in praise of mediocrity

In pro sports they call it parity, on Pitchfork they call it a 7.6 and comb it for stray nuances. At work it's sewn into the culture, so when anything bold or fresh happens we raise our eyebrows and scurry to a Microsoft help file for shelter. And every day some new novelist or worse poet emerges to present a new origami version of the same glinting and fragrant piece of crap.

In politics it hangs in rolls around the Clinton middle, on the Greyhound bus I take to work they actually pump extra quantities of it into the air as a kind of perfume or stimulant. At closing time when folks head home the office parks and parking lots make perfunctory love and by midnight their new spawn have birthed and laid further waste to the landscape. Look at them now, curled up crammed together so thick that in the sodium haze you can barely make out the moon.

My dear, what I really want to say is of course I'll attend your wedding, thank you so much the invite. The save-the-date card will honor my refrigerator always, and when the warranty on that expires I'll get strong clear tape or laminant and fix it to the dishwasher, so that whether loading or unloading I can remember that blessed day. Even if you get divorced I'll refuse to acknowledge it and continue to serenade the milestones as they cascade lovingly by. I'll shout it from real rooftops, hire mariachis, bake anniversary cakes that no matter where you move or hide will find you just in time.

It's strange though, as gushing as I am about the whole scene, as much as I write to praise your once and future happiness, now that you and R. are getting hitched and leaving town (forever and ever one hopes) I feel like I have woken up 50 pounds lighter, as though one of the many blocks against magic and artful function in this world has been lifted. Your presence had become a nagging but almost invisible pain, but had become so commonplace I didn't recognize it. It'll make my world a better place to have you far away.

When looking at wedding dresses keep in mind that some dresses will be better suited to some weddings than others. The type of wedding dress to choose will partly depend on the type of wedding you will be having; your wedding could be formal or informal, take place indoors or outdoors. It could be a grand occasion in a massive cathedral, a sophisticated evening event with a civil ceremony, a simple church wedding, or a beach wedding in the tropics. This will help to inform your choice but should by no means limit it.

There are many wedding dresses to choose from for all types of weddings, so it should not be difficult finding one you like and that fits the occasion.

the basic properties of light

When we were kids we had a way to send somebody off, grandparents or an aunt and uncle who visited. You stood at the front door and flickered the porch light and they honked their horn and you kept the light going until they were out of sight, so they knew you would keep the lighthouse going. The point was for them to have no doubt that if they returned unannounced day or night you would still be standing there flickering the light like an idiot. It was a way of saying distance is an illusion, we are here together no matter what, we love you.

Another way we had in the summer was to run alongside the car until it got out of our development. This way they knew that we loved them so much that we were stubbornly clinging to their presence. Sure, you could do it alone, but it made more sense to do that in groups, my brothers, my sister and me, so we actually had a theoretical chance of catching the car, lifting it in the air and returning it to park back in front of the house. The point was for them to have no doubt that if they looked to the side of their car 20 or 30 miles down the road they might see you sprinting alongside, getting pretty good mileage out of only love and cheap pro Keds.

Using a paper-and-pencil test consisting of multiple-choice situational questions which also require reasoning for the choices made, common misconceptions in light were identified. It was found that most of the students understand the basic properties of light at a knowledge level but had difficulty applying these concepts in novel situations. (And fuck, doesn't growing up mean ending up twisted/distracted/scattered in a hundred directions, subjecting that theory of long-distance communion to the harshest conditions).

My grandfather, the last of those visiting loved ones still capable or willing to make the trip, might be an agnostic by this point but if you press him at an opportune moment he'll articulate a fine vision of heaven. The soul, he says, is wisp of light, and when we die we return to the source, to be together with those we love.

what we expect when we talk about expecting

first trimester (0 - 14 weeks): Baby may occasionally react to specific meals with belches or hiccups; on occasion a tiny "fuck yeah!" rings forth. small hairs produce wolfman-like appearance. is small enough to leave your body on stealth excursions, e.g. for barbecue wings or midnight movies. does not yet see ghosts nor communicate with them. baby should not operate heavy machinery or use the internet unsupervised during this period.

