Yes she said yes I will yes. Or maybe not. It's so hard to tell after forty years.

This is just simply the best photo taken of me ever. Amazing. Back in 1962 when it was taken I wasn't sure, but now I am. So let the half befuddlement, half disgust, and half barely-able-to-control-my-inappropriate-pleasure 'smile' portend the Happiest of Happy Holidays to you and anyone even sideways concerned with your business interests.

And by the way, my mother ABHORS this photo, says it looks nothing like me, and insists that I take it down in the interests of decency. I love that it looks as though I have a football player's neck, and I love that it is impossible to tell whether I am about to crack up laughing, slap someone, or finally announce the One True Grand Unified Theory. (In all likelihood, I was probably just thinking really hard trying to understand a knock-knock joke.) I also enjoy that between the collar, hair, jewelry, makeup, and expression, I accidentally look like a 1960s Wellesley grad faced with the proposition of either eating 'Easy Cheese' squeezed on tinned 'Vienna Sausages' or dying of hunger.

And on the subject of great wit, What is Santa Claus' favorite style of pizza? --Deep and crisp and even!

A Reader's Guide to the Personal Weblog

Since people appear to be reading this, as well as writing to me about what they read, the following are intended to be helpful tips to prevent those people from having difficulty with making either heads or tails - or heads along with tails, if that is their preference - of the contents.

I'd Have to Use Even More Liner. (And driving would be yet more difficult.)

Firstly, take it all with a hearty helping of coarse-grain Himalayan Pink. I have never once, for example, taken an oyster knife, grapefruit spoon, or hydraulic corkscrew to my (gorgeous, seagreen) eyeballs over the sight of Dockers at dinner, despite what might seem to be (glaring and repeated) indications to the contrary.

I'm Not Reuters.

Secondly, the foregoing derives from the fact that this blog is neither a news wire nor a diary. It is not true, in other words, nor does it purport to be. There is truth in it, surely, but that truth, where one can find it, is snuggled up tight with with all kinds of tricks, like exaggeration, sleazy argumentation, grasping at straws to make a point, and lazy recourse to such creatures as litotes, anaphora, paranomasia, syllepsis, paraleipsis, and their wicked, wicked chums, to lend, at times, the sense that I truly do accord the selection of the evening's shoes the same weight as I do truly weighty things. --Or to make things sound more pleasant, or less pleasant, or funnier, than they really are.

I'm Lying.

Thirdly, the same foregoing can be interpreted to mean that some of the details are factually inaccurate. I might say 'Dockers,' for instance, when in fact I was at no point anything like close enough to read the tag inside the pants of the individual in question. In that case, I am extrapolating from: 'chinos of some sort' plus probability, as I learned a few years ago in Harper's Index that about 80 percent of American men own Dockers. Thus, they are indeed likely to be Dockers -- but, again, they might not be. And if it is the case that there was an initial 'd' in the vicinity looking lost and hapless and unbecomingly unadorned, I might say 'Dockers,' anyway, even if the benighted boob under scrutiny was -- as unmistakably as he was inexcusably -- wearing corduroy. The ratio might be close to the following: 15 percent true, 80 percent fic-trutional, and 5 percent abandonedly, recklessly, from-the-gut brutally honest.

Why, Just the Other Day I Ate a Whole Half Rosemary-Roasted Brandywine.

Fourthly, if not all admissions are entirely accurate, so, too, must one be wary of reading too much into omissions. We might take bathing and eating as two obvious examples: I do both so frequently that one could almost consider them 'daily activities,' and yet there is scant mention of either. I have neither the time nor the inclination to make this a minute-by-minute accounting of the day's every activity. I would like to keep work, for example, out of it almost entirely, confining it, if I can manage, to the occasional snarky and quite general aside. Dating, for its part, is poked at only when it can be used to serve as a convenient portal into disquisitions on some of my more general Concerns with Our Decaying Society, or 'make a point' in some way I misguidedly think might be amusing, or open the way for a large-scale rant on a marginally related topic for which I lacked a segue. The blog also features a great many lacunae -- including around dating -- the (non-?) existence of which gaps being attributable in part to a sense of decency and concern for others. I am more than happy, in other words, to prate on at obscene, contrived length about the recurring failures of my structurally-unsound would-be 'hairstyles' and my inability to give a one-word answer to such questions as 'Do you like tomatoes?' while I would hope that I am possessed of sufficient restraint not to catalogue the conversational and sartorial failings of anyone misguided enough to go on a date, or enter into a relationship, with me. This latter is of course true only of the present: my gay exhusband is still gay, and my other exhusband is still welcome to help me find pants whenever he's in town, and anyone base enough to have offended the sensibilities of the Only Perfect Girlfriend in the Free World (TM) may likewise find mention (if little quarter) herein.

I Left My Heart in Ouagadougou.

Which, having covered factuality, intent, scope, omissions, and timbre, leads us to Sixthly, which is the timestamp. And sometimes the date, too, if I, let's say, neglected finishing my birthday greetings to M. Saussure until the day after, in which case I can retroactively date it appropriately and thus save face with the dead. Neither, then, is an entirely accurate gauge of my doings. Six o'clock is six o'clock in Vanuatu, or Yerevan, or the Marianas Trench. Whichever one I had it set to then. Or a different one, as that list above was arbitrary. For the sake of clarity: I am not certain that I have ever set it to any one of those three. Just as geographically savvy alcoholics can always reassure themselves with the fact that the sun's always past the yardarm somewhere and start the day thus with a G & T rather than regret and misgiving, so, too, is it the case that it is frequently oh-six-hundred-hours somewhere -- just not always precisely where I am. Sometimes, frankly, the thing's all written, and I just want to look over it once before work, or upon returning home, which would mean I had 'really' written it before, even though I am pushing send now.

My spectre around me night and day

Like a wild beast guards my way...

Dost thou not in pride and scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn,
And with jealousies and fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

There are various reasons I don't own a cat. One is that my bed does not have a roof.

To a cat, however, it looks like it has a roof, because it looks like it has sides, due to its having curtains where sides would be on the sort of thing that has them. Consequently, when the neighbor's cat comes over, he (or she: I have no idea), being a cat, frequently wants to get onto the nonexistent roof, and to accomplish this jumps from the low chest, to the tall lingerie chest, up the curtains, and then, using the tops of the curtains and his claws, inches his way - precariously and flattened out because there is about an inch of clearance - to the far end, from which he still believes, until he gets there, that he can leap to the top of the armoire.

Since he in fact cannot, he instead just sits there, discomfited and increasingly petulant, until I put on a padded suit, goaltender's mask and gloves and reach to get him down.



A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime. -Mark Twain

Blackwater Found Stealing Old Ladies' False Teeth

Blackwater killed the New York Times' puppy dog in Baghdad.

Have You Seen This Inner Child?

I blame it on the Beats. That is unsurprising if you know me, as I blame most of everything on the Beats, from unpremeditated 'poems' of testosterone-ridden admiration hastily scribbled on cardboard bar coasters, to white men in dreadlocks, to women in public in sweatpants, to shorts on adults, sneakers as shoes, Dockers as dining attire, sexagenarian playboys, and restaurant place settings without knives. I blame blogs on the Beats, for heavens' sake: they are evidence of the now pandemic delusion that everyone, anyone, can write -- and therefore, what's more, should. But at least we are not getting paid for our self-indulgent drivel. And it is not being forced upon anyone, as is sadly the case with barroom panegyrics and their unwitting subject/victim, as well as the sight and sound of long-haired middle-aged men in sportscars blaring Korn or Dave Matthews or some indefensible 1980s girl band from their convertibles.

