OhGodOhGodOhGodFerGodsakesGETMEOFFTHISTRAIN

It's the Jewish wedding tonight. No, the real deal. Tearful Manboy and Girlwoman will be laid to rest in the Jewish fashion. I'll get pleasantly smashed and be the uproarious Goy comedian, the one who always dresses like Frank Sinatra wished he dressed.

I'll stumble home via a prepaid cab mumbling "What the fuck's a schmatta???" to the Iranian taxi driver, and Brigitte will be pissed off at me for acting like a jerk and disappearing from the hotel just when the arm-dances begin and coming back, pie-eyed and slurring "You mean it's still happening? Did they get married yet?"

And the talk of the town is going to be how surly and brutish I managed to be when someone asked me to "schmance."

Oh yeah. Ohhhhhhh, yeah. It'll happen, sure as there is rain in Tegucicalpa, all 10 centimeters per year, it will go JUST as I am predicting now.

What does faking a heart attack feel like? No, really? Do I clutch my chest or clutch my left arm? Do I topple like a Redwood or just ooze to the ground, panting? What do I say when the ER doc pronounces me fit and drunk as a fiddle, and that I can please go home?

HELP ME PEOPLE GODDAMNIT, HELP ME. I'M DYIN' HERE.

The Number of the Bullet

Y’know, I’ve lived fifty-three years now. And I’m the luckiest person I know. I don’t know how many times you think about it, but I think of it more and more. It’s not just a fear of mortality, it’s more like: I’ve dodged so many bullets, so many times when I could have zigged but I zagged and the bullet missed me, but, as real soldiers on the battlefield think, so do people who are not in a battle, yet see others around them dropping and have to ask themselves: why me? How have I escaped for so long yet seen dozens, if not hundreds, go through trauma that tries any human soul, and some, terminal trauma.

How long have I got? I’m not going to ask God, because ever if there was one, he’d be far too busy ministering to the Ones Whose Names Were Pre-engraved on a bullet. Oh no, he wouldn’t bother me.

But that bullet has probably already been manufactured by entity, chance or karma, because I’m sensing it over my shoulder.

Look at me: I’ve led a comparatively charmed life. I’ve never broken a bone. I’ve never been stung by anything worse than an ant (I rack that one up to my insane care around stinging things). I’ve never been in any more than a fender bender, despite probably having driven or been driven the equivalent of Earth to Mars round trip in my lifetime (that’s about 72 million miles).

Never been beaten up, although I’ve had tiny shaves. Never witnessed anyone die. Never been present at anyone’s death. Never had anything horribly catastrophic happen to someone I know at any given time while I was with them. (Whoops, sorry, amend that. I saw a two-year-old girl plummet to her death when I was 6 years old — she was my best friend’s sister). 

Never gotten dangerously sick. Spent maybe three times in my life in hospital, usually due to some drug or alcohol mishap.

Have escaped many potential death-delivering situations, yet gotten away completely unscathed, from age 5 to now. Severe undertow at unfamiliar beaches. Swimming in water with brain-destroying parasites in Africa and India.

But somewhere out there, that bullet is sitting. It doesn’t know what gun it’s going to be loaded into. The thing that fires it doesn’t exist yet.

But I’m getting very aware that my luck is going to run out, no matter how careful I am. I pray only that what it is will come quickly, unexpectetdly, and not hurt at all.

Bond. Bill Bond.

Just imagine if that had been the title to a Bond movie. Like "Quantum of Solace."


I mean, what the FUCK does that mean, exactly?


Imagine the billions MY Bond film will make when they call it "The Dead Never Lie."

Why is Facebook so Vapid?

I've just been reading some articles (well, calling them that's a backhanded compliment) about how to write good headlines. These articles don't tend to focus on ones that read "New Weapon Dropped on Major City in Japan"; rather more like grabbers like "Why You Look 20 Years Older Than You Really Are."