second trimester (15 - 26 weeks): You are going to be hungry as shit now. Example: you may eat a dog or other mammal whole. baby's hiccups, more active now, are capable of triggering world disasters, e.g. floods, wars, famine. now has capacity to yell "motherfucker!" at room volume in quiet or awkward situations. may briefly become a fan of the Dallas Cowboys; typically recedes as a normal part of your child's mental development. first traces of cynicism (sample conversation: You: Baby, how do you feel about the recent national election? Baby:____ You: I mean, will Obama run the country like he ran his campaign? Baby: (may kick) You: But seriously, come on, level with me here. Baby: As long as you view Obama in a ruling class context, you won't be disappointed.) Later, baby may express profound hope about the glacial thawing of our racist national heart, tempered by reminders of imminent bombing, etc.

third trimester (27 - 40 weeks): Baby now capable of revealing your innermost thoughts in stealth calls to your parents, friends, or the national media. typical in-flight wing span now exceeds three feet. baby is typically born during this period, a simple and foolproof process after which follows tidal waves, tsunamis, the complete redrawing of the national map with texas occupying the area formerly known as canada and ohio greedily occupying the rest, the reversal and/or multiplication of gravity to several times its intensity, dizziness, hallucinations, vomiting, waves of confusion and happiness and telegraphic love, a scrambling of the periodic table whereby unstable elements occupy the first 12 elements and form the others when fed after midnight. during this time tic-tac-toe may become an immanently winnable game for you or your partner. relatives reappear. marital conversations reduced to grunts, sighs, and storming out of the room (helps to prevent an immediate second child which christ knows you could not handle at this point).

Baby may exhibit alien vampire tendencies and attempt to drain mother of all bodily fluid. also may develop acne but should not at this point be left unattended overnight.

my energy efficient new heart

so the other day i wake up and my heart has stopped, a clot of bad vibes blocking up the works. wanting to do the responsible thing i pull it from my chest, seal it in a ziplock bag, and stash it on the bottom shelf of the freezer behind an old carton of vanilla ice cream.

i go down to the hardware store and replace my heart with a compact flourescent bulb. when i get it home it takes an extra couple seconds to light, but when it does i feel 1,000 times better.

people take to me and my replacement heart. i'm a new man. i sprint from the train to work and take the stairs 20 flights in leaps and bounds. my coworkers shower my efforts with unanimous, unfiltered accolades. within the week my boss gives me a big raise and moves me from a cubicle to the corner office with the nice view of the SILVERCUP sign. kids and elderly people rush up to hug me on the street. doves and deer appear everywhere i go, shitting rainbows. my girlfriend even stops hating my guts.

but every time i open the door to the freezer my heart is in there waiting for me, eating something, frozen chicken, tortellini, even raw coffee beans. it looks up in disgust, like a scorned claymation california raisin. my heart hates me. it wants to fight me.

life beyond the fridge continues to improve. my girlfriend and i marry, i inherit a zillion dollars from some aunt i never knew i had. the president of the company flees the country to avoid jail time and appoints me in his place. shares skyrocket. Economic Dipshit magazine puts me on its cover three months running. i lose weight, my piano playing develops a rhythmic quality, the ozone layer replenishes itself. my wife and i even speak in complete sentences.

back in the kitchen, my heart's moved to the refrigerator side and it's looking strong, poised to take over the whole apartment. knee deep in a tupperware full of leftover quinoa, it questions my manhood, my intellect, cursing at me like richard pryor kicked out of his own bed in the middle of the night by a dozen tiny richard nixons in elvis gear. my heart warns me of last days (mine) and irreparable offenses (grievous, multiple).

i know that it just wants me back, that all i have to do is promise to pay more attention to it and we can live in peace. but things have gone so much more smoothly without it that i can't justify the expense. so i stop buying groceries.

one day my heart chomps gloriously through a Hungry Man TV dinner, pantomiming sex with a big bowl of chocolate pudding, singing "Guantanamera." two days later it's dead tired, rationing the last baby carrot, plotting an escape it's too tired to execute. by the weekend it's just my heart and a half empty bottle of ketchup. two days later that's gone and my heart's too weak to even stand. profane requests are whispered for foods high in protein and carbs.

the next morning my heart's lying prostrate in the ice cube tray, both middle fingers extended, out cold. that night when no one's looking, i drive it out and lob it off the verrazano narrows bridge, my energy efficient new heart glowing in my chest.

layoffs

call half of your staff into the main conference room, let your HR director explain things in calm perfect resource-speak and then fire her too while someone changes the locks. pay and then fire the locksmith and have them all thrown out into the parking lot and sprayed with a firehose by the security consultants.

