The Sons of Thomas Magnum

You Fat Liar.

2009-08-11T15:23:00.039-04:00

I was enjoying an otherwise relaxing evening on the Cape on Saturday when a headscratcher of a line scrolled across the bottom of ESPN's Yankees-Red Sox telecast, something along the lines of "Former BALCO chemist says Ortiz may have been victim of supplement spiked with Nandrolone." The story seems to have originated in a New York Daily News article, which has the huge, stupid balls to state:

"Patrick Arnold, who did prison time for his role in the BALCO scandal, said it's possible Ortiz took 19-norandrostenedione, a supplement that contained the hard-core steroid nandrolone and which could be purchased legally in 2003."

Their source--a felon convicted of assisting athletes in masking the use of PEDs--is referring to 19-norandrostenedione, a supplement which--no matter how hard the pro-Sox cabal at ESPN squeezes their asscheeks together and wishes--has never contained Nandrolone.

Until 2005, 19-norandrostenedione was a perfectly legal prohormone, part of a shady group of supplements that includes DHEA and the much better known androstenendione, a substance so infamous it doesn't even trigger my Blogger spellchecker. Prohormones have essentially two uses: First, they provide a monstrous case of backne while elevating useful hormone levels at a useless rate; and Second, they provide a convenient excuse when stacked with more effective, illegal substances.

At some point in the process of transforming steroid use by a bunch of grown men playing a child's game into the great Moral Swamp of our time, one would expect that our sports media might have accidentally contracted some basic knowledge of...well, steroids...but this clearly hasn't happened. Let me mention some things that I learned as a 15 year old cleaning tanning booths at Gold's Gym in scenic Waterbury, CT. First, some useful context...

People who sell performance enhancing drugs know an enormous amount about performance enhancing drugs. They don't just take your money and sprint for the nearest tanning booth. They tell you what you need to take, what the ideal dosage should be, how to cycle the often labyrinthine complexes of substances they recommend, and most importantly, how not to get caught taking those substances by the hypocritical losers--bodybuilding promoters, high school football coaches, Bud Selig, etc.--who order tests for such things. All of this is included in the basic service, which can also include actually injecting the stuff between your toes in a mensroom stall at your gym. Imagine your pot dealer in college taking you aside, telling you what specific kind of pot would best suit your literary interests, what delicious snacks might best complement said pot, which studio take of 'Kind of Blue' to listen to, and most importantly, exactly how long said pot will stay in your system in any noticeable concentration.

That is what steroid dealers provide, and it's been that way since Arnold's Muscle Beach days. Beyond the businessmen, the steroid subculture is host to more obscure knowledge and rabid detail than your average Dr. Who wiki. There are hundreds of forums on the internet with queries like 'Will Deca show up in a test 12 months out from my last cycle?' and 'How do I trick my pit bull's veterinarian into writing me a Clen scrip?' Before the internet, there was The Steroid Bible, which started life as a self-published looking booklet/fanzine that made the rounds at every Powerhouse Gym on earth, but is now available on (goddamned) Amazon.com (fer chrissakes).

Another interesting reality that the sports media is glossing over is that an enormous number of people have been taking A LOT of steroids for a very, very, very long time. For example, I can comfortably assure you that roughly 65% of every high school football team on Earth will use Winstrol or D-bol or Nandrolone at some point.* Every gym in this country is flooded with people who know a great deal about performance enhancing drugs--making it incredibly easy for even a casual gym member to get indoctrinated into the culture--and I can only imagine how enthusiastic these people would be to share their knowledge with a celebrity athlete. When I was a kid, I'd often take supplements based on the recommendations of older gym members, recommendations that usually included statements like 'Better try it now before they make it illegal.' In the cases of GHB, Clenbuterol, Ephedrine, Androstenendione, and every other over-the-counter AAS in the last twenty years, they were right.

Getting back to the article, let me list the things I don't believe about this scenario...

Sometime in 2003, David Ortiz walked into a GNC and bought a bottle of androstenendione, presumably because he read that Mark McGwire used it in Sports Illustrated, and look how big Mark McGwire got using it.
The bottle that Ortiz bought was part of the batch contaminated with 19-norandrostenedione, which is a metabolite of Nadrolone, and was known even at the time to trigger a positive test for Nandrolone, an illegal steroid.
Although David Ortiz was a professional athlete at the time, he didn't workout at a gym with experienced, um, exerciser people, with a trainer, or with any of his teammates, any one of whom could have told him that A.) prohormones have very few meaningful benefits*, and B.) they will cause false positives in drug tests. He especially didn't ask Manny Ramirez, who also knows nothing about steroid use, as evidenced by the fact that he apparently knew to take a female fertility drug as part of an anabolic steroid cycle earlier this year.
Unlike Mark McGwire, Shawn Merriman, Roger Clemens, Miguel Tejada, Barry Bonds, CJ Hunter, Marion Jones, Jason Giambi, and A-Rod, Ortiz really did only ingest 19-norandrostenedione, because as a professional athlete with limitless resources, he wasn't aware of the fact that prohormones won't actually help you hit 54 homers, run a sub-10 second 100m dash, or throw a shotput really far, all on their own. Unlike all of those people, he didn't have access to a trusted advisor, who would have told him that he should take an oral prohormone with those injections of Nandrolone, so that he'd have an excuse, just in case. Which is something I knew when I was 15. Poor David Ortiz.

Here is my version of this fairytale. In 2003, Ortiz showed up in Boston. He became fast friends with Manny Ramirez, who recommended that on his next trip to the Dominican, he walk into a pharmacy and purchase steroids, which are readily available EVERYWHERE in Latin America. Looking to improve on his journeyman stats and salary, Ortiz tried it, because hell, his friend is doing it, everyone in the league is doing it, and the league doesn't even test for it. Manny mentions he should take a prohormone, too, because someone he met at the gym told him it might be helpful if he ever gets tested, a very real possibility in the post-Sosa/McGwire era of 2003. Ortiz takes Nandrolone (or something) for a cycle, which increases his bat speed just enough to transform him from a good hitter into a great hitter, he gets a $13 million per annum salary, and the Sox win two World Series.

Big deal. I would have done the same thing. But when A-Rod's name was leaked from that PA list, when Giambi's name was leaked, when Bonds' head grew four sizes and McGwire lied to Congress, no one rushed to their defense. Just because the man looks like Shrek, doesn't mean he should get a free pass on this one, and the fact that the media and MLB seem to be changing tactics for his benefit disgusts me.

There is also something deeply stupid about using a BALCO chemist as a source. Two high profile cases of athletes claiming false test results based on over-the-counter supplementation are CJ Hunter and Marion Jones, who both later admitted to using anabolic steroids. Both were under the supervision of Mr. Arnold's former employer, and the fact that any credible news outlet would even entertain the idea of printing a tired and well-known lie in defense of David Ortiz is enough to impact a nice day at the beach. Let's also ignore the fact that when prohormones were finally banned by various organizations like the IOC and MLB, it wasn't because of their advantages as training aids, but because athletes were known to use them as masking agents. If even the idiots responsible for testing programs know that the Andro defence is a lie, shouldn't ESPN?

In closing, I just wrote this off the top of my head during my lunch hour. The least we can expect of the Daily New and ESPN--if they insist on wringing my hands for me twice a month--is a bless'd little research.

*According to our Congress--which wasted its attentions on this nonsense while the world crumbled around our ears--these athletes abruptly stopped using steroids immediately after signing their NFL contracts. Which makes a hell of a lot of sense, provided your learning disability can convince you that normal, four-hundred pound humans can run the 40 in 4.4 seconds
*Prohormones have been shown to produce anabolic effects in the range of less than 10% of their illegal cousins, which is fine if you want tender nipples, nightmares about werewolves during the four minutes a night you'll actually sleep, and spending twenty minutes a day screaming at random babies. The real benefits are minimal, and could probably be matched by a high-protein/high fat diet, and replacing those endless sets of preacher curls with some squats, you narcissistic pussy.

Through such deafening silence...

2006-04-20T18:15:00.000-04:00

Without so much as a word of context, here is the note I forwarded this past week to the kind folk at US Air. My intention is to write them one note per week detailing my increasing distemper at their inability to do the simple act we pay them to do. I am hoping I grow more and more angry, that my notes grow more and more weird, and that they never write me back. I'd hope they go out of business, as well, but as they are barely even in business, that seems a bit vindictive.

To whom it may concern,

I'm really unsure how to phrase this, but I'm sufficiently curious to at least try. I am, at present, sitting in my office in Boston, waiting for my girlfriend's flight to arrive at Logan. I do this every Thursday, as she is a consultant and travels frequently. Her firm uses your airline exclusively, and for the last seven weeks of her customer engagement, every single one of her return flights has been at least 30-45 minutes late. Last week and this week averaged one and one half hours. Out of curiosity, why is it that you are unable to limit flight delays to AT LEAST the duration of the flight itself? I've tracked these flights online, and the last two 1:30+ delays were caused by 'baggage handling' and 'cabin servicing'. Seriously? It takes an hour and a half to load the baggage for a 737? If that is true, please let me know, as I am somewhat concerned about you at the moment.

Yours,
Gavin

Modigliani on a Cigarette Boat

2005-11-22T10:28:00.000-05:00

Dude, I totally need a coffee. And a woman shaped like this...

Sunrise on Oahu, and the light of the grey day whispered between the blinds. Morning here is a sound I’ve heard a thousand times, that whisper that tells you the day has begun without you. It sneers at the corners of your eyes, sneers that somewhere in the Hawaiian morning, no matter the weather, something is very, very wrong with your Ferrari.

"Bastards," I mumbled, dragging a sleepy hand across my mustache. There were no stewardesses in the room, no Polynesian tour guides drowsing like honey under several strategically-placed pillows, and if that wasn't disorienting enough, Mr Fujikori was standing on my end table, beaming down on me with the highest watt smile a 65-lb man can muster.

"Mother of a Retarded Christ!" I shouted, but Fujikori was already shaking my hand, and before I could drag my unbelievably limber body from my 900 count sheets, he vanished, leaving nothing but a puff of green tea scented smoke, and a page torn from an address book.

819 Kahala Beach Road.

The tuning fork in my head shook like a new-hatched bird. 819 Kahala Beach Road.

I slipped into a polo (the wonderful white Burberry one with the fuschia cuffs and the embroidery on the button placket...but that is neither here nor there), a pair of short shorts that shouted 'Macho!' rather than 'Rent me by the hour!', grabbed my .45, and disappeared into the AM mists.

You still give me shivers

2005-10-03T14:31:00.000-04:00

You want to tell me what, huh? Dangerous boy. We jump out of planes now. Be a difficult woman or a dangerous man, because this side of the island has gone deeply weird, and you don't have the shoe size.

I really had to wonder though, standing in line with a thirty-page waiver in hand, having neither ceiling nor border. Gross negligence should never be on the table. But then maybe I think like an auditor now--since strangely that is all that I am now, keeping tabs--but an auditor who has been thoroughly digested by a year so shitty, hyperbole blanches in conversation. Jump from where? Just point. Here are my initials, you can have them. A dozen high school kids doing the admin. Or maybe they are in their twenties? Another thing, another good reason to take some chances, I can't read ages anymore, things is getting muddled.

And I am in the grips of a withdrawal you wouldn't fucking believe. I want car crashes. I want knife fights. I haven't heard a scream in six months. I haven't seen a fullgrown man fall on his knees and cry in six months. I haven't seen the readable end of drunk-driving in six months. I haven't had a stranger throw her arms around my neck in six months, haven't heard stories about uncles or wives or grandfathers or any other stupid, depressing thing in six months. I haven't watched a skull open from the inside, or an eyeball swell up in its socket, or an old man rattle his bed coughing all night with emphysema, or an old woman push away her family and walk down the hall, finally, totally and for always alone in her little house somewhere. Six months. No more children crying because their Dad was struck retarded late at night. No more stupid, ugly, horrific bullshit, sleeping in stairwells, on windowsills, in lobbies, on benches, everything smelling like shit and piss and vomit, smiling, smiling, and smiling some more, slipping downstairs for a cigarette and a few minutes to emote without adding to the pile of it all, no more being that alone. Now I get golf, and corporate work, and conferences, and a new taste for wine, and weddings to attend, but my body likes to shake now. It doesn't like all this anymore. I have a nervous system like a pitbull in a very narrow room.

So I jump out of planes now. Already scheduled for next month. You have a better idea? Yes, and this opinion of yours is based on what?

Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch, You Know That I Love You?

2005-07-20T09:40:00.000-04:00

Wait a tic, this stuff is slippery! No one told me...

Haleiwa. It was five AM, and the first rose of morning was flirting with me over the waves off Niihau. It was a beautiful sight, and like all beautiful sights, a dozen dangers hid themselves in...

Fuck it. I just wanted to mention the fact that it has been suggested in several media outlets that one of the selection criteria for the current Supreme Court nominee was a lack of documented 'decisions'. This presumably limits the traction of his 'detractors' in their uncivil attempt to denounce him based on his beliefs and policies. Fair enough.

Out of curiosity though--show of hands--how many people out there would want their morality shuffled into a court like a Greek in a big wooden horse? Anyone?

Poor lighting can be hilarious...

2005-07-05T13:03:00.000-04:00

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
-Henry Miller

The light was in good humor, is how I remember it. It could go either way. Like most tequilla-induced evenings, I am of two minds on it.

You know the way a room can be dark at night, and the shadows mellow evenly from corner to corner, so that nothing is too obvious or obscure? That is the signature of quality lighting. And we’d spent the afternoon staring at Sargent paintings at the MFA, Titian and the Flemish, with the light thrown on the figures like dropcloths, and definition and distinction in the visual arts are so depressing…

There was a wonderful Degas. In the foreground, an old woman sits with crossed hands. Her features are a miracle narrative, and you can read in the eyes—or in the lines around the eyes, or in the way they are set—how proud she is of her boredom, and how she insists on it. I believe she lived a good life. Probably, someone was sent to the market for her. She was probably one of these women who in their mid-twenties marry men fifteen years their seniors.

And I’ve heard her talk to her daughters. The thing is, my dear, that you avoid the unpleasantness of watching a man build his life, make decisions, doubt himself. You get to enter into the life of a finished and well-defined individual, and his pleasure is to avoid watching his girl watch him stumble, da-dee, da-dee.

She has a finished face, the old woman. The paint is crisp and the lines are deep, the shadowing more like a charcoal for a portrait to come. I wondered what the intention was, leaving the daughters off to the side, looking off to the side, and their faces smeared with a cloth, the features finished and then obscured? I wonder what they are thinking, although it probably won’t matter. The light was in good humor, I remember that much. What I mean is that it was dark, but it could go either way, I am of two minds on it.

Screwing Everything Up Is a Funny Way of Helping

2005-06-28T00:27:00.000-04:00

To commemorate my grandmother falling and breaking her hip—requiring surgery tomorrow—I propose a tale…

I heard a story once. The story was about a bear who wandered out of the woods. His location was a gated community in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His motivation: one of the new constructions was on fire. He stood, fascinated, wondering what possible difference the destruction of a fully insured five-bedroom home in suburban Connecticut would make, from the perspective of…well, of anyone. The contractor would call the owner. The owner would call State Farm. State Farm would make a few phone calls internally, schedule a meeting, and build a spreadsheet detailing the lost materials and labor costs. Another phone call would be made, and a check would be cut. Et cetera.

But if the wind blows the hat off a beggar...

When the bear had finished, he wandered off. Eventually he found his way into the swimming pool of an adjecent property. It made the local news.

I have a confession to make: there was no bear, and I was invited into the swimming pool. This is the entry, such as it is.

I Hate Laughing

2005-06-14T23:31:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry, I can't leave this be...what are those two talking about in the opening scene? What kinda game is that guy playing? Did this thing, for all its well-considered absence of restraint, actually improve the life of even a single mentally challenged human being?

http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2667018

What were we talking about again?

2005-06-14T14:15:00.000-04:00

The other side speaks!

Excerpt from a response from General D. McArthur to G. Thomas Magnum, on the event in question...

Disaster? Yes, my boy, but to truly live, one must devour the broken custard.

This is some fetching nonsense, I will admit that. You have the conviction of a wailing woman--heard above the crowd--and I suppose your standard pedestrian would consider this admirable. You and I are familiars, however, and we both know I am not an apt correspondent on this issue, as it's a rare morning I stir to the sound of complaint and/or other pussified bullshit. You shouldn't have expected a quick response. I told you seven years ago to go to law school and swallow the consequences in your middle age, like all sensible men do. I will ask again: What, precisely, were you anticipating? That you would skim the raw and practical waters of adulthood--lofted on your own wind like some oblivious duck-winged imbecile--and come softly to rest somewhere in coastal New England? Was some dentist to make an honest housewife of you? Explain, please.

Fortunately for you, I've room in mind for your pointless cargo. Your father might have beaten this nonsense out of you at an early age, had he not been occupied with his occupation, which seems to have been the support and maintenance of a capering little jackass. But sit there, and I shall tell you a story. Let me set the scene. You are sitting, undoubtedly, on the deck of your rented apartment, smoking a $200-a-box cigar, and the whole of your attention turns on not ashing the thing on your $300 shoes. I will not ask the pointed questions--the ones you certainly know the answers to--questions like 'What do you feel you've done to deserve such things?' and 'What do these things do for you, in the end?' I simply ask that you continue reading, and that you compose for me, your own friend and correspondent, the message I intend.

Don't laugh, but once, long ago, in a forest where only the ancient hemlock kept the time, there lived a great chief, Wyandanch, master of the Abenaki peoples. This chief had a daughter, White Fawn, who was more beautiful than all the lands. Her voice was the sun on summer breezes; and her eyes all the birds in all the trees in her lovely Indian world.

Now, in Wyandanch's tribe there were many great warriors, strong men with arms like woven oak, and all of these warriors loved White Fawn. But there was also a disinterested brave, whose name is unrecorded--but let us name him Bartleby the Spoiled Yankee, for the sake of the narrative--and this disinterested brave loved White Fawn with a love far stronger than the strongest warrior, primarily because he didn't have a clue what he was letting himself in for. Do you see where I'm going with this? I doubt that you do. Probably you think this will be a Romance...

Though White Fawn was largely ignorant of our Bartleby, she was familiar enough with him to be startled by his appearance at the door of her father's longhouse. What store of courage buoyed this unlikely suitor, she wondered lazily to her pretty self, as the young and disinterested brave entered the granite regard of his Chief. What does he believe he will gain, and why does he believe he deserves it, having never fed so much as himself, and nevermind a family?

As you are likely realizing, my dear G. Thomas, these were the days of Tribal Wisdom, so we can assume that Bartleby knew these questions as well--knew them better than even White Fawn--and carried them so close to his heart that it was sometimes difficult for him to distinguish his own desires from their pressing insistence.

Things grow murkier from here. The Great Chief Wyandanch was impressed with this normally disinterested brave's courage, and immediately his thoughts ran to a grandson, to a potential heir. Afterall, Bartleby had entered his presence with little more than the conviction that this was certainly what the other fellows would do, if they hadn't already, and the Chief knew this. So, once the question was asked, Wyandanch drew himself up from his fire, and stretched his mighty right hand, strong like woven oak, and said 'You may have my daughter's hand, Bartleby, if you catch for me a certain fish, from a certain stream, which will appear only as the sun sets. But Bartleby, the stream where this fish will swim is in a haunted briar, and the ghosts of fallen warriors wail in its shadows, hunting the living.'