Is there some sort of headline school for this? I recently went through the ordeal of trying to use Google's AdWords. You know, those close-to-annoying-but-not-quite column ads that seem to appear like kudzu after a summer shower on every Web page you visit these days. I was trying to sell my DVDs of old classic cult flicks and was talking to this Google flack (who was a very nice guy, mind you) how to phrase my ad in the most concise and attention-grabbing form. Well, apparently this is an art.


I guess it goes back to those snake-oil days, when "Elvira's Elixir" elixated all kinds of nasty diseases that everyone used to have, like giant bezoars residing in your guts and yellow-bile inflimflammatory melancholicks and you need a short, snappy yell-out that snapped the throngs out of their paregoric hallucinalia.

Facebook as sketched during preliminary concept work, c. 1998

And I don't really know how this affected what I'm writing now, but somehow the Facebook headline immediately popped into my mind, so I thought perhaps it was demanding an article to go along with it, even though I could could just leave the headline and it would be a standalone -- an article that simultaneously answers its own rhetorical question, has a middle and an ending, intrigues yet repulses, and is only five words long! 


Unfortunately, when you're a poor schlub that gets paid by the word (an absurd concept -- no really, think about it! You could make the whole article about YOU, so you'd get to use "I" over and over! And keep the rest of the words really short! Like "I had no idea what I was writing, but I was sure that I had come across a new form of expression, one in which "I" became the main thema (toss a strange word in to prove you're somewhat artier than the reader) opposing the non "I-ness" of the reader, of whom I knew little, if anything, but I was so taken with this novel prosaic (toss in a word that hardly ANYONE understands, just for good measure) wordsmithing that I felt that I had indeed performed a good day's work. I could therefore relax with my customary strawberry martini."


Uhh . . . oh yeah, where was I? Why IS Facebook so vapid, and why am I sure that it's going to be Geocities or MySpace within ten years as sure as AOL went to A-Oh-Hell.


Well, because it's a stitched-together, shambling few-celled protozoa of an application which, having reached its zenith, its apogee, its ne-plus-ultra (see, my vocab drills have been paying off!!) its absolute pinnacle of vapidity, its complete Failure to Launch, has only one place to go! Yes! That would be a 45-degree angle, and one in which gravity holds sway!


Thus, what you get with such a development is a mad scramble to try to "tweak" its doddering Frankensteinian drooling, mumbling corpse by first, continuing to do what has been done ever since its abortion of a birth, namely desperately trying to patch all the faults that tend to manifest themselves when you start with a half-assembled prototype to begin with, and now, having half-finished with that, are trying to prop up the rotting corpse with "enhancements", like pretty much every single Microsoft product ever produced.


Allowing us to learn that Facebook's creator, Mark Dickerburg, is "enhancing" his own billionaireness with the truly disturbing announcement that in order to eat meat he must kill it first (I mean, come on. This is beyond even zany billionaireness. Cattle ranchers aren't on hand to wield the knife that takes their Hereford's life -- where the fuck does this total PROLAPSED ANUS get off on not only doing it, but broadcasting it to the world? Fuck, it's like saying "I embalm ALL MY DEAD RELATIVES PERSONALLY so I know that they've been lovingly dealt with before they start pushing up daisies."


But I digress! Facebook was born with no limbs and early-onset autism, for which we all know there is no cure, so no matter how many stitches and prosthetic limb "enhancements" they glue on, to borrow a naval expression, IT'S goin' DOWN, DUUUUDE!


There now. That was one of the most satisfying posts I've made since the blog's inception. Maybe I'll kill the folks at Blogger to truly get all the appreciation I feel for their creation at this moment.

Doing It

You know, you think about a task, something -- something that's coming up in your life that you can't avoid and you you say "No, I can't do this, I just can't. I know I'll break, something bad will happen! How can I get out of this?" But you know you have to do it. YOU HAVE TO DO IT.

It's the worst feeling in the world.