pile the unused aeron chairs in an empty conference room until its full of them. empty chairs have sad old memories, sagging marks from sagging people, dead dreams, amusing enough. but these tangled chairs are also actually a form of competition; if something goes wrong and a competitor buys you out they'll never be able to untangle the chairs and suddenly they're paying rent on a room they can't use.

assemble your remaining staff each morning for 8:00 a.m check-ins. pace the room, filing your nails with a machete. reveal nothing.

don't lay off by merit. keep the managers who botched it up for now but pick their lackeys off at random, using percentile dice or the I-Ching. after you've fired half the staff, hire ten new people at higher salaries to break the spirits of the rest. wear a bandolier festooned with human skulls.

when plotting layoffs, don't think people, think strategy. consider office layout, an even gender balance, two by two. if this downturn for some reason features an apocalypse, will your organization be prepared to propagate the species? consider both your situation as chief executive but also that of your chosen successor. castrate or drug other males. police your brood. kill your successor, planting his head on a pike in front of your office to warn pretenders to the throne. think of your employees as potential followers in the dusty haze that will follow the great war. fill the supply room with bottled water, TV dinners, and a trusty cyanide supply, just in case. in case they come for you.

perhaps you've gotten a bit paranoid, alone in your office late at night, drunk in the dead new york quiet. but it's sort of nice, isn't it, how every one else has gone home. now you don't have to draw the shades or lock your office door. unlock the secret vault and review the dog-eared pages of your great plan. if the market continues its descent you can fire them all, and the last man standing will be you: master of the universe.

watching you and chuck dance

your ex-husband never was much for dancing. i think he thought he'd sprain an ankle or miss something on TV. but it seemed like that's all you wanted, to be good and drunk on a saturday night, dancing your face off. it didn't surprise me when the two of you split up, him on crutches and clinging to a little portable black and white TV, watching you move all that heavy shit out of the apartment by yourself, in your dancing shoes.

once you asked me to dance and i said no. it isn't that i won't do it, but dancing combines two of my weakest suits--rhythm and casual physical contact. i'm still trying to play down a 1995 incident involving language barriers, castanets, and temporary blindness for a hungarian economics major. i felt bad, though, like i'd let you down when all you wanted out of life was for it not be a boring sack of bad writing and flat white brooklyn irony.

this made me all the happier to hear you'd gotten together with chuck--a fantastic dancer--but i didn't see what sort of solid gold shit y'all were working with for myself until the other night.

chuck was wearing a sequined bodysuit and wielding 8" Dazzler-brand glow sticks like a ninja. you were dressed in a triceratops costume, your third of the night, this one a sort of maroon. T and I had been drinking "full grown men" (3 parts beer, 2 parts whiskey, 1 part jaeger, lime wedge) and talking up librarians. Then the librarians had taken off, T and I had missed our own cues to leave and there we were, you, chuck, us, and my dad, who for some reason had just arrived and was playing "Lady in Red" on an accordion.

watching you and chuck dance we saw a future spool out where each of you was always looking up to see where the other one was and the other one would always look back, eye to eye, getting each other, digging what you saw and not fucking it up.

you danced, changing leads, twirling, tipping, never spilling. it was almost 5 in the morning. T, my dad, and I took off in full possession of saturday night peace. the clock tower had all its faces back and we couldn't smell piss anywhere, no matter where we walked, and my dad at the top of his game, chord and melody everywhere, a shimmering and nimble pack of mid-sized animals on a forever plain.

how voodoo works

All of my teams are born losers. The Eagles always tank. I gave up the Phillies for the Mets in '01 when I met L, who has an 86 and a particularly coked-up looking Doc Gooden tattooed on her right bicep. Things started looking up. But now all of a sudden the Mets are Charlie Brown trying to kick a field goal, and the Phils are wizards, world champions.

I suspect that my grandfather--my mom's dad--can control the outcome of sporting events with his mind. He's a knowledgable man, and could he string together a focused sequence of games I believe he might guide the Eagles to the Super Bowl.

There are two problems with this flight to victory. First, for late games like last night's, he goes to sleep by the 4th quarter, and some night-owl Chicago area grandfather was probably able to sneak in his own psychic tomfoolery to tighten up the Bears' goal line defense. Second, football games always seem to bring out the man's nostalgia, prompting him to pour a glass of something strong. Andy Reid and Jim Johnson have complicated playbooks, and if grandpa's vision is blurred, he might dial up a blitz where something a bit more conservative would be appropriate.