Prior to that day, Bartleby would certainly have declined, but on that day he found his love for White Fawn so strong that he was unable to conceive an alternate path, and so he accepted his Chief's challenge, and agreed to bring him this prize. And so he went to this certain stream the Chief had mentioned, and built a wicker weir from birch saplings, in order to snare the fish as it went past. And indeed the briar was dark, and indeed there was a strangeness to its shadows--an indeterminacy, say, although it is highly unlikely Bartleby would agree with our term.

Bartleby sat by this stream and waited. But as he sat, he noticed the shadows in the thorn bushes by the water, and he could not keep his eyes from the shadows in the thorns. His wicker weir was damaged, but he could not keep his eyes from the shadows in the thorns. The fish swam through the holes in the weir, but he could not keep his eyes from the shadows in the thorns, and when the sun set, and the moon rose full in the sky like a broad white face, the shadows extended out to meet him, and tore him to pieces.

You're thinking you know the point of this story, which only proves you haven't been listening these last few years...

All night Bartleby's blood flowed down that certain stream, until in the morning it came to a light-dappled pool, to where White Fawn, the Chief's beautiful daughter, had come to bathe her irrelevantly lovely body. In distinctly folkloric manner, White Fawn became pregnant with the child of a young brave she knew only in a somewhat tangential way, and when she died in childbirth, the Chief took the child--a boy--and raised him as the son and heir he had always been guilty of wanting.

G. Thomas, I forget what the point of my story is. It was a long time ago it was told to me, and it is now beyond my abilities to outline the thing, or to say THIS is the hero, THIS is the villain, THIS individual was wronged in some elemental way. But when I find myself in a hole, G. Thomas, I generally just keep digging, knowing by experience that the world isn't that deep. In this spirit was most of America built, afterall.

Now you and I are very much alike already, G. Thomas, but then I ask you, is it always a good idea to help the Chief?

the hows and whys of reverse cliff-diving

2005-06-07T18:00:00.000-04:00

Chess is the opposite of clamor

He is an older, though no less optimistic Son of Thomas Magnum making his return today, complete with an additional half-inch of forehead, fifteen extra pounds and, most alarmingly, white hair in the temple region, all mine to return, through months of unnecessary work, back up the steep slope of potential energy.

That is the thing about cliffs, an old diver on Lanai once told me: no matter how terrifying, they tend to charm by exhilaration. The slow and deliberate slog back is where the real daredevilry comes in, flapping its cape at the neighbors and looking damned inappropriate. A dermatologist friend of the family informs me the rapid hair loss is likely stress induced, and will return. Though the resilient refugees are bound to emigrate soon after, I will not wince, being an old-fashioned sort of guy. Jason Statham, meet Jason Statham.

The weight, certainly, is mine to deal with, and six-day-a-week workouts will make short enough work of it. The bastard. If the worst of my own end is to come out looking like a melon-headed underwear model, I can hardly complain. Humility, etc.

Much thanks to Antonio for assisting me in learning a new game. All the loud noises this ugly, classless, disgusting city can throw are absorbed by three glasses of iced yerba mate and four hours of chess, I promise you.

Vancouver, in case you've forgotten...

2005-03-28T04:05:00.000-05:00

Page one of a planned 2000-page guide to the life of Mo Whatshername, in the event that she needs it...

You were born on the sixteenth of June, 1983, by caesarian section in the maternity ward of the Waterbury Hospital in Waterbury, Connecticut. I believe it was sunny. Your arrival was more of a shock for our middle brother, Stephen, who had yet to experience such a tweak to his ego, and spent the day stealing my toys. I don’t recall my response, but this isn’t surprising. At the time I was a touch autistic, or at least emotionally vague, and it is entirely possible I didn’t respond at all. I’m sure I was happy, of course, and will include photographs supporting this.

Stephen and I were turned over to Selim N. and his wife Linda—who remains our mother’s closest and oldest friend. We spent the day with them, playing in the family room of their home in the East End of Waterbury, waiting for news. They bought us Happy Meals. This is important, as control over our diets will be a central point of the study of our shared childhood, which will follow.

Although our family lived in a small raised ranch in suburban Middlebury, Waterbury was—if the term can be used—our ancestral home. Both our mother, Margaret Ellen G., and our grandmother, Theresa Ann S., were born and raised among its several nondescript hills, and any number of friends and relatives lived there as well, attending the same schools and churches and generally existing in a manner unchanged from the coming of their immigrant ancestors, most of whom tumbled off ships in New York around 1900, grumbling in foreign languages and smelling badly. People went to church. During the summer, they went to picnics or parish carnivals. Some still spoke Portuguese, Italian, or Polish, and in their neighborhoods, which I will draw out later, or in their small stores downtown you could still see that national character carried, useless as a stuffed cat, across the oceans to America. Some still smelled badly, of course, but the overall tone was Fifties conformity, and it was pleasant enough, and no one seemed to complain.

The Charming Inevitability of Bear Attacks

2005-03-21T11:36:00.000-05:00

Can Congress hold a hearing about how ludicrously, hilariously, hypnotically friggin' unfortunate my life is these days? Yes, 'unfortunate'...deflation is the stuff of reality, you fucking child. When I'm not helping my mother wipe relatives' asses, I am conducting audits, and missing events such as, well, you read it...

http://www.sister.co.jp/GirlsUStour2005/

Happiness is a lazy arrangement of the facts, folks. While my hairline tries to distance itself from the world around it, and conscience gets the better of my vices, and my hand hovers inches over my cell phone through all dark hours of the night, I find myself less and less resistant to the reality that--ten years from now--this will seem like a Paradise. So, I give in.

Perhaps I am unable to attend a night of Japanese girl-punk, and yes, Gang of Four will probably sell-out before I get to the Avalon box office, and yes, if I don't get to the gym within five minutes I will officially become the least sexy version of myself in living memory, but...Hitler is still dead.

Move over for a damage case

2005-03-20T22:11:00.000-05:00

I've found something/That there's no use for.

Reveal thyself to me, O moral of the story, that I might emotionally invest in you. You fucker.

The video made an interesting diversion, and sitting in the 8th floor conference room—the long and oddly shaped one across from the physical therapy center—I had pause to reflect on the appalling mess I’ve become, at least on video.

Nevermind the change in my sister, who is twenty pounds lighter. Myself? That a slab of ham could have bags under its eyes, this comes as enough of a surprise, but to recognize at least in silhouette the body supporting it, my goodness…

It was good of Richard Harris to donate his hairstyle. And praise Jesus for Memory, which provides us the wherewithal to seed distant images of teenage curls with a stubborn tuft of fluffy worthlessness, like tufts of moss on a hillside, holding the mountain together. But eat me, Time. You fucker of a cliché.

It was fun to watch my brother’s wedding video, as only a month and a half ago I was ten pounds lighter.

Have you spent a month eating in the cafeteria of a half-assed medical facility, catching two hours of sleep now-and-then on the windowsill of the waiting room? In between visits from doctors, and the shuffling of other families, who had nothing more to deal with than those same doctors removing some significant area from the skull of a loved one? Were they expecting good news? Quit your snivelling, ugliness must sleep.

Just think, ten years from now you could be completely bald, fifty pounds heavier, with all of your loved ones dead or estranged.

For now, more Motorhead, and some Pierre Fernand Reserve. An audit next week in Connecticut, then the slow path to summer. But we are in the Rehab Hospital now—clostridium difficile and all, smelling like old shit with half our head shaved—glad you understand our progress! My good friends! I am miserable with happiness.

10:20PM
3.20.2005

Useless Trivia

2005-03-17T23:51:00.000-05:00

Mmmm. cognac...

In case anyone was wondering, this is the official 'ComaWatch 2005' mix, pieced together in the 6th floor waiting room of the Neural ICU at RIH. Bear in mind, I had only the cds in my car at the time of the accident. This is the soundtrack of my sister breathing through a tube, and if it is lame, so are comas...

Thinking of a Dream I Had
The Walkmen
A good song on a disappointing album. Why did they go from sounding like The Walkmen, to sounding like Bob Dylan circa 1966? This is a development path?

Banquet (Phones Disco Edit)
Bloc Party
I enjoy British accents. And drum machines. Plus, I can beat you up. Trust me. Say something.

The Back of Love
Echo and the Bunnymen
See previous entry.

Taste
Ride
I should hate these guys. See previous entry.

Staring at the Sun
TV on the Radio
I pray they keep going.

Part Company
The Go-Betweens
Semaine de Bonte is my hero.

Regret
New Order
I forgive them.

Glad Girls
Guided by Voices
I thought this was a Fooled by April song for about two years.

Dreams Burn Down
Ride
Christ, I should hate these guys.

Little House of Savages
The Walkmen
Bring back the antique piano, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

The Answer
Bloc Party
If you rip-off Gang of Four via Fugazi, it isn't as bad as being Radio 4.

You Can't Hurry Love
The Concretes
Karl, you were right. I owe you a beer. Come to Montreal.

Ai No Shirushi
Puffy AmiYumi
If you are a Japanese female between the ages of 18 and 30...call me.

You've Never Lived
The Go-Betweens
I will buy one of their cds for you. That is how good they are.

The Killing Moon
Echo and the Bunnymen
It was in Donnie Darko.

Neighborhood #2
The Arcade Fire
I refuse to hate bands that sound like the Pixies.

Carry Me Ohio
Sun Kil Moon
This is the most beautiful male voice I have ever heard. I assume he wrote it about someone he loved, who killed herself, or simply died, or was simply forgotten. When I hear this song, I see people crying in the fucking waiting room, and thinking.

Green green green

but what about the sweetness we knew

what about what's good, what's true

from those days?

...

Craving dreams

a million miles ago you seem

the star that i just don't see

anymore

Words long gone

lost on journeys we walked on

lost her voice is heard along

the way

Sorry for

never going by your door

never feeling love like that

anymore

Heal her soul

and carry her my angel

ohio

Carry me, Cognac, the road is dull...

2005-03-11T17:36:00.000-05:00

Friday and I feel wordless, so just an update. My sister is speaking, having been tricked by a tricky speech therapist into forcing a bit of cough over her vocal cords. It appears to have worked, and she is learning slowly the things she knows already. Such is life.

We are out of the damned ICU, and on to the rehab hospital portion of the tour. Some sad stories, and I feel like a dumb, hand-me-down Dante. My kingdom for a trip to Galway, or even the Outer Banks.

I superstitiously offered up Bourbon to the brain-god, as the true One was disinterested. I am left to find a new love. Cognac is leading the race, although sake has a certain Eastern vagueness…

In other news Gucci loafers, Burberry, and Creed Irish Tweed. Delight in the delightful, they say, and they say expect the rest.

If anyone reading this ever needs anything, seriously, don’t hesitate to ask.

You Say Despair, I Say To-mah-toe

2005-03-08T14:34:00.000-05:00

A gift for you!

Some potential t-shirt slogans, from the simple, to the simply elegant, and perfect for all ages...

"I Went to Church Every Sunday for Forty-Six Years and All I Got Was This Lousy Cancer."

"God Didn't Cut the Oxygen to My Wife's Brain, My New Baby Did."

"God Loves Me. He Just Loves AIDS More."

"If You Pray Hard Enough, Your Four-Year-Old Will Still Be Blind."

"Embollisms...God's Way of Saying You Talk Too Fast."

"God Loves Me. He Just Hates My Braindead Baby."

"Nietzsche is Dead, and So Is My Fiancee."

If you need me, I'll be selling these outside of the Chapel...

We can dance in the ashes

2005-03-06T11:29:00.000-05:00

What? Didn't everyone dress like this in 1985?

There is a man in a hospital gown and tan slippers circling the halls. He walks past every ten minutes. His arms hang at his sides. Afterthoughts? I suppose he is too busy walking, and too busy for the luxury of them.

Feet, too, are miracles.

Our miracles are tedious. We don’t notice them.

When he passes I nod or wave, but feel inadequate—as though there were a better way to meet a stranger. Ask about his head? How’s the family?

Being inadequate doesn’t seem exotic here, given the surroundings. Not too much the conspicuous violet.

I meant to say last week that I’ve never liked myself more than I do at bedside, around 4:00am, wiping drool from my sister’s mouth. Must be the Catholic upbringing. You who will never suffer enough for having suffered loudly.

The woman in the next bed complains about the lighting. Remind me to tell you what panic and grief did to my compassion.

The woman vomits every fifteen minutes. Her husband has a thick, unpleasant voice. It cuts through my headphones.

There are more people than chairs in the waiting room. A Latino family sits by the television, watching a Spanish-language cable network.

The family of the woman who slipped into a coma after giving birth to a beautiful baby boy is slumped in the corner of the room. A slump, not a huddle.

Earlier in the day, the new father had the nurses show my sister his son. My mother tells me Maureen smiled.

I hate this place deeply. Raze it. Bring salt.

Two weeks ago a young woman appeared in the recliner in the family consultation room. This was the room my mother had claimed, where she slept at night. The woman told us her husband had just returned from an eighteen-month tour in Iraq, and was hit by a drunken driver on his way home from the gas station. He always wore the shoulder restraint of his seatbelt off to one side, she told us, because it made him uncomfortable otherwise.

My mother didn’t like this woman. She said there was something wrong with this woman. My mother can be judgmental, and distrustful. I resented it this time, as I often do, but when $200 disappeared from my sister-in-law’s purse, my mother asked security about the woman.

Turns out she had no husband, and we haven’t seen her since.

I have a hard time being angry at her. There may be hope for me yet. What does it take, do you think, to make a person behave that way?

5:16AM
3.6.2005

And under running laughter!

2005-03-04T01:31:00.000-05:00

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
(poem read in grammar school)

I file one nail, stop to see how I’ve done, and then move to the next. Maureen has opened her eyes, but isn’t seeing anything, or not that I can tell. She stares up and to the right, at the numbers on the monitor, or the lines running to the IV pump.

Through this, my mother repeats something about God. I don’t mean to be condescending when I talk to her, but something lashes out when she goes on. I wait for it, and then I watch it. It confuses me, because I’m not proud, or hadn't been.

The woman across the hall gave birth to a five-pound, nine-ounce baby boy. An embollism left her comatose. The nurses wheel her child down the hall to the father, who leans against a door jamb. He stands very quietly, listening to an older woman. She is trying to comfort him. They speak in Portuguese.

I catch Jesus. He says it.

O, thank you Lord, for these little moments.

Falling down nightly...

2005-02-24T00:06:00.000-05:00

Funny when it didn't matter?

Possibility of permanent damage to various functional centers of the brain, including the cluster controlling the movement of the eyes, and of the right arm. If so, stroke-like damage most likely caused by oxygen starvation, and/or a simple pressure caused by contusions on the left side of the brain...

Three weeks I've been in that place, and six patients have died, from healthy to dead in a day. I've watched the doctors tell their families. I refuse to say more of it.

All the news is bad, every call is a panic, everything buzzes and rings and flashes. My mother can't sleep, my father can't stay awake, and my sister can do neither.

And you mean to tell me--with all the fight an old woman has when her wiring is torn, pissing in her bed, or how hard a child holds a tree in a fucking tidal wave--that it isn't worth it? Spare me the artful horseshit, I insist on not understanding.

But what I wouldn't do for an article on modern health care...

"That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to his music; Faulkner's conviction faltered when he had to confront Twentieth Century Negroes instead of the black symbols in his books; and when Dos Passos tried to change his convictions he lost all his power."

"What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?"
Hunter S. Thompson

Good Times at the Neural ICU, 5AM Style!

2005-02-16T15:55:00.000-05:00

Can I please, please, please get some sleep?

RIH, 6 INCU, 4:42AM, 2.15.2005

I didn't have time to finish this one. I will finish it later, sorry.

Letter to the Patient

2005-02-14T17:45:00.000-05:00

And you smell, too...

Dear Maureen,

Wake up. Seriously, enough with the coma thing. We've all been crying for two weeks now. Mom looks like Willem Defoe. I now have Brando's hairline from The Missouri Breaks. Even Dad lost two pounds, which we both know is the equivalent of two cubic miles of ice suddenly shearing from the polar ice cap.

Also, my blog is no longer the fun diversion from winter I'd intended. It's beginning to get a bit clove cigarette in here. Hurry the fuck up. I want to post about coconut bras and why Bloc Party should try to sound more like the English Beat...

Plus, if you intend to get hiccups again while on the respirator, please wait until Stephen is on watch. You know I have a bad heart, and 3AM is no time for nonsense. Stephen has a wife; I have champagne, Pearl Vodka, and Tiger Balm. He is better suited.

In closing, wake up.

Yours in Jesus,
Gavin

PS. Love the haircut! Asymmetry is in!

Part Thirty-Two, In Which I Finally Fail To Make Sense...

2005-02-14T16:38:00.000-05:00

I swear, O god of Blogging, that when this has passed I will never blog after 2AM, at bedside, in the ICU, ever, ever again. You will allow me one last purple passage? It doesn't have to make sense? Awesome. Hugs and kisses...

Correction: "Der Monch Am Meer"...forgive, me be tired.

I am a bad person, or perhaps, should marry.

2005-02-13T03:48:00.001-05:00

Me and My Animal Habits

2005-02-11T17:30:00.000-05:00

There will be no graduation! There will be no trumpets blowing!

Goofy pretense, my one true friend!

Around ten a neurologist walked in, said hello. His head was large and sunken at the temples, but the skin of his face was youthful and smooth. A grey corona of hair moved in a current, back and forth, but slowly, like the branches of a willow. Smile. The air in the room was moving, a fan was on. It was meant to lower her body temperature, encourage restfulness and limit her brain activity. Brain activity sapped energy from more important matters, and made problems where none were needed.

This was what the neurologist told me. He was very kind, very soft-spoken, and competent in a way that put me at ease. This quiet confidence is wonderful, although it can seem like arrogance, depending on your question. This is another cliché, this idea of cool, dispassionate skills. Most of the doctors have it. I would think they live in it, like a coat or something. Something to look nice in when a woman is asking about her husband, if his shitting his bed is a good sign.

What are you supposed to do, incidentally, in that case?

The neurosurgeons share an unnervingly young look, like they preserved themselves in studies that last ten years, locked over Thayer Street…

The morning resident is in his seventh year. My aunt calls him—in her beautiful, slow Southern accent—‘My son.’ He is thirty-four years old, and has never made more than thirty-five thousand dollars. He attended medical school at Trinity College, in Dublin.

I remember the medical school. We had a common entrance, and shared ashtrays in the building courtyard, which was really an alleyway for an administration building, if I remember correctly.

It surprised me that they smoked.

Earlier in the week, a stroke victim with emphysema occupied the other bed. I’ve never heard anything like it. I smoked heavily for a while, myself, in Ireland, up to two
packs a day. I’ll never smoke again, two nights hearing him breathe like a ship sinking.

He was moved to a step-down unit on Monday.

