Yo

I was trolling the internet the other day and came across this great picture of a young, naked Tony Danza. It was, like, the third picture in Google Images when you search for “Tony Danza.” I didn’t even specify that I wanted Tony Danza to be naked. But then, a few days later, when I went to look for the picture–because I’d talked about it to anyone who would listen–it was gone.

Rest assured that if I find it, I’m posting it up here immediately. Rest assured.

Update

No frozen white bread has been et, because I broke my bad internet habit.  Since posting my resolution worked like gangbusters, I’m going to try another one.  I realize that nothing is more tedious than reading about other people’s plans for self-improvement.  But this blog has to be good for something, and if that something is forcing me to stick to my plans because I’ve declared them to my vast international readership, so be it.  So here’s another: only two drinks from now on.  Two drinks, then switch to delicious water.  It has been written.

I confess that I have been reading Julia Allison’s blog and I promise never to do it again.

Hey. Those of you who still check this moribund site may not have any idea what I’m talking about when I say, “I confess that I have been reading Julia Allison’s blog and I promise never to do it again.” And I’m sorry about that. But I’ve got to do something here.  I’ve got to do it for myself. I’ve got to do it for my time. I’ve got to do it for my work. I’ve got to do it for my brain, my soul, for all my teeth and cells. I’ve got to do it for the mitochondria in my cells.  Here goes:

I’m never going to look at this again.

What is this crazy stuff, and how did I even come to it?  I’ll chalk it up to my old job in publishing.  It’s weird: I decided I didn’t want to continue in that realm partly because I never liked the insiderey, shmoozy stuff a person has to do to succeed; didn’t like the striving and the business and the doing deals and the being cool. (Mind you, photocopying manuscripts at 7:30 pm was not “being cool,” but to gain some prominence, it was clear that you had to play along and go to some parties and know some people and talk about the same subjects that were–how odd–cropping up in various media outlets in succession.)  So anyway, yeah.  It was paradoxical that, right around the time I started to detach myself from my job out of the desire to escape that stuff, I started reading Gawker all the time. Which plunged my head into that very same insiderey media world that I referred to earlier, although, granted, allowed me to experience it at more of a remove. 

Anyway, one of the targets that they, characteristically, both mocked and glorified was this person.  Let me just quickly define her as some sort of a celebrity pundit/dating columnist hybrid.  I wanted to write “mongrel.” My awareness of her has only been a toxic force in my life.  No–that’s an exaggeration.  But, when I think about all of the embarrassingly many times I’ve clicked on her blog, I’m ashamed at all the minutes, if not hours, that I’ve wasted. I’m ashamed that I could have been doing something else–anything else.  I could have made 7,000 hard-boiled eggs, one by one, and fed them to squirrels, and still felt that my time had been better spent. I could have peed on a subway platform, gotten cited by the cops, fulfilled the requisite hours of community service, and still have spent that time better.  I could have even eaten 9,000 loaves of frozen white bread, and there’s nothing I hate more than frozen white bread.  But still, still.  It would have been better than allowing my mindspace to be occupied by Julia Allison.

So why did I even read her shit? By the way–in case it wasn’t clear–I’m writing all this as a binding promise to myself that I will never do it again.  I guess I found her to be a familiar type–irritating, false, “successful,” highly invested in “femininity” while at the same time incoherently professing some superficial, apolitical brand of feminism. I mean, I realize that I sound like a hater.  And I suppose that’s because I am.  And that’s okay, really. 

I think there’s something more meaningful to say here about fascination with celebrity as a means of avoidance and distraction, but I’ll spare you.

In conclusion: if I ever visit that blog again, I will have to eat one loaf of frozen white bread for every click.

Gabriel Byrne’s smoldering Oirish eyes

A couple of years ago, I saw Gabriel Byrne in Ozzie’s coffee shop in Park Slope. It was pretty incongruous to see him there, among all the would-be writers and carefully dressed lassies angling to inspire “Missed Connections” on Craigslist.  He was probably the most unassuming dude in the place.  Come to think of it, that’s a quality I’ve always appreciated in his acting as well, the reserve that masks the intensity.  Even when he played Shelley Long’s doctor in that movie where she fatally choked on a bone and her kooky sister brought her back from the dead–even in that ridiculous (but endearing) film, he was able to create the impression of someone who thinks thoughts all the time, and conceals most of them.