Yet I digress. While all those symptoms and disorders share a common etiology, and while I could digress far more in innumerable concentric circles about all of it until I bored even myself, what they also have in common is what I wish to lament here: a renunciation of the Civility clause in our social contract, the subsection that stresses that your rights end where mine begin. Now, only an adult can understand that concept; an infant doesn't even know that he stops at any point, and a child has great difficulty seeing beyond his immediate desires and their quick satisfaction --much like the Beats, and their latter-day progeny unswerving in their resolve to 'let it all hang out,' 'chill,' 'listen to their inner children,' and 'find themselves.'

I for one have yet to wonder where, or who, I am. (At least in the sense they intend, and for other, more practical, senses I have GPS, and the invaluable Google Maps on the Blackberry, not to mention the nice officers who pull me over and ask if I know where I am going, which is something, even with the above, that I sometimes cannot answer affirmatively.) It used to be common wisdom that if one had questions about this, the answers were predictably to be found in a youth hostel in India or Western Europe at the age of 18 or 21. Those failing to encounter an integrated self by that time, and to choose an appropriate superego congruent with this self, were quite rightly deemed insane and offered antipsychotics at government clinics.

Now, of course, it's quite different. One can realize at 70 that there is a gaping hole where instead a Whole should be, of personality, tastes, goals, desires, values, and dreams. A void where for years all those components of a self, of a Gestalt, were ignorantly presumed to have been resident. And nobody gets medicated, or lobotomized, or ridiculed. Divorced, perhaps, but then marriage or 'heavy' relationships are just one more instance of the hand of the Man keeping a free spirit down. A free spirit who could instead be occupying himself with penning boozy free-form verses with a Sharpie over several months' worth of Chimay stains on paperboard about my felid eyes and porcelain cheeks and sangria lips of oranges and sunshine and the endless day and hair black as rainwashed Dougfir in the misty gloom of the blackblack forest gloom. Or something.

No, I encounter myself every day, whether I want to or not. I'm the only reason I have ten red suit jackets. I'm the only excuse for buying aspirin by the case and for putting ice cream into the refrigerator. I can look to no one else for a rationale for the absurd bed, or the driftwood arrangement by the bathtub, or the highly idiosyncratic wine selection, or the dying houseplants. It's down to me and me only that there are bottles of unfinished perfume around, miles of sari cloth, hairstyling products in the wine cabinet, and socks in the tinned-goods-organizer in the kitchen. It's me with the tailor on speed dial and the phobia of hairdressers, and me with the books under the covers on the passenger side of the bed. Everywhere I turn, ever since I had a sense that there was in fact a me to speak of, I haven't been able to get rid of her. Even when I look in the mirror, it is chilling how deep a resemblance my reflection has always borne to me, and me alone.

So I don't get it. How does one wake up, in the midst of being an adult and decades after crashing triumphantly past Piaget's goal line, to find that that the hole one so recently discovered is a hole with a shape that can only be filled with Burning Man, or rabbit hunting, or arena rock shows, or casual sex, or over-the-road trucking? Genuinely, it strains my mind. Additionally, what makes it all the more grievous is that the vast majority of such cases do not 'realize' they have 'always wanted' to join the seminary, or start an NGO; instead, their epiphanies as regards this previously missing 'self' tend to focus on the need to tend to the needs of that neglected self, not to others. This in its turn leads to a convenient discursive loop, as the neglected self, being neglected, is always presumed to be in some child state, if not the dread Inner Child itself, thus excusing all manner of base and self-indulgent, if not overtly puerile, pursuits.

Which is where the Beats and the Social Contract come in, if only out of convenience rather than painstaking logic, since I am becoming quite cranky with thinking of all this, and have a long week ahead in which I will have to muster my usual charming self repeatedly. The painstaking logic can come later, if I feel like the taking of pain might for some reason be pleasant at that point. For now, the Beats and their popular lionization, quite simply, are handy scapegoats for the existence of the near-ubiquitous reverence for the supposed virtues and, indeed, necessity (for the 'self,' of course) of a perverted, solipsistic, jejune freedom over the adult responsibility necessarily implied in acknowledging the worth of others around one, one's fellows in society. Acknowledging that we are a part of a group, and that the group consists of other individuals with their own desires and needs, perforce constrains behavior. If one can manage to accept that it's improper to murder members of this brotherhood, I fail to see it as a great cognitive leap to acknowledge as well that respecting them in other ways is in order.

And etiquette is nothing but respect and consideration for others. It is not about proving to (or lording over) others that one knows the proper utensils to use for jellied consommé or oysters or bacon; it is instead at base an attempt to create and foster an environment of mutual respect. In other words, I respect you by not sonically resembling in any way a giddy aye-aye with an egret's egg as I eat my consommé, and by not air-guitaring 'Stairway to Heaven' as you pray with your congregation and by not ruining the coming week for you by blasting inane 'dance music' out the opened windows of my Porsche or forcing you to witness the horror of my deformed toenails and crusty heels in 'flipflops' or a topographical map of my cellulite through mangy sweats because I was, yes, rude, that is the word, and so is immature and so is tiresome and so is inexcusable after the age of three and in my rudeness wore Inside Clothes outside because my Inner Child wanted to.

Perhaps at this point we are too far gone in our stoned and Xanaxed and liposucted solipsism for one to expect that we might credit our peers with having existences, wills, and souls of their own. But if we are intent on becoming children ourselves, it is not unreasonable to suggest that we put into our service that much-vaunted 'childlike imagination' we thus have again at our disposal and, for the purposes of sustaining an at least marginally livable world, pretend that they do and accordingly put behind us the stringy grey ponytails, the shorts when not on the water or holiday, the adolescent pop music, the sweat pants and track suits outside the gym, and, in the name of all that is holy, unsolicited spontaneous 'poetry' of any stripe.

We'll Frolic and Play, the Eskimo Way

It's not as though I don't have Christmas cheer, as the previous post may have seemed to imply. I have scads of it, as evidenced by the Christmas dioramas in the accompanying photos. One is inside, and features some kind of dwarf fir, I think (I made notes at the time - and thank you Flower World - but I don't remember where I put them), and the trio outside may be firs, as well, but, again, I no longer recall.

At any rate, two of the boxes outside are green and one is red. That equals Christmas, as does the shape of the trees, and the fact that they are some kind of conifer. Inside, as you can clearly see, there is red, green, and gold in the diorama next to the planter, in the form of vintage, modern, and Saudi perfume bottles. What is less obvious is the exuberant holiday cheer stuck into the planter itself, consisting of a sparkly apple, two sparkly little balls, a tiny drum, and simulated, sparkly conifer and ivy branches.

Moreover, my bedroom itself is red, red, red and gold. My living room is green and red and gold. Or at least celadon and sage and raspberry and gold. So I am living Christmas all the time. I even have Balthazar in Spanish, yet none of the rest of the (less-Christmassy-titled) Quartet in any language right now. Add in the photo of St. Joseph with the infant Jesus, and it's almost oppressively Yule in here. All I need is a karaoke machine and some nutmeg, and the opportunity to catch the neighbor's cat unaware and stick some stuffed reindeer antlers on him, and then no one, no one, will again question my holiday cheer.

