Men Play the Game; Women Know the Score

On Wednesday, my good buddy Wicked Thistle and I met up with our respective laptops at a local coffee shop with the goal of eating overpriced pastries and sipping trendy, overpriced caffeinated drinks. And to eventually stop gossiping, eating, and sipping, and maybe tap out some writerly-type stuff on our laptops.

Wicked is a full time teacher and a closet writer. I’m a most-of-the-time writer and a not-so-closet shoe fetishist, which is ironic much, because on those rare occasions when I muster up enough cojones to actually sit down and calculate my really real per hour pay? I shouldn’t be buying a newspaper much less a pair of these:




Anyway.

Normally, I’d never go to a coffee shop with my laptop to write. When I have an assignment, I write at home. On my iMac. In my running clothing because while there may be just enough time to get in a workout before the day starts, there most certainly isn’t enough time to change and shower. Yew. I know. Glamorous.

Anyway, there are several reasons why I make an exception for Wicked:

A. She is a most excellent writer and when I am around her, I am inspired to excellence. Or at least shorter sentences.

B. She never, ever, ever finishes an entire piece of cake and since we know each other well enough by now to share girl germs, that means I get extra.

C. She is two years into a relationship with a man who sounds suspiciously similar to Moi’s own enginemeering-type Spousal Unit, and therefore the path she is treading is one upon which I have already tripped. In flats. Which means I get to have a laugh or two.

So as a prelude to writing, Wicked and I did the gossip thing, and then the what do our recyclables say to the neighbors about our drinking habits thing, and then the, well we’re not really all that bothered by Daniel Craig’s small headedness (and do these celebretard types, like, Google themselves in their off hours, and, if so, do you think there's a chance DC's lawyers would send an email asking us to cease and desist in our disparaging talk about his body parts?) thing, and then, one final thing before actually writing, the All About Our Spousal Units thing.

During which convo I made an observance that isn’t it interesting how some men, upon tipping over into the big 4-Uh-O territory, also seem at the same time to turn ever so slowly into curmudgeons when it comes to the goings-on in the world?



I said to Wicked that I’m not sure I could handle it if, in our twilight years, S.B. morphed from Super Duper Sexy Calm Guy into Bat Shit Crazy Yelling at the Television Guy. Especially if said morphing involved the frequent use of the phrase “back in my day” and the wearing of those weird ass polyester jumpsuits with the little belts at the waist.

Even if S.B. does it during our really, really twilight years together, that is still no excuse, because even at eighty bazillion years of age I will have nonetheless doggedly upheld MY end of the bargain by not putting myself out to pasture with buckets of Ben and Jerry’s and all-you-can-eat buffets with the girls. In other words, I will most likely fool myself into thinking I still have a shot at the tennis pro down the road (an attitude predicated, of course, on there being mucho plastic surgery breakthroughs within the next forty years.)

And while Wicked did give me her classic, “Good grief, what planet are you from?” look, she did eventually have to agree that this would, indeed, be a relationship killer of epic proportions.

Naturally, the conversation then swung 'round to present day annoyances, like the way our spousal units flip with white lightening speed through the channels whenever commercials pop up and how that is, in actuality, tremendously more irritating than actually watching the commercials themselves.

Which is when I dispensed yet another brilliant piece of relationship advice: Always, always, always be on the lookout for ever more clever ways to mess with your man’s mind. In other words: hide the remote. It's the marital equivalent of putting peanut butter on the roof of the dog’s mouth. You’ll only get away with it a couple of times, but those couple times? Priceless.

So, I want to know: what's your relationship equivalent of peanut butter?

So Shocked, No Title Comes to Mind

New York City's Chrysler Building is one of the most hands down beautiful things ever constructed. Not only is it an American architectural icon, it is symbolic as well of a kind of clear-eyed economic and artistic vision that is in woefully short supply today.

And now Prudential Financial has sold its 75 percent stake in the building to the Abu Dhabi Investment Council. The business arm of Abu Dhabi's gub'ment.

What was that line in Blood Diamond, where Leonardo di Caprio responds to Jennifer Connelly's request for an interview? "No thanks, I usually like to get kissed before I get f - - - ed?"

Uh, huh.

