things i used to would've scribbled on scraps of paper and then lost

i miss our old house, the one we grew up in.

that, and more than just about anything, i miss when me and you would spend all day in the backyard sliding on that wet banana. that was just about the most fun thing i can remember from when we were kids. when it was sunny and hot and the grass was bright green and we'd slide til we made a mud pit at the end. and at the end of the day we'd have grass stains on our knees from all the sliding.

(for those of you who wouldn't know, a "wet banana" was nothing more than a long strip of yellow plastic tarp about three feet wide and 30 feet long, that came with a plastic toy banana-shaped sprinkler that attached to the end of a garden hose.)
posted by everett [author] at 1:19 PM

on the radio this morning there was a very interesting interview with richard allen, the natl security advisor under reagan. he apparently has a tape of the famous white house scrambling when reagan was shot. he's come forward with it because oliver stone is doing a film on it, and he wants the truth to come out before the lies. sadly, i did not get to hear the tape played, but essentially he said that the accounts of "total chaos" over who was in charge were greatly exaggerated.

the funny part, though, was how bemused allen is with conspiracy theories about government and particularly the right wing. several callers (some reasonable and some outright wacko) were asking him conspiracy questions of various kinds, and he took them in stride.

one caller asked how many of the reagan people were members of the "skull and bones" or the "tri-lateral commission". he answered by telling a story of reagan being asked one time in alabama a press question about the "tri-lateral commission". he said reagan stumbled his way through the question, then when he and allen had boarded air force one, turned to allen and asked, "what the heck is the tri-lateral commission?" allen explained that it was some supposed secret organization that really runs the country.

allen also laughed that in the movies, the national security advisor usually wears dark glasses and is a bit more plump than he ought to be, and of course is always deep into some kind of conspiracy.

("freemasons run the country!!" - the simpsons)
posted by everett [author] at 9:38 AM

np: belly - broken

i have begun rereading one of my old college texts, pilgrims in their own land: 500 years of religion in america.

it is amazingly well-written. now i know why i didn't sell it after the course. i felt like sharing a few blurbs that caught my eye.

from the preface:

The vast American landscape immediately became--and has remained--an environment of both threat and promise ... Never before in history have so many different religious groups had to coexist. Seldom have even several done so with so little bloodshed, even as the believers were able to hold to their faiths with integrity.

...

Of course, Puritan Protestantism forcefully shaped much of early America and indirectly influences it still, but millions do not recognize the ethos and many reject it. Of course, one can make a religion of pragmatism and practicality, but how do we account for the many who sacrifice themselves and live by improbable creeds?
To put the name "chaos" on chaos is the first step in ordering.

...

It is often said that Americans have amnesia: they do not know who they are, nor do they know their past. Schools teach them about past wars and statecraft but are silent about the spiritual element in their past. The United States Supreme Court has echoed the almost unanimous company of foreign observers and supports the overwhelming finding of the polls: somehow "we are a religious people." Yet few learn what this means or how we came to be such. Fearful lest the dead hand of tradition hold them, citizens ignore or reject tradition. Yet if they do not possess it, it possesses them. From the past come words, images, gestures, and choices that still inform and prod.

i love that phrase, "the dead hand of tradition." how visual.
posted by everett [author] at 10:50 AM

the painting mentioned in the previous blog is here.
posted by everett [author] at 10:30 AM

yes, the song is still playing. i just finished. bleary-eyed now. need sleep. painting started out gothchick, ended up scarfchick. i like it. it's square. it needs a square frame, which i don't know i'll be able to find. prolly have to have something built. i can't scan it right now, because it's still wet. blue paint all over the flatbed, that'd be a royal mess.

i nearly drank out of the paintcup again, but i caught myself. scraped the acrylic off my arms and palms and brushes with scalding hot water from the kitchen sink, which is stainless steel which is a good thing for this. the porcelain in the bathroom stains too easily. there are spots of blue hair dye on the floor in there that will probably never come up. peeled the tape off the borders, looks good. mostly clean lines. scribbled the title, name and date. erased them. my handwriting gets worse every year, it seems. wrote them again in blue pencil, erased them again. repeat about five times. still not satisfied but left it.

i miss the studio from when i was a student. the gigantic room shaped like a cube, two-story ceilings with windows at the top that no one had any way of opening. laboratory-white walls scumbled with paint upon paint of all colors. tabarets crusted so thick with paint that the corners had become rounded blobs. i miss those, for no reason i can explain. maybe because i'd never seen them before ... little lockers-slash-palettes, freestanding on their casters and scattered around the empty studios in the morning like the tide had left them there. people had brush-grafitti'd them with quirky comments i thought were funny at the time like, "there is no god except orange maple," or "colors are for stupid fuckers."

i remember a handful of my classmates who used to show up in the studio in the middle of the night just cause they could. a freckled blonde girl, older than most of us, with a white trash aura and a throaty cigarette voice. she was short, all hips and breasts, curvy and curiously attractive but in a way that didn't really make you want her. always in the same corner of the room, dimly lit, invariably with a beer and a cigarette in hand instead of actually holding her brushes. always hanging out talking to the dusky unshaven guy with the broad shoulders who painted the disturbing 6-foot-tall closeups of sex organs in swirling colors. alston hated him for his paintings, they offended her feminst sensibilities, which i still think is funny as hell. he was, however, perhaps the most talented and respected of us at the time. he wanted to be a soccer coach. that always pissed me off, that he had no intention of becoming a painter; but i liked him anyway. i always wanted to be one of the "in-crowd" of the painters, but i never was, mainly because i didn't hang out in the wee hours drinking with them in the studio. i miss knowing painters. i still don't know any.
posted by everett [author] at 12:44 AM

fuck. i just drank out of my paint cup by accident. i hate when i do that.
posted by everett [author] at 10:50 PM

np: see below.