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

It seems I had misremembered Christmas. It's not surprising, really. I did so well with my sombre Yom Kippur wishes for my more Hebraically-minded friends that I was bound to mess something up.

Anyway, Christmas is always a bit of a conundrum for me. There are so many options, and all are slightly discomfiting. When I had roommates, or lived at boarding school, Christmas was always a time to savor a brief bit of solitude and quiet. I remember at college in Southern California, KPFK would play a reading of The Alexandria Quartet all day and all night for days over Christmas. If I were staying in the dorm over vacation, I could sit alone in my dorm room for hours at a time and listen. I could stay up all night and listen -- and who cared? it was Christmas break!

Now, however, I usually fulfill my RDA of quiet, solitude, and contemplation without needing a state-imposed religious holiday to do so. This leaves me in a bit of a bind when I do find myself confronted with one. Most things are closed -- not just (all but eleven, according to Open Table) restaurants and supermarkets, but gas stations, convenience stores, tire stores, nurseries, book stores...almost everything. Probably even Wal-Mart, too. Well, maybe only in largely Christian markets.

Thus normally the activity choices outside of churchgoing are fairly circumscribed: some kind of Christmassy thing at someone's Christmassy house, or Chinese food and a foreign film with the Jewish population of whatever city I'm living in, since Larry Durrell can no longer be relied upon for succor. In the first case, not only is there no species of traditional North American or British holiday food that I enjoy (although I love getting the good charms in a pudding!), I also dislike feeling trapped in someone's house as people get drunker and stupider and the dread board games are resorted to one after the other in an attempt, presumably, to stave off the Holiday Melancholia from which the revelers would otherwise be suffering. If I should find myself overtaken with suicidal impulses and existential angst, God help me if I for one second believe Boggle to be the cure.

The problem with Christmas dinner for the single person who is not overwhelmingly inclined to celebrate Jesus' birth with drunkenness or ironic renderings of 80s metal ballads is that Jews and Chinese seem to be the only religious or ethnic minorities who want things to proceed with as much semblance of normalcy as possible amidst all the gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And since, outside of Florida and big Eastern cities, the Jewish community in North America tend to leave the restauranteuring to other groups, while non-Chinese non-Christians in the business gladly leap upon their one opportunity a year to take a day off, that leaves the Christmas trinity of Hunan, Mandarin, and Szechuan, with the odd offering of late-night dim sum (not available in all areas). There are also, of course, 24-hour/365-days places and nicer hotel restaurants open on Christmas, if your Yuletide tastes run toward chicken-fried steak with eggs or eating amidst lonely, stranded business travelers and recent divorcés who haven't yet found the courage to cook for just one.

I hadn't misremembered that. It is hard to forget the limited culinary offerings when the same thing happens every year and I get sufficiently frustrated, once more, around 8PM so as to relent and find myself again numbly picking at a plank of ghastly tinned ham over a Monopoly board, with people potty on boozy curdled cream with nutmeg scum to the accompaniment of a whiskey-fueled rendition of My Way streaming from the den-turned-karaoke-studio.

This year, however, I had an alternative. My Australian friend was going to be in Denver on Christmas Eve prior to flying out for skiing on Christmas Day. The snow would lend a festive yet nonsectarian air, and the crack addicts outside the window would serve as handy stand-ins for more traditional holiday revelers. And since I'd already be in a hotel, it would make sense to eat in it. Or I could just have some nuts and Toblerone from the minibar. In either case, not a single incongruous eggroll would need pass my lips.

That is the part I misremembered. I had about 80 to 1 on it being Christmas Eve/Christmas with a hedge of 2 to 1 on New Year's Eve/New Year's. I lost out on both, because it was squarely in the middle, the 27th, which doesn't help me at all, since by then I could be eating Hakka or Lebanese again if I wanted to. My only wish is that, whatever transpires, however many rounds of cribbage or Pictionary and however many murdered Rat Pack songs and show tunes I have to sit through, however many people cry, or break up, or end up in the ER, and no matter how many bowls of punch are gone through, there be no Tofurkey at any time, anywhere. That would kill my Christmas cheer completely, and quite possibly permanently.

I'm...Sensing...a...Grammarian...from...Beyond...

We all remember Captain Kirk. Some - the hot alien 'humanoid' chicks on distant planets, for example - remember, no doubt, far, far more of him than we mere human late-night dorm-room Star Trek rerun watchers ever knew. But even we can recall his slicked hair, his ripped shirts, his luck with the ladies, the high attrition rate of his red-uniformed personnel when out in the field.

Mostly, however, what endures is his diction. It was daring, unique, revolutionary, even, not merely to have an African-American woman on the bridge of the Enterprise as an officer, but to also have a main character speak...in...so...repellent a -- manner. It needn't only be repressed trauma, however, that we take from this shared heritage: knowledge of exactly what someone means when he refers to 'Captain-Kirk-Speak' can help us in our quests to make the world a better place -- or at least not make people sick when we communicate with them.

Leaving aside the overrated realm of face-to-face contact, I would like to turn to the written word and, in fact, to pay especial attention within the print world to the problem of email. Email can be a bit confusing, I realize, because we send it to people we know and people we don't know, and we use it with people with whom we share a mutual fondness, as well as with people we despise and who despise us. Still, in hopes that the last category can remain smaller than the penult, I would like to add my own rule to the standard email proscriptions of Don't Write in All Caps; Don't Eschew Standard Paragraph Standards; Don't Assume Something Will Sound Funny and Not Mean Once Written; Don't Use LOL, R U, U 2, C Ya, or suchlike, unless you have not yet graduated high school; Don't Write in Such a Way that Emoticons Seem Necessary to Convey Your Meaning; and Don't Use Emoticons.

My rule, friends, is simple: it is Do Not Abuse the Ellipsis. We all have our problems, our own crosses to bear, but years of living upon this earth have taught me that most of them derive from bad parenting, poor health, and imperfect decision-making skills. I can think of exactly none that could possibly be traced to run-ins with three...sequential...printed...dots. So take out your pain on something else.

Here is the lowdown on the skinny re the 411 about the ellipsis (plural ellipses, and coming from the Greek ἔλλειψις, meaning, unsurprisingly, 'omission').

• You can use it in quotations, to indicate you are leaving something out, as in this bit of Yeats, where I show I hacked it from the front and back and tore some guts out of the middle, as well:

1. - ...Our breasts are heaving...our lips are apart...

• You can stick it at the end of something, to indicate you could go further, that there really is more to be said (again, an omission), but you are opting not to, for reasons patent or opaque. You might also see this type of usage in fiction writing to describe the trailing off of one party's side of a conversation.
  

1. - Obviously I never planned to sleep with Jennifer...
2. - Surely you're not wearing that shirt...
3. - Ronald was doing perfectly fine until he met up with those Heideggerians...
4. - Now that you mention it, I don't remember turning the stove off...
   

• And I admit that it can be used, at least in casual situations, at times, to represent a pause longer than a comma between two parts of a sentence. Alright, fine, even between two sentences, but again, only in very casual communication, and not all the time, and not to imbue the writing with a gravitas that it lacks qua writing (which is how and where writing should get its bloody gravitas, if it even wants any to begin with. Not from dots. No dots I know of are capable of impregnating any pause).
  

1. - He told me he loved me...again.
2. - I rewrote the article...with no ellipses this time, sir.
3. - Well, yes, it seemed odd...but he is a Heideggerian.
4. - Of course I turned the stove off, pet...or was that yesterday?

