I Good things.
1. This webcomic called xkcd, which Marshall alerted me to.
2. This weekend's upcoming visit from Marshall.

Just because you're paranoid.
I was nervous about typing that, up there. No: fearful. This book I'm writing, about well, death, has fed into an previously-held superstition with regards to speaking excitedly about the future. I'm constantly concerned that my loved ones will have fiery accidents on the way to birthday parties, family holidays and bar gatherings. These accidents will be, secretly, my fault. I caused both the plane's engines to fail because I expressed a naive excitement about reunion at the upcoming happy event.

I talked with a friend recently and discovered she harbors the same fear. Before her s.o. leaves the house each day, she must tell him, "Wear your seatbelt! And be careful on the Interstate!" We do the same thing, she and I: Search our minds for potential disasters and then name them aloud out of some superstitious belief that doing so puts us one up on Evil Fate. Or, if not one up, then at least we've voiced aloud a healthy respect for its power. And maybe we just can't be surprised if the worst does occur. (Laughable, of course.)

I don't know about my friend, but for me, it's like I'm bracing myself. I feel real stabs of fear at those moments when I warn people against walking on the side of the road without the sidewalk on the way to my house, although I keep my voice light and casual when I do it. I don't want them to think I'm crazy or that I think they have no sense. But really, it has nothing to do with their actions; crazy things happen every day beyond anyone's control. What I'm doing is between me and fate, alone. It's an incantation, a spell. "Watch out for crazy drivers" means now those drunken lane swervers will steer clear of you, and "Pack a lunch for your trip," means I've now evaporated potential disguntled fastfood employees armed with uzis into the ether. At least for you. At least for you, my dear, my friend.

For a long time, hearing Channel Eleven Holiday Greeting proclaim its innocuous, "Have a Safe and Happy Fourth," or "Have a Safe and Happy Groundhog's Day" or whatever, drove me nuts. How false a well-wish is that? It says, "I wish for you on this celebrated day the bare-minimum of no permanent injury or scarring." Besides, it's condescending. Your viewers: this uniform group of eight-year olds about to shut off their TVs to run out into the streets, scissors in one hand and lit bottle-rockets in the other.

And the acceptance of the "Have a safe" whatever, or the infinitely more cloying "Be safe," only grew. Now it was an acceptable send-off from the office on Fridays. Now it was an acceptable send-off before your trip to Vegas, a place where a certain kind of lack of safety is supposed to be the entire point.

It was wildly unacceptable to me. First: the condescension, and second, the implication that you could control anything that happened to you, that you could make yourself "Be safe;" it made anything unsafe that befell the greet-ee his or her own fault. From inside your own head: "Yooou weren't saaafe!" chided the now finger-wagging receptionist from your afternoon's dental appointment, after your mugging later that night. And thirdly: This wasn't fun. This was freaking paranoid. As a college student, I didn't want to have a "safe" Halloween. Granted, the life-transforming sort of sophisticated debauchery I envisioned, always to the tune of some woozy old Bowie song, never quite materialized; but still. Likewise, for this and other occasions that are Supposed to be Fun, who wants to be told that someone's fearing for your life? Talk about a downer, man.

But, holy shit. I realize now that I've joined the ranks of the legion of warners. What I want to know is whether there are still more people whom actual fear prompts to say such things to people. Are you out there? Where do you stand, Henshaw, on the eve of this Labor Day Weekend, which will be safe for some and unsafe for others and who knows on which side of that line any of us stands on this Friday afternoon?

This summer shall have a vegetable, and that vegetable shall be called the Okra that is Pickled.
It was supposed to be the summer of the tomatoes that we grew outside in pots, but this fell beast called the hornworm reduced ours to sticks. (Ginger looked for an organic solution to these evil-looking critters and found, “Pull them off the plants and toss them into a bucket of kerosene.” Kerosene. We are not evolution’s ultimate product, not by a longshot.)

Anyway,:

This is not the hornworm. It is however, sure enough an ugly thing, isn’t it? I have a friend in Atlanta who so dislikes pickles of any sort that he gets the skeeves if you so much as touch one on your plate let alone crunch into one in the same booth at the Earl. Which is a shame; the Earl’s got good pickles.

But, pickled okra-! I have Ginger, my Real Live Southern roommate to thank for this one. Since she introduced me to their crunchy perfection back in June, the summer has been one long mouth-watering stretch between um, okra? Okras? Okra pieces? Wedges? Okrettes? Anyhoo. I can't get tired of them. I think it’s the heat. I was at the library one afternoon and suddenly could not get the delicious taste or texture out of my noggin. It was maddening.
I was not pregnant.

I have since scouted out, bought and consumed three jars of the things in various cities. I think they help you concentrate. I think they’re good for you.
Hip, hip, hooray and a great big mwah to my latest jar. Don’t mind if I do.

