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2004.03.08 ears

  • I Can See The Mormon Temple From Here
    I CAN’T NOT HEAR IT | IT’S IN MY HEAD ALL THE TIME | WHY SONG WHY?
  • I Will Kill You Fucker
    LIVE AT THE STARRY PLOUGH | FEB 13, 2004

In a recent meeting with the executive and development directors, we contemplated a constellation of about thirty pastel color-coded post-it notes I had left on the wall. What were they? What did they mean? What were our next steps?

We turned our eyes to this… lil cave of altamira and immediately, three-o’clock high style, I saw that somehow, three of my non-pastel color coded post-it notes had made it into the mix. They referred to things that I really had to do right away, but since they were adhered to this wall, and not the wall in my office, I had really very seriously not attended to those things, or had I?

Yes, I had, certainly, because I had subconsciously felt comfortable leaving them here.

No, I hadn’t, panic setting in, because there was nothing to remind me that it all needed to be done.

Then that convenient calm descended, just like it descended around my unmailed bill payment, discovered between the seat and the emergency brake of my friend’s car. This is overdue by several months, yet I have yet to receive any consequences, I thought, holding the coffee-smelling document and looking at the water from our postion on the flyover. This calls into question all kinds of things. Things like Time. Consequences. Efficiency of Systems.

Because of all this (I do believe that), the executive director went to these notes immediately and asked for a full report.

Suggestions for epitaphs.

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description and salesmanship are not parallel

You know those letters you get from the [INSERT APPARENTLY WELL-RESOURCED NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION HERE] asking you for the [INSERT POWER OF TEN HERE] time to give at the level just above where you gave before?

I notice that they always have

  1. margins less than a half inch around because they are sore afraid you will not turn over the page
  2. a serif font, which is considered legible but you and I know it is not.
  3. an unwillingness to italicize for emphasis. Emphatic messages are always bold and underlined, which strikes me as typographically hyperbolic
  4. a message that attempts to make you aware of just how desparate things are [GET USED TO IT] while attempting to inspire you to believe that giving at the slightly higher level you did last year will effect the outcome one iota.
  5. neglected to include a checkbox that permits one to give money and never receive another set of slightly incorrect mailing labels, gift cards, newsletters, or affinity marketing opportunities ever again. You know. So that the paltry donation I’m about to make isn’t just a fraction of the production cost of the solicitation.
  6. made me wince.

So.

I’m bringing all my talents to bear on the creation of one of these very pieces of forgettable AND TYPOGRAPHICALLY INFURIATING direct mail solicitations.

There I said it.

Sigh.

Blame me, because I’m aiding and abetting.

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hello freud,

goodbye, avenue a.

I lied to everyone about taking friday off, then climbed on a nearly empty bus this morning with the intent of getting all the work done one can get done at work…

…when no one knows one is at work.

Little retail not included:
Working on the friday after thanksgiving gives one an excellent idea of what things would be like if the lone gunmen were permitted to continue their agenda. Roomy. Quiet. Efficient.

So yes, naturally, I forgot the keys to the workplace. I stood there about to be truly disappointed at my forgetfulness… and then I went down to the courtyard and ate my bagel, chatted with the butcher guy who never truly understood what I meant when he overheard me advising a friend never to ask a man with no arms to carry boxes, climbed back on another nearly empty bus and drifted back.

With a type of drunken imprecision I tried to decide whether looking at the keys on the counter, then failing to put the keys in the pocket, then traveling to the locked place that required the keys should be seen through

  • a freudian lens
    BAD!
  • a monkey-mind lens
    YOU BUDDHISTS ARE A BUNCH OF NAGGING HALL MONITORS!
  • a random lens
    IN WHICH NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED!
  • a compassionate lens
    I REALLY REALLY LOVE ME!

Now finally here I can list them all. On the bus ride I would get a third of the way through the list and start over. Repeatedly. I think there was a carbon monoxide leak.
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Sue Hutchinson Facilitated My Fright

The ink went out of my inkjet right before the check run, when I was trying to print the report now that it had been resized to 19 pages instead of 33 for the fax of the emailed url for the ftp site or, if you had the userid and password, the html which favored, in a teeth gnashing way, IE browsers from wintel machines. Would I accomplish both a/p and a/r and payroll and quarter-end financials? Was that the phone?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, but I could not have known that at the time. However: Yes. It was Sue calling to remind me that we were going to the Parkway and then to 21 Grand. I began to equivocate, recalling that the Parkway movie was being touted as

black blair witch
black blair witch
black blair witch

Twisted! I thought she said Twister! These are two totally different movies!

During the question and answer period after the show, I had the typical sensory overload problem: tingly hands, nausea, and my familiar affliction of instant and irreparable melancholy brought on by seeing people scream relentlessly, hysterically, and, here’s the tricky part, fictively so, like, even if I wanted to help them I couldn’t because…

it’s a fucking movie

No matter. It’s Bob coming over the couch in a latter twin peaks episode, forcing me into wounded silence for a day and a half until I end up sitting on the porch in the fading afternoon light crying and crying and crying.

What’s the matter? Z asks.

The fucking Lynch! I sob. He’s… He’s… amoral!

I was really hurt by David Lynch’s use of subwoofer in lieu of coherent plot. I was really hurt by Constable’s cloud studies. I was really hurt by those Titians showing people getting their old testament heads chopped off. I was really hurt by the scene in Defending Your Life when the toddler cries helpless in his playpen as his parents argue pointlessly and cruelly over his head.

Pi didn’t hurt me. Requiem for a Dream did.

Bjork in Shepherd’s Bush didn’t hurt me. Bjork in Dancer In the Dark did.

Boo.

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lunch in a children’s art studio

Mo’s (what about yemen?) has a can of atavistic bad beefaroni calling to me, but I cannot heat it until I find a container.

This is an art studio, and every container has a bit of paint, or glue, or glitter, or clay, or modge podge in it. I settle on the empty that once held three pounds of cream cheese. The little reality train speeds away on who buys cream cheese by the three pound tub then brings the empty here. I’m more startled by this:

I smell the tub before using it.

What will that do?

On the microwave, I don’t know which speed dial to use. Is beefaroni is more like soup… or art?