What it shouldn't be used for is a crutch, as with habitual attempts to render thought processes typographically. Nor again, as per the above, to make things seem thinkier or deeper than they really are. Think of it as simple mathematics: if you look at a page of writing, what does it mostly contain? Positively tons of letters, only here and there interspersed with dots and other punctuation. The punctuation is there in the service of the letters and the words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs those letters make up. The punctuation is like the boom-mike guys on a set: necessary, but hardly the crux of the matter.

So these sorts of things frighten me:

1. - time to...think, and...reconnect, with self...
2. - wanting to...understand
3. - to think...and to feel...
4. - for me...and...for you
   

I don't know what they mean. I don't know what the ellipses mean, either. That's a bit of an exaggeration: I do, to a certain extent; the ellipses are there, in cases like those, alternately to 'soften the blow', to serve as a proactive, prophylactic defense against allegations of callousness, and to prove, through graphical representation, that each word was labored over until just the right one, or, minimally, the least wrong one, out of such an imperfect selection, was at last found. I'd say more here, but I'm...thinking...right...now, in fact. Is it not obvious? Can you still suspect I am not, despite the preceding proof?

Dear...friends (see? it's creepy, no?), the Japanese are the only ones on this planet who can use ellipses routinely without thereby increasing my chances of dying of stress-related illness. The reason is that the Japanese are the only ones on this planet with a culture that demands much be left unsaid, in order to preserve dignity and promote harmony. Because of this, there is a whole infrastructure, thousands of years of precedent, giving context and meaning to each incompletely-uttered thought. That in practice means it is far from impossible in the vast majority of cases to deduce what lies on the far side of the dots.

1. - Yes, Friday is perfect... (It's just that)...
2. - I didn't sleep with Jennifer... (But that was only because I fell down the stairs untying my shoes)...
3. - We'll certainly consider your proposal... (And by 'consider' I mean laugh about it and toss it in the trash)...
4. - I would be ever so happy to join your Heidegger study group... (I'll just make sure to be elsewhere and unreachable every Wednesday from 3 o'clock on...)

All four have implications that conflict with at least part of the stated sentence. And in spoken Japanese, or English spoken by a Japanese person, this fact would be obvious in the moment, as would be the gist of what remained unsaid. But unless you are Japanese, and dropping a few dots at the ends of things to maintain decorum and foster civility and good will, I beg you: be chary with the ellipses. Plus, if you save up enough of them, you won't have to worry about coming up with any pithy Final Words with your last breaths; you can just whisper 'Dotdotdot' and leave the world to make the necessary inferences from your life.

A Little Less Conversation

Some of you will recall my earlier jeremiads about drug ads for potions to stop brittle bones and stave off penile-implant surgery. Those of you who don't, and those of you who for your own unfathomable reasons wish to relive the horror, can click on 'Sally Field' or 'flaccidity' in my Labels list to the right and share in my pain of many months ago.

Let me begin by saying I don't watch television all that much. I have a very small set, and it is hard to see from where I usually am, which is at my computer desk, ordering antique perfume bottles off Ebay or once again struggling to come up with ideas for a seasonal dish in the cold and stormy heart of winter that does not involve turnips or kale. And since I generally turn the sound off when it is on, I seldom have any idea what anyone is saying, since I can't read the subtitles at all from thirty feet away. Still, occasionally, I have both the television and the television audio on simultaneously, and when this baleful combination of phenomena occurs, it is rare that I do not regret it subsequently.

Recently I was foolhardy enough to press 'power' without 'mute' before walking over to the vanity to select the day's fragrance, whereupon I was wrested from my tranquil toilette to stand agape and aghast at the horror that flickered before my widening eyes. For it seems that now Viagra has a new campaign, worse than all the rest, and while I hold no particular affection for any Elvis song or film from the 1960s, it does seem that using Viva Las Vegas to hawk erection pills diminishes substantively whatever charm or cachet that song can be said to have once possessed.

Not that it wasn't full of macho swagger, boastful virility, and the desire for unbridled hedonism -- if, admittedly, less than artfully put by the crack songwriting team of Messrs. Pomus and Shuman. But that's just it (well, part of it): the ad is using the universally-recognized song to evoke that libertinous 'I'm just a devil with love to spare' strut in the back of the viewer's mind, while the new lyrics, by contrast, kick the unsuspecting rogue in his pants. Not to mention his cerebellum.

Firstly, let me say that I understand Cialis is doing well, and has done well marketing itself as the flaccidity fixer for men who already have women to have sex with. It has advantages Viagra does not, including more rapid and longer-lasting effects. That's hard to battle, and simply whining, 'Heeey, remember us? We've got one, too. And it's kinda the same' is clearly insufficient. If New Coke had done well, its competitor would have had to strive to position some new product of its own as being similar, and similarly delicious. So Viagra finds itself wanting to declare that even married men who want to have sex with their wives will find it useful.

Of course, Pfizer (or their ad agency) could have said that. Explicitly, and in uncloying language. Instead, we are given the image of a group of early-middle-aged men in the widest assortment possible of casual wear (so that you, whoever you are, will surely be able to find one to 'identify' with: is it the plaid-shirt guy? the rakishly-untucked one? or are you really the bandanna'ed motorbike rider in your heart?) who got together in a bartenderless roadside tavern in the middle of the day to turn Elvis Presley songs into paeans to Erectile Dysfunction drugs and sex within the bonds of marriage.

How do I know they're married? Could I not just be leaping to conclusions for the sake of being able to hate all these ads equally (and by the way, I have never yet seen a single ad for Levitra, and for all I know they could be as bad or worse, but if we fall in love, you and me, and you find you're having a bit of a problem, and I still haven't seen any, please do the right thing and support Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline)? No, I know they are married because I was subjected to first-year-film-school clunky closeups of wedding bands on left hands playing various instruments, and because my brain was fried by having the following lines imprinted on it, forever:

• This lonesome toad is sick of the road/Can't wait, can't wait to get home
• At the end of the day/I'm not a guy who'll stray/'Cause she's my heart's desire

'Lonesome toad,' I guess, is supposed somehow to make them seem like normal men who say manly, cowboyish self-deprecating things in bars, rather than go to them to sing about drugs and impotence and monogamy and how they are inexplicably stuck in the bar, when really all they want to do is go home and have drug-enhanced sex with the wives they miss so much. And, since they have been trapped there who knows how long, and have been thinking of little besides their wives and the great married sex they are going to have with their 'hearts' desires,' I can presume that they, unlike Elvis, are not wishing that there were more than twenty-four hours in a day -- unless their Honey I'm Home package includes a Cialis tab or two.

'And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.'

Can't Celine Dion just stop? Soon? Now-ish? Can no one make it end? How can this possibly be happening, and why are we all so powerless to stop it?

Your Tuscan Holiday Awaits. In Fredericton.

And while we are on the subject of appalling taste, I would like to go to Tuscany for a moment, if you don't mind. Not the real Tuscany, of course, but the false, 'fauxed' Tuscany of interior designers and housebuilders and underpaid furniture painters in China.