The next was a man who, while shaving in an upstairs bathroom, had blown a secret little aneurysm, hiding in his head. His wife found him. Their daughter spends most of the morning crying, pulled up on a windowsill in the consultation room.

The next was a man fresh from surgery, holding over in the Neural ICU, for observation. And here again we have this awful, strange disjunction. All night long—as I watched seven languages I can’t read crawl up through the numbers on the monitor—he was shitting his bed. But why should a man, of any age, appear more dignified at the lip of death than, say, while taking a shit? What difference does it make? To whom?

And this is my issue, tonight: A brain can either be right, or wrong. At this time, we are neither. Why not wait to respond to something that is, rather than chasing your own morbidity through the cracks in the tiles? Making it, in the first place, something, and then following it—crying over its hands—in every instance deeper into an annihilating sentimentality that, in the end, will only comfort itself?

G.F., our primary neurosurgeon, is a perfect example of the alternative. Listening to his calm, hobbyist voice, you could never tell he was describing tears in my sister’s memory.

They’re bringing her downstairs for an MRI. Gotta go.

2/10/05
1:06AM

It's a Maudlin, Maudlin World!

2005-02-09T13:00:00.000-05:00

A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Bed

2005-02-02T23:01:00.000-05:00

Late last Friday night my kid sister was hit by a car while walking back to her dormroom. The driver fled the scene. It was minus-five degrees out, counting windchill.

I have also had something of an educational week. For example: hematoma. There. I spelled it. My new favorite sentence is "If you don't get in here and change this dressing, I'm gonna go to your house, set your dog on fire, record the sounds it makes, and play them back to your kids."

She was upgraded to 'Fair' from 'Critical' yesterday, and we're told that a month long stay in a physical rehabilitation hospital will do wonders. But then someone once told me chamomile worked wonders.

So much for not being melodramatic. Ah well. I need sleep now.

Bury Me in a Prairie of Snow, O Bullshit Hallmark Card Landscape

2005-01-25T22:10:00.000-05:00

The Classic Maker's Manhattan

The following was written by three, classic Maker's Mark Manhattans, served with three cherries per, not your standard one per, which is for amateurs, or men with limited confidence in their own masculinity...

Quick, are you a male? A jogger? Between the ages of 18 and 45? Currently residing in the Greater Boston area? If you answered 'yes' to one or more of the above questions, a word of advice: I hate you. You heard me. Freak. And I hate your pants. Plus, I'm stronger than you are. Much stronger. 100-proof strong. So, actually, nevermind your choice in menswear, just stay home. Stay home, man. Why? Because it's snowing out. A lot. In case you didn't notice this morning--as you were,I assume, greasing your girlish thighs so as to more easily sliiiiiiiiiide into those ridiculous 'Look Mom, I'm Buck Roger's Lifelong Bachelor Cousin' tights--we have nearly three feet of snow on the ground. Got that? We. As in 'This is our problem.' You know that wacked-out, foolish entitled jackass mental nudge you give people as you hog the sidewalk in good weather? Those bullshit, telepathic 'Hey, I'm busy being healthy, asshole' little passive-aggressive whitebread non-glares you give decent, cigarette-smoking, rib-eating folk as you skip down a public thruway? Yeah, well that shit isn't going to fly in this shit. Dig? Cause hear me now, son, and I will type this in boldface for you, in order to show sincerity, I WILL PANTS YOU IF YOU DON'T STOP JOGGING IN THE SNOW. That's right. I am willing to spend the five minutes it would take to remove all that Spandex from your little cancer patient legs. In public. In three feet of snow. Happily. There are five foot snowdrifts on the sidewalks. Go home. Have sex with your girlfriend. Watch The O.C. on DVD. Learn to speak Arabic. Whatever. Time and place, my friend, time and place. I feel my point is made.

The Hell of a Million Me's, Part One

2005-01-13T22:12:00.001-05:00

"But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me..."
--Waiting for the Barbarians

The Venetian
Las Vegas, NV
13 January, 2005

To Whom It May Concern,

A sketchy note...

Back when I was a young man--a fire, say, that fanned itself from the family estate in Hertfordshire, to the hearths of Oxbridge--I rather ungenerously imagined the artistic act as the focusing of an abundance of animal droppings (the World), into fertile earth, into a hectare of roses. And now I disagree. It is, rather, the arrangement of an abundance, intended to disrupt the emptiness of that abundance.

This is rather more generous to the merchants and tradespeople, those who actually provide the clutter of objective reality. I mention this only because the events of the past week have forced my hand somewhat, have compelled me to seek new terms in my relationship with ugliness, greed, stupidity, and the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. For it is one thing to look out over a sea of Donald J. Pilner oxfords and Joseph Abboud blazers, and see not the tides and currents of human life, but a succession of porcine compromise...and another to be a good man.

Details to follow.

Yours very truly.
Sir J.Q. Higgins

'I Will Be With Thee, Bush of Fire': My Very Own Slipknot-Destroying Time Machine

2005-01-07T09:26:00.000-05:00

Hold on, you can't ditch Revolting Cocks!

Had an interesting conversation with Pablo Puhanna yesterday. Over a sequence of double-zombies at the Garden Bar of the Honolulu Hilton, he challenged me to name one band whose removal from the pantheon of rock would have the greatest positive influence on the subsequent scene. In essence, who would you remove from the rock timeline, all Back to the Future style and whatnot? This to me is an outrageously complicated and difficult question. It would be perfectly reasonable, for instance, to immediately shout 'THE FUCKING EAGLES!'--but think about it. Who did the Eagles really influence? Anyone? Their poison died with them (you might argue that without them we'd have missed out on Fleetwood Mac, but I consider them a good band, even though I spend most of my time listening to The Birthday Party and Big Black). So you would have to remove the bands that caused The Eagles, namely The Byrds, and, if you remove them, you deny yourself Gram Parsons, Neil Young (I think), Big Star, The Soft Boys, early-REM, (probably) The Replacements, and Guided by Voices. Are you willing to sacrifice all of that, just to avoid 'Hotel California'? I'm not.

What are we looking for, then? We need to think in terms of marketing, I think, since that is the lifeblood of all Honest To Godness Crap. If [insert shitty band here] had never sold [insert enormous number here] of units, then record labels would never have signed [insert subsequent crap-ass rock bands here]. Bands that influenced other bands terrible ideas should be excluded, because you'll probably find that their bad ideas became good ideas in the hands of other people (a perfect example would be the Doors, probably one of the worst bands that ever existed, but one whose stupid, lame pretensions also gave us Iggy Pop and Joy Division). We also need to exclude good bands whose good ideas fell down the stairs of history into a steaming pile of Avril Lavigne. Pop punk has been working its way into teen pop for quite some time, and now we have Ms. Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, and even poor stupid Hilary Duff to deal with, which seems unfair in a world in which tidal waves can kill 150,000 people. But what do you do about it? Pablo suggested removing The Ramones, which must have pained him greatly, although it isn't a bad point. The Landslide of Pop Punk Suck looks something like this: Ramones>Buzzcocks/Undertones>Lookout Records (Screeching Weasel/Mr. T Experience/The Queers)>Green Day>Blink 182>That Band with the Ugly Little Canadian Kid>Avril. It's terrifying, but we can't blame the Ramones. Afterall, they created the CBGB scene, which begot UK punk, which begot early American Hardcore, which begot my entire record/CD/MP3 collection. Can't pull the plug on that, no matter how laughable Ashlee Simpson gets (Ohohohohohoho, my God, should the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sue, or just change to electronic music?).

So, who do we kill? My list of nominees includes Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, and Aerosmith. But let's dig deeper...

METALLICA: A long time ago there was a band named Motorhead. This is the band fans of Metallica think Metallica is, but they are wrong. Metallica is not rough, exciting, angry and visceral music. It is dull, long, slow-paced though played-fast crap, as pretentious as Yes, but with more violent fans. Metallica writes songs about the inevitabilty of human decay that actually cause humans to decay. And they last ten minutes. Screw Metallica. If you remove them, look what happens to today's 'heavy' music. No nu metal. No Korn, no Limp Bizkit, no Godsmack, no Slipknot, and probably no Hot Topic. Yes, I just typed that. Think about that the next time you're rocking out to 'Creeping Death'. Cheeseball. [If you choose to disagree with me, please see the index below, where I’ve included the lyrics to ‘Creeping Death’, the best song The Moody Blues ever neglected to write.]

NINE INCH NAILS: Now we're getting serious. Think about Nine Inch Nails for a second. When they first came out, they were actually kind of interesting; 'Head Like a Hole' was like angry-Cure, which sounded great at age 13. And they've been inactive/irrelevant for so long now, that it may be difficult to comprehend the damage Trent Reznor did. But he did damage, and it has nothing to do with 'industrial' music, Orgy, Rob Zombie, or The Faint. When Nine Inch Nails started to sell in the early-90s, someone bankrolled a label for Trent. He signed Marilyn Manson. The scary/sexual hard music thing opened the door for Korn, who got massive airplay on MTV, and did the same breathy-breathy breakdown parts Trent used to do. Korn turned around and gave the Gold's Gyms of the world Limp Bizkit. If Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral don't sell, then Marilyn Manson becomes the new Gwar, and I can go to the mall without laughing the whole time--not that I'd go to those malls, anyway--and Korn wouldn't have been shoved down our throats--complete with their retread-Snapcase guitar riffs--which would have helped spare us from Fred Durst, Slipknot, Linkin Park, Stain'd et al. My God. BUT...none of this means anything if Metallica still exists, because we might have gotten those things anyway. So eliminating either Nine Inch Nails or Metallica is probably a waste.

On the other hand...

AEROSMITH: Here we go. This is my pick for obliteration. If you want to hear shitty Stones-crossed-with-Zeppelin music, you can listen to Free from now on, because cutting these guys does wonders. Without Aerosmith, hair metal probably doesn't happen, which means no Poison, no Warrant, no WASP, no Cinderella, no Ratt, and on and on (yes, it's upsetting that we'd probably lose Guns n' Roses, but they could always have switched to AC/DC as a primary influence). Plus, this means that Pearl Jam has to sound more like the Stooges, which might free us from the likes of Creed, Nickelback, and that fat 'It's been a while' guy, while at the same time bettering the chances that Mudhoney breaks in the early-90s. AND! This is the big deal part, what puts Aerosmith over the top: they were involved in the Run DMC crossover, which a.) proved to hip hop acts (and more importantly, their labels) that pandering to a white audience will produce huge amounts of cash, and b.) helped beget rap metal. So now what do you get in the mainstream...

PLUS

Mudhoney

MINUS

Guns n' Roses (a loss)

Poison

WASP

Warrant

Ratt

Bon Jovi

Cinderella

Skid Row

The Bullet Boys

Slaughter

Pearl Jam

Silverchair

Candlebox

Creed

Nickelback

That Band With the Fat Lead Singer (not Limp Bizkit)

Limp Bizkit (through rap crossover)

Korn (?)

Linkin Park

Will Smith

Nelly and his ilk

Chingy, etc.

Ja Rule, et al

Fabulous...

Great God Almighty. Think about it! 'Mama Kin' is a small price to pay to have spent an entire lifetime never hearing any of those acts. I'm gonna go build that time machine now. Disagree all you want, Benny Menahune, but it should be impossible for you to argue with me on this. Aerosmith is to Pop Music as the Catholic Church is to Fun. Period. Show some integrity.

Speaking of integrity, this entire post sucked. I am off to my brother's bachelor party tomorrow, followed by a flight to the Big Blue conference in Las Vegas (once again, missing the AVN convention--and what I have to imagine would have been major league associated comedic possibilities--by two days), then back to New England for my brother's wedding.

INDEX

Other nominees...

1.)Madonna: Whew. Where to begin and/or end? Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and No Doubt. Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore and even Ashlee Simpson belong to Tiffany/Debbie Gibson, but any of the uncounted mass of female artists who surfaced, dropped their pants, and then resubmerged may be numbered among Madonna's terrible progeny.

2.)U2>Radiohead(ok)>Coldplay(awful)>Keane(dear God)

3.)Paul Simon>Crap 70s Singer-songwriters/John Denver/Gordon Lightfoot/Jim Croce/James Taylor/et al. His own value can be debated. Also, the blame can probably be shared with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen.

4.)Whoever it was that gave the world Pussy Galore, Royal Trux, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion...and others. Sooooooo...Sonic Youth? Tough one. Who created the artsy, dull-ass downtown New York danger-rock scene? Suicide? I'm hoping it can be traced to someone other than the Velvet Underground.

5.)Operation Ivy/Madness/The Specials>Ska in general (although they are all good in their own right), but let's just write 'Goldfinger' and be done with it.

6.)Green Day>Blink 182>Sum 41>Good Charlotte>The Rest of Them, Whatever Their Names Are, Ask Your Little Sister, She'll Know

THE LYRICS TO 'CREEPING DEATH', IN THEIR ENTIRETY (And if you can disagree with me after reading these lyrics, I never want to talk to you again.)

Slaves

Hebrews born to serve, to the Pharaoh

Heed

To his every word, live in fear

Faith

Of the unknown one, the deliverer

Wait

Something must be done, four hundred years

So let it be written

So let it be done

I'm sent here by the chosen one

So let it be written

So let it be done

To kill the first born Pharaoh son

I'm creeping death
Now

Let my people go, land of Goshen

I will be with thee, bush of fire

Blood

Running red and strong, down the Nile

Plague

Darkness three days long, hail to fire

So let it be written

So let it be done

I'm sent here by the chosen one

So let it be written

So let it be done

To kill the first born Pharaoh son

I'm creeping death

Die by my hand

I creep across the land

Killing first born man

Die by my hand

I creep across the land

Killing first born man

Rule the midnight air the destroyer

Born

I shall soon be there, deadly mass

Creep the steps and flood final darkness

Blood

Lambs blood painted door, I shall pass

So let it be written

So let it be done

I'm sent here by the chosen one

So let it be written

So let it be done

To kill the first born Pharaoh son

I'm creeping death

Hahahahahahahahahaahhoohohohohohohohhahahahahahahahaha...

Fair Enough, But If You Get Into the Hall of Fame for What Is, in Essence, a Child's Game, Does Jesus Care?

2005-01-06T10:21:00.000-05:00

Yea, baby, let's light this thing!

Let's all welcome Francis Panziano, an old friend and Yankee fan from New Haven, CT. He will be talking about baseball. And maybe swearing a lot. And hitting people. Probably

So the Yankees finally acquired Randy Johnson. Sis-boom-rah, as the friendly cheerleaders used to say. I can't wait to live through six months of 'How can you possibly root for a team that BUYS championships, blahblahblah?' and 'If you claim to love baseball so much, how can you support an organization that is so clearly bad for the sport as a whole?' The answer to these and similar questions is an obvious one. Because I fucking hate you. You fucking overbearing, overwrought and mercilessly stupid piece of shit. Why don't you go have sex with a hooker, catch a brain tumor in your penis, and die someplace they won't find you for like nine months. Why? So when your mother has to ID you, your body looks like a pile of butter and burnt marshmallow. Obviously.

Sorry, G.T., but I'm fixing to go off, baby!

One: unless you live in Montana--or some other horrid nightmare far from a baseball market--you don't even choose your favorite team. Your father is a Dodgers fan? Cool, then you're a Dodgers fan. It's like blood type, or religion. If your dad grew up in Harlem and Queens (pre-Mets), then guess what? Unless you can't stand the guy or he sexually molested you or beat your mother to death with a hammer, you're going to be a fucking Yankees fan. So why bother asking 'How can you be a Yankees fan?' It's a bit like asking me--in a pissy, condescending tone--'How could you possibly have freckles? I mean, what is up with that?' I'll tell you what's up with it, princess, oh I'll tell you unconscious. I should stop rooting for my favorite team because they spend a lot of money? If I were a Milwaukee Brewers fan, and gave up on them to become a Sox fan, only because their payroll slipped below $30,000,000, wouldn't you call me a clown?

Two: so, what, you want a salary cap? It would take a two year lockout to get one. At least two years, no baseball. It will never happen. More revenue sharing, more luxury taxes, that might happen, but not a cap. What should happen is contraction, because the real issue isn't the fact that ARod and his kind make $25 million a year, it's the fact that there are so many buyers, and so limited a number of players, that the price of a bottom-of-the-rotation starter is now $7 million a year. And they're backed up by good-but-not-great-or-even-predictably-productive position guys demanding 10mil+ contracts. Those are the guys who eat up salary, your Troy Glauses, Edgar Renterias and J.D. Drews. If you cut the number of bidders, all of a sudden Jaret Wright, Eric Milton, Matt Clement and (for the love of God!) Kris Benson turn back into 3 year/$9 million pumpkins. Maybe then guys would accept arbitration once in a while, and small market fans wouldn't have to cheer a whole new set of 21 year old know-nothings year after year.

Three: what is Steinbrenner supposed to do with the money? Buy an island? Save it? If you had the money to buy a Ferrari, would you instead buy a Pontiac, because otherwise you might have an unfair advantage in wooing the opposite sex, and that would just be bad for the dating scene as a whole? Are you high? No. Because if you did that, you'd be Jesus Friggin' Christ, and people would paint pictures of you and see you in fucking toast and stuff. And you're not Jesus Christ, you're a tremendous dickhead who spends too much time thinking about baseball and will never appear in a piece of toast. Ever.

Four: I'm actually happy for Sox fans. How's that for 'typical Yankee arrogance.' Now maybe they can get on with their lives, and lose the urge to mutter nonsense like, 'Thank God, now my Dad can die knowing the Sox won one.' Really? Awesome. So he was waiting for them to win one before deciding to die? I'm happy he can die now. By the way, is your dad fucking retarded? He sounds retarded. That would be impressive, since retarded people don't usually live that long, and your dad must be, what, 50? 55? My sister-in-law works with retards...sorry, 'retardeds'...and she tells me they usually die before they turn 35. He must be older than that. Does Fenway offer discounts for people in his condition? You should be proud of him. That guy--and I'm not in the habit of throwing this term around--is a trooper.

An Open Letter To Whom It May Concern

2005-01-05T10:19:00.000-05:00

Dear Bruno Magli,

I have received your gay shoes, which were supposed to be in my non-gay size, but I'm afraid I will not be able to continue my correspondence with, like, your shoes. Were I to wear them, they would be the gayest thing I have ever been associated with, and that includes the gay bachelor party I planned and then participated in for that gay wedding a couple of gay years ago. Carlos, if you are reading this, please forgive me for my humorous use of the word 'gay', as that Manhattan was still the best Manhattan I have ever had, gay or otherwise. And stop reading my mail, you silly gay bartender.

Had I known, for example, that the size difference was inconsequential, that the real issue with the shoes were their near-elemental gayness, then I would not have troubled you. I am sure you have many things to do other than put things on my feet and act like I look good. We both know I was born for workboots, that I'm not 'Hollywood', and that the fact that I don't blink makes people uncomfortable. Why distract ourselves from these important realizations by exchanging gay shoes via UPS? What would the point be? Que sera...loafer.