Gabe is one of the reasons I gave “In Treatment” a shot–along with Dianne Wiest– despite having serious reservations about watching a show on therapy. For one thing, I expected it would just make me nostalgic for the crackle/drama/intelligence of the Melfi-Tony sessions.  Also, the subject of therapy lends itself pretty easily to sentimentality and unrealistic excesses, and I can’t deal with that.

 So, imagine my pleasant surprise at the show’s restraint.  Byrne’s reticence works really well here–it’s what he doesn’t do and say in the sessions that makes him convincing as a therapist. His facial expressions are muted and he’s mostly silent, except for the occasional incisive question. (In my experience, the patient-to-therapist talk ratio is 90-10.)  The writers also deserve credit for holding information about the patients’ characters back.  Patients don’t spill their guts to their therapists, they fool themselves and conceal things until careful questioning and continuous conversations chip away at their delusions.

I had a major problem watching Laura, one of Byrne’s patients, who’s maddeningly self-absorbed and provocative and poorly related.  I didn’t like how her sexual attraction to Byrne–which she announces to him mid-session–is treated with an air of legitimacy.  This character has an obvious personality disorder. Why, when Byrne’s taking to his own therapist (Wiest) about Laura, doesn’t he call a spade a spade and diagnose her, classify her, put her in her place, in some way? 

Final thought: the segment with the (possibly suicidal) teenaged girl is the best. It’s the most arresting and worrisome, in a way. That kid can act. 

Anxiety meatballs

I tried to make a batch of meatballs on Sunday and fucked them up.  In retrospect, I think the pan was too hot and crowded; the meatballs blackened on the outside but didn’t cook.  Midway through I scraped the black parts off the balls and mushed up the remains in the hope of making some kind of meat sauce.  Wrong.  Nothing browned, and I was left with two pans of raw, mushy, unsalvageable meat (yeah, I brought in an auxiliary pan to see if I could fix things, but I couldn’t).

I cried about this–real crying.  Kinda disproportionate, that reaction, but of a piece with how I’ve been feeling lately.   Frustrated, irresponsible, insufficiently adult, and sad.   

But I think I’m going to turn a corner. My new stance will be, “Yeah, I fucked up those meatballs–who gives a shit about those meatballs?  Great job for even attempting meatballs! It’s going to be okay!”

I mean, obviously this meatballs thing is trivial, but I wanted to exorcise those underlying bad feelings and this helps a little.

By the way, it’s much easier to write about meatballs than, say, my experience last week of overdrawing my bank account by $500.  Bouncing checks to one’s significant other and a mental health professional in a pretty short span of time = anxiety, anxiety. 

Now that I think about it, those meatballs may have been an indirect effort on my part to overcome my issues with facing the music, confronting things. I don’t cook. I never cook. I can’t cook. But there I was, after a hard week, trying to execute a fairly complex recipe without any help. I think I was trying to prove to myself that I am capable and competent; that I’m not stuck playing a child-role in my life and relationships.

 I think those were anxiety meatballs.

Let’s examine this myth of the “good drunk,” shall we

Now, I’m a drinker*.  I’ve certainly been a heavier one in the past, but even in these more moderate times, I drink two or three nights a week.  I’m prefacing in this way because I want to make clear that I’m not criticizing booze or boozing.  As a matter of fact, I just enjoyed some beers this evening, and I’m sure they enhanced my darts game.   

But I want to dispel right now the myth of the “good drunk.”  I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my life I’ve heard, oh, so-and-so’s a “good drunk,” so-and-so’s a “bad drunk,” or so-and-so’s a “delightful drunk.”  I mean, I do realize that there are many incarnations of drunk–I knew a girl whose only defining characteristic when she was drunk was that she complimented people weirdly and excessively–but really, I’m here to argue, they’re all bad.  

Let me start with myself.  When I get drunk, there is a window–usually–in which I’m probably incredibly pleasant.  I smile wide.  I say things that I think are amusing that are possibly amusing to others, too.  I make audacious jokes and swear.  Sometimes I’ll grow the sack to say something I’ve felt too inhibited to express before.  But inevitably that window closes.  At best, I start to slur my words and continue to utter benign things, most likely about how hungry I am and how great falafel would be.  At worst, I say terrible things, because inside I feel terrible.   And at worst worst, I can’t say anything at all, because I’m too locked inside myself.