I am not certain when this started, as I am a delicate soul and try not to notice things that will wound me. I still remain unaware, for example, that people use bed sheets sewn from tee-shirt material. But it has been going on at least a few years: the first 'Tuscan Square' restaurant cum 'Tuscan Lifestyle' shopping plaza went up in 1997 in Rockefeller Center. And I don't fault Americans or anyone else for wishing they had more time to sit around drinking brunello and eating good olives. It's just that they don't actually live in Tuscany, and that drywall from 1997 made to look like cracking marble or rotting lumber is still drywall from 1997. (Notice in the decorating example left that the ceiling has been painted, as well, to make you believe you are simultaneously outside in the Tuscan sun and inside a 'Tuscan' dining room with real faux masonry!)

One of the problems with attempting to copy something is that you are unlikely to get it right. Think of any number of 'period films' and you'll realize it's not just a matter of adding in a few Studebakers and bakelite phones, but being able to resist, as well, current fashions in such seeming minutiae as eyebrows, lip shape, location of hair partings, and how to line (or not line) eyes. A film made in 1984 about Joan of Arc or Marie Antoinette will always look like a film made in 1984. Likewise, you're not fooling anyone with your 'Tuscan villa' in Manitoba or Missouri.

Nor do I understand why someone would wish to try. On the one hand, if I am overtaken by the urge to stay in an Alsatian chateau, that urge is predicated on the Alsatian chateau being in Alsace. Not in Edmonton, and not in Buenos Aires. As for 'Tuscany,' no amount of 'timeworn' copper pots, 'sun-drenched accents,' hideous pre-cracked 'majolica' knockoffs, 'Old-World' murals of grapes and vineyards, dining tables that 'cleverly' incorporate wine racks, or wooden beams 'aged' by having the gardener beat them with tire chains are going to evoke anything other than sadness and dyspepsia in a reasonable person.

On the other hand, there is a persistent belief here in an inexorable correlation between price and worth. I remember someone proudly and wistfully showing me a pre-aged, pre-yellowed, 'crackle-finished,' 'French Provincial' (I think, although it is easy to get these things wrong, and, frankly, I tried not to look at it too long) formal dining set he was soon to need to replace, once his estranged spouse's boyfriend's wife was completely moved out of her residence. 'You can't imagine how expensive this was,' he whispered as his hand caressed its 'crackled' corner gently, believing (quite reasonably, under normal circumstances) that only with this knowledge would I be able fully to appreciate its 'timeworn,' 'Old World' charm, and grasp by extension the measure of the sort of man willing to lay down thousands of dollars for a Sino-Gallic gamboge monstrosity such as this, with its premature patina so skillfully achieved through the meticulous application of coats of various subtly contrasting tints overlain with caustic solvents and a gloss finish by 75-cents-an-hour artisans in Guangdong.

Clearly, his revelation had a rather different effect than that intended. Nonetheless, I cannot help hoping I am not alone in this, that someone else, wherever he may be, finds the existence of a series of tract homes (with 'old world charm' and 'individual Tuscan flavor'!) called Toscano as odious and incomprehensible as it patently is. Not to mention the 'Tuscan' salt shakers, 'Tuscan' latrines, and 'Tuscan' condo kitchenettes one cannot help but encounter no matter how assiduous or numerous the precautionary measures undertaken. I am starting to feel as though I am living inside an Escher drawing of a purgatorial pizzeria in which each step I take leads me not to a door, not to respite or sanctuary, but to another stairway up to another 'marble'-columned, plastic-grape-arbor-festooned, trompe-l'oeuil toilet-wall mural that doesn't trompe anyone.

And if anyone has the vaguest notion what the following sentence means, I'm all ears. I, for one, have never hid any gold in any of my 'furthermost crevices', and I shudder to contemplate the day when that would seem desirable or well-advised: The earth's hues in ranges from blistering yellow like the sun itself to the concentrated gold's like those she hides in her furthermost crevices are used throughout this theme.

Never Mind

Let me apologize to all cats and cat owners everywhere. My Umbrian friend informed me that the cat was suffering from the weather, just as a dog would do, and so it wasn't him, or me, but God. And now that the monsoon has stopped and the floodwaters are nearly cresting, and blocked roads will at some point be opened and electricity will conceivably be restored to some, he is once more resting blithely, and thus exceedingly cute again and not trying to eat my eyeballs. Apologies for any confusion.

Shakespeare and His Cats

And with regard to that neighbor's cat, I am at a loss. We are having a bit of very heavy rain here, which makes me less than favorably disposed to going out (and although I do have a raincoat, I have no idea what a person is supposed to do with her hair, or her shoes), and as it is Sunday (now Sunday night), any work I had is work to do at home. So I mostly, with a couple exceptions, stayed in. Which is where this cat comes in.

Cats have some crazy hold on the psyches of certain people. There is a whole Cat subculture about which I neither know nor wish to know anything. These people buy cat napkin holders, cat toothbrush holders, cat blankets, cat lamps, cat mousepads, and cat 'art', and some, I can only imagine, have probably even seen Cats, not to mention purchased and no doubt enjoyed copies of the too-ghastly-to-contemplate picture-book Shakespeare Cats, in which memorable scenes or characters are needlessly rendered as though being played by - obviously, at this point, I suppose - cats... it's far too painful to elaborate further...

-- Never mind; I can't help myself: they buy up cups with cats on them, cats to pour cream from, cat-embellished shirts, and cat-embellished tea towels. They have Whimsical Cats, and Naughty Cats, and Sensual Cats (usually, of course, panthers, and generally meant to symbolize alongside this austere and capricious sensuality the nexus of feminine-feline and the Sphinx-like opacity [don't pretend you didn't know it was coming; of course it was; it always does] of both), and cats to burn incense in and cats to hold your toilet roll while you sit and stare in amazement and transfixed disgust at the cat holding your toothbrushes...

I have no better explanation for this than you do, and it appears also to be confined largely to one sex. If you start to say, Yes, but women have always been compared to cats, or even, Yes, but women are so, well, feline, so Sphinx-like, aren't they, in either case, I'm not going to punch you or even wish to, but neither of those excuses such appallingly bad taste. Thou canst compare me to a summer's day, if you feel the need (and I sorely doubt that you do, even though I am more lovely and yes more temperate, too, but never mind), and I will be in no greater danger than before of going out and buying cheap prints of Van Gogh's Sunflowers or decorating in chintz. Maybe I am sunny as the smile of the blue firmament, but that doesn't make me incline toward hanging hummingbird feeders in the latrine!

So for me, the Inscrutable Mysteries of the Inscrutable Cat hold no appeal. I am not curious in the slightest why someone should wish to be so mercurial, so self-centred, so obstinate, and so awake at exactly the wrong times. I don't care. Dogs don't do it. Plants don't do it. Even educated clams don't do it.

Today was an endless loop replayed with, for my part, ever-diminishing enthusiasm. The not wanting to sit on his 'special place' followed by savagely attacking the Jetsons chair followed by whines for eating again followed by whines to go out immediately upon which came the sulking outside the door subsequent to which was the biting of the hand that retrieved him (from the rain outside the door, I might add) short upon the heels of which was ignoring the Things to Scratch I'd bought for him in preference to something I had bought for vastly divergent purposes after which came the return of randomly attacking things and knocking perfume bottles off things not designed to be leapt onto...

I freely admit I know nothing about cats. That is one of the reasons I don't have one. Another one is a preference for species that 'make sense' at some level inside my hominid brain. When a dog, for example, stares at his food bowl, or pushes it toward you, you are right in assuming it means, You are fifteen minutes late on the grub, chump, and I'd say I'm never going to forget it but I'm a dog and this will all be irrelevant and, just between us, irretrievable, in about twenty seconds. It never means, Go to the refrigerator and grab something for me and then walk over here because I really want to leap up and bite you in the face.