So, in closing, please give your contrasting stitching and overall daintiness to some Italian kid. Italians can sometimes get away with this stuff, as when they pluck their eyebrows then immediately get all defensive about it, and threaten to 'Fuck you up' if you mention it outside the club. Why they don't just NOT pluck their eyebrows is beyond me. Thank you though, Bruno Magli, because you have given me an interesting idea for a sitcom treatment, in which a thickly-built Irish guy discovers a pair of magical shoes that turn him into a gay superhero (called 'The Gay Elemental'). He will become the gay superhero whenever he puts on the shoes and says the word 'Grazie' in a real gay way. It will be like 'Shazam!', but gay.

Yours,
G. Thomas Magnum III
Diamond Head, Maui
Hawaii

The World's Meanest Time-Traveling Six Year Old, Part Two

2005-01-04T20:21:00.000-05:00

Wow. So do you run on stupid batteries, or just the regular kind?

Due to a near-Apocalyptic encounter with an attention-starved, cat-loving first grade chick, the six year old G. Thomas has hurtled forward two decades into the future, to deliver the following rant on mall pet shops a full four days earlier than usual.

You know what I don't fucking get AT ALL? Mall pet stores. Just what is the scam here? Does anyone actually bring a puppy home from one of these places, or is it the dumb girl/idiot kid equivalent of a Montreal club strippe (Yeah, my French is that bad. So you're smarter than a six year old, big fucking deal, whaddya want, a blowjob?). While you might spend a lot of time rubbing things, you won't be taking any of it home, and you know it. How humane. And what's the real difference between a puppy in one of these places, and a zombie in a crap Italian horror flick? The music? Aren't they both just twitching piles of stink seeking to attach themselves to you? Fucking yuck, man. But nevermind, there they are in a mercifully declining number of malls throughout the country, filling the concourse with a melange of cat piss, hamster shit and wood chips. Yay for animals. There is no more depressing sight to a boy of my age than the image of a high school football player--the supposed KING of his genre--distractedly following some squealing dipshit of a cheerleader around one of those places, in the faint hope that she might give him a handjob later. Because I know that in ten years, I'll be that guy.

That is my real issue with mall pet stores, I guess. They reveal too much about us. They say, 'I'm the kind of person who needs to feel a warm, gently-pulsing, piss-soaked ball of terrier in my arms, and will use the image to manipulate both myself, and any girls in the area, into thinking I'm a gentle, sensitive human being who doesn't mind smelling like piss.' And the need to do this is apparently so strong, that even The Market has picked up on it. So now a booming industry has sprung up amidst the ruins of our emotional integrity. Fucking YES, dude! I can't help thinking that, if we'd only watched what we ate a bit more, so that we didn't get chubby and unsexy, or if we'd only responded to our parents in the way we intended to respond, rather than choking back years of roaring distaste, or if our first, second, and third loves had turned out a little differently, so that we never lost all hope in the possibility of a human connection, that maybe, just maybe, no one would ever buy a fucking cat ever again, and they'd all starve together in our streets and public squares. That would be the first GOOD sign for our species in about 3000 years, man.

Laugh it up, fat chick, because tonight, while you sleep,
I'm gonna rub my asshole on your lips.

Oh, and I do have a special place in my heart for cats, or rather their owners. To be honest, on my list of 'Assholes I Hate Talking To', cat-lovers fall just below teenagers who break into old women's homes and have nonconsensual sex with them. Loving a cat is like loving your own alcoholism. It is slowly devouring everything that was once good about your life, but you love the thing because...because why? Because its fur is soft? What are you, Helen Keller? You can't see what the thing is up to? It's only in it for the food and shelter! Would six months of curling up with you on the couch and purring like he gave a shit so endear you to your neighborhood crazy homeless guy, that you'd let him crap in the kitchen and leave his pubic hair all over your sweaters? So why the double standard? Oh, I know, 'Because she loooooooooves me.' Whatever, Cindy, whatever. The cat doesn't love you. You'll have to excuse me, as I'm only six, and have yet to develop an interpersonal compass and/or code of ethics--so I'm not in the habit of calling a lump of shit a Faberge egg--but NOTHING and NOBODY loves you. If anyone did, you wouldn't need the fucking cat. So there it is, having a cat means you've conceded you don't deserve love. Good. Fine. Why don't you go buy that purring physical incarnation of your own failure as a human being a fucking sweater or something?

Christ. And it isn't going to get any better, is it?

Oh, and congratulations to The Richard Formerly Known as Kai, who finally landed the most richly deserved promotion in the long, dumb history of IBM. Good luck with your six-figures! I look forward to begging you for a job when I (inevitably) decide I need to live in Manhattan.

The Limp Mysteries of THE LIFE AQUATIC

2005-01-03T22:21:00.000-05:00

It's magical!

You know what I don't understand about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou? Why hasn't Drew Barrymore asked Wes Anderson on a date yet? Is there something wrong with him? I mean, I know 95% of my hometown would look at him and nod 'Yes'--and then mention that he probably couldn't bench more than eighty-ninety lbs, if that--but didn't Drew Barrymore marry Tom Green? That guy only had the one testicle. What do you think Wes Anderson is missing? It just doesn't make sense that those two haven't hooked up. Maybe he only has, like, a colorful sea pony in a champagne flute down there. That's really all he has in his newest movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou and Lots of Shots of Bill Murray's Nipples. WAIT! Maybe that is what the movie is about! The writer/director's failure to get hit on by Drew Barrymore. This would make some sense to me. It would add the fragrant spice of...uh...drama and human yearning and...something to think about between shots of Willem Defoe in his fucking Speedo.

Incidentally, my thanks to Mr. Anderson, as I'd often wondered what Jeff Goldblum would look like in a pair of nut-huggers--for the record, nice-sized Johnson, but totally out of proportion with his balls. Or at least the left one. Now that is filmmaking! Be sure to show up late. That way you'll be forced to sit in the front row of the theater, where you can spend two hours nestled snugly beneath three feet of middle-aged, Judaic hog (dimensions may vary, depending on the size of the screen).

Fantastic! Anyway, this whole Drew Barrymore thing didn't occur to me until I was back at the old apartment, sweating myself autistic. In kind with the sort of asstrocious architectural lunacy that dominates Boston, the woman upstairs controls my goddamned thermostat. Turns out her father was a Greek Cypriot, and her mother was a motherfucking African fucking violet, so she has some sort of genetic weakness that demands wave after wave of heat and (in response) ambient rage.

So there I am, sweating the dimples off my face--after nearly overdosing on $9.75 of pure Texas quirk--and wondering what the hell the point of making The Life Aquatic could possibly have been. I mean, this movie is NOTHING, and you can do NOTHING without even making a fucking movie (I like the word. So fuck off). I have to assume it is considerably more difficult to write, arrange financing for, and then complete a feature film than it is to...say...go down to the local cafe for an oversized scone and an Americano. Yet, every morning (or afternoon, as the case may be), I awake with a powerful motivation to walk down to the square for said items, only to remain on the couch in my shearling-and-calfskin slippers (many thanks to Jesus for the being born in slipper-season thing). To go and do something like a movie, you have to want to, right? So how exactly do you want to do NOTHING (stick with me, next I'll be italicizing capital letters, or vice versa...SHIZNIT!), to the point that you go out and overcome enormous obstacles just to get your unique nonvision committed to film?

Sure, the cutaway boat stuff and Disneyland sea creatures charmed me into a more innocent, childlike mindset--back to a time when I trusted Mister Wizard's opinion on everything and sometimes had trouble wiping my own ass--but charm does not a story make. Someone, please tell me what Zizzou's malfunction was supposed to be? Why did he want to hang out with Luke and/or Owen Wilson, who seems like such a dick all the time? I don't get it.

Responses will be appreciated. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go sweat now.

PS - Yes, I realize that this post is entirely about penises. But one can only blog from lived experience.

PPS - No, the name of my band in college was not Ambient Rage. That was the name of my first puppy.

The World's Meanest Time-Traveling Six Year Old

2005-01-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

Christ, you're still here?

Every Sunday afternoon G. Thomas Magnum III's six year old self hurtles two decades forward in time to say the things G. Thomas chokes back. This is one such rant.

You know what I fucking hate? The advice I get from loved ones. My God, how many otherwise fully-functional words go down in burning pointlessness when used to express concern for another's well-being? And it's almost always in the form of 'You should' phrases, too, like the three seconds they just spent considering your issues produced this miraculous fruit of brilliance that they will now pass along to you, a lovable idiot. 'You should...check out this Paul Simon album...attend Bible study classes...work with retarded kids...buy a house...ask my chubby friend Susan on a date, because she's a good listener...try Chilean wine...smile more...visit Italy...go to bed earlier.' Thank you Grandpa Stupid, and can I get a side of sentimental bullshit to go along with that generous helping of moron you just dumped on me? No one ever tells you anything useful, things like 'You should avoid Sprint Wireless, if you can,' or 'You should rub your belly counter-clockwise and say these magic words, because then that pile of wet towels on your bedroom floor will change into money and hot Japanese girls.' Tell me, during what magical moment was affectionate concern forever linked to useless, intrusive stupidity? Was I napping when it happened? A delicious realization: the people who love you the most wish you were humming 'Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard' while waiting to discuss your interpretation of Jeremiah 3:24 with a roomful of soccer moms and closeted homosexuals. That kind of love is AWESOME. How 'bout next time you just send money, though? Because seriously, a house? The average home in Greater Boston now costs upwards of $3.8 million, and I need that money for all the contract killings. Why not just say 'You know what you should buy! A motherfucking jetpack!'? At least a motherfucking jetpack doesn't have a kitchen table, across which you could share your hard-won wisdom, O Lord of the Point Most Obvious.

And as for smiling, do you ever notice how many people talk to you when you're smiling? Even strangers! For instance, the last time I smiled at the post office, I wound up listening to some college girl vomit up her entire summer vacation in Belize--directly into my ear canal, like it was fashioned by God's own Hand as a repository for her lack of personality. So that's why I'm not smiling at the post office ever again, onaccounta I hate stories that include the sentence 'The people there just live at a different pace than we do, you know?' Thank you Claude Levi-Strauss. I'm so glad your parents sprang for the roundtrip ticket, so that you could return and impart your vast experience on me. Next time you feel like sharing, please start the conversation by stabbing me in the throat, you fucking devourer of time. Just because the smelly heroin addict who works at the coffeehouse tells you your pigtails look sexy doesn't mean I'm going to find everything you say goddamned essential listening. I'm six fucking years old. I don't care about your sexiness. Or Belize, which we all know is TOTALLY FUCKING OVERRATED.

A Very Magnum Christmas, Episode One, in Which a Son of Thomas Magnum Attempts to Participate in an EOQ Revenue Call With a Broken Ass

2004-12-22T10:54:00.000-05:00

Wait a tic, this stuff is slippery! No one told me...

Regret for me has never lasted more than four or five seconds. You decide, stupidly, to take up surfing, show up at your first lesson with a near-catatonic hangover, and lose your footing in six inches of water and a cubic mile of jagged coral. But the feeling doesn't last. As you fall through space, you may take a moment to wonder 'Why the fuck didn't you go to bed early last night, you ignorant bastard, instead of sticking around for three more Manhattans and a conversation about the Happy Mondays? Did you really think your pool game would improve? All you were doing was staring at the waitress, anyway, and now here you are, hurtling through blue nothingness on your way to multiple contusions and some crappy story, you stupid fucking bastard.'

And then I land.

Last night I discovered a new regret, one that will last at least through this afternoon. It goes something like...'You stupid cunt, why didn't you learn to fucking ice skate when you were living next to that Norman Rockwellesque pond in Connecticut?' Ruined a perfectly good evening. Seems funny, and unjust, but a man can go from enjoying a delicious filet mignon at a local steakhouse, to being run over by a middle-aged French Canadian in a Boston Bruins jersey in considerably less than two hours. Wild swing, that.

After a few trips ass-over-tea-kettle, after a few spills, a few desperate grabs for the boards, a few 'Yes, I'm fine, I just wanted to sit down on the ice for moment, thank you's' to the girl in the lovely green sweater, I threw my hands up in the general direction of my vague New Englandishness, wished my friends a good evening, and retreated home to my sofa. Two Tylenol and a couple of Bookers later, and everything seemed normal. But it was not to be...

When the alarm clock went off, it was obvious something was wrong. I reached for the snooze button, standard procedure for charming but undermotivated private investigators, but there was something in the flex of my wrist that sent my...forget it, it hurt really bad. The worst part was my ass. What do you do with a sore ass? How do you walk around in public? And to have it all come down to an ICE SKATING accident? How unmanly. Nancy Kerrigan ice skates. Let's leave it to her.

I will try again, at some point. This morning's con call was very bad, though. What started out as a reasonable, intelligible sentence (I’d intended, “They don’t appear to have an active contract with us, though.”), came out as “They donarrrrrggggggh oof darn sorry.” Ergonomically designed chairs my sexy bruised ass. Merry Christmas.

You Too Can Leave Exactly When You Like

2004-12-14T16:58:00.000-05:00

Now don't go being modest...

One of the hidden benefits of work-related travel—especially when you travel by car, or by train, or even by surf-ski—is the opportunity to sit in traffic, or in the café car, or at the edge of the tide pool, and do next to nothing. You feel no need to be anywhere, are merely on your way, and the one person you answer to is aware of this. It’s a rare and wonderful feeling. I once spent nine hours at Heathrow, following the total failure of the airport computer system, and wasted every damned second of that time in the video arcade. Cost me eighty euros, but it was worth every…um, penny? Eurette?

So I may not have palm trees this week, and I may not have hula girls, pepper-crusted mahi-mahi in a wasabi cream sauce, or even the faintly-sweet Pacific breezes of my home island, but I do have my car stereo, and the I-84 traffic between Hartford and Southbury, Connecticut.

This morning, somewhere around Bethel, I realized the commute had renewed my love affair with Wire’s Chairs Missing and 154...

Actually, this will need to wait. Best wishes for a speedy recovery to JB, and here's hoping the insurance company recognizes your late Porsche as a 'Total Loss'. Get well soon, Montreal is calling.

Let's Get Pretentious, Bitch!

2004-12-10T10:32:00.000-05:00

This was the Woolworth Building, for one morning anyway.

You know who is beginning to grow on me? TV on the Radio. In hindsight, crossing Pere Ubu and Prince seems damned obvious, but in practice, this is similar to Balsamico Oro and raspberry gelato: you will be unwilling to order it, until you've already tried it. So thanks to She-Who-Makes-the-Mix-CDs. And to the good people of Modena. And to raspberries, as well, come to think of it.

Thursday morning, Cyril mentioned that he didn't hate the day's post. This was a compliment. I responded by mentioning that Frank Stanford could have been a more successful poet than Hart Crane, had he been born in the 1890's, rather than after the Beats, that he wouldn't have felt the need to be so expansive. This was really just a way for me to throw the line 'I blame jazz' at Cyril. Things like that bother him, generally. But he took it in stride, and said he felt jazz had proven a better influence on the visual arts and film than on literature. Which got me to thinking. Which is why you should stop reading now.

I spend most of my day arguing with people over things like revenue recognition rules, mutual cotermination letters, and the appropriateness of placing 'wherein' in spots where 'to which' would be more useful. My life is stupid. So I miss things. Sometimes for two years. A few weeks ago I finally stumbled on James Wood's review of White Teeth. Wood coins a new term, one I assume wasn't well-received, in hysterical realism. Cool. I won't summarize the review, partly because I'm not sure he believes he's right, at least in the case of Zadie Smith. In the cases of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, The Six-Hundred Pound Don Delillo (I felt bad for Don, even Jonathan Safron Foer gets three names, and his book blew so hard I almost paid it...), Salman Rushdie, and Dave Eggers, he admits his argument makes more sense. Alright, so I'll summarize. So I'm a liar.

Your flight leaves LaGuardia in 45 minutes.

To me, it has a lot to do with why Frank Stanford didn't get to be Hart Crane, even though they each had their images, and their own weird vigor. Hart Crane was a fan of the metaphysical poets. The metaphysical poets were fans of well-conceived, difficult conceits, usually about women applying makeup, or the deaths of the men they used to have sex with at Eton. Every image and turn of phrase in their poems was directed back toward the central argument, and the poem had a hard structure. The words were free to further the needs of the conceit only, and the poet had to make the heavy thing work. It isn't freedom, but it has a vitality, probably from internal pressure. But then what do I know. Ask me about portal software, ask me about personal limitations...

Stanford wrote a book named The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. It is very good. It's also terrible. It is three hundred and eighty-three pages long. Think of a ballade about Huck Finn. Now ask Jack Kerouac to add an additional three hundred pages, in the middle of each line. Now you're getting it. There is another way to achieve vitality in literature. It is what Wood describes in his review, and has nothing to do with forcing language to surrender its freedom to the pressures of craft, and everything to do with what white folks thought jazz was in the Fifties. Free. Modern. Optimistic. Not, God forbid, boring, which is like death in a way, isn't it? Being bored. Being white and suburban in the Fifties. How uncreative. Nevermind that the best-of-all-possible-novels that could have been written about the Fifties wouldn't have been the story of drifters without consequence exploring freedom and sex and consciousness and other drivel, but a novel about a housewife in a milltown in Pennsylvania. Is America enormous? Yes, it is. But that's just space, baby, it ain't of you. And nothing is more enormous than a dinner table, at a certain moment when no one is speaking, and for a specific reason.

Abstraction, or your eyes on a windy day?

The first time I visited London, the trip was intended to celebrate my engagement. The question itself had been asked under strange circumstances in the dining room of the Woodstock Inn, in one of the most beautiful towns in the entire world, to my mind, and remember, I have prejudices against it now. The ring used was her grandmother's. I didn't feel this was appropriate, so in the time between...that, and our trip to London, I cleaned out my savings and purchased a ring of my own. Because I am an idiot. Point being, this was also the first time I'd been to London, and I wanted to go to the National Gallery. They were having some sort of Van Gogh thing. Very exciting, because I know next to nothing about art. I'd seen The Night Cafe at Yale, so I knew that. And I had a print of Bedroom at Arles. The end. We went to the gallery, and it was all very nice, as it would be. As we walked back to our hotel, through some park or other--they have too many parks, which makes storytelling difficult, after the fact--I decided to present the second ring. I tugged my tourist satchel thing from out of my shirt, and we had something similar to the following exchange.

"What are you doing?"

"Wait a second."

"Don't take that out here! What do you need, travellers checks?"

"No, hold on a second, stop walking."

"You can't take that out here, someone will try to steal it."

"I want to give you this," and I produce the ring.

"It's beautiful, but put it back, we can't do this here."

I bothered to type this because by the time we got back to our hotel room, it looked like Van Gogh's bedroom at Arles. The actual conversation might not have been exactly like that, as she was a good deal nicer than all that, but that is pretty relevant as well. So what is all this shit that happens to us, anyway? Is there a good way, as well as a lazy way to deal with it?

Further and further and further.