i have discovered a madonna song i have a soft spot for: true blue.

listening to it on repeat and about to begin painting.

i have also discovered that, when painting, i like to listen to the same song or songs on repeat. i think there is a meditative function to it. interesting and unexpected.

i'm about to start painting.
posted by everett [author] at 10:47 PM

np: ministry - bad blood (mm...matrix-y goodness)

this afternoon i have beaten...

wait. i mean, I HAVE BEATEN the Great Time-Suck that is diablo2 (electric boogaloo). i have uninstalled the beast from my computer, and now i can get on with my life again. hoo-haa. HOO-haa.

harris teeter is nigh. i got to watch a live performance of COPS today across my backyard. the arlington fuzz had some kind of druggie in handcuffs, on the ground, fidgeting and crying and kicking. also, they'd maced him to get the cuffs on. so EMTs came, and they put on gloves, and they got out a water bottle and threw water in his face every few minutes. all the little thug children on that block of my neighborhood came out to see. little faces pressed up against windowscreens.

kris and i watched from the window awhile, then debated getting out lawn chairs and going out back to watch. we decided it might offend the cops, so instead i just put on my coat and sat on the back steps, unceremoniously chomping (chawing, really) big bites out of a red pear and chuckling noticeably (mostly to piss off the thug children). the cops all stood around for much longer than was really necessary, almost laughing at the criminal, who every so often would stagger to his feet and try to run. mostly, he'd fall on his ass before the cops even had to grab him.

more and different cops showed up on the scene to do things, or maybe just to chat, because as a new cop would come over, they'd all start gesturing, re-enacting the "fight" with their hands. hands flying up, out. torsos pivoting like people doing exercises on those tv ab machines. and every so often you'd hear a snatch of conversation like, "i thought he was gonna run," or "you have to open your eyes." i imagine that to the thugs, it seemed the cops may have been tormenting the perp with that water bottle.

the whole experience was gratifying. i spent the better part of the last two years calling the cops on the people on the block behind my yard, mostly because they were cranking their car stereos up to window-shaking volumes and being drunk and disorderly. eventually, some months ago while i was out of town, the cops came and took four or so of the worst offenders away, presumably on drug charges, and the neighborhood has been peaceful ever since. so i was very glad that this time i got to watch as one of that crew was busted.
posted by everett [author] at 3:29 PM

np: nothing. my house is quiet at the moment

a thought crossed my mind last night in the car with colin and nadra. i forget how it came up, but basically i was saying you know how you meet a stranger at random who you instantly despise, for no reason other than that you don't like their face?

as in, their particular combination of facial features? not that their face is even aesthetically unpleasant, more that it is inexplicably the face someone who is your personal enemy. well, i'm thinking that maybe there is a reason for this. maybe on some root level from our collective pasts, our ancestors, etc., that this stranger-hostile resembles the people from that tribe over the next hill that rape and pillage our village. hey, that rhymed. haha. anyway, that maybe we've got a little bit of that jungian memory for those people that carries on down the genetic line.

colin took it a step further and suggested that this feeling might mean "that person's features mean they wouldn't be good to breed with. their genes wouldn't combine well with mine." "not only that, but kill it and its babies!" i added.

then i think we ended up talking about how unusual it is when two ugly parents produce an attractive child. when exaggerated features that are opposite get essentially averaged out in interesting combinations. and then we arrived at the party. and that's a whole 'nother story.
posted by everett [author] at 12:39 PM

np: mojo nixon - elvis is everywhere

went to pennsylvania this weekend. liz and i ate and drank to excess with dex and alicia in some nice restaurants by the river in philadelphia. the neighborhood we were in was very boho ... art shops, yuppie antique stores, and good places to eat.

the antique stores were full of pre-distressed neo-antique furniture, pseudo-folk and pseudo-primitive wooden chessboard knicknacks and jewelry painted in bright acrylic hues, and the usual complement of sour books for women with titles like "how to train your man in 20 days using the tricks of professional dog trainers".

we went from store to store, wrapped up in the kinds of conversations old friends have when they're catching up and not really paying much attention to the stores or their shopkeeps. the only exception being our stop at a wine store where we chatted with the owner over samples before going back outside to walk under the cold drizzle. it was tolerable in my thick swiss military overcoat. my blue hair was out of place in this neighborhood, moreso, it seemed, than in washington where mostly people pay no attention.

the image stuck in my head of a man on the sidewalk who gave me a silent, rueful stare. a shortish man with a pushbroom ned flanders mustache, wearing a cap with USS IOWA emblazoned across the front. i wasn't sure if he was giving me the look because of the color of my hair, or because of the swiss overcoat with the silver and red-enamel soviet surplus medal pinned on the collar, or both. i wondered what he would say if he knew i worked for the military?

that night, it snowed about five inches. the snow came down out of the sky in big, soft flakes, but in such great volume as you'd see when it snows the tiny, rainlike flakes. i hate the cold, and usually i hate the snow as well, but it was so beautiful a sight that liz was surprised that i didn't need to be convinced to go out to play in it. it was about midnight, and we stood under a streetlamp and watched the illuminated white swirl as it fell, the world looking like a great big snowglobe.
posted by everett [author] at 11:43 AM

np: prodigy - g-force

there are few things in life more embarrassing than your boss walking in on you while you're doing "the monkey" to this song.

oh, and the bradbury story from the preceding blog was named "All Summer in a Day".
posted by everett [author] at 9:45 AM