Clearly, however, there is Not Having One and 'not having one,' the latter of which I fall into now. His real parents leave him outside, whether it is 85 degrees, or snowing, or hailing, or pouring rain. He hides under cars from the sun, or lies on top trying to get some heat: it's not as though I have a choice in this, wrecked weird chair or no. I made him a bed inside the Chinese wedding cabinet, on the lower tier so it was safer, even though it meant I couldn't use it for what I had intended to, or close it. I put a box in there that I painted that said 'Baby' so he would know where to go. I bought him his own hamper to attack once he made it clear he wanted to kill my cute matching set of two, which matched everything in the house, and then relented and gave him one of those when he didn't want the nearly identical one I'd got for him. And then I bought a wrought-iron one for me, so there would be no question...

Still, though -- and this doesn't mean I want anything, ever, in the shape of him -- he is, when he is not trying to rip open my jugular, or nap on my keyboard while I'm typing, or tip over my wine cabinet, or ruin my stockings when I'm trying to put them on, he is, actually, recklessly, unashamedly, murderously cute...

Furniture Wrasslin

While in a stylistic slump I bought the above child's bed. I of course had no intention of leaving it like that, but nonetheless, looking at it now it's easy to wonder what I was thinking. I am no stranger to DIY, but there are some things that even I can't D. What you can see in the photo is that it is pine, which is by itself something, indeed, to reckon with. What you can't see is that it is for children, is upholstered in a thin, white, scratchy and semitranslucent fabric, and that the ends can handily, Allen-wrenchly, be let down as your child grows.

Well, I don't have a child, just the neighbor's cat on occasion, and I stopped growing years ago, much to my continuing dismay. Moreover, my decor scheme lies somewhere between Lebanese Maiden Aunt and Balkan Bordello, so the clean lines and light tone of Nordic pine stylings are far from congruent with the rest of my furnishings. My bed is all pillows and curtains and dark Chinese hardwoods and silky sheets; the living room is overrun with textures and brocades and highly sink-into-able things. Not to mention more pillows.

Obviously the pine had to go. That made a great difference, but it was then a darker-colored boxy child's bed in austere Northern style. So I bought a few billion dollars' worth of fabric trim with tassels on it (you don't know how pricey fabric trim is until you buy it by the mile), and some 'Turkish turban' big tassels to stick where the trim ended on the 'ends' of the bed (now the outsides of the 'sides' of the divan.) I upholstered the bed part, which was now taking shape as the seat and inside arms of the divan, and covered the tops of the 'arms' with upholstered foam. Next I took a few dozen pillows out of storage, et voila: a divan on which any self-respecting member of any Divan would have felt more than at ease (in languid recumbence!) enjoying some apple shisha with the languourous (not to mention dusky!) odalisque of his choice.

'Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.' Just don't say that in the Ladies' Department.

Tonight I watched a very pleasing movie in which Anthony Hopkins plays what would otherwise be my deceased stepfather were the character concerned not based on another real dead person. It was The Fastest Indian, and I had wanted to see it for a long time, not least because Indians are an integral part of my Ideal Man, the bench-pressing, PhD-in-theology-holding, sartorially scrupulous polyglot with a distaste for 'comic opera' matched only by his weakness for Sephardic love songs. Although I had in mind more the kind you can sit up on, and have me ride pillion.

That fact notwithstanding, we ate raviolis in a lovely intense red sauce and drank a deep Umbrian with an extremely sweet and fancy dog. All, I suppose, that was missing was the motorbike ride, but it is approximately one degree Fahrenheit outside, and thus prohibitive of fahren in anything without a roof and sides, and anyway even though I had wanted to buy one last year I didn't. And with platform shoes having once again gone the way of the seersucker suit, I suspect my chance of reaching the ground at stop signs has come and gone.

The only downside to the whole thing was having ruined a dress I have never worn. Somewhere near the 'vanity,' which is also the clothes-steaming zone when it needs to be, a tiny bottle of carrot oil had disgorged itself all over the floor. It being a long dress, I first dragged a bit of the ends in the oil unknowingly before lifting it into proper steaming position. Following that, and still not knowing what I had already done, I dropped it, halter back, ruching, tiers, and all, straight into the viscous orange puddle.

While on the one hand I am not the sort of girl who becomes unduly attached to material things, and have in fact rid myself of nearly all of them more than once and some of those times quite wittingly, in this case I am genuinely a bit distressed. Not only had I never worn it, not only did I feel I had an occasion that suited, but the dress alone was something. Firstly, it was satin, and secondly, it was olive drab. To me, that is akin to having an Amarone in one hand and six canelés in the other with a vat of almond cream on hand just in case, while one nice someone massages my feet and another pets my (silky when in its rare natural state) hair.

However, the most egregiously grievous wrong of this entire bout of hideous misfortune is that the bloody thing fit! Normally I am reduced to tears in dressing rooms, save for those rare occasions when there is an exhusband around to ferry ever-smaller sizes back and forth so that I don't have to skulk to the rack in longjohns and choler, and to remind me soothingly that I'd be just fine in Laos.

But this dress wasn't like that. It wasn't one of the sort that make one feel guilty for never having topped 92 and usually hovering around 89. No poor tailor was ever going to be begged and bribed with chocolates to tear it apart and take five sizes off it. It fit, and as well succeeded in making me look nearly lady-shaped. The ruching around the hips even gave the clear suggestion that I had some.

It didn't use to be this way, you know. When I was in high school and college I could buy clothes and not have to donate blood plasma to pay my tailoring bills. Then, the weight of the average American increased, and kept increasing. And as clothes companies do not exist primarily to keep me looking nice, but rather to turn a profit, clothing sizes have increased to accommodate demand. US sizes are about six sizes larger than when an attempt at standardization began in the Forties and Fifties.

Another factor is 'vanity sizing,' and this area is problematic for me. I have empathy for someone not wanting to buy something labeled size 20, assuredly, but when a renamed 10 becomes a 5, and an 8 or 9 becomes a 3 (which used commonly to be the smallest size), what becomes of the 'real' 5s and 3s? Well, some, it seems, become Zeros, and others become Double Aughts in a fit of blazing, indecent numerical fatuity, while others just slide off the grid. There isn't a woman's line that offers pants to fit me, and while I've taken to wearing children's jeans, because I've taken to wearing jeans in the first place out of despair and necessity, there are times they won't do, and one can't very well pair a gabardine jacket and silk shirt with pink corduroy Winnie-the-Pooh pants. The alternative is no less unthinkable: I don't aspire to be a World-Historical Figure, surely, and I doubt Hegel would have even liked the dress, but as Mark Twain admitted, Naked people have little or no influence on society. They also get burned a lot while cooking.

Doe-eyed, Po-faced, and Half Dotty Already

Earlier, while duskily languishing and hanging upon the cheek of night like a French Hook in an ecdysiast's ear, it occurred to me how pleased I am that I am no more in need of recourse to clip-on hair. In fact, I have so much of my own now that it frequently gets in my way, and I have alternately to Put It Up, Pull It Back, Smoosh It Down, and continue to work on my own tragic version of the French-Twist-with-a-Pouf, wherein all the extra bits that would otherwise make me look like a daughter of Akhenaten were they stuffed in with the rest are instead pitched topside, in a studied simulation of the sort of Devil-may-care posture I'll never quite pull off. At least not until I'm convinced that the Devil doesn't care very, very much and is not standing to my left at all times and pulling little pieces of it out and around and straight up, to illustrate that the only way in which I'll ever resemble Brigitte Bardot will be in my looming dotage when I'm so potty over animals I have no idea what I'm saying about anything else.

