Category: Uncategorized

Gay Halloween

gay_halloweenThis is a thing now?

According to NBC Must-See Thursday it is. First-up on the so-much-greater-than-last-season Parks and Recreation was, oh, the young intern girl in the office. The one who I think was in the latest Judd Apatow. The one with the boyfriend who himself has a boyfriend (hilarious). One of her talk-to-the-camera cutaways involved complaining about the lameness of Ann(e)’s party. “I passed over a gay Halloween party for this. Have you ever been to a gay Halloween party? They’re incredible. Last year I saw three Jonas brothers make out with three Robert Pattinsons, it was amazing.”

Then one of 30 Rock’s plot lines involved the male writers trying to be nice to Jenna in order to get in with her gay posse and get invited to a gay Halloween party, because it’s where all the hot girls are.

I’ve thrown at least one Halloween party. Maybe two. But this was back when I was playing it straight, so no wonder they were boring, I guess. I’ve never been to a gay Halloween party. I’ve been invited to meet up with some folks tomorrow night at the Q, which for outsiders is Lincoln’s gay danceclub. It sounds to me even more terrifying than the Q on every other night.

Is it a thing? First Oscar night and now this. Maybe we’re quietly taking over the nation’s holidays. When people scheme to get into Gay St. Patrick’s Day parties* you’ll know we’ve fully arrived.

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* The rainbow? “Corned beef”? It’s perfect.

Help Needed from Readerly Friends

I’m writing a course proposal for a class I’m unoriginally calling “Weird Stories”. So: stories that don’t do anything expected or familiar either in terms of form or content. Here are some texts I might use:

Donald Barthelme, “On the Deck”
Lydia Davis, “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman”
Franz Kafka, “The Country Doctor”
Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”
David Foster Wallace, “Oblivion”
J. Robert Lennon, “The Accursed Objects”
Christine Schutt, “You Drive”
Kelly Link, “Lull”

Speaking of lulls, I’ve got one in my thinking. Can anyone help me think of stories that are great, mostly in the way they flat-out confuse or confound their readers?

Does anyone have 2.3 million I could borrow?

Because there’s kind of a house I want to buy.

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I don’t have a lot of cars, and surely not a Ferrari 250 GT Spyder California, but there’s all kinds of space to, safely, display some.

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It even comes with an answering machine that plays the most deliciously droll outgoing message to anyone who might call up, be it opportunistic best friends, or high school principals.

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I’ll totally go halvsies. Or maybe tenthsies.

Here’s a Dirty/Fun Prank to Pull

1. Break into our home while we’re gone. A friend of mine has a key.

2. Tear out the tree on the back patio, tear down the fence (it’s half falling down anyway), and expand the brick about five feet in both directions.

3. Center the table we have, or chuck it out and get an old weathered picnic-bench-type thing.

4. Hang this over it:img_0520

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You’d be my best friend.

Today’s Brain Stumper (II)

Q: How did Jeanne Tripplehorn become famous?

A (with spoilers): In 1967, Jeanne Tripplehorn was swinging on the swings at a playground in Rancho Cucamonga drinking a YooHoo when a casting agent walked by looking for a strategic place to park the stroller that held his infant son, the better to hit on the vicinity’s single and/or interested mothers. She drank her YooHoo without a straw and yet didn’t spill an ounce on her bright pink T. “You sure are enjoying that chocolate bottled drink beverage,” he said, getting gravel in his espadrilles.

Jeanne Tripplehorn pumped with her pale, fauny legs and said, “Yeah.”

jeanne

“What’s your name, little-girl-on-the-swings?”

Jeanne Tripplehorn said, “Jeanne Tripplehorn. Like a unicorn, but three times better.”
Continue reading Today’s Brain Stumper (II)

This is Water

By now you’ve probably read David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, and if you haven’t your life is lesser for it. If you, like, have been meaning to and but can’t find the time, I’ll try to grab the best part to give you a sense of how good it is:

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Continue reading This is Water

Roth's Pastoral Pictorial

HTMLGIANT is one of many writing-related blogs, this one like the bratty stepchild of the rest. Its posts, like all blogs’, are hit or miss. Today, a bull’s-eye:
roth
“Let me tell you something mother fuckers: it’s not easy writing all day. Sometimes I like to take a long walk by the stone wall and sit down and wait for a mojito — which never comes. If one were to magically appear in my lap, I’d believe in surrealism once and for all; but for now, social realism will have to do.”

N.B.: Yers truly = big adoring fan of P. Roth.