plus la corde est longue

the longer the string, the higher the kite flies.

there are these great Italian candies - dark chocolate bon-bon type doodads, with chopped hazelnut that scream sexy times in your mouth - that i became obsessed with in Europe.  they're called Baci, meaning "kisses" in Italian, and i happen to love their silver foil with cute blue writing and stars, and best of all, each comes with some sort of proverb or saying, usually romantically inclined, but always translated into four or five different languages that i always try to stumble through, no matter the readily available English translation.  they always always always always make me smile.

i used to think, back in the day day (yes, that is an extra "day", to denote just how long ago that day was), that if you hadn't accomplished everything you needed or thought to accomplish by the time you were 35, you might as well just die.  well, i'm 35, and the way i look at it - i haven't sung at La Scala and i probably won't, so no check on that box.  that kinda peeves me until i think about the work it takes to be an opera singer - a LOT, just the same as a doctor, say, and while i'm really quite fascinated with the amazing inner workings of the human bod, there ain't no way in the highest heaven you'd remotely catch me pulling the 80,000 hr weeks it takes to become a bona fide, certified MD.  an opera singer likewise BUSTS their BALLS, their boobies, their buttcracks, their kidneys and livers, everything and anything if you're really goin to get somewhere on that golden stage.  i might have had a nice voice, but truth be told, the slightest stressor throws it into all sorts of disarray, including cold, allergies, and mainly but not entirely all other variables limited by and entirely contributed to my psyche.

so, that's that.

this is Maria Callas.  after i got over Madonna, i couldn't get over Maria, the way she rolled over even the most arduous series of eighth notes that a chap like Bellini Rossini or Verdi could throw down on a symphonic page.  this Greek goddess ate other sopranos for breakfast, in fact, i think she was the greatest that ever lived, and you know how the curtain fell on this one?  she got herself involved with a short Greek guy who promptly turned out to be a complete asshole, whereas in she promptly died of a broken heart, alone, in Paris.  

plus le cerf-colant vole haut

prime time, high def

one of the things missing in my life when i was a child was a television.  not that it was missing in a negative sort, since i'm actually quite thankful now that i grew up without it, but its absence from our lives then seemed to be just another deafening roar that our poverty made to everyone else in the county.  it was so embarrassing to have friends over, to watch them stare questioningly into the corner where the tv should have been, a cold draft from the outdoors causing the nearest curtain to flutter uncomfortably.

the story goes that my old man threw the tube out the 2nd floor window when my brothers ignored his calls to come help with some work outside, just one time too many.  legend also has it that my mom was just pulling in to the house, probably in a silver '67 Chrysler, when that Zenith '76 came crashing to its sad demise in the driveway.  thereon, RD2 Box 9 was sadly and conspicuously absent of that amazingly comforting high pitched whistle that accompanied the powering up of the boob tube in every other home in America.  my father then became so incensed with the concepts of television and so certain that it was the demon in the den and the demise of society that he even tried to start a "non-tv society" which pretty much went over well exactly nowhere in the continental United States, but he did at least make it quasi-official by plastering a serious looking banner across the other set of family wheels at the time, a tow truck, no less.

so, there we were.  my brothers and i riding our bikes to the public library twice a week, all of us filling up a brown paper grocery bag - also of the days of old - with as many books as our bike baskets could carry.  when it was time to come in for the night, after our homework was done, after running ourselves snot-ragged over the hills and cliffs and forests and trees and rivers and limping or carrying our busted selves home, oft times we all sat around the fireplace (it was too cold in those days to hang out upstairs in the bedrooms in winter) and read.  our parents were still learning English then, so every once in a while, pops would look up and ask, from behind his MAGNIFYING glass, "шта значи реч 'conspiratorial'?" and one of us would have to explain it.

these days, i happen to be mildly obsessed with 30 Rock, House Hunters International, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, but man do i still ever HATE tv.

what's better than a Dragon

i used to think there was nothing better than being a Libra, but certainly being born in the Year of the Dragon can only make that cake sweeter.

think about it.  a Dragon really is the shit, seriously large and in charge.  shimmery, scaly, slow but deathly precise, alternately silent or terrifyingly deafening when need be, fiery, mysterious and just pretty much straight up superior...you kinda don't want to run into one, but then again you kinda do in which case you just want to stare and be transfixed by it and think holy shit, i hope that thing doesn't look too closely at me and then when it does, you're preeetty dang sure you've never seen anything as mortifyingly gorgeous, right before it comes down from its mountain perch in one fiery swoop and then i'm not really sure what happens after that.  it either utterly destroys you, in which case, what does it matter, or it scoops you up onto its massive back between silver or gold or purple wings and flies you off to some super magical land where you'd much rather be anyway.  

i don't have a problem with that.  

here's to the Dragons.  happy Lunar New Year.

cross wide end over narrow

about two months ago, i stopped thinking.

a lot of people expect me to say that i stopped drinking when i start out like that, but i can't really drink anyway, so what would be the point?  two drinks and it's more than a solid nauseated sort of night for yours truly, so no, i'm not talking about grey goose sprites and lemon or maybe malbec maybe syrah maybe a nice blend, you know?    