Why bother writing? As representation goes, it is a terrible thing. Cyril is right. The world creates fewer problems for film and the visual arts. Take painting, or representative painting. A two foot by four foot limit in which to work. Or one foot by eight inches. Or twenty feet by twenty feet. It doesn't matter. What will you be leaving out? You have to leave something out, boyo. A useful thing to do would be to make that mean something. I plan to stick a bunch of John Marin paintings in here. You may have noticed. My favorite painting in the world is a watercolor he did of New York City. I don't understand New York City. It fills up too much of my attention. It doesn't fit inside of my head. It doesn't fit inside of a watercolor either. Marin, being smarter than me, painted it that way. He deals with the enormity of the city by painting alternate frames into the painting itself; the tiny little space of the paper gets played as a strength, similar to the way the conceit of the metaphysical poem focuses its promiscuous little words (A sort of cubism, although I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about right now. You can see it in the Brooklyn Bridge sketch above). Whitman would have written a thousand line poem about the view in this watercolor, but Marin is forced by the limitation of the frame to make an aesthetic decision. He turns a complicated subjective experience into a simple object. A small watercolor. The density amazes me. It practically is New York. If you're late for something. Or you're lost.

But back to James Wood. Sort of.

When I was an undergrad, I was forced at gunpoint to write a thesis about James Joyce. One of the many indignities I suffered was pouring over a football field full of secondary source materials, and it always struck me as odd that most-to-all of the critics had failed to mention that Bloom was having, not just a bad day, but an important-ly bad day, in his life at least. Everything was mock epic this and roots of postmodernism that. No one ever brought up the fact that any day spent wondering if your beloved is cheating on you, and trying to decide if you either deserve to win her back, or should even bother attempting to win her back, is going to be a day filled with a certain amount of digression. That is just reality. Isn't a better, more economical way to represent the unbounded and synchronic hell of that, to put down 700 pages on that one day alone, and fill those pages with as many, let's say, alternate frames as you can squeeze in? Let's face it, adultery is HUGE. It does things to people, I've seen it. I've watched them go about their days. Those are long minutes they're living. Aside from everything else that is going on in Ulysses, isn't the decision to, well, not equate, but put-side-by-side the greatest epic poem in human history (about a god-man returning to his wife), and an account of the day a middle-class Jew in Dublin tries to decide if he should win back his wife, I don't know, an aesthetic decision made in the interests of representation? Not of literature itself, or of the cultural moment, but of a man living his life during a certain cultural moment? Another shot at realism? Isn't that what life feels like? Here's some glibness: Dreiser may feel like reality, but reality doesn't feel anything like Dreiser.

And then we have the heirs or whatever of Joyce and those experimentalists, the Richard Powers and David Foster Wallaces, the elaborators. Although it always bugged me when people included The Gold Bug Variations in their 'If you liked Ulysses...' lists. It's more like the USA Trilogy. Or, as James Wood says, like Dickens. Read the review (the best part is where Zadie Smith seems to suggest that Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace represent an important development in the novel, because they know how a Cisco router works). He basically argues that, faced with the same problems writers are always faced with (really saying something about the world, or society; characterization; boring fucking everyone with your dumb stories), they decided to create huge perpetual motion machines, designed to manage caricature, in the manner of a Dickens novel, or any writing, really (he says Chekhov is an exception), a new jazz that excites, endless riffing on computer programming, game theory, international cabals, ballistics, sentences that don't end, much like this one isn't. And when you run out of room, screw it, you can't run out of room, but if you do, there are always footnotes. The pressure in the novel is no longer the boundaries set by the decisions the novelist has made, but the pressure to get your point across, usually something about consumer society, or how funny we are about sex, or racism. And you keep writing until that point is made. Did anyone read Infinite Jest? I was told to read it, and that it was 'like Ulysses,' but I'm of the opinion that Joyce decided to write all of those strange episodes because of something he learned about literary realism in Dubliners, not because he believed it would be more entertaining, or that it would allow him to say something about the act of writing, or anything as dull and academic as that. In fact, if I remember correctly, I didn't understand why Infinite Jest had to end at all. It could have kept going. David Foster Wallace's travel essays are fantastic. His editor must have given him a deadline. The Broom of the System goes nowhere. There are no limits, and the baby drowns in the bathwater.

Maybe it isn't as bad as all that. I have met at least four people who tell me they've finished The Gold Bug Variations without skipping large chunks, and they aren't the sort to lie. But if you ask me, a writer just writes, and a literary artist accepts that she can't merely continue in every direction, that the limitations she sets by bothering to make aesthetic decisions are as much the root of her art as how hot-and-bothered she gets over words and ideas. Afterall, they're just words. Like 'fuck'. Fuck is a word. And an idea. Fuck it.

Everybody's Happy Nowadays

2004-12-09T21:53:00.000-05:00

Welcome to paradise, you goddamned idiot.

"Your eyes are long Vermont roads
With a tacky song on the radio
And your eyes are toothless young men
In Tennessee in the rain again."

I am a classic American idiot. I like pluck, or the appearance of pluck. I have a natural distrust of privilege, even my own, and a certain ambivalence, re: myself, as I also covet privilege. I like the Alamo. I like the '84 Tigers. I even have a soft spot for the '04 Red Sox, although I am a lifelong Yankees' fan, which is its own problem. I think the floor will drop from beneath me. I believe the sky will never fall, and on and on. So it isn't impossible for me to visualize Bill Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and even--if I'm feeling especially generous--Jaime Sanchez, picking through piles of scrap for compromised ballistic glass, if there is such a thing, duct-taping it to their viewholes, and then driving north to fight...somebody. In fact, given that it's the one poetic needle in a haystack of depressing information, quotes, demonstrations and statistics, all orbiting our $200,000,000,000 bid for global pariah-ism, you might even say I treasure the image. In a way, it is my own, unlike the other nasty business. Because I'm an idiot.

Is it possible for there to be more and more of less and less? It is, isn’t it? How untropical. I only mention it because of a conference call I was on yesterday, in which we were informed of the sale of IBM’s Personal Computing division to a Chinese company: Lenovo. It would be racist, in a way, for me to huff about the sale of an important American asset to a Communist nation, particularly one that holds so much of our national debt. That certainly isn’t my issue with it. For one thing, IBM is no more an American company than it is Chinese. Or Irish. Or Indian. John Walker Lindh was born here as well. For another thing, 40% of production was already taking place in China, a number which may not change. But there’s poetry in it. Or am I wrong?

Christians who help no one. Patriots who cheat their employees, or sell their companies to extremely foreign interests, just to increase profit margin by 3%. Warhawking pom-pom artists who fail to arm their own soldiers. These are the people who keep invoking ‘poetic’ America. Good for them. Why be bashful? Goddamned idiots.

So here is some real American poetry, in which 'I know' and 'I dream' are identical, without compromising either. Thank you, Madame Millwhistle.

"...I dream let those that won’t believe me believe me the virgin is sighted
on the mount I’ve laid down Durendal for the virgin I rode with her on the steed
we mosey on over to Elaine and go to the ice house I throw to the line
and win a little enough to buy her an eskimo pie
the lavender garment on the palfrey a sword fight right there I win
the chamber of weeping courtiers
the peckerwood boys picking their nose they lost
the virgins are dismounted the torn dress
some of my buddies around the Round Table everybody has their boots off
drinking wine and telling jokes a pretty good time
the boys all passed out the virgin and I are eating a watermelon
we are rubbing our faces in it like it was a soft towel and we was wet
but I am always sad I can’t forget
the pyres of the innocent all lined up like a fleet a formation of dead children..."

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford

The Heart is a Drunken Malihini and Then It Isn't

2004-12-08T09:33:00.000-05:00

Hero? Yes. Role model? You bet your ass I am.

Some rules to live by, open to editing/additions...

Be Nice to Everyone: For the most part, the average person will spend their day surrounded by dull ugliness. Although there are exceptions to this rule, you should conduct yourself at all times as though you are the only smiling face they will encounter all day. This is just healthy, for the both of you. So if that elderly blind woman who hired you to pay off those blackmailers refuses to acknowledge that the girl living with her is not her actual daughter, but her daughter's former roommate, who decided to replace the old woman's actual daughter ten years ago, after the actual daughter died of a drug overdose, then you should not only refrain from comment, but act as though this were perfectly normal, even for CBS.

Always Smile: This is related to the rule above. It must be admitted that the native surroundings of Hawaii can conceal any number of onlookers. There may be an FBI tail in those bushes right now, in fact, so you should smile. Why? Because it sets FBI agents, jealous husbands, Morgan Fairchild, vengeful Kahunas and the guys from Simon & Simon at ease. So smile at the punkette who makes your morning Americano. Smile at the nice Japanese girl who made you that delicious Green Tea Bubble Tea this afternoon. Smile at Higgins. If things go violently wrong, smile at the camera. But most of all, smile at Erin Grey, because she is seriously hot.

A Mustache is Nothing Without Dimples: See Rule 2.

Your Money is Good, Their Money is Better: Look around. You are in hostile territory, my friend. You could very easily wake up one day, your bank account brimming with useless goodness, and wonder 'Why didn't I hook up with Erin Grey, instead of wasting my time pimping myself to some soulless, Corporate necropolis?' And you may not have an answer. Which doesn't mean you should strive to be conspicuously absent from the Great God's Own Gravy Train movement. Ferrari's matter, but there are two ways in which you can't afford them. Arrange to borrow someone else's.

Exercise: Some people jog. Some people row. Some people swim. Some people do all three. We do all three, then pull on a Lacoste shirt. No need to towel off, because Magnum doesn't sweat. Except in 'Nam. But the world was a funhouse mirror in those days.

You Know Who Fights Well? TC: So let him do it. Some guy tells you the Tigers suck? He's a Red Sox fan. They should know better.

Never Let Them See You Try: If you wanted to work hard, you would have stayed in the Navy. Results matter, but things have a way of tying themselves up within forty-five minutes anyway. If not, we tell Sharon Stone it's a two-parter, and you get to try your 'I was in Lassiter' line again. There are worse fates. So relax.

They Call Them Shorts For a Reason: Sorry, son, but are those shorts, or your third grade school slacks? Studies have shown that inseams longer than five inches dramatically reduce a man's ability to appear sexy in a nonthreatening, I'm-so-at-home-in-my-body-I-have-to-smirk sort of way. If you can't feel that breeze--and I do mean feel that breeze--then you may be trying too hard. Worse yet, your straining may make others uncomfortable, jeopardizing the case. Rule of thumb for shorts: If you don't have to really think about how you're gonna sit in that chair, they're probably too long.

Let the Willing Be Good Men...Prude

2004-12-07T19:10:00.000-05:00

This is not a mustache. This is not flattering.

If you happen to hit the beaches at Ala Moana at the sacred hour, when the natives are just drifting on the waves, staring back at the setting sun like mothers watching their kids play in home movies, or if you're just a bit drunk, or sentimental, or just a bit too well-rested, you can push from your mind everything you know about this island. Kama'ainas don't break into rental cars to feed Ice habits. A skeleton of a wooden shack never costs upwards of two large a month. The gods won't allow it, as ninety-nine menahunes out of a hundred could never afford it, and the gods, being reasonable people, are in constant need of good vibes.

[Unpleasantly surprised to hear about Hawaii's many problems, from a genie girl or a nurse or a cat--and former resident--at a Halloween party. Yes, I went as Magnum.]

I was stretched out on the seaside hammock at the Kamehameha, bathing my volleyball-benumbed calves in a stiff sniff of Cruzan Single Malt. Why rum? Haha. Because there is a difference between Hawaii and the Highlands, my friends, and I prefer sunny rum to mossy ol’ been-stuffed-under-the-sweaters-in-grandma’s-closet-and-tastes-like-it Scotch, no matter what Cyril or Schilzy McGee might say. Peat moss. Moth balls. A terrycloth bathrobe that should be washed. Yes, sir, thank you, sir, that will be $160.00, and would you like a kick in the shins with that?

What is my point? No, no, who is my point. When I reached the bottom of my glass, I went inside for a refill. Stanley Alsop was in my booth at the Kamehameha cafe bar, looking as always like a big bundled Stetson full of old-fashioned blue eyes and integrity. He was something of a hero of mine. But something was different today.

[Pleasantly surprised to find a Google image search for the word 'Rambo' produces a mock-up of George Bush on the second page. This shows restraint.]

Stanley had made a career of saying stupid things to me, things like "Never lie," and "No, mutual funds, you need to think long-term, kid." So I was happy to see him.

"Hey, Stanley," I said, and waved Leilani over. I hadn't forgotten that rum.

"Magnum."

"What's up?"

"You need more money."

"No," I said, and turned to smile at Leilani, who was standing over us.

"You need to go to Church. Are you going to Church?"

"Leilani," I said, to Leilani, "I'll have another Cruzan." She smiled her sunny smile and walked away. "Stanley," I said, to Stanley, "What the hell are you even talking about?"

"Times ain't now, but like they used to be," he said, and the gleam in his eye could cut glass.

"What does that mean?"

"Bad, always bad. What is that shirt made of, anyway?"

"Just cotton," I said, feeling a bit embarassed.

[Ummmm. Go Knicks! I guess.]

If He Still Have Legs, Sucker Better Jump

2004-12-03T14:13:00.000-05:00

There is a town I know, the people there listen to Big Star and Nick Lowe...

Warm gratitude to the boys and girls of the Middle East Downstairs, circa 12.2.2004, to Joe and the men of Fooled by April, to The So and So's, who have never let me down, to The Halogens, whose singer does a mean Joe Elliott, and of course to the reason I was there, Scamper. Not only was the Newscastle Brown a welcome substitute for my current beverage of necessity-- Motherfucking Dayquil--but I've a free cd to boot.

I have to admit, the power pop is not my weapon of choice. The cd player in the Ferrari is a bit heavy just now, with The Stooges, Radio Birdman, Thin Lizzy, Motorhead, Gang of Four, and AC/DC. But even I have to confess, 'doo-doooooooo' makes a nice verse-prechorus transition. It helps that no one makes music like this anymore. If I hear one more Pop Group/Gang of Four indie dancefest I'm going scrawny-kid hunting, I swear on the broken thumb of Kahuna Mapua. You have been warned, Moving Units. Try me. One more 'Sexy girl go dancing 'cross the sexy sexy danceFLOOR!' song, and someone is waking up far from home. That goes triple for !!!, if that's your real name. I mean it, !!! No, really, !!! Yeah!!!

Enough of this. I promise a return to Magnum mode by next week, at the latest.

It's Gun-Metal Grey, But Lurverenhillerfeetswelloop

2004-12-02T19:17:00.000-05:00

Although he is no longer 13, Kim Deal still intrigues...

It's a five-thousand mile ride from Oahu to Lowell, MA, but it isn't every evening the mighty-mighty Roger Miller straps on the shotgun headgear. Nevermind that the Pixies were headlining. I said NEVERMIND. Trading the general tan of Hawaii for the carpet wholesaler-cum-abandoned mill and SPLENDOR of downtown Lowell, Schilzy McGee and I made our way to the Tsongas Arena. When you start from so beautiful a place as this, all travel takes on a fall from the garden feel. Still, we were rewarded...

"Why is Kim Deal still sexy?"

"It's her voice."

"I think it's the poor posture."

It was a woman or maybe a girl who threw her bra to Kim Deal. Or a guy. Hard to tell. Strange crowd. I saw a guy in an 'Academy Fight Song' era leather jacket, who looked like a dentist candy bar in a biker wrapper, who had obviously attended a Boston-area college in the early 80s, who was thrilled to see Mission of Burma again. People like me, who only listened to the Pixies after their Victory Records phase passed sometime in college. And then! Surprisingly enough, high school kids.

"I'd completely forgotten about 'U-Mass'."

"I feel old."

"God, they sound wonderful!"

And when we left, there was a line of minivans out front, waiting for their kids...

¡Bienvenidos, Don Luis Magnum de Madrid!

2004-11-16T18:24:00.000-05:00

There is one car, and only one car...

The Sons would like to welcome another brother, from yet another mother, Don Luis Magnum de Madrid. An old acquaintance of T-Mags, Luis is the only of the brothers to actually own his own Ferrari. The rest of us merely borrow.

Our apologies for the long silence. Words to come.

Panic on the Streets of Boston, Allston, Brighton, Cambridgeside...

2004-10-21T01:45:00.000-04:00

Noise? Yes, but in the morning I've my own mug to pick me up...

'if you like to gamble I tell you I'm your man you win some lose some it's all the same to me'

I know what you're thinking, I was going to think the same thing. But then I caught myself. So, yes, at the moment there is a steady line of cars cruising the street outside my windows. And yes, each and every one of them is honking their horn, or I should say the driver is, in each car. The other passengers are...singing 'Tessie' in that gruff way girls sing when they're pretending to be boys...singing 'Tessie' in that girlish way boys sing when they don't want the girl beside them to know how drunk they are...shouting...hooting...singing 'Dirty Water', the unoffical city anthem, written by a band from somewhere far away from Boston, which would make sense to you, if you weren't also far away from Boston......doing Girls Gone Wild impressions, which on a night like this could get a bit sharp...and chanting 'Yankees Suck.' The firemen at the station next door just joined in, and they have much bigger horns.

Do you think something happened? I wonder if something happened. That's the thing about this town, you can just never tell when something has happened.

You know what must have happened? That election in Afghanistan must have gone well...

Also, who was supposed to tell me about Explosions in the Sky? I love this. No words. It's like a really good childhood.

Well, I will now try to sleep. May a horizon of Molokai butterflies float you into dreamland.

VM02: Can a Man Be Pretentious in a 5-Inch Inseam, or Merely Too Personal?

2004-10-20T01:39:00.000-04:00

L-R: The lovely Erin Gray...our Casual Hero.

The clock was ticking. If you needed to summarize my day in a simple phrase, that was it. NyanYa Petros-Davis had breezed her way through the front gate, like a bouquet of pick-me-ups, and left her voice teetering on every windowsill in the guesthouse. “We need this,” she said, ‘We need that.” And the flour in the pantry? “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said, and revealed just that much more knee.

They have a term for this in boxing, but I’d been hit one too many times to remember it. Something about a face become a ceiling become a floor. Nothing to do now but adjust the Croakies on my aviators, add a few more pounds to the bar, and think of a summer back in ’73, Da Nang, where even the leaves could kill you.

“Do you know there’s an Italian in your living room?” she asked.

“I know.”

“It might not be the best idea to say the word ‘p*ssy’ in front of him. He might think less of us.”

“I’ll apologize, if necessary.”

“Terrible innocence makes people throw baseballs on a field,” she said, “Ooooo, did you get me the shoes I asked for?”

We Make Our Meek Adjustments

2004-10-19T21:37:00.000-04:00

HIGGINS! Where is my Tigers cap?

Hideki Matsui looks up at a fan in the first row. He stops moving. There is an honesty in this, but at the moment it doesn't even register. Instead we find ourselves screaming at someone else's television set, upsetting our bottle of Sierra Nevada, which to begin with wasn't even our first choice. It occurs to us that this might be compared, in its small way, with the trick of birth that lands a person just to the west of Hartford, rather than in Nassau County, which is really not so terrible a place, once you wander a bit into the neighborhoods. Or, and this is especially comforting, what if you were born in Northampton, Massachusetts? Wouldn't that make Derek Jeter's lack of patience at the plate, his unwillingness to take a few pitches from a man whose failing ankle appears to be bleeding through his damned sock, just another fact in a series of...but what is it makes up a baseball game, anyway? I would say, cringes. The people at the bar downstairs wouldn't agree with me, but who knows? In two hours they might have a different take on it. I wonder if the shout will sound any different, I really do.