What I'm saying is that when the Eagles lose, it doesn't bust up my theory. You have to look for other factors. McNabb's inconsistent brilliance is one thing I would watch very closely, if I were you. Cross-tabulate with my grandfather's mindset at any moment.

Another reason the Mets can't win is that my dad's parents met at Connie Mack stadium. It is possible that the jinx hanging over the depressins these past two years has actually been the handiwork of Ed and Lorraine, formerly of Marlton, NJ, now of the sweet hereafter. They're probably haunting the shit out of those sad sack Mets. My mom's dad is a Phils fan too.

To put my ability to jinx my teams to good use, I've taken the amateurish next step of falling in love wiith the McCain-Palin ticket. As my team, they will surely lose...

...but everyone knows that isn't how voodoo works. It'll cross you just for trying to fuck with it so obviously, reverse your jinx. I'll have to get grandpa to show me how it's done.

caffeine paranoia

the kind of doom and gloom week for quick spirals of paranoid thinking, e.g.:

a) total economic collapse perhaps more palatable than second Mets collapse?

b) assets perhaps best converted into canned food?

c) nonprofit fundraising perhaps not first profession to prosper in the new world?

d) south jersey perhaps too populated to protect family?

e) vast array of guns friend has been quietly gathering in his basement perhaps not scary, so much as lending library or nest egg to build a new community on?

definitely need a good night's sleep.

anesthesia

pumpkin a/k/a the troll man, under anesthesia.

you breathe it and the tide goes out, but consciousness can't disappear, it reunites with the whole. so under the knife you're nowhere near the scene.out the window, your breeze curls a tired american flag into something pretty to behold. you're sunshine, trees, the fading fall air, you're each schlep stumbling into the hospital's front entrance to stay alive for their loved ones or help their loved ones stay alive.

you're there but also further out, you're the rings around saturn, the kid orion threw in the air a light year from throw to catch, you're both dippers and a blinking satellite making its rounds, spewing good news back to earth in rapid data packets.

back here on earth they're remaking part of you. but they can't touch you, you're the totality now, all the good in the world. you are baseball momentum, secret handshakes, 12 tone rows, chutes and ladders, frisbee catches. you are cherry coke and strict california grass, you are guitar through two fender super reverbs one clean and one with long delay, and the clean one is snaking a melody through the hedgerows of delay.

you are every love that ever was and ever will, you are the discovery and documentation of heaven, perpetual motion patented and pushed on late night TV for just infinite easy installments. you are every historic first that ever was, first love, first man in space, first saturday morning cartoon. you are the first child, king troll the 1st, progenitor of a long trollish line.

we've been beating ourselves up all week about this and now it's finally coming to pass. every time a door opens i picture some asshole with a bereavement counselor name tag. 'Mr. and Mrs Trollman? I'm sorry..." and what I would punch in a violent helpless expression.

trollman, if you just make it through this, we promise, we'll never take anything for granted ever. we'll learn spanish and chinese and esperanto. we'll dot every i, cross every t, give every homeless person ten dollars and never say a mean or snarky thing to no one. we'll honor every tenet of every religion, we'll root for every team, we'll unbreak everything we've wrecked and apologize to everyone we've ever hurt. we'll take full responsibility for u.s. foreign policy and do our best to reverse it, we'll never ignore each other another second, all will be sainted perfect love ever and ever amen.

but all of this, we bring upon ourselves. in the end it was a minor procedure as those things go and now they're leading us it's fine he's fine are you sure he's fine to where you sleep in the nurse's arms.

and everything that could have receded from the world never to return is back again, and i'm kind of starved for one of those not-bad hospital burgers.

pumpkin preface

before pumpkin (BP) we moved to jersey from brooklyn. the omens didn't improve:

driving a UHaul into town, a bird flew across an oncoming car and shredded through the grill.

on consecutive mornings packs of big flies coated the southeast corner of the house. sprayed with a hose they stayed right where they were.

our cat ignored the omens and found the suburbs much to his liking. william, the kaiser, roamed his fiefdom at will, bestowing purrs and tail wags at his leisure. he tightroped fences, dodged dogs, presented us with a chipmunk for a royal feast, respectfully declined. he pondered the living history of sunny patches, and let it be known by royal decree that as the kaiser willed it, so it should be warm and bright. but he always came back. then one day he did not. or the next. or the next.

such were the portents, but the pumpkin would not to be denied. dear reader, etch his birth date in the nearest tree in a generous-sized heart: 7 - 31 -2008.

let us offer each other some sign of peace.