Report from House Arrest, (Chained to Computer.)
(Warning: This post contains Snake Island-y content:)

These days, I eat breakfast, consume coffee, writewritewrite, make lunch to Wolf Parade (“Fine Young Cannibals” and “An Animal in Your Care” are the official Themesongs of Lunch in August), then write some more, usually severely reduced-quality content.

I also make lists. Like this.


Nominated for Retirement.
I’ve decided I'd like to nominate the following songs for retirement. They’re not bad songs. I’ve just had my allotment for this lifetime.

“California Dreamin’”
“Satisfaction”
Anything by John Cougar Mellancamp
“I Feel Good”
“Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Moondance”
“What I Like About You”

Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you can’t imagine a life devoid, from here on out, of any chance of “Jack and Diane.” I don’t want to be a dictator about this. If we could just work something out where I don’t ever have to hear these songs again, that’d be good enough.

I know it don’t thrill you; I hope it don’t kill you.
Late this summer, I discovered the university library to be an ideal place to work. Its peculiar off-season emptiness pleased me; the place was near-silent except for the occasional off-color exchange between bored summer employees and constant dark hiss of the a/c. All of this contributed to the illusion that I wasn’t really supposed to be there, or moreover, like no one would ever find me there, which made it the perfect place to write.

I like doing work under the illusion that I’m getting away with something, and I like to work at places and times that encourage that belief—a local diner in the wee morning hours, a crowded coffee shop, abandoned classrooms or the departmental office no one ever uses early on a Friday evening, anything to encourage the idea that what I’m doing isn’t work, but some sneaky pleasure.

So I blame my current block on the return of the students to town. I sit and look at these shoddy, rambling, absolutely no-holds-barred first drafts I cranked out in those days of what felt like writing splendor, and have no idea where to cut or how to fix them. And how, and how-! they desperately need it.

And I can’t face them now, not in these days of rapid repopulation by the baseball caps and cellphones and George Hamilton tans. And it’s not just the undergrads. Knowing that my own colleagues are coming back to town feels just as paralyzing. “Go away!” I think when I see their friendly faces and field their friendly Hi-How’re-yous, even in my mind. (Everyone that is, except you, Henshaw.)

Everyone, all this humanity, returning and wresting the town’s character back with it, from weird little beachtown to collegetown once again. And bringing the expectations I knew would befall this experience eventually, with it.

Welcome back to the schoolyear, Henshaw. The very last one.

Happy, Happy Prole.

My friend Ginger works as a housekeeper at one of the more popular, affluent beaches here in Beachtown. This means she comes home the very definition of drained, every single evening, having spent the day polishing the staircases and scouring vomit from the bedroom floors of tourist bungalows. It also means my diet has expanded, to include exciting surprise items we now find in our refrigerator and pantry on a regular basis: full six-packs of strawberry yogurt, plastic bags half full of Tortilla chips, canned chili and other foodstuffs the profligate tourists leave behind in their beach houses when their vacation week is through.

Since Ginger and Carmelita are the principle cooks in our household, and since their summer jobs maintaining other people’s homes have made occasions of pot roasts and fancy stews less and less a frequent occurrence at home, we’ve taken to grilling out The Tourists’ hotdogs and drinking their leftover Coronas a whole lot. (Or: Ginger and Carmelita have. I don’t know how to use the grill.)

Having recently joined the ranks of the unemployed myself, I’m happy to consume free Wiener Casserole and Shish-kadogs several nights a week. And it would all be quite enjoyable if it weren’t for the fact of Carm’ and Ginger’s drooping eyelids over our (thanks, tourists!) paper plates, every night.

But I do need to find a job of my own. I found out a couple of weeks ago that funding for a bookish, on-campus position I was supposed to hold this fall had fallen through. I didn’t work in July, but concentrated on writing and researching for el Book, thinking that this job would pick up again in August. But now it won’t.

So I’m looking for something mildly interesting and profitable that won’t suck all my energy away this year, so I can concentrate on this thesis. This job doesn’t have to be my career, but it would be nice if I didn’t dread going. I have a lot of friends like Ginger, who take perverse pleasure in the satisfaction gleaned from a rote task perfectly done. People who enjoy physical labor as the polar opposite of writing. How it clears the mind.

But I am lame.
Unlike Ginger and my other friends, I am an imperfect cleaner at best. I get physically tired and when I do, I feel sorry for myself and when I do, I want to whine about it and I want people to feel sorry for me. I am bad at being consistently pleasant to mean, rich vacationers with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. The never-doneness of housework maddens me and makes me want to give up. I work sllllowly.

It scares me, Henshaw, this tiny set of skills that I have. I will never be Ted Conover. Hell, I’ll never be David Sedaris. (But we knew this, Alice.)

I can write. I can talk with people and listen and show them how to do things. I can get extremely involved in one task and hunt down its every last detail till there’s nothing left.
But that’s about it. It's sad.

Workers of the World, Unite! But let me do the part where I don’t have to sweat.