I deserve to post the post below. I earned it, so give me shit if you want. That is what I deserve. Just think: If one or two things had gone differently, we wouldn't have this problem. Now if you don't mind, there's the matter of the next beer...

______________________________________________

I Will Meditate and Destroy You

Is this the face of Evil? No!

Note: The following post was written from an overstuffed hammock on the Master's Estate, while watching Game 4 of the ALCS. The fact that the series hasn't ended in no way alters the sentiments and opinions herein laid out--however poorly--in my fashion. If the Sox somehow manage to win, my hat is off to them, but I am far too busy to rewrite this now.

The 2004 American League Championship Series. It was like climbing a thousand-foot coconut tree, and finding pina coladas pouring from the broad leaves. No need to do anything, it was all right there. Kinda takes the rum out of it.

Boston and a hopeful media set the tone for this thing. ESPN.com allowed a regular contributor to predict a Twins' ALDS victory...in four games. Disney had Peter Gammons appearing on ABC sitcoms, repeating 'The Yankees don't have Curt Schilling' over and over. Curt Schilling came out saying he was going to shut-up New York’s fans. Did this mean that Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui were merely a means to an end for him? When was the last time a big-game pitcher bypassed the opposing team’s batters, and went for their fans instead? And what role was the rest of his team to play? Matsui, meanwhile, finally admitted he’d had 'a pretty good night,’ after going 5-for-6 with two home runs, two doubles, five RBIs, and five runs in Game 3. That was his second five RBI game of the series. But the Yankees were the arrogant ones.

Let me be clear: I have mentioned many times during the course of this season, and often to the wrong people, that I did not like the character and makeup of this year's Yankees. They came out of the gates big, lazy and ineffectual, like some sort of blockbuster summer sequel. But looking at it from this side of the All-Star break, I suppose I should correct myself. It's a tired point, but there is something to be said for chilly professionalism. Whether you're a consistently effective Major League shortstop, or a marginally gifted but deadly charming private investigator, it's a good idea to leave emotion aside, at least until the fait is accompli. Just a good policy. Unless Heather Thomas is involved. That woman will not be denied.

As for wacky haircuts and blood vendettas, the jury is still out. It does look like all the tough-and-hairy guy talk, clubhouse silliness, and mystical schizoid optimism/pessimism finally conspired to sink the Red Sox. They looked like jokers out there; meanwhile the Yankees looked like the crew of the Death Star, just sort of getting it done, ho-hum, all corporate and whatnot. No base-running errors, no flubbed relays. Done and done. Nothing left to do but pick a title for next year's Sox movie: Jeter Tosses A-Rod's Salad is appealingly neutral.

In almost every circumstance in which we are expected to perform, I tend to believe that emotion is a bad thing. It is the exhaust fume of our day, and I swear the Sox clubhouse choked on it. There is no other explanation. Johnny Damon turns 'We're idiots' into a rallying cry, and winds up 1-18. On the other side of the house, Mariano Rivera has been known to collapse on pitching mounds, but only after the series is clinched. Derek Jeter? I doubt he blinks when he asks Jessica Alba on a date, and this is just baseball. In the three-spot, Gary Sheffield's crazed, jittery aggression at the plate is actually a way for him to slow down the game--a control, not a motivational tactic. And don't even get me started on Hideki Matsui...

OK, to start on Hideki Matsui, this was what it was like to watch Lou Gehrig in the postseason, right? He hit .550, against a pretty good staff, and everytime he came to the plate I fully expected a rip down the line, behind the runners. Aside from two outfield...I won't say, 'gaffes', maybe 'underachievements'?...he provided everything you could ask for in a postseason performance. This is a guy who hit .334 with 50 homers and 107 RBIs in his final season with the Yomimuri Giants, came to the BIGGEST baseball market in the world, and hit only .287, with 16 homers and 106 RBIs. Rather than rolling over (Hideki Irabu? Como esta?), he worked his rear end off in the offseason, learned the AL pitchers, and followed up a disappointing rookie season with .298/31/108. His OPS went from .788 to .912, which means he is my hero. Why did the Sox even pitch to him, with Sheffield on base in front of him almost every time? Behind Matsui were Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and John Olerud; in front, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Gary Sheffield. What is one baserunner when Posada is due up in the postseason? Walk him.

In the afternoon just prior to the start of Game 3, the Independent Film Channel ran out Samurai III: Duel on Ganryu Island, a favorite of T-Mags and I, as it features the mighty Toshiro Mifune. After a ten-minute, climatic swordfight before a red-lit Japanese tide (which consists, in its entirety, of maybe seven or eight actual sword thrusts), Mifune dispatches Koji Tsuruta. As he returns to his humble village, his extremely humble boatman, Sasuke, mentions how pleased he is that Mifune has survived the duel. Is Mifune? Hell no. He is crying. Why? He knows deep down that he will never face a better fencer than the arrogant Kojiro, whom he has killed.

Call me sentimental...and I will probably dislocate your shoulder. Wait. Call me a Romantic, but I have a feeling that after an horrific, thirty-pitch at-bat against the still-terrifying Pedro Martinez, ending in, say, a run-scoring double off the leftfield wall, that Matsui would cruise into second base, wipe a tear from his eye, and wish he could live in that at-bat forever.

Goddamn, I still love baseball. There is hope for me yet.

HATS OFF TO...Keith Foulke, for a pretty amazing performance in Game 4, considering the circumstances...Hideki Matsui, for giving me a good reason to root for a team that might otherwise offend nearly all of my sensibilities...My cousin Brian and his wife Sachiko, who have two children so adorable, so happy, and so well-behaved, that seeing them may have set my biological clock to ticking...Wait, that last sentence makes me uncomfortable...Um...Something cheeky about Asian women might fix it...Hmm...Incidentally, if any of you know any Japanese women between the ages of 24 and 30--well, 29, say--who are in the market for a muscular, financially secure Irish-American--with the loyalty of Abraham Lincoln and a tongue he can do chin-ups with--please let me know...There, that is better...Kind of a long way to go to get back my smirk, but in the end it will be worth it...

The Quantum of Wantum

2004-10-18T22:05:00.000-04:00

We die slower, and then we die anyway.

David Ortiz was just thrown out stealing second. David Ortiz weighs 230 lbs, a number that to me seems rather liberal in its modesty. He stands just over 6 feet, 4 inches tall, and moves--without the slightest shade of hyberbole--like a water buffalo stumbling off its rear hooves. He hasn't the first business in the Great Mall of God's Holy Damn Creation to be running on anything short of a double off the Green Monster. I know this. And I am not even a Red Sox fan.

After the inning ground to a burnt matchhead, after there was absolutely nothing more that could be done to the fans of either team in a mere five-hour, twelve-inning game, I called my friend Brendan, just to say "I am going to fucking die." He assured me that he was also going to fucking die...on behalf of the Red Sox. This was strangely comforting. I mentioned that I had spent the tenth and eleventh innings answering basic questions about the structure ("There is no reason a baseball game must ever end. In theory, it could simply continue.") and proper administration of a baseball game to four Italian tourists, who happened to land in my living room on their way to a club. Occasionally I wonder how I must come across to people, what image and opinion our meeting leaves them. In this case, I couldn't care less. Francesca, do you remember that burly and eerily silent American with the funny hair? Yes, Alfonse, and my goodness he was unnerving.

Welcome to the fourteenth inning.

Too bad about 'em. They were very nice and well-groomed. Too bad about 'em. I could have gone out with them, and met the love of my life. Too bad about 'er. This is National Geographic time, folks, and I am the rabid mongoose, with the conscience of a shark, and the temper of a basement full of oily rags. Do not make eye contact.

At least until this awful series is over.

Hmm: "Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged" -- Al Gore

The Islandhoppers' Musical Review Show, featuring TC and Rick

2004-10-18T09:58:00.000-04:00

NOTE: The views expressed by Orville 'Rick' Wright do not necessarily express the opinions of the management. Those expressed by Theodore 'TC' Colvin, however, are probably rather close to the opinions of G. Thomas Magnum, and for that we apologize.

RICK: Mahalo, and greetings from the skies over beautiful Waikiki!

TC: (sounds bored) Yeah, we are about a thousand feet up in my chopper, bringing you this week’s newest tired-ass white person music…

RICK: Now TC, we’ve been over this. Don’t bad-mouth the talent.

TC: (under his breath) Talent my ass, man, Billy Ocean, that boy got talent.

RICK: What?

TC: (sings loudly) CARIBBEAN QUEEN, UNH! NOW WE SHARIN’ THE SAME DREAM, TWO HEARTS THAT BEAT AS ONE…

RICK: Careful, man, you’re weaving all over the place.

TC: Sorry, man, I get carried away, that track reminds me of those Johnson triplets, you remember them, over in San Diego?

RICK: Oh, man, the ones with the cute overbites?

TC: Dig, man, dig.

RICK: I tell you that was some first class seating, am I wrong? Wow. Anyway, this week we’re reviewing Deceiver, the latest solo album by Chris Thile.

TC: (angry, under his breath) Yeah, this week we reviewing Deceiver.

RICK: What?

TC: We not reviewing The Delfonics, so tune out if you have taste.

RICK: TC, that is not fair, this is some classy music.

TC: It’s something alright. Why we always reviewing this stuff? It’s always Gillian Welch this and Mark O’Connor that. Ain't no drums, man, cornpone, CORNPONE. But this here is some white-ass shit man, album sounds like a damned sunburn.

RICK: What TC means to say is that this album is a diverse, occasionally innovative, but often frustrating offering from the mandolinist and composer, who is best known for his work with the band Nickel Creek. It does not lend itself to categorization, although it does seem to stand well with more popular acts, such as John Mayer, and the English jazz imposter, Jamie Cullum.

TC: Yeah, diverse, one second sounds like he should be wearing overalls, next he's in a zoot suit, then a cowboy hat, then he's wearing tights like those cats at the Renaissance fair.

RICK: There's also the influence of more gentle, American college rock types. Like Toad the Wet Sprocket, Elliot Smith, Pavement...

TC: And for the brothers out there, Pavement is like the white New Edition, and Elliot Smith, he killed hisself cause he looked like that old midget chick from Poltergeist.

RICK: Why do we even bother?

TC: Don't look at me, baby, this was your idea.

RICK: Fans familiar with Chris Thile may find some of the songs difficult to approach, as they lack the more organic flow of his Nickel Creek compositions. But there are some wonderful surprises buried in the ever-changing tunes, here, a bridge left hanging in front of a chorus that doesn't come, like a fragment of an old Guided by Voices song, or a melody that suggests Schoenberg...

TC: (laughing) Yeah, Little Orville knows something about Schoenberg, man, please, can we put on the Commodores now?

RICK: Wait TC, try to be a professional. The only glaring weakness is the lyrics, which tend to lapse into adolescent vagueness, and lack the attention to structure and rhythm displayed by Thile's instrumental settings.

TC: Yeah, a perfect example, "I forget the difference between being in love/And being familiar with something I hope I'm above." Huh? Boy looks a little too pretty, too.

RICK: I really don't see how that's relevant, man.

TC: He's pretty man. Looks like those boyband cats.

RICK: He's MARRIED TC, and I bet he does well with the ladies.

TC: I bet he does too, Orville.

RICK: Can we get back to the album?

TC: No, let me tell you about these chicks, man. I been doing some reading, dig, and I got this figured out, see, it’s what you call an imbalance in the Self/Other matrix, you follow?

RICK: TC, aren’t we flying a little low?

TC: No, man, we cool. OK, so the thing with these chicks is, regarding you white cats, see, they goin’ for the fellas look more like chicks, you know? More familiar. Now when they looking for a MAN, well, they come to TC, I am the Other, baby!

RICK: I really don’t know what to…

TC: Now that is the deal with this Justin Timberlake boy, you know? Like, he look like Jodie Foster to me. Now with this new fella Britney’s got, this, what’s the cat’s name? Dude look like a female ex-con in drag?

RICK: Kevin something, he’s a dancer.

TC: Dancing nothin’, that is schoolyard, man. Britney, if you listening honey I gotta dance lasts three hours, and it’ll leave you like Charlie Tuna, baby…all wet.

RICK: (uncomfortable laughter) TC, that is not appropriate…

TC: What are you talkin’ appropriate, man? This is MY chopper, MY flight time, and MY gasoline, dig? Now take your hands off my damn eight-track, I’m'a put the Ohio Players back on.

Higgins Presents the World's Great Unknown Books, Part the Third

2004-10-15T15:09:00.000-04:00

Were it gasoline, it might be called a fine Sherry, but it is not.

I must apologize for my earlier poor form. You see, I am at heart something of the perfectionist, and to read so dull and spiritless a post, well, it was almost too much for my sad heart to take. Naturally, I responded by removing the offensive item from the board, though not entirely, leaving just enough trace to warrant curiosity, and those who wish to read more about Irishmen at a Natural Distance are more than welcome to make comment here below. The book may additionally be ordered from the Waterstones chain of booksellers, although finding one in your area may prove rather troublesome. After a spot of what I must call a disappointing Sherry, I have returned with another attempt to fill both space and attention, and will endeavor not to bore or otherwise offend your sensibilities.

The work at hand is an old and deeply personal favorite of mine, a work by the American, Henry James, a first edition of which was loaned to me by the late Lord Mountbatten just prior to the Prince of Wales' nuptials with the lovely Diana Spencer. In addition to being a fine hand at bridge, Mountbatten was among the world's foremost experts in failed first novels by wordy, American authors, and so when the edition in question appeared in Sotheby's Christmas Auction listings, he could not resist the urge to 'snatch it up', as Magnum is fond of saying. I can not begin to express my gratitude--however sadly ill-timed--to the marvelous man for exposing me to so perfectly executed a specimen of that tired genre of Detective fiction. Here, at last, is exactly the sort of suspenseless, loosely plotted and meaninglessly detailed writing CBS no doubt intended to mime, in their poor fashion, when our show first aired all those decades ago. Think of it as Spencer for Hire, with a more intelligible inner architecture.

The novel, The Wastes of Spring, tells the gripping tale of Melinda Breckidge-Stoningham, a beautiful Welsh girl from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, who comes to London in the hopes of advancing in that world capital of cultivation and fine Indian cuisine. She is murdered in the first sentence, and we never encounter her again, but the novel continues for 483 breathtakingly well-wrought pages, detailing the expatriate American Mark Festus Carruthers' aesthetic responses to the sound of her screams. The opening pages show the sort of literary daring the young James possessed, avoiding all pretext of action and dialogue, preferring instead to set himself up for a tour de force passage towards the end of the first chapter, in which he describes in great detail the rear legs of a Louis XIV armoire. Simply smashing:

It can almost not be believed that such well-honed prose was available to the seventeen-year old James, but here it is. Certainly, he would go on to write more celebrated examples of his particular blend of interior design and class poutiness, but it is all here, in this volume, waiting to be explored. I especially enjoy the manner in which he leaves behind the tired and formal expectations of The Mystery Novel, by not once returning to the murder itself, or indeed even leaving the miraculously refined subconscious of his main character. Such daring! I for one would much prefer learning what effect the aroma of dried violets, pressed with antique care in the pages of a volume of Sappho, have on the mind of a delicate and discerning man, than to know what became of dull old Melinda. I would wager she attempted to climb inappropriately through the ranks of higher society, and was disappointed to learn that they, quite reasonably, were unwilling to countenance her silly earnestness, at which point she began a love affair with a Greek shipbuilding tycoon, who promptly had her killed upon discovering she'd contracted tuberculosis. This is the sort of thing that happens, goodness, all of the time, where I am from. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have furniture to catalog.

Higgins Presents the World's Great Unknown Books, Part the Second

2004-10-15T10:47:00.000-04:00

Saul na Gopaleen, Sydney, 1991

Irishmen at a Natural Distance
by Saul na Gopaleen
356pgs, Calder Press, 1978

Not surprisingly, I have been asked to provide yet another review of the world's less heralded works of fiction; but first I must beg, on behalf of G. Thomas, your patience while he recovers from a particularly trying visit to New Hyde Park. It should be mentioned that the Irish, no matter the volume of their moustaches, are at heart a sentimental race, prone to periods of the most mawkish lassitude, and when this bloody peevishness mixes with American emotional hyperbolism, well my dear, one finds oneself confronted with a great, weepy monster. I would not be too much surprised if I were expected to carry on this enterprise for several more days, while he hangs his head over certain unpleasant comments he had made regarding the deceased, just prior to their passing. There is a lesson to be learned here, friends. Thankfully, I

YOU KNOW WHAT? THIS GOES ON FOR ABOUT FOUR PAGES, IS BORING, AND I AIN'T DOING SHIT 'TIL T-MAGS POSTS AGAIN. IF YOU NEED ME, I'LL BE OVER AT NICK'S SITE WRITING MOCK MEDIEVAL BALLADS FOR THE REMARKABLE DISAPPEARING CYRIL.

Higgins Presents the World's Great Unknown Books, Part the First

2004-10-08T13:45:00.000-04:00

Gukunda Habyarimana, London, 1986

The New Color, by Gukunda Habyarimana

It was a day like any other when Magnum entered my study, hands on his slim and powerful hips, asking if it were possible for me to fill some space on this ridiculous waste of time. Of course, I thought, the thick Yank undoubtedly wishes to spend his lunch rubbing posteriors with some dim nubile, but far be it from me to allow my private bitterness to deny all six of you the opportunity to discover--but dare I say it?--new and brilliant vistas in this sad world. I have long taken it to be my commission in life to educate those I come across; it is a duty I hold as close to my heart as the Queen's own plea to defend my homeland all those years ago in the burning sands of Alam Haifa. It is in that spirit of duty and unflinching honor that I pass into your hands the genius of Gukunda Habyarimana, Rwanda's greatest writer of novels having to do with the vagina.

To begin, I would like to relay an anecdote from my days of service with the Eighth Royal Fusiliers regiment, stationed at Alexandria in the days following our victory in the Pacific Theater. I was chatting with a massively inebriated Lawrence Durrell during a tea reception at the British Museum in Cairo, when suddenly a sharp and, I believed, pained light broke just behind his eyes, like an explosion on a crisp desert night. "My dear man," I started, torn with concern over the state of my friend, who had until that moment been sharing a rather amusing episode he'd witnessed in Marseilles, involving the American ruffian, Henry Miller, and the female driver of a donkey cart. But Durrell waved off my concern as he waved off most things in those days. "It is nothing," the great man said, "Only a realization that has been germinating in my mind since my last trip south, into the damp eternities of this primal continent..." He went on for several minutes in that vein, but I found myself lost in a particularly celebrated vintage of brandy, and I'm afraid the contents of his monologue were lost to me, even in the moment they were spoken. When he had returned from that height of inspiration, he looked me in the eye, and with a terrible clarity in his voice, announced that the world had in Africa a pearl of immeasurable value, enclosed hopelessly in a shell of violence, and that once the minds of this continent had been exposed not only to the form, but to the civic peace afforded by sound patronage and governing, that the greatest writers we had lately seen would emerge from its virgin immensities.