Certainly it won't be for supporting Le Pen. Nor, I suspect, for having an affair with Serge Gainsbourg or encouraging massacres in Algeria. Still, it would be nice to be able smolder abandonedly every so often, presuming there were no German playboy astrologers around to render it all cosmically de trop.

This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.

Said Keats regarding indolence, and while I to this day hate that Ode, I still love Keats and admire as always his respect for indolence. We devalue it tremendously, of course, the sitting, being, the taking in, and allowing...

We are no doubt fearful that passivity or unalloyed receptivity in one area will leech out and become some overarching guiding principle in our psyche, or life. That we'll wake up one day and find we've unwittingly morphed into swarthy, layabout Mediterraneans who say 'five' when they mean 'six-thirty' or worse. This is one reason, amidst poor taste, uninventiveness, ignorance, xenophobia, and fear of solitude, that we spend our vacations righteously doing things, ticking off Chartres and Epidavros on our lists, snapping the requisite few hurried shots of St. Basil's and St. Peter's before making our way to consuming the Great Wall and Kyoto's daibutsu.

I have no such fears, myself, but certainly if you are the sort of person who needs to, you can check my resume and see that I have worked hard enough, and worked long enough, to have 'earned' the right to spend the day doing nothing but making melon balls I never intend to eat or sitting around Montmartre doing nothing other than doing nothing and calling it a holiday all the same. And that's what I did. That was my vacation. I ate quite a bit of pastry, drank a lot of both coffee and wine, talked to my friend and my friend's friends, and bought a book hoping it would help me reproach one of them in German. It didn't, and anyway I expect his French and English were better than mine, so I stuck with those and reproached away and got a foot massage out of it so all was fine.

We did make it to Champagne, which is where the reproaching, the Teuton, and the feet come in, but it wasn't a 'goal' of mine, or even my idea. And we almost didn't make it (European gas mileage is a thing of beauty, but only when there is gas in one's tank to get mileage from), but we did, and we sat around there, too. This litttle sojourn to France was very nearly the only short trip I've ever taken except for ones close to where I happen to live right then, and I was very tempted to stay there, too, except that that would mean the loss of both my bed and a truly fabulous coat.

Maybe I'll move there next year. It couldn't possibly cost more to ship my bed than what I paid in overweight charges for books and shoes when I left Greece. And by then I could have conceivably winnowed my current supply of both to a manageable level, so that it would only be the 100-piece Chinese bed and the 50-pound coat with which I'd need concern myself. And since it will no doubt remain true in a year that the only German I know consists in a few cabaret songs and the occasional singspiel stanza, I won't have worn out my welcome with anyone.

Happy Birthday, Ferdinand

Who, indeed, knew that your given name was Mongin, or that you were English at base?

Geneva, 1857. Dead, 1913. Atherosclerosis and pneumonia.

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure. French. Calvinist. Synaesthetic. Seminal. The Without-Which-Not for all the social sciences and liberal arts that have come after his quiet existence.

--But it is language itself, not merely pronunciation, that is always teratological, darling, as your descendents have amply shown. And as you along with Freud and Marx stripped the human- out of humanism, we have only a desiccated -ism to cleave to now, without a handy (PIE!) root to grab onto. Still, if you hadn't lived, I should never have been able to have read Zizek, and for that I thank you, if not now or at any other time for haute Structuralism at its hautist...


My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

I don't know. I tried to write an entry about how senior citizens aren't what they used to be anymore, and I thought I did the math wrong, so I scrapped the whole bit, only to try it one more time after deleting everything, upon which I discovered I had it right all along, up until the point I redid it. I didn't have to 'borrow' from the zero at all, since I was subtracting a 0 from a 7 before that... Which means, to those of you who don't know math as well as I do, that 2,007-70=, as I previously and rightly believed, 1,937.

So, nothing about Chuck Taylors versus Novachords, or Gene Krupa or Bing Crosby before the 'Road Pictures.' It's sad, too, because it had funny bits. Moreover, it explained things much better than 1927 did, an equation I found inscrutable in many ways, most of all the heads tilted sideways when I mentioned things like Lyonnaise Potatoes and Pork Chops, or Holländer, or the shock of the New Look.

And then I read a story about a seminal philologist that moved me so strongly I actually attempted to 'contribute' a 'comment.' At which I also failed, apparently, because I don't know what I pushed instead of 'Yes, show me, I'm trying to do something here!!' when Firefox let me know it had shut down a popup and did I want to see it. Nothing happened, so I reloaded and recocked, and whether it's the firing pin or the trigger assembly or the action is too light, something went awry and I went straight to the Technical Issues page, and by this point I was all in (seminal philologists can do that to me, even Calvinist ones), so I had to set up my Outlook, as that's the address the Technical Issues office wanted, even though they could reach me far more handily elsewhere.

But I seem to have achieved greater success with the manly Hand Balm I started, which makes sense because you can blunt some of the technical issues of scent and still have good results. It seems quite likable now, but we'll see as it cures. So far it is strong on oregano and saffron, as I wanted, with vetiver, cedar, and oakmoss in the bottom, and very little bergamot for a tiny bounce and to coax out the citrus notes in the vetiver. Who knows, but it smells great on me right now, and the oregano is settling in so beautifully.

Happy St. Calvin's Day!

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the US, and along with The Harvest, the fruits of This Great Land, squashes of all sorts and can-shaped cranberry puree, the changing of the seasons, colonialism, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, the Noble Savage and the White Man's Burden, we also pay homage to the undying legacy of John Calvin. He gave us hard work and Blackberrys and fax machines, to be sure, and quite possibly timeshares and cruiseboat holidays, as well, but the full measure of his influence cannot be appreciated without taking into account the Puritans' sumptuary strictures and their enduring significance.

'Original sin, therefore, appears to be an hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls "works of the flesh."' - J.C.

I do not mean to imply that I think the whole Reformation was a bad idea initially, or sprang from bad impulses. I would not like to have lived in Burgundy, for example, during a certain period, if I did not happen to be recognized as exactly and precisely orthodox by the Benedictines. I would have preferred not to live in Spain, either, from about 1500 to 1800, regardless of my affiliations or lack thereof. And I am grateful not to have been in the position of attempting to lead a devout life in some of the less-than-devout monasteries that reform and renewal put to right. However, if the end result would have been that no one, ever, centuries later, when I wouldn't even know, except in Heaven, where I could no longer feel pain, would have had to wear polyester masquerading as 'gabardine,' or drink 'white Zinfandel,' or stuff themselves into hideous little rooms on boats the size of cities with thousands of other holiday-makers, only to spend their days gorging on cafeteria food, playing shuffleboard, swimming in chlorinated pools in the midst of the Aegean, and debarking in growling hordes to buy up gilded replicas of Attic treasures and machine-made lace, I would gladly have submitted to whatever tonsure, penitence -- or cloistered aristocratic licentiousness -- were the case in my region.

'You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.' -J.C.