I've been in a bathroom in a hotel in Paris feeling like complete shit, looking at myself in the mirror because I look so horrific, but in 20 minutes I have to check out and get on the subway on a rainy Sunday morning with a a vicious hangover and somehow find Montmartre station. Then take a subway with my bag to Charles de Gaulle and get on a plane to Montreal via Amsterdam. I can't! I can't! My mind shouts that I can't.

But like a robot, I take the steps. When you boil them down into tiny increments, the hugeness of the task becomes almost irrelevant. It's always best if you've done this sort of thing before. "Oh, God, that was HORRIBLE!! But I made it through that, so I can make it through this!"

I guess that's kind of like what soldiers in combat think. Except there are no bombs exploding! No bullets flying! Yes, your brain says, YES! They went through a trillion times worse shit than you so YOU CAN DO IT!

There's a wedding coming up. A huge Jewish wedding. There will be strangers staying at my house. Every day will be an obligation day. TWO WEEKS. I can't do this. How can I do this?

How?

Hi. I think I killed ten men. How's it going?

Imagine you're a sniper on a remote hill in Hellmand province in Afghanistan. The Taliban have been hassling you for days -- no sleep, daytime firefights, you lost Gomez a week back, Petrie has no leg and is in some hospital back "there" . . . and you've been sitting there all day with your scope and your spotter.

And all of a sudden, Mullah Omar appears (they're all Mullah Omar.") You get a bead on his fuzzy head -- the black framing beard is a great target, and you thrill. You pull the trigger and one second later his face disappears -- there's no black, just red. You do a massive high-five with your spotter.

Flash forward six months later. You're long out of the army. You're sitting at a street cafe just having had dinner and are just hanging with your friends. None of them has ever been in the military, but they all knew you were in Afghanistan.

Then, after three Irish coffees and half a liter of white wine, the question comes.

"So what was it like? You kill anyone, dude?"

Nazis

Plastic Nazi: More integrity than an armored division of the real thing

You know, Nazis were pigs. They thought they could cover it up with those smart-looking designer uniforms, but it the end it was just like slapping a Rolex on a pig's wrist and telling him how handsome he looked. That's why I love that movie Inglourious Basterds, (though I loathe most of Tarantino's other stuff).

Because in it, no matter how handsome, dashing and polite the young Nazi was he was still just a young, dashing and polite pig. Can you imagine being a Nazi soldier in occupied Paris in the early years of WWII? Can you imagine being a supposedly "neutral" American who just happened to reside there during those years? I'm reading a book called "Americans in Paris" and though it's a bit of a slog at times, it does give a small idea of what it must have been like to be there. These strutting goons occupying the bistros and bars and restaurants, perhaps spontaneously bursting in the Horst Wessel song with their collaborating Vichy whores on their arms . . . an abomination.

Imagine being a baker and being forced to sell your wares to that bunch of "boeufs incultes" (uncultured beasts) . . . I'd do it with a smile and a flourish, knowing I'd used my very own piss to feed the yeast in their "special" loaves. And I wouldn't even bother trying to explain why the nuts in their cookies were so tasty.

I don't know why I like collecting Nazi action figures, with their dashing uniforms and regalia. Perhaps it's because I know that the plastic form of a single one of the dolls itself has more integrity than an entire armoured division of Nazis ever had in real life.

Royally Pissed Off

Uh-oh, Nick's pissed off again! Bet you've never seen him pissed off on these pages before! But on the scale, I'm hovering around nine out of ten.

A couple of days ago, the big Start of Summer day was officially inaugurated. I cleaned the detritus off the balcony -- old cigarette butts from the boors that still insist on smoking that were blown from their makeshift ashtrays (if I hadn't been a former smoker myself, they and their cigarettes could take the elevator all the way to the ground floor and smoke in front of the building, but I'm a nice guy and I let them indulge on the balcony. One thing's for sure -- most smokers are total slobs. I know I was. But I digress.)