I had no reason to doubt the man, but it was several years before I myself witnessed the first fruit of his prophecy. A certain girl I had saved from a coterie of smugglers during a safari with the Duke of Northumberland had come to England through the charity of that great, late Duke, and had studied at the finest schools, where her mind was exposed to the great works, primarily Englishmen--and Jane Austen and perhaps the Brontes, it is a bit spotty. Regardless, I received by post several months ago a copy of the woman's first novel, entitled The New Color, and was absolutely ravished by its sensuous evocations of the moist mysteries of the female body-proper. The novel tells the story of a young girl, Uwimana, who must traverse the long hazard of her native country's civil unrest, all while coming to an understanding with the spectral blossoming within. Remarkable business, that. At its heart is the magically realistic coincidence of the onset of her first menses, and the cessation of hostilities among her countrymen, suggesting a sort of sanguineous closed-system whereby one avenue of bloodlet is closed as another opens. I was beside myself with what passes for English joy upon discovering the remarkable opening passage, attached below, in which the young girl experiences her first period while hiding in the rafters of a local papist's hut:

The novel itself is organized into sixteen chapters, each associated with a mother of lost children whom Uwimana encounters during her return to her home village. Of especial brilliance is a passage concerning Uwimana's search for food in the nighttime wastes of the savannah. While digging for taro with broken fingers, Uwimana is visited by the Dust Goddess, who arrives riding an eagle made of the four winds, and carries the girl off to a beautiful mossy cave of...but I give away too much. These are things one must discover for oneself.

I am saddened by the Nobel committee's reluctance to recognize so fine a writer as Ms. Habyarimana. Certainly if they have the time and pain-threshold to read Elfriede Jelinek's Women as Lovers, they should prove more than capable of embracing a 675-page Third World feminist genocidal incest disaster novel of so fine a form as The New Color. As a connoisseur of magical realist atrocity novels in which the female reproductive system figures prominently, I am more than qualified to recommend this fine work, and am thankful of the opportunity to provide some substance amidst all of this windsurfing and Ferrari business.

[BREAK: The truly appalling thing about this post is that my real cousin—this guy—was once heli-lifted out of Angola, or some other shithole country, where he was designing water filtration centers, or teaching people how to build septic tanks, or delivering penicillin or some other useful and humane thing. Me? I spend my lunchbreaks at my cushy corporate job writing parodies of novels about genocide. In every man’s life there is a moment when he realizes what a failure he is as a human being. Welcome to mine. Hugs and kisses…]

Flowers in the Bible/Bullets on the Grave

2004-10-07T10:36:00.000-04:00

Ex Unum Patris et Unum Mickey's...

I looked across the table at him, “A fox will chew its own leg off to survive…”

“Foxes?” he whirled around in mock horror, “What foxes, I don’t see any…”

“You know what I mean,” I said, but he had his head under the tablecloth, looking for his foxes, and he didn’t hear me.

“Did you bring it?” he asked.

I put the gun on the table, a 1962 Smith & Wesson .38 caliber Policeman’s Special, nickel-plated, with walnut grip; it was his gun.

“Is it the same one?”

“I checked it, it’s the same.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“Well, good,” he said, standing up to leave, “I can go then.”

“Wait,” I said, “What was your name again?”

________________________________________

During his lifetime, Papa Magnum got to be...

HERE

AND HERE

...and it is probably not surprising that he was somewhat cold.

The Beard, the Pool, and the Orchid

2004-10-06T14:46:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry, Nicky Paolone, but this is just too friggin' ridiculous.

Mr. Kobayashi wasn't the excitable type, so when he called, the nervous trembling in his voice bothered me. Nothing I could remember had ever shaken a decibel out of that deep Mifune rumble of his. It was enough to make me drop my 11:45 Horny Toad--but I didn't--because something in that precious mixture of tequilla, fresh lime juice, and Cointreau screamed 'Hold me, Magnum, and don't ever let me go!'

The same couldn't be said for this case. Kobayashi's poolboy, Nicky Paolone, had gone missing.

"What's the big deal, Mr. Kobayashi?" I asked, "Why not just run down to Honolulu and pick up another one?"

"It is not for me to say, Magnum, not at this time. There are...corporate interests."

"Fine," I said, "Any idea why he left?"

"He said the season was over." It was a cryptic answer, and not one that stirred the old pot.

I decided the best plan of attack was to contact Benny Menahune. As the head of the local chapter of RSN, Benny had his fingers in everything, and if anyone would know where a poolboy gets off to in the middle of October--screaming and crying and wishing the season weren't over--it was him.

After asking Mack to cancel my 12:15 spearfishing lesson, I had the car brought around, and headed to Benny's place. I found him on the beach, with a case of refreshing Red Hook Sunrye Ale. Fate to Magnum: Want a beer? Don't mind if I do, Fate.

Benny knew of the poolboy, and was ready to talk. I asked if he had any photos, and he flipped me a picture of Nicky, curled up with a teddy bear.

Some things you can't unsee.

"What in the name of Rupert Everett is this f*cking thing supposed to be?!!!"

"It's a picture."

"Well I know that, Benny, but Jesus H. Christ, he knew someone was taking his picture, right? I mean for crying out loud, they didn't, I don't know, knock him out cold and then pose him with that goddamned teddy bear, did they? Holy sh*t!"

"Well..." Benny started.

"Jesus!" I interrupted.

"Are you..." Benny started again.

"Is that f*cking eyeliner?" I interrupted again.

"Would you let me get a word in here? Apparently he and his surfer friends liked to get drunk, then recreate their favorite coverboy poses from the golden age of Tiger Beat magazine. It's perfectly heterosexual."

"Seriously, I'm not even kidding, is he wearing lipstick in this?" My detective skills had entirely abandoned me.

"Pull it together, Magnum, this part is important. My sources tell me Kobayashi found these pictures, and that his company--Open Orchid Holdings--was using them in their marketing campaign for a Japanese dating sim called Italian Funtime Dreamboat."

"I mean the v-neck t-shirt is one thing, but what's with the f*cking eyebrows?"

"Do you want to know why this guy disappeared, or do you want to criticize his grooming?"

I wanted nothing to do with any of it. Not a thing. I met with Kobayashi at the poolside bar at the Kamehameha Club, threw down six quick shots of Wild Turkey 101, and asked him about the Italian Funtime Dreamboat ad campaign. He tried to be coy.

"Magnum, I do not have time to explain the terrible and intricate marketing strategies of my race, nor do I intend..."

"You know what, Kobayashi," I interrupted, dropping the photo on the bar, "I have as assertive a feminine side as any man I know, but this just makes me uncomfortable..."

[Sorry, man, I HAD to...]

Fall in Autumn, Land in Spring

2004-10-05T14:07:00.000-04:00

It was getting to be that time of year again. Lono was packing his toys and receding deeper and deeper into the early afternoon, robbing mankind of light, vitality, and the entire spectrum of recreational aquatic sports. What light there was just wasn't the same, so I figured, hey Magnum, it may be time to switch vices, break out the Dunhills and the Bookers, shave the old noggin, toss a wool cap on it, and embrace your mossy Irish roots. I am--in the end--a Sullivan, and tweed is just as good as neoprene, provided you aren't scuba diving. But what to indulge in? I sat for a moment on the wicker chair by the ulu grove, and listened to the breeze off Diamond Head as it caressed the satin-and-emerald leaves of the canoe plant; watched the light turn on its axis as it glinted off the freshly detailed Ferrari, losing its wonder in the cooling air; and thought of all the staggeringly awful things I could do to myself...

Bookers Bourbon
There is only one other experience on earth that outdoes the sweet savagery of a neat shot of Bookers Bourbon, and I am too much of a gentleman to mention it here. However--as Frank said in episode 7.17, Laura--don't punish yourself, kid, use ice cubes. Big ones. Two big ones. Not those little shaved things. In fact, if you're ever in a bar, and they serve you whiskey with those tiny ice cubes, leave. Immediately. If they serve it in a plastic cup, beat up the bartender, light the place on fire, and then leave. Because if a drink costs you more than $12, you have a right to be treated like a man. Ladies, too.

Tastes like: I won't bother with the 'hints of...' nonsense here. It's like getting punched in the mouth by a woman who wants to sleep with you, ie., the very stuff good TV is made of...

Midleton's Irish Whiskey
Rome and the English failed. This is 1400 years of failed attempts to stamp out the vestigial paganism of the Irish Catholic, all the bright-grey glee of the Sidhe, old rage aged to perfection, its teeth softened but not removed, bottled, and then sold in stores where the help have to wear ties. Love it.

Tastes like: The taste of sunlight excusing itself from your tongue.

Cruzan Single-Barrel Rum
You're the man, Cyril! Perfect for a hot day, as the whole affair is delicate as a grandmother's sigh. I imagine it would also work well in cold weather: one sip and you're juggling pineapples on Maui, your clothes in a ball at your feet.

Tastes like: First kisses, or honey evaporating in the moonlight.

The Classic Maker's Manhattan, as served poolside at the Kamehameha Club...
Me play grown-up good.

Pearl Vodka, a touch of over-brewed Green Tea, a whisper of Martini Blanco, and a shaving of ginger so thin, you can see the future through it...
In other words, The Martini Formerly Known as Kai, named after our friend, Kai, who is now named Richard. Legally, anyway. [Here referred to as Tony Montoya-O'Leary.]

Davidoff 'Exquisitos'
One of the many benefits of T-Mags' choice of profession, these were recommended by a cardiothoracic surgeon from Bombay. Davidoff somehow managed to measure the distance from the Red Parrot to the Old State Capital in Newport...in cigarillo puffs. This shows moxie. Good for them.

Rogue Dead Guy Ale
The beer of choice for Schilzy McGee, world-renowned volleyball instructor and heartbreaking friend of women everywhere. Robusto, mi amigos. I am the kind of guy who believes you can taste color, and I'm the kind of guy who believes the trees in northern New Hampshire attain the most beautiful color in Nature's palette--right around, hmm, early-October--and that color tastes like this.

Avo No. 9
Our Uncle Jeff Bernstein likes to sit on his deck, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean as it collides with the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and smoke these. Often with a modestly-priced Scotch, which shows the kind of self-initiated cultivation sorely lacking in our urban areas. You heard me, kids. Don't spend. Live.

Red Hook 'Blackhook' Porter
From the people who brought you my senior year in college...

John Player Blues, UK-edition
From the people who brought you my voice sounding like Tom Waits. Eleven times the tar of an '86 Buick Regal, and an industry-leading seventeen times cooler than your lame-ass Marlboro Lights. Camels? I wouldn't smoke those with your sister's mouth, boyo. If you're gonna die, die with flavor.

Christ, this is exhausting. Tomorrow, more windsurfing!

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...

Pablo Puhanna recommends the warehouse sale. $120 for Midleton's...if you'll excuse me, I must weep now.

Go Evil!

A Pretty Good Dancing Chicken

2004-10-04T11:39:00.000-04:00

When art and life begin to mix late on a Friday evening, I generally just sit back, blow the froth off a Bells, and set my eyes on the suggestive blue glow of the horizon. Maybe I know as well as anyone that a man living on (various) millionaires' dimes shouldn't ask much of his evenings...just a clever opening, a solid second third, perhaps some unexpected character developments as we head--popcorn in hand--smiling into foregone conclusions. A few run-on sentences later, and you can remain relaxed, even grateful, throughout any evening in the Aloha State. But maybe, just maybe, when the day is done, the Ferrari is tucked away behind the guest house, the lads are cuddled up on the veranda, dreaming of thieves and walls that can't be jumped, as the dawn hints at itself, teases as the smoke of tomorrow's sun on the black edge of today's disappointments, its missed opportunities, poor communication skills, inappropriate advances, bad chemistry with the help, ten minute turnarounds at the bar while some blond attempts to flirt her way into a free bottle of the worst Chardonnay in all of Honolulu, when the jet skis are secure, the mustache is trimmed, the uisce beatha has been ordered and enjoyed and T-Mags has already begun hinting that there must have been a better place, somewhere, anywhere, or at least one with a healthier percentage of wahines...

That's the thing about weekends. No matter where they go they always end. Now Kahuna Mapua was staring at me with those charcoal-edged eyes of his. He'd hired me to find $3 million worth of antique seashells--each no bigger than your fingernail--and Monday morning found us knee deep in Kilauea's hot and sandy foothills.

The man couldn't stop talking about the ALDS.

"Shut it, Kahuna,"I barked, trying to buy time, "I need to think."

"Well, leave the thinking to someone else, haole, your shoes are on fire."

If you buy it for me, I will take you fishing. And drinking. And speaking. Simply.

A Sense of Debt

2004-09-30T11:16:00.000-04:00

It isn't that the Ferrari 308 is a finicky car. The clutch can be a bit headstrong--especially in the lower gears--and the suspension is wound tight as a riot cop, but this is what men who borrow other people's exotics want: something that leaves you naked to the road and your own misshifts, insured by someone else. I would say the Ferrari is both powerful and nervous, and like all powerful and nervous things, in the wrong context it can be a hazard. The traffic out of Honolulu was the wrong context. A wave of tourists had poured through the mouth of the Honolulu International Airport, flooded the lines and counters of Hertz and Avis, and then flowed out onto the highway in a great rising tide of dangerous and jumpy stupidity. [BREAK: My heart goes out to the women of Boston, as judging by the male drivers, their men are nearly all premature ejaculators. There were fewer lane changes in the original Spyhunter game. Boyos, not the mindset that leads to satisfying sexual encounters. Break it down.]

By the time I made it back to the Kamehameha, I needed a friend and a little confusion. Thankfully, one of my many, many brothers had called at the poolside bar, to tell me that one of our prep school alums had made good. Or bad. Or grey and plausible. It all depends. You can make a lot of judgments on Hawaii, but judgment here is like the sand at Waikiki, and nothing comes of it. It spins and settles. By morning it will be something else.

And that goes twice for Sammy Babalu. He slid up to me at the bar, scent-first, Creed Irish Tweed like a change in the tradewinds. Five seconds later he was on my right arm, waving a G&T under my nose like it was the blood of Christ.

'Are you a Hendrick's man?' he asked. 'I'm a Hendrick's man, Magnum, I could live on this stuff, could you?'

'What do you want Sammy?'

'Oh, good news, my boy, good news. You know that favor you owe me? I'm calling it in.'

‘You already called it in. Last quarter. And the quarter before that. And what favor?’

‘I need you to watch my house tonight. Until 3AM, at least.’

‘Not tonight, Sammy, I have Triathalon training with Schilzy McGee and two Australian stewardesses in the morning.’

‘Now Magnum…’

‘Now Sammy…’

‘As the snake said to the dying boatman,’ he winked, ‘you knew I was a snake when I got on the boat.’

On Interesting Women...

2004-09-28T14:12:00.000-04:00

No vibes from the Hibiscus Camp Shirt this afternoon, sadly, but I HAD to mention how hot Simona Pari is...and how thrilled that reptile/chivalric 600-year old segment of my lower brain is to read she is on her way to safety. Along with the other one. Seriously, is she in friggin' Ladytron? And why do I find a female survivor of a hostage crisis soooooo sexy? Is this what other guys call 'The Tennis Effect', re: Anna Kournikova, who to me looks like the hostess at Felt, ie. dull as a sinless planet? Let's review: SHE WENT TO IRAQ TO BUILD SCHOOLS. I'd shave half my mustache off, I would...and walk from Naples to Milan...and watch The Godfather III...and debate human sexuality with the Pope in adjacent mensroom stalls at RNC headquarters...and burn down every Olive Garden on Hawaii...and educate every child in Iraq...whatever is needed...

I guess it's true what Higgins says, "My dear fellow, we can't all be boob men."

Everyone Who Pretended to Like Us Now Knows They Were Only Pretending

2004-09-27T16:14:00.000-04:00

One of the things I like most about Hawaii is the tanlines. As Brother T puts it--often with that spacey, dangerous look in his eye--they are sexy, dark and sexy. But you can read things in all that sexy darkness. A trained eye can tell a lot about a person by their tanlines, what they do for a living, how often they do it, even what they think about their bodies, all based on where the sun is allowed to fall on their arms and legs. And no one here can go an entire day without revealing where that lucky old sun has been, not on this island, where the day lasts from 5AM to 8PM, almost without variation, season after season. Eat it, New England. Mix it in your apple crisp, take it to grandma's, and eat it. Have some chowder first, for all I care.

As a private investigator, and the son of a private investigator, and the son of the son of a private investigator, and the son of the son of the son of a private investigator, who was also a farmer, a swineherd, a hand on deck of the SS Romantic out of Liverpool, England, a professional cricket player, tin whistle virtuoso, and deacon of the St. Agatha Parish Church in Ballygilgan, Sligo, as well as...well, the last person in the family who actually did anything at all.

The point, obviously, was that I could tell, just by looking at the lack of a tanline on Leilani's bare right arm, that she would be asking me to pay my bar tab. It was too professional, too strict a tan for your average bartendrix. A touch fascist, perhaps? I looked over at Rick, but he was busy doing squat thrusts, blowing out the rhythm on his trainer's whistle, so he would be no help.

I ordered a mojito, and stretched out for a long day of...avoidance. Leilani gave me the eye, but mixed the drink, and walked it over. I took a sip. Snake eyes.

'Leilani,' I said, 'you're a wonderful kid, but there's no mint in this.'

'You sonofabitch,' she started, but I began to wave frantically at Rick, and she couldn't get the next phrase out. Rick reached us just ahead of Carlos, who brought over my surf n' turf.

'Hey, Magnum,' Rick smiled, 'check out my bullhorn.' He raised it to his mouth, 'PAY YOUR FUCKING BILL YOU DEADBEAT!" Classy guy. The bartendrix let out an adorable giggle, and grabbed the bullhorn. I looked down at my lobster, and tried to sympathize; to think of coconuts; of monkeys; of monkeys juggling coconuts against stunning, varicolored sunsets.

'Now Rick, you know damned well...'

Leilani gave Rick that half-moon smile of hers, and eased the whistle out of his hand. Then she held the bullhorn to my ear, and blew the whistle into the bullhorn. I started to reach for my lobster fork, but Leilani leaned over and whispered,

'Shhh, did you hear something?'

'GODDAMMIT, Leilani...'

'Pay your bill, G. Thomas!'

'I just paid my bill yesterday.'

'You have to pay it again.'

'Why?'

'That's the way these things work, G.T., I didn't invent it.'

There are times when one human being really shouldn't take advantage of another. But this wasn't one of them.

'You look pretty today.'

'Shut up.'

Thankfully, Mack came over with a call. I picked up the receiver and gave my most professional 'Hello'. My cousin Taco Sullivan was on the line. A retired attorney from Waikiki, Taco had abandoned his practice at its height--during the real estate peak of the mid-eighties--to pursue a career alienating himself from his family. His most interesting personality trait was a flaming Joyce Carol Oates head tattooed on his right pectoral, the outline on the blurry side of visible under a gauzy linen shirt. I assumed he was wearing the shirt. He always wore that shirt. It was all the charm he had.

'I hate you,' he mumbled, 'You work too much.'

'I'm not working,' I said, admiring the ice in my 11AM mojito.

'You sound like you're working.'

'I'm not even wearing shoes, Taco. What do you want?'