But because I didn't, we live in a society that continues to view pleasure as dangerous and the senses as Satan's inbuilt handmaidens. We oscillate between wordless orgiastic feedings of Grande Meals at the Big Hombre and the next day's punishing asceticism. Neither tastes like anything, but one causes self-loathing while the other promises redemption -- and flatter abs. We eat salmon-colored tomatoes in February and think nothing of it; we pump 'cheese' out of an aerosol; we have diabetes and hemorrhoids, cancer of the colon and hypertension, and our only consolation is At least we didn't enjoy ourselves getting to this point...

'Though Satan instills his poison, and fans the flames of our corrupt desires within us, we are yet not carried by any external force to the commission of sin, but our own flesh entices us, and we willingly yield to its allurements.' -J.C.

A handily reductivist version of Calvinism is that Adam screwed it up for all of us, and we're never going to get back to anything close to a prelapsarian state, in spirit or conditions or behavior, but it is our duty nonetheless to try to - even if we're some of the ones God has already decided He's not that keen on letting back into Heaven - with every waking breath, in each act and thought of our lives, and thus anything that distracts us from this is proof of our fallenness, our 'total depravity' (a phrase which came after Calvin himself but is not an unrepresentative distillation of his point of view), our hideous natures which draw us away from, rather than toward, the Good.

'Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.' -J.C.

This is an exceedingly long leap from the Roman Catholic position of 'don't get so drunk that your judgment will be clouded and you risk making bad choices and ending up in an opium den in Chinatown.' In Calvinism, we've already tied off our arm, flicked the needle, and had sex with the dealer. We are meretricious, deceitful, murderous, lazy, avaricious, gluttonous crackwhores from the start who would sooner kill you than wish you a good day. No wonder, then, that we can't stand the idea of enjoying a good meal in pleasant surroundings: one bite of the medium-rare filet with a delicate shallot beurre blanc and we have paved the way for lechery, idolatry, pederasty, income tax fraud, bestiality, and unbridled killing sprees. Enjoy anything too heartily, and it's only a matter of time before the stakes have to be raised, before the beurre blanc just won't do, it will have to be pounds of some ponderous Norman cream sauce, poured all over the steak and dripping down your chin, and the med-rare will mutate into saignant and before you know it you will be starring in a Bosch painting, eating babies, buggering lobsters, and never combing your hair.

So it arises that we take pains not to have too good a time. When that doesn't work, we endeavor to convince ourselves we are not really enjoying things but doing what we must, such as rampant overspending cloaked as necessary Christmas shopping or renovating yet again what we just discovered to be a hugely outdated living room. Or, we deny our urges so habitually, and in such illogical ways, that they perforce irrupt disguised - that they might for once be satisfied - and we rather than buy one pair of fancy shoes, or get a bit giddy on two glasses of port, or quietly watch the setting sun from the shore of a lake, instead order sixteen shots of whatever, stuff down some onion rings slathered in synthetic 'mayonnaise,' and try to convince the drunk girl next to us to go back to the apartment for anonymous, detached, barely conscious casual sex.

'So indulgent is man towards himself, that, while doing evil, he always endeavours as much as he can to suppress the idea of sin.' - J.C.

And that isn't what the Catholics warned us about, either. It's not the alcohol's fault. The alcohol is there in order that the rest can take place, in order deliberately to renounce judgment sufficiently that we can be as mindless of sin as of either genuine pleasure or redemption, and thus get on with our half-hearted quest for the bad food, the unsatisfying company, the superficial conversation, and the mindless, soulless, fumbling sex. We're no longer worrying about God, or Calvin, or Burgundian excesses. We don't even know where or what Burgundy is, for that matter, since we don't drink nice wines, or read books that aren't assigned, or travel to places where they don't speak American. And we no longer believe we're damned, nor care; we're chained to the ramified legacy of Calvin, without any recollection of how we got here or what the original argument was. We just know we're not supposed to enjoy ourselves. We should be multitasking on our Blackberrys while chasing the four-minute mile and listening to management seminars on our iPods, not idly reading the TLS on a Saturday morning and sipping mimosas in deck chairs amidst birdsong and evergreens.

'Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols.' -J.C.

So, when the dam breaks and the need for genuine pleasure mutates yet again into a virulent need to consume, we are stuck. It's too late to decide to keep fresh flowers in the house. Gone is our chance to enjoy the walking tour of the Piedmont, or to start wearing clothing that doesn't punish all the senses. And no longer will poetry or color or silky sheets or taking up ikebana or cheesemaking sate our deranged, repressed need for something, anything, that can stimulate a sense of even the most distant, third-order simulacrum of the commodity called 'enjoyment.'

But we've become by that point the crackwhore Calvin warned us about. Now it can no longer be about nuance or joy. We have ground ourselves down to nearly insensate lumps from alternating between compulsive and overarching gravitas surrounding work/'success' and puerile outbursts of mindless grasping that we can no longer just be. We have annihilated our receptivity so thoroughly that our whole outlook reduces not merely things but people, as well, to instruments. I see you for what you can give me, just like the obscenely large truck or the Patek Philippe or the ten numbing, dumbing vodka-and-Red-Bulls. But don't worry; as soon as I've eaten you and the four-pound McNasty and the 'craftsman style' high-end bathroom renovation, I'll spend two hours on the electronic bicycle and commit myself to at least three more memos a week and do a colon cleanse and take a Men's Retreat and swear off booze and find my inner child again and give him the kick in the teeth he so roundly deserves.

'I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.' -J.C.

La Plus Haute Tour

I went on a good date tonight.

And shut up you for thinking what you just thought: if I hold out no hope I am in no danger of being misled or misconstrued. My approach is neutral; therefore my reading should rightly be presumed accurate. In fewer words, it was a good date, and I should be trusted on this. I had rather seal my lips, than, to my peril,/ Speak that which is not.

But yes it is true in the end: I am as shocked as you to discover that people other than me should be simultaneously nice, thinky, and as engaged as they are engaging. And I think I was mostly fine, too, which is something. Except for the beginning, when I had to call and ask was that him the guy I just squinted at and walked away from or was he not here yet which would be preferable as if he was that guy and it looked like he might be because they looked the same it might be better if we tried this another time because I could leave now and not walk up to the guy who just looked at me weirdly and then again at the end when I didn't know what to do and so barged ahead the better to get the ending ended and opened the door on my own which I hate doing and anyway am no good at either because physics gets in the way but didn't see much of an alternative at that point.

But the middle bit was fine. I hate pickles but I ate about sixteen, and there were no real knives so that was challenging because I do think they are an integral part of the eating part of a meal, but apart from that I'm sure it was fine. Well, there was the part where my hair hit the limit of its (purported) 'style' and I discovered far too late that it was not merely listing leftwards as I had only recently come to suspect but was instead fixed entirely on the left rear of my head, undoubtedly with all the end bits exploding in an unprepossessing fountain-like structure above my left ear, but I'm used to that since my lack of cosmetological expertise lends itself daily to hairstyle tragedies. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I do take it in stride and always assume my companion(s) understand it is a failure not of conception but merely of execution and, my being bereft of an engineering degree, such things are likely to happen and should be excused without prejudice.

Anyway, it was far from hell. By-and-by is easily said, but we both avowed something or other with appropriate levels of genuicity and advienne que pourra. I don't mean to sound as though I'm thinking anything other than What (overdressed) couch is the neighbor's cat hiding under, and why isn't he in the armoire where he belongs, but, as Fats Waller said, One never knows, do one?