Which brings me to my point: alcohol is a depressant.  I mean, even if it doesn’t induce an awful dark mental state, it still depresses you, if just in the sense of slowing down your response time or lulling you into believing it’s okay to shove a bunch of deviled eggs into your mouth at a party.  

I don’t want to be too absolutist about this.  I mean, I have this great memory of returning to college after my study abroad semester and drinking with my friends on campus before classes started up again.  Not many students were around, so it felt like we had the run of the place. It was winter, and there was fresh, soft snow on the ground.  I got wasted, we roamed around, and I kept belly-flopping into the snow, screaming, inexplicably, “I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE AN ASTRONAUT!” 

That was great. 

But it was exceptional.  And most likely I fell asleep later that night with tearstains and hot wing sauce on my face, because that’s what being drunk is all about.

(*I almost wrote, “I’m no teetotaler,” but then I was like, I don’t really say that word aloud–not that it’s so obscure or anything, just kind of conspicuous–so why would I write it? It’s like the other day when I ran into someone on the street, a girl from college whom I like very much, and she asked me where I was going, and I told her the restaurant I was headed to, and she said she’d been there, and I asked her how it was, and she said, “oh you know something something something neophyte something something.”  I thought to myself, why must we do this?, then made some joke about Burger King and went on my way.)

Gherkins

I rashly and somewhat violently deleted all of my earlier posts except for the original one.  I’ve been scolded, and I apologize. I did not mean to jerk anybody’s gherkin.  I just thought my posts were self-revealing and cheesy.  Maybe that’s cowardly.  And I suppose it raises the question, what’s the point of personal expression in a public forum if you’re uncomfortable with disclosure?

Speaking of personal expression in a public forum, that reminds me of a story I heard several years ago about someone I went to high school with, who was arrested for doing a “genital dance” in the parking lot of a pizza place in our town. The phrase “genital dance” appeared in our local paper’s account of the incident.  I didn’t read the article myself, but I’m willing to bet that ”genital dance” appeared without quotation marks, like it was an established phenomenon.  I believe the guy’s defense was that he was changing out of his work uniform in his car, without any intention of exposing himself.  Hey, I’ve been there. 

My point is, while I’m wholly on the side of genital dances (see, no quotes), I’m ambivalent about self-exposure.

This dirty minute

No, I’m not into guns (not even pee-filled Super Soakers). I just like the word materiel, and other words I like–brackish, implacable, bananas–didn’t sound all that felicitous as blog titles.   I almost went with the name “Brackish Girl,” because it’s resonant of “Moorish Girl,” but then I had to stop and think–where do I know the phrase “Moorish Girl” from, anyway? Is that from Ulysses? I have this problem of thinking that every little verbal snippet I can’t place is from Ulysses.  That reminds me of this dumb dialogue I wrote in my mind once while under the influence:

 Person 1: “I think I might have a learning disability.”

 Person 2: “Oh no, why?”

 Person 1: “I didn’t really get Ulysses.”

So shlocky.

So what am I doing with this blog?  Well, I have some tedious applications to fill out and feel like my eyeballs will resume their twitch (they really twitch, for weeks at a time) if I write another personal statement. No statement that’s written without any contractions sounds remotely personal.  And yet, use too many contractions and you’re a goofball. Mix it up and your tone is uneven.

Last thing: maybe you’re like me, and you were troubled by the assassination in Pakistan but even more disturbed by how dumb, ahistorical, and uncritical the mainstream coverage was.  I find it damn near impossible to read the news reports from NYT or CNN and have any sense of what’s going on.  Anyway, I want to make this a fun blog (penispenispenis), but this is important, so here’s a link to Democracy Now’s interview with Tariq Ali, which at least begins to provide some context for the political developments in Pakistan and what the US’s role has been.  

No really, lastly, I watched the Karate Kid (Part I) tonight and realized for the first time  that Sensei John Kreese is supposed to be a deranged veteran.  Fighting the Vietnamese, you could assume. Miyagi’s a veteran, too, but he was fighting Germans, while his wife and newborn son died in an internment camp.  That is so f*cked-up.  The Cobra Kai dojo kids who terrorize Daniel all have sort of a Hitler Youth look to them, but I guess it could also just be “Californian.”

Good night!