Author: substitute

nope

The glove compartment isn’t accurately named and everybody knows it.

I dreamed that you and I went for a walk on the beach on a cold night. You wanted to swim and I didn’t, so I waited on the sand for you.

You went out too far, beyond the buoy, and the sea took you. And I waited forever but you never came back. I felt a cold dead sadness in my chest when I knew you were gone forever.

But really, I knew that’s what you wanted. The sea, and not me.

Ferris Bueller’s Mail Merge

N.Y. Students Pull Birth-Control Prank

SELDEN, N.Y. (AP) – Parents opened their mailboxes to find an official-looking letter offering birth control – and motel rooms – for the upcoming senior prom.

They were not amused – and neither, needless to say, were the stunned administrators of the Long Island high school.

“It’s inexcusable, offensive and quite frankly demeaning of all individuals,” Mitchell Ross, principal of the Newfield High School in Selden, said Friday in a telephone interview.

The letter, an apparent end-of-the-year prank, described a “Protection Package” of “very specific birth control items,” including condoms, Ross said.

It also stated that “a number of rooms will be made available” for interested students at the Inn at East Wind in Wading River, where the prom is to be held June 23.

The hotel, which was notified of the prank, does not rent out rooms to high school students, said Ross.

The letter’s official-looking letterhead actually was “cut and paste job,” Ross said.

He said the school, which has about 400 seniors, has narrowed the list of likely culprits to 10 but believed only one or two students were involved.

“In order to pull off a prank like this, we believe it had to be an individual that’s bright and who is familiar with the mailing system,” the principal said.

Disciplinary action will be taken against the individual or individuals involved, said Ross. The hoax also “would involve police action” since mail fraud was committed, he said.

Ross said the mailing list used in the prank, first reported by Newsday in its Friday editions, apparently had been stolen from one of two student offices. The list had been missing since April, but officials at the time did not know if it was stolen or simply misplaced.

Ross said the prank letter envelopes were mixed in with other legitimate school bulk mailings.

fandom

I was staggering around the Internet this evening and I kept tripping over fan subcultures. You know the ones I mean: Harry Potter maniacs, Pern obsessives, people whose entire existence revolves around one rock band, fanfic addicts. It made me wonder about modern popular culture, which is to say U.S. culture.

I’ve read thousands of books so far in my life, and more than a few of them are in my personal Pantheon of literary quality; I re-read them regularly. I’m a lot less of a movie fan but there are a few I enjoy enough to see once in a while and know whole bits from, etc. And I spent years as a pop music critic and have been obsessively in love with a few musical acts over the years too.

But I’ve never felt the impulse to reenact my favorite movie, dress as my favorite character, go to conventions about some artist or work of art, write fan fiction, or in any way be a “fan”. In fact, I can’t stand it. It freaks me out! I remember back in the mid 80s when friends of mine were following some band like R.E.M. or the Meat Puppets all over the country and I was thinking “Great band, yeah! I buy all their records! I am yelling WOOHOO in the front row when then play in town. But FOLLOW them?”

The other thing that’s interesting to me is that the fan cultures I see on the Internet are all about pop culture, recent pop culture at that. You don’t see people getting together at a hotel to share their love of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Small fan subcultures like the Lord of the Rings folks balloon to huge size when the feature film comes out. And some of these, like the furries, are entirely creations of pop culture. No one dressed up as a cartoon animal and went to conventions about it until cartoon animals had been around for quite a while.

I don’t want to get too McLuhan about it, but it seems that fan subcultures are linked very closely with television and movies, as though these groups of people imprinted on a visual image like baby ducks. Does fandom push our parent/child button or something?

the more upmarket caryatid will have a roughened or distressed stone-like finish

I had my web cam up earlier and I had a cast iron blimp on my head. Y’all missed out.

Today was almost a day, but not quite. I’m very nervous and anxious about work, because I need to get stuff done to avoid letting other people down and being a jerk, and it’s been difficult for me for unknown reasons. Usually I don’t get blocked or neurotic about work tasks and I’m alarmed.

Tonight on the patio all the worst people were there. Plus me and odradak. The Loomer and his buddies, including the young man in a wheelchair who may be his son, showed up, sat down and began solving world problems. The loud drunk bartender returned as well tonight but was somewhat restrained.

And of course Bible Mike! He showed up with too many papers and things and immediately launched in a blaringly loud cellphone conversation. He is one of the best Unreliable Narrators I’ve seen. From his end of the conversation it seemed that he’d been in a church group and began lecturing them, and they weren’t interested, and he got loud, and the pastor’s wife told him to leave. He kept telling his friend that he is just a slave! It’s God doing it all! Sometimes his lungs and mouth are used to rebuke people! His face got more than usually red. He also wanted his friend to write a song, JUST ONE SONG, YOU CAN DO THAT! ANYONE CAN WRITE ONE SONG! COME ON, EVEN I COULD!

One really messed-up thing about evangelical christian culture is the idea that violent opposition from others implies that your doctrine and your behavior are correct. The rhymed advice says: “You’re on the right track when you’re under attack”. Now I do understand that prophets and saints are reviled more often than not, and that at times one must be strong to keep one’s spirituality against the disapproval of mistaken people. But, you know, sometimes when everyone is yelling at you to shut the heck up it’s because you’re being a tiresome boob and not a prophet. “Under attack” can mean “boy do you have the wrong end of the stick, son” too.

i heard Coldplay in the drugstore while buying stuff. This put me in a blue mood because 1) I don’t like that band and 2) they remind me of a slice of my life that I’d like to slice out.