settlements are a twisting rusty blade in the wound that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They are just as insidious and ignominious a practice as missiles fired across the border into Israel by violent Palestinian militants. If you support them, whether their expansion or their continued existence, I suspect that you do not really want peace, but continued tension with brief breakouts of all-out war for the next century. The Bush Administration and their compatriots would have loved nothing more than this. They do not want peace. Deep down they want the war to continue. Ditto Netanyahu.

The Israeli officials acknowledged that the new American administration had different ideas about the meaning of the term “settlement freeze.” Both Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have said in the past week that the term meant an end to all building, including natural growth.

The Obama Administration will hopefully go further and demand that Israel withdraw all settlements at least to the 67 border. The American government will continue to support them, but only if they show they want peace with their neighbors. It is more the responsibility of the Israelis than it is the Palestinians to demonstrate that they want to live peacefully, because their country came into existence where another people had been living only 60 years ago. If you move into someone’s house, peace between you and your new neighbor is your responsibility.

Nail clippings and used strips of floss and several nubs of bars of soap that refuse – refuse – to proffer even a smidgeon of additional cleansing product no matter how hard and how long one scrubs but instead disintegrate in your hand and that look like the thin wedges of plastic that often used to be found in the handles of gallon-sized milk cartons and that were easy to pop out and wrinkled up toothpaste tubes and empty shampoo bottles and whiskers and pubic as well as cranial hairs and soap scum a.k.a. limescale and mould and mildew and dull protective-cover-less razor shavers. He bounded through the bathroom door without seeming to notice any of it and pulled the shower curtain shut while reaching behind to turn the water on.

A lot of folks are talking about this article from The New Republic. Here’s one of the paragraphs that they’re discussing:

But despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.

And the second:

The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.”

A few things I ponder:

If no one whose words are cited is willing to take responsability for their criticisms of Sotomayor, isn’t this “heresay”? The article is called “The Case Against Sotomayor”. It sounds like a dubious case, given that the only attributed criticism of the nominee in question is this:

In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants.

A footnote, which includes the word “might” and is written by a “conservative” judge. Rosen doesn’t investigate what it was that Sotomayor said that might have inadvertantly misstated the law. Why is The New Republic publishing this, and not The National Inquirer? Was there not enough salaciousness?

The last paragraph is money in the journalistic bank:

I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. It’s possible that the former clerks and former prosecutors I talked to have an incomplete picture of her abilities.

Neither have I, but I wouldn’t think about writing an article defending her to be published in a major political journal unless I’d done the requisite research, and had more than anonymous critics to cite. And is that second comma really necessary?

Isn’t it funny how places like this only take articles seriously when they happen to aid them in their war on Obama? Otherwise, I don’t think they’d quote TNR to back up an argument. Conservatives have built up a very strong defense mechanism against the reality which is changing faster than they’d like it to. As long as they raise furor about the left-wing press, they don’t have to come to terms with anything that happens in the world which might cause them to rethink their myriadly entrenched beliefs.

He was done pottering about. He would go at them hammer and tongs. Stentorian, he would divide and conquer. It was war, ergo, bring it on! He would sign, seal, deliver, in one fell swoop. Perfunctorily, he would pigeonhole and dismiss. Arbitrarily, he would line them up in tens and eliminate the tenth. Phalanxes would be effectuated and put in motion. He would smash them like a cock-a-roach. He would string them up by their balls. He would build them up just to bring them down. He would divide them so that they would fall.  He would chew them up and spit them out. He would find their idol and melt it in front of their on-looking eyeballs. He would deconstruct their hierarchical binaries to prove that their existence, as well as their non-existence, was contingent upon their presuppositions and linguistic constructs. He would glue their eyelids, nostrils, lips, and ears shut, letting them breath, eat and drink through two straws, and then communicate to them using Morris code knee tappings, informing them that spring had arrived and describing the beautiful weather, of course making sure beforehand that they did not understand the requisite Morris code, and besides, it would still be winter. He was done pottering about, like old folks waiting for the end. He was going to act in the world, crack puzzles, learn languages, dig up the remains of long-extinct creatures, eat tomatoes when everyone swore they were poisonous, escape from jail, join a band of pirates and then disappear on a raft with a kidnapped princess, leaving a note that he was not just a pirate but the collective phantom of pirates past.

He had an outlandish lisp-inflected voice, the tone of which he would whip about this way and that. His face featured an outlandish scar, which ran all the way from his temple straight down to disappear underneath his chin, and people were always taking pains not to look straight at it when they talked to him, but they were trying to examine it all the same, so they would look at him and pretend to focus on his eyes which were always direct, i.e. looking straight into their eyes, but they would be mentally looking at the monstrous deformity which was blurry on account of it being a bit to the right of the centre of their vision. An outlandish hat, an outlandish smile, outlandish eyeliner, outlandishly big arms for his miniature physique, an outlandish laugh, one that shakes whichever room it happens in, and then everyone turns around to see where it came from, man or beast, and whoever he’s with just shakes their head knowingly. That’s outlandish. You’re outlandish. That film’s a tad outlandish. His writing was outlandish. He’s an outlandish director. Holy smokes, the lyrics of this song are outlandish. He writes outlandish books. It’s sort of an outlandish philosophy. Yeah, try to wrap your head around that outlandish book. It was an outlandish show. That was an outlandish game. That was an outlandish pitch. She was wearing these outlandish sunglasses, just like she thought she was Jackie O. Jesus titty-fucking Christ, lady, who do you think you are, Jackie fucking O? What are you wearing all those outlandish bracelets for? Yeah, I enjoyed the show, except for that outlandish scene where the band of actors dressed up in monkey suits totally unexpectedly tears down the walls and run onto the stage to perform methodical pelvic thrusts on all the actors, props and those in the audience unlucky enough to be caught sitting in the front row, all the while letting out victorious simian whoops. That scene, I didn’t really care for. It was a little much. He exploits outlandish imagery to provoke the reader into seeing reality from a different angle, and it’s expected that s/he promptly forget what s/he’s seen as soon as the next image enters their mind’s eye’s vision. Her ringtone’s outlandish. She was wearing these outlandish eyelash extenders and so much makeup that she ended up just looking like a beached, pasty catfish. Paris is outlandish, n’est-ce pas? It was ten days of outlandish festivities, each one surpassing the last. He says he likes to write when he’s uncomfortable, that discomfort actually helps his writing. Well, that’s not so outlandish, is it? He danced his outlandish dance to the didgeridoo. Didja redo the didgeridoo? I thought you could make it better if you tried it a second time, that’s all. His toenails were outlandishly long, discoloured, i.e. hideous. He was dressed outlandishly. He was wearing these outlandish horn-rimmed glasses. And not just outlandish, preposterously outlandish. Outlandish to the second degree, you might say.