That was when I noticed the tail...

'Someone is following you, Magnum.'

CHIKALICIOUS, I HEAR

ONCE MORE INTO THE SHINY AND REFLECTIVE BREACH, MY FRIENDS

My 401k Weighs a Ton

2004-09-24T20:17:00.000-04:00

Decades early, Robert Walser perfects the 'G. Thomas watching a David Ortiz at-bat' look...

If sitting in the den in an overstuffed armchair, drinking your father's bourbon, eating apple pie, and watching one of the most important baseball games of the season qualifies as an experience of exile, then I have spent this week in exile. It isn't that Connecticut is a dull place, although there is no windsurfing, the air is cold, and the drinks lack the citrus-y complexity of Don Kalani's strange proofs of genius. I don't hold these things against the state. It just seems to be living a few years down the road from me. That's all.

For example, there are no surf-skis, and no tourists with lifeless skintones and dull, jet-lagged expressions, the kind that make you feel at home, by happy contrast. Not even the Ferrari. Not this week. Just five days auditing...stuff. In an office park.

This office park isn't a bad office park; it has a duck pond. At first this seems strange, but when you notice that there is no walkway down to the pond, that there is no path ringing the pond, that there is in fact no way to move from the glass-enclosed walkway that connects the two wings of the office, to the meadows below, which surround the pond, then things begin to make more sense, and you start to think about work again. This is the type of mind control I am against--the corporate architecture type--which focuses your energies by limiting the amount of nearby space in which those energies would have any purpose whatsover. I consider it a bit underhanded, you know?

So, I was sitting on a bench outside of the western wing of the office, reading these little stories, after speaking with the former manager of one of the teams I had just audited. He retired recently, had lost probably fifteen pounds--not an easy thing to do past sixty--and seemed very happy. He hadn't quit smoking, which is actually admirable. isn't it? Not working for a living had done wonders for him, and I'd like to think his body will forgive him a few cigarettes, provided he isn't seized with impotent, managerial rage while he smokes them. I forget what I wanted to say happened next, while I was sitting. Forgive me, the Yankees appear to have won, which is distracting. Anyway, with apologies to the estate of Robert Walser, I feel I should reprint one of these stories here, for the benefit of Pablo Puhanna, who will not likely pick this book up--at least until he reads this story--as I also gave him the Library of America edition of the collected poems of Walt Whitman a while ago, which I am sure he hasn't read, as he sounds, more often than not, still quite German.

"Once there was a man and on his shoulders he had, instead of a head, a hollow pumpkin. This was no great help to him. Yet he still wanted to be Number One. That's the sort of person he was. For a tongue he had an oak leaf hanging from his mouth, and his teeth were cut out with a knife. Instead of eyes, he had just two round holes. Back of the holes, two candle stumps flickered. Those were his eyes. They didn't help him see far. And yet he said his eyes were better than anyone's, the braggart. On his pumpkin head he wore a tall hat; used to take it off when anyone spoke to him, he was so polite. Once this man went for a walk. But the wind blew so hard that his eyes went out. He wanted to light them up again, but he had no matches. He started to cry with his candle ends, because he couldn't find his way home. So now he sat there, held his pumpkin head between his hands, and wanted to die. But dying didn't come to him so easily. First there had to come a June bug, which ate the oak leaf from his mouth; there had to come a bird, which pecked a hole in his pumpkin skull; there had to come a child, who took away the two candle stumps. Then he could die. The bug is still eating the leaf, the bird is pecking still, and the child is playing with the candle stumps."

A hui hou, then, I'll be off the mainland soon...

Some of Them Fell Into Heaven...

2004-09-23T19:54:00.000-04:00

The Venetian 'Magnum' Pentecost, Ital., 16th cent.

I know it's difficult to believe, but even in paradise it's possible to have a bad day. And then fate has surely sailed off on you, malihini--left you a dozen ulus short of an outrigger--because where to paddle now, Thor? Peru? This is essentially it. As the man says, there is no South Hawaii, so don't go buying beachfront.

It must have been the coffee that soured me to this week, to this...paradise. I've long believed that a sound measure of a culture's worth is the relative quality of its Kona Peaberry; that, and the quotability of its assholes. [BREAK: RIP, Brian Clough, you will be missed wherever pubs accept credit...] But four days of the Devil's bathwater have left me wondering if this isn't all some sort of postscript, if the pants in the family hadn't left long ago--under their own power--without even bothering to zip up.

The short-shorts, rather. I suppose it's true what they say: sometimes you put the lime in the coconut, and sometimes the shark only bites your dick off.

In happier news, The Sons of Thomas Magnum wish to offer a warm e komo mai to our newest brother, T. Edward Magnum, the product of a happy accident involving a malfunctioning jet ski, Father, and the beautiful Norwegian antiquities dealer whom Brother T calls 'Moder'--whatever that means. Drinks and festivities to follow in the Kamehameha Club function room. Bring singles.

A hui hou.

Musings on a Mustache pt. 1

2004-09-22T13:39:00.000-04:00

My father used to tell me that a man is only as good as his mustache. I believed him. You can separate the men from the boys, and the men from the women, by looking at their mustaches. How thick it is. How dark. How sexy. I've dated a lot of girls in my life, a lot, and none of them had a good mustache. That is saying something.

Of my friends, only Rick doesn't have a mustache. Maybe that is why I never really trusted him. T.C. has a mustache. Higgins has a mustache. Rick doesn't. I think that is worth mentioning. I can't imagine not having a mustache. It would be like not having a hairy chest, or not having a kick ass guitar riff in your theme song. These things are unthinkable. And yet, I think them.

Life is weird that way. At least that was what I was thinking before she stepped into the picture. Tall, leggy, blonde, without a hair on her upper lip. I placed her away in the "do not trust" section of my mental filing cabinet. She told me her husband was missing and the police wouldn't help her. She said he cleaned out their bank accounts and she hasn't heard from him in two weeks. She thought he was still on the islands, somewhere. She said she had a lead, someone had seen him at a place called the King Kamehameha Club. She asked me if I had heard of it. I smiled and said yes, I think I have.

I didn't think this sounded much like a mystery, but I don't turn down cases. I am a PI, after all. It is what we do. We solve mysteries, wear Tiger caps, and always – always – roll over the hood of a hot sports car if the occasion warrants. This is our code. I am bound.

I asked her for a photo of her husband. She gave me an 8x10, black and white. He was a handsome guy. Salt and pepper hair, thin face ... and a mustache. My day was getting weirder and weirder.

Echoes of the Mind, pts 16-32

2004-09-21T10:40:00.000-04:00

And if you still want it back, you better pay for shipping...

The investigation had taken an inconvenient turn, and T-Mags was nowhere to be found. Here I was, staring at Lt. Inouyue and an afternoon's worth of third-rate coffee, with nothing more than an insincere smile in my bag of tricks. The old cop was really laying into me, too...

LI: And did you knowingly or unknowingly allow for the acceptance of unauthorized business commitments involving the object in question?
GT: No. Wait, unknowingly?
LI: You are as dumb as you are tall! Ask yourself.
GT: What the hell are you talking about?
LI: You have to ask yourself.
GT: ...
LI: Go on!
GT: Did I allow for the acceptance of unauthorized business commitments involving the object in question?
LI: ...
GT: ...
LI: Well?
GT: No! Listen, this was all in the report you hired me to write up three months ago, it's all right there in the file, look at it!
LI: That doesn't concern me, Blue Eyes, do you want to be here forever, or what?
GT: Alright, just hurry this up, I have tennis lessons.
LI: Who acted as general counsel?
GT: Karen Cohen.
LI: STUPID MAINLANDER!
GT: WHO ACTED AS MY GENERAL COUNSEL IN THIS MATTER?!
LI: YES!
GT: Karen Cohen! And I'm from Oahu, Inouyue, you know that!
LI: Don't tell me that, I shouldn't know. Write it down.
GT: Write it down...what makes you think I had anything to do with this, anyway?
LI: There are...certain indications.
GT: Like what?
LI: A mustache was added.
GT: What are you talking about, Inouyue, I didn't draw a mustache on anything.
LI: And a hat.
GT: I drew a Tigers hat on it?
LI: AHA!

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

2004-09-20T16:18:00.000-04:00

We Put the Tender in Legal...Nevermind.

The Hawaiian language is a wonder to me, not only for its musical, cascading syllables, but for its relative restraint and economy in the face of a world run through with a thousand shattered images of itself. [BREAK: I have eaten the silly prose you were keeping in the icebox, forgive me, it was so purple, so purple and so purple, and me, I was running a fucking contracts audit in the middle of nowhere…] What kind of native modesty the first Hawaiians had, to walk off their ships into the million birdsongs of Kailua, the fifty-three shades of purple the moon draws in the white-haired surf at Punch Bowl--that night-pile of moving glass--the hundred anticipated gradations of light in a single afternoon, something impossible anywhere else; to see and hear all of these things, and name them each just once. Presumably, they were too busy gawking at it all.

Now me, I have seventeen pairs of shoes, eleven of them Sperry Topsiders, and each one of them has a name: that's the kind of guy I am. I also have a name for each of the eighty-three smiles a dangerous woman can use on a man, and the one I was looking at now was named ‘Deirdre’.

My client, Deirdre Menahune, had come up the stairs at the Hong Kong to Honolulu Social Club, just as I was making my exit, and I was ready to move to the side to let her pass. It's the kind of compromise I can live with, the kind that doesn't end with me face down in a pile of regret and guard dogs, but Deirdre had other plans. The man you are looking for is upstairs, at the bar, she told me, and flashed that smile again. It was like finding a photo of the delectable Erin Gray in your Cracker Jacks at an Hawaii Islanders game: a wonderful surprise, but just confusing enough to be sinister.

And my buddy, I said, pointing toward the doorway at my new friend, He wants a beer. You're not serious, Magnum, she said. So I gave the guy a look that said, You and me both, pal, and headed up the stairs to the bar.

I found the informant hovering over a sixty-four ounce scorpion bowl, looking like he forgot his swimmies. I have your info, he said, But it'll cost you. This town sure has gotten expensive, I mumbled, Ever since the money came in.

Shouldn’t be a surprise to you, he said, You’re not here for free…

SECOND WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS RELATED JOKE OF THE AFTERNOON

IN A WORLD RULED BY SURPRISE AND CHANGE...

POTENTIAL TSOTM ROAD TRIP, LUNA LOUNGE, 10/16(?)

PLEASED TO MEET YOU

Beau's Belles Beam Broadly

2004-09-17T13:54:00.000-04:00

Hello, you've reached Sexy As All Hell...

No casework today, but birthday wishes and Lowland Scotch dreams go out to the legendary Schilzy McGee, serial monogamist, hobby-womanizer, and resident volleyball pro at the King Kamehameha Club. Schilzy and I first met while working a case for the Agency in Bridgeport, CT…

Cue flashback sequence.

TITLE CARD: EASTSIDE OF BRIDGEPORT, CT, 1999
Schilzy McGee: What are those guys doing?
G. Thomas: I think they’re stealing the aluminum siding off that house.
Schilzy McGee: Why?
G. Thomas: Maybe to make musical instruments, like on Fat Albert...

End flashback sequence.

Then Schilzy executed a perfect, slow-motion dodge-and-roll over a pile of fuel cannisters, all while taking deadly aim with his nickel-plated .45. I protested that this was really more of an A-Team thing, but Schilzy pointed out that my chest hair was on fire, which distracted me. Our thoughts are with him, as he appears to be drifting toward the tragic role of ‘Serious Bicyclist’--McCartney to ‘Radical Shi’ite Cleric’‘s Lennon in the Ridiculous Asshole Wax Museum of Terror. Love the outfits though (‘Hey that guy’s got a penis! Nice balls, Care Bear, where’s the fire?)…

The Most Wanted Dog in Hawaii

2004-09-16T13:04:00.000-04:00

Dreams are a funny state of mind, considering that state of mind is often forgotten by morning. We take it on faith that we experience them as these expansive, vivid, and vibrant things, that in the moment they are as powerful and significant as any event in our day. But how many dull dreams about--say--drinking milk, or playing slapjack with Kim Jong-Il, fade and die forever in the Oahu sun? How many about taking out the garbage, or paying the phone bill? How many do we have, remember, and, in the end, allow to color our waking hours? Who knows. Even Plato had a lost continent.

I hadn't gotten much sleep that night. Something happens to my mind when I know an important call will be made in the morning. My head tries to stretch itself out, reaches for the snooze button five hours early--ahead of itself--and I sleep poorly. But I must have gotten a few hours at least. I could remember dreaming about windsurfing off Molokai, or maybe I was parasailing over the greasetraps at Rick's Cafe Americain. In any case, when that phone rang, I either couldn't remember, or didn't care to...

Good morning, G. Thomas, the woman on the line said. I could tell it was Mimi Hifalani. If her voice were any more soothing, it would come with a prescription, and if I hadn't been awake already I might have reached for my .45. The case was for a big-money client, something about a hifalutin show dog--Lord Igby Barnstable-Moriarty--a talking Pekinese with the good sense to be born well. Unlike me. Ah well, I thought, might as well. So after a quick run on the beach with a hungover but oddly triumphant T-Mags, I jumped in the 308 and headed for the office.

When I got there the room was empty. Of people anyway. The dog was there. Igby looked up at me through big liquid eyes, and asked if I wanted to grab some lunch. You’re a girl, I said, surprised. You’re thinking too much, Igby said, Now how about that lunch?

But by then the little voice in my head was painting the air blue, swearing like a sailor, and always the same message: Magnum, accept favors from some people, and they’ll have your head in a dogbowl by lunchtime…

LATEST ENTRY ON MY '25 GREATEST FEMINIST EPIC DESCENT NARRATIVES' LIST.

THIS IS FUNNY.

THIS IS MISSING THE POINT.

Why Are the Elderly Excessively Cautious?

2004-09-15T15:58:00.000-04:00

Most mornings on Oahu are like mornings anywhere else: you wake up, say ‘hi’ to the stewardess in the shower (usually played by the lovely Stefanie Powers), comb your mustache and hop in your Ferrari. On the surface, it’s a series of events that could happen anywhere. Westward from Bonn to Budapest, men with mustaches are saying hello to naked, wet, twenty-something stewardesses. But every once in a while Hina likes to throw her flaming stopwatch in the gumbo. This morning, for instance.

When you're out on your paddle-ski, drifting midway between island and sky, it's easy to overlook the passage of the day. You might even say your mind invents new ways of measuring time. A bank of emerging cloud passes over Mauna Loa--how long before it reaches the shores of Kailua? A muscle in your lower back has cramped--how long before the cramp passes, and you paddle on? When was the last time you spoke with this friend, or that relative?

My morning was going by in just that way, and fool that I am, I was willing to let it keep going. But then I spotted Mack on the pier of the Kamehameha Club, waving his arms like a man with a point to make. Alright, Mack, I thought, let's see how you play it. Mr. Magnum, he called to me across the water, it's Fu again, he wants you in the office by eleven, and Mr. Magnum, he sounds sore. I started to paddle in.

Just then Sophie from the tourism board appeared on her porch, just yards down the shore from Mack, and started waving me in as well, shouting something about my car insurance. I started paddling toward her, but Pablo Puhanna pulled up next to me in his cigarette boat, mentioned that Gina Lolabrigidscross was on the line from County Galway, and handed me his satellite phone. I was about to take the call when I noticed Mack again, with two tiki torches in his hands, waving me in like an air traffic controller with a potent work ethic.

Alright guy, I shouted, and headed back to the Kamehameha. But it wouldn't happen. Four meters to port Mr. Fu surfaced, and through the water running off his scuba mask his beady little eyes were watching me. Yes, Mr. Fu, I said, and headed to shore.

This whole time I couldn't stop thinking about Diego Daguerro, who was supposed to contact me with important info about a pending case. His voice was the only one in the world that morning, and I wasn't hearing it. It reminded me of a poem T-Mags mentioned during one of his stories, but I couldn't remember the words, only T-Mags' description of the young woman in question. Something about an old man yelling across a pond in New Hampshire, and getting nothing back...

Maybe I was trying to tie up the loose ends. You know, like those TV detectives.

2004-09-14T17:31:00.000-04:00

Too Ugly to Flinch

2004-09-14T14:56:00.000-04:00

56…57…58…59…60…

There are two kinds of physical pain in this world. That’s what my grandfather told me, back in Michigan one frozen day in late January. There’s the kind you hate--like getting chased down and gnawed at by the boys, Zeus and Apollo, or chopping up an ice floe on the U.P.--and there’s the kind you actually enjoy. Doing chin-ups in the face of a Kapiolani sunrise was definitely of the latter.

At 62, Mack from the pool club tapped me on the shoulder. I had a call waiting at the hotel bar, a Mr. Fu. He was with the Company. I should have known better, I should have gone right on to 63...64...65... Maybe all those years ago something of that frozen winter had quietly lodged itself in my brain, had made itself a part of me. Or maybe I was a part of it. It was the second option that made me think of Mr. Fu, that night in Miami, talking about sales calls and monthly forecasts. I decided to take the call.

Mimi Hifalani was our new Director. Fu told me. I took a long, thoughtful sip of my 8AM Mai Tai, and tried to think of Kirk Gibson. Why? Fu didn't know. She was reporting up through the VP of Transformation, Growth and Initiatives, and was a tall woman. Something told me it was all wrong. She wanted to speak with me, with my whole team. I told Mack to bring the car around, pulled a pair of chinos over my surf trunks, and headed for the door.

The conference room looked like the continental breakfast at the Sheraton-Montreal. I knew the score. Bagels. Chive cream cheese. Lox that would make Israel jump en masse into the Red Sea, never looking back. For this I’d given up fresh hunks of pineapple, pomegranate juice with a rum chaser, roasted pig that practically excused itself off the bone, and a sunset that would make Patton cry. The whole Skipper's Luau at the club. For this.

At the center of it stood Mimi Hifalani. "Beauty knows no pain, boys," she shouted, then she threw a pot of decaf in the Pipeline Manager's face.

I glanced over at my old pal, Tony Montoya-O’Leary. He had that look on his face, the same one he wore off Pahuhu, our legs dangling over five empty fathoms of deep Pacific. It was a look that said, ‘Yeah buddy, something is tugging at my leg, too…”

Man, You Said Dinner, You Didn't Say Last Supper...

2004-09-13T11:20:00.000-04:00

Rising from the bottom of your beverage...

Father was both capable and good-natured. This is what sets him apart from the shows of today. Certainly, Donald Trump would not hire him…

I didn’t know exactly what Lily meant when she told me to either bring a gun, or an alligator on a leash. Had East Providence really gotten that bad? Years had passed since I finished my Masters in ethno-bartending at that hunk of brick and leftism off Thayer Street. The sun was too strong a lure in Hawaii. It traps a man's attention, like age, like disappointment, like a beautiful woman walking back to her table with her skirt stuck in her underwear. As I sipped the morning's first virgin mimosa (with a side of Cruzan single-barrel...for flavor), I couldn't help but think I was forgetting something. Was it a woman? Or was it something deeper than that? The face of the Poison god Ki'i welled up from the depths of my drink, parting the orange juice like the surf off Kahala, a stone of