I installed the nice little fake-rattan patio set and hauled out the Weber nano-grill and got all the BBQ paraphernalia out from last year. the project was Meditteranean-style chicken thighs, bone in, skin on -- a LOT of them. (I figure if I'm going to go to all the trouble, I might as well grill a huge batch to be stored away and eaten later.) I also ground some stewing beef for Brigitte and seasoned them to be kuftas (keftas, koftas, whatever you prefer).

And it was off to the races! I pre-baked the coals in a chimney starter and dumped them into the grill and started the chicken. The only trouble was, the hardwood charcoal had been sitting in a plastic box (sealed tight) on the balcony all winter, and despite the seal, had become damp. Thus, there was a lot of smoke. Then, the kicker -- no wind. So all the smoke just hung around the building.

I'm still on my first batch when Brigitte notifies me that my next-door neighbour, who happens to be the head of the building administration, has been getting calls from some tenant/condo owners about the smoke. Would it perhaps be we who were barbecuing? Well, we couldn't lie.

He reminded us that in the rules, no one was allowed to have a barbecue grill.

So I was shut down. Not just for that night, but forever. If they ever got a whiff of barbecue smoke from now on, bad things would happen. So . . . a summer without grilling.

That makes me fucking PISSED OFF.

The delightful new setup. Many a beer will meet its end here.

Farewell, Mr. Barbecue

Vocabulary

If you read lots of books (newspapers and magazines don't count) and always have your whole life, you know you don't automatically run to a dictionary every time you come across a word you don't know. And after years, no, decades of reading, you'll come across that word again and again, and although you've never actually looked up the word in a dictionary, and it's a word no one in their right mind would ever use in spoken English (unless you're say, Winston Churchill), you more or less understand the word by having read it countless times in context.

Take, for example, a word I read today and finally went to the dictionary for: "Blandishment." If you asked me a definition of the word, I would have no idea. But if you put it in a sentence, say, thus: "I hope the agency gets a handle on it with something other than blandishments from Blogger Bob" you kind of understand it because you've read it so many times before. I would have defined it as "a vague criticism, a gentle rebuke."


When I looked it up, I found that the actual definition was "A flattering or pleasing statement or action used to persuade someone gently to do something." Hmm. Well, I wasn't far off, but I wasn't spot on, either. I could have gotten through the rest of my life without having looked it up in a dictionary but there are hundreds, if not thousands of English words that I "kind of understand" if in context but couldn't give you a dictionary definition for.


And, if you know me at all by now, you'll know that that bothers me. From now on, if I come across the words "houri" (a voluptuous, alluring woman) "solipsistic" (the philosophical idea that one's own mind is all that exists), "heuristic" (enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves), "hegemony" (leadership or dominance, esp. by one country or social group), "recondite" (dealing with very profound, difficult, or abstruse subject matter) or "nostrum" (a medicine sold with false or exaggerated claims) I will indeed go immediately to the dictionary and memorise the definition.


After all, I am someone who wants graven on his headstone the epitaph "He did his crossword puzzles with a pen."


Addendum: Word of the Day! 


Logorrhea: incoherent and rambling repetitive speech


Check back for more words of the day, y'know, like stuff that's boring and unnecessary and just off the top of your head, like Sarah Palin, y'know? I could go on but I gotta go see how many beers I have left and if I have to go out and get more, because that'll be most annoying, really it will be.

I Graduated!

I finally got my diploma! Watch out, working world, here I come!

Anyone know a good frame shop?

Windy

If you've ever read any books about Everest, you come across sentences like "The wind was roaring like a 747 at takeoff."

I live in a building that's 8 stories high, facing an apartment complex of several buildings, so it forms a natural wind corridor. And boy, is it windy. It's a continuous roar if not that of a 747, at least a space shuttle coming into land. I almost got blown over crossing the street.

Glad it's 28 degrees and not -28.