BUT

you see, two months ago, i realized that many of my anxieties comes from overthinking and rethinking and eatsleepwalkrunjumpthinking and just always always always thinking and then those thoughts from thinking reach/sink from your mind into your belly twisting it all around tight and small in there making you want to right away straight puke into the face of the next person you see in front of you and from there that poison reaches out of your belly, grabbing your shoulders tight from the inside with these long skinny invisible anxiety skeleton arms, and it's a miracle that you can get off of your chair to look out the window and maybe raise your face to the sun for a minute, those invisible, cold, anxiety skeleton arms reaching up from your gut and grabbing your shoulders and all, so, as you can see, it all had to come to a definitive end - somehow.

i read some line somewhere in one of the endless self-help books i [used] to be addicted to that you can stop any destructive thought by thinking something along the lines of, "i don't need this piece of shit thought cluttering up my mind right now, so thanks but no thanks and now just beat it"  well, evidently, i became so aggressive in my use of actually saying that line that my mind decided to not think at all, lest it be chastised for thinking too much about whether or not i really should have dessert after dinner say, or where whoever really was if they really were there at the time they said they were there.  and p.s. that self-help book addiction is a straight up legit addiction, so kindly keep your sneering mockery to yourself, please - evidently, mass numbers of Americans fork over exorbitant amounts of money every year to slurp on whatever the next Deepak Chopra has to say about the current and always state of Happiness, which is, evidently, that it's all in our minds anyway.

so, just like that.  not a peep of overthinking thoughts coming from this head now, two months and counting.  people tell me that this newly induced close-to-meditative, perpetual state is probably a rather advantageous place from which to begin any number of successful endeavors, but i don't seem to have gotten the hang of it yet.  what the f am i supposed to do from here?  run for president, run a revolution (calm down, big brother), write a book, feel fulfilled, take a pet, have children?  i'm really not sure what the logistics are on "next steps forward", so i wondered what Buddha would say.  i tried a search on "Buddha" and "thoughts", but just when i thought i really had the peaceful peacefulness of things going, this is what i came up with instead:

You see what you are thinking and feeling, seldom what you are looking at.


great.  do you know what that means, then???  absolutely NOTHING!

righteousness, a mighty stream

what with today marking the birth of one of America's absolute finest, i thought i'd take a moment to discuss the art of oratory.  earlier on with a friend, i dilemminized over whether or not MLK came up with his own words himself or if he had a speech writer in the wings - imagine all those years and replays and thousands of various deconstructions later and it turns out that the "i have a dream" speech was written by some scruffy hipster who just happened to land the "write" gig right out of college??  obviously, we decided this couldn't possibly be the case, but once again, we had to sadly face the fact that not only do we not have anyone cool to rally around and thank and lead a cause for us, but people just can't even speak for shit anymore.  we can't speak, we can't think, we can't do...   

i worried and worried until NPR played a few clips of King speaking frankly at some event he was at, before "I have a dream".  i don't know if it was scripted or spontaneous, but the whole short sentence of it practically brought me to my knees and so i realized, who cares??  the man was magic.  

abracadabra doesn't quite seem to do the trick anymore.  

money and underwear

an interesting thing happened this week that has never really happened before.  i began to run out of money at the same time that i began to run out of underwear.

by "run out" i mean that suddenly i realized how strapped i'd be until the next handout came along, as in not soon enough.  ruminating on this unsightly situation, i realized that over the past few days, i'd likewise really found myself digging around for the black hanky pankies.  now, i don't leave my house without a full face of makeup, bikram yoga be damned, or a pair of black thongs, so when things get low, it's really more than enough to get the nerves on.  i don't know exactly what happened, where they were getting lost, in transit or laundromats or overnight bags, or whatever the case might be, but there was a severe deficit, which also just happened to be the case right then with my dollar collection.

so there i was, scrounging for clean underwear and a quarter, when suddenly i realized that tonight i'd finally be able to do my laundry, AND, it's payday.