No, But I Did See the Movie

You know, for a writer with aspirations of one day publishing one of the forty million crap novels I have languishing on my hard drive, I sure don't read a lot of contemporary literary fiction. That's because I think most of it is pretty lame-o.

Recently, my feelings were confirmed by one of my fave crap magazines of all time, Entertainment Weekly. Of their recent listing of the 100 Best New Literary Classics of Last 25 Years, I've read, oh, maybe a tenth of one percent.

But I've seen every single one of their 100 Best Movies.

That's because in almost every case these days, it seems, the movie ends up being better than the book. You couldn't prod me to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy for all the Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby in the world, but I thought the movies were nothing less than breathtakingly epic. Same goes for No Country For Old Men (we'll get to McCarthy's books in a second). About the only exception to this rule that I can think of is The Golden Compass, which sucks major ass. The only entertaining thing about it is:

A. Scoping out what, exactly, Nicole Kidman has had done to her face (Ah, hah! There, see, she raised a brow!)


and

B. Trying to decide if Daniel Craig is, indeed, über hawt or only meh-I'd-do-him-in-a-pinch-I-guess hawt.


Sorry, where was I?

Oh. So, I couldn't disagree more vehemently with Entertainment's choice of the number one best books in the last 25 years than if you'd suddenly pitched Moi into a room full of Marxists who were all wearing Crocs and gypsy skirts.

Why? Because Entertainment magazine's pick for best book is, steady now, Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Yup. That's a big 10-4 WTF!?!?

Let me cut to the chase: In my opinion, Cormac McCarthy is no writer. Yes, I said it. He may be a thinker, and, as such, reveals an unusual willingness to take Big Mac-sized bites out of grand themes like good versus evil, man versus nature, fate versus free will. But he executes those themes with all the elegance of a third grader wielding a Sharpie to illustrate what mommy made him for breakfast that morning. McCarthy doesn't write so much as he lists. And he does so with such joyless, humorless determination, one has to wonder if his preoccupations are more sadistic than they are redemptive.

And my Gah do the critics just dribble themselves silly extolling the virtues of McCarthy's "economic" style. Puhleeze. There's economic and then there's downright stunted. Take Hemingway, for instance. That man put the curt in economic for sure. But he was also elegant and eagle-eyed, every word serving both form and function. Witness his cut-to-the-chase description of Francis Macomber's wife in one of the finest short stories ever written. After a couple short paragraphs of spot on observations about her hard-heartedness, he sums her up by calling her, "simply enameled in that American female cruelty."

That's so excruciatingly well done, it makes me never want to pluck at another keyboard for the rest of my life and just go sell candy at the mall.

McCarthy, however, gives me hope.

Check this out:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

That, Party People, is The Road's freakin' opening sentence. A sentence so clunky and tongue twisting, it just makes me want to throw the whole thing into the compost pile where all those clunky little words will thankfully decompose and bring their beauty not to the world of words, but to my basil plants instead.

Wait, though; it gets better. Check out what passes for dialogue in Cloud Cuckoo McCarthy Land:

Can I ask you something? he said. Yes. Of course. Are we going to die? Sometime. Not now. And we're still going south. Yes. So we'll be warm. Yes. Okay. Okay what? Nothing. Just okay. Go to sleep. Okay. I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay? Yes. That's okay. And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something? Yes. Of course you can. What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.

Whoa. Not only is McCarthy smoking some pretty good weed, his editor is for sure whacked on crack. 'Cause that shit don't float unless you're high on drugs and sporting an extremely itchy case of The Emperor's New Clothes.

So what do I think is the greatest book written in the past twenty-five years? To me, it's a three way tie between Lonesome Dove, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Bonfire of the Vanities. Where did they fall on Entertainment magazine's list? #24, #73, and #57, respectively. All behind Waiting to Exhale, which is a nifty lil' piece of Emancipated Chick Lit If You Happen To Like That Kind of Thing, but come on, and Jonathan Franz's The Corrections, a novel so stultifyingly insignificant that you need a microscope to plumb all one-quarter-of-an-inch of its depths.

Another surprise? Not a single book by James Lee Burke, in my opinion, one of the greatest writers putting words on paper today.

I swear, someone just needs to put me in charge of everything. Until then, I'm putting the book down and heading off to the movies.

Mute Monday: Patriot

“It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president . . . except me.”

Happy Birthday, Us!

Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness – it all rocks.



I also can't help thinking on this day of all the people I know who emigrated to this country and made it their own. Starting with my mother. This is a page from one of the many photo album/scrapbooks she kept throughout her life, and it contains just a few mementos of her voyage over to New York City from Germany in 1963.


Seeing this makes me think of the incredible price she and others like her paid to come here. And I'm not just talking cash. Can YOU imagine leaving all that you've ever known – your place of birth, your family, your friends, your way of life – to embark on a voyage to a place totally unknown to you except as an idea? That's unbelievably, mind-boggingly gutsy.

She's not the only person I know who did this.

To all of Moi's immigrant friends – from Germany and South Africa, Iran and Iraq, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Great Britain – I know this isn't the place where you were born, but I do so hope that it has become the place you call home.

Shoes For Thought

Remember these?

Some of you loved them. Some of you hated them. Most of you doubted I would ever wear them. Well, I'm happy to report that, in the sixty five thousand seconds since I first Dillard's carded and couponed their happy asses into my closet, I've worn them exactly SEVEN times. Yes, indeedy. That comes out to, let's see, uh, divide by seven, carry the five, and then, uh, $3.50 per wearing!

And I'm about to do it again. Because tomorrow is a holiday and we all know what holidays mean to me. Yes, yes, a sanctioned opportunity to stuff myself silly and not go for a run, but also: BLING. Holidays are when the shiny shit comes out of the closet, Party People. And what could be blingier than our Glorious Nation's Birthday?

Most importantly, however, another wearing means that my total price-to-wearings ratio is now at . . . uh . . . um. . . Never mind. I think one mathematical calculation is enough for one day. Let's just say, the more I wear these, the lower that ratio number will go until, ta da! Sometime next year I'll be wearing these babies for next to nothing.

So what will you be wearing to celebrate the Fourth?

And please, do not tell me one of these:

Party hearty. Party safe. But do NOT party fugly.

Throwing Your Two Bit Cares Down the Drain

Despite the fact that my poleetical leanings tilt decidedly towards the libertarian end of the spectrum with some slight slouching towards anarcho-capitalism (only wearing a really good outfit and heels), it is indeed a fact, Jack, that most of the people in my life are Demochromatics. And I love them anyway. Because, like Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd.

But my friends also know that I can't pass up a good opportunity to point out the essential idiocy of ANY politician and that the Demochromatics are, well, up next.

I mean, check out this bit of nonsense.

First of all, of course the shindig is being held in Denver. So apropos. Once a bastion of laissez faire Old West spirit, Denver in the past 50 years has devolved into what I can only describe as one of our country's most starched-stiff fascist city states and that's with whipped cream, nuts, and a cherry on top. It may slum like it's all ultra 21st century P.C. cool, but behind the scenes, it will slap you silly for one misstep outside the status quo.

Irony much?

Gah, how I would LOVE to be there to witness all those buttoned up Chamber of Commerce wags get jiggy with their hippified teen spirits. Ah, I love the smell of warmed over patchouli in a crowd. NOT.

But you know what really horrifies Moi? The SWAG. Organic cotton fanny packs? Are you kidding me? Really? That's, like, so 1995. Besides, not everyone there is going to be outfitted like they just got out of yoga class. Arianna Huffington, bless her liberal ass heart, at least knows how to dress. I simply can't imagine The Fraulein deigning to wear one of those things.

Psst . . . Arianna, dahlink . . . come on over to Moi's side. I'll give you candy. Gift certificates to Sephora. Andrew Sullivan, Camile Paglia, and P.J. O'Rourke at your table. Duck confit, shot that morning by Troll's cousin Boo and prepared by I Am Not. Lots and lots of champagne and tequila. Cakes by EmmaK. Moi's Weapons of Mass Distraction flitting about in flirty skirts and high heels making all the big boys blush. Live performances by Bjork and Beck, Primus and White Stripes. And Justin Timberlake. Dancing on tables. Coat room antics. General all around, good natured, no-worries-about-our-carbon-foot-prints-and-whether-
the-noise-will-impact-the-mating-habits-of-the-spotted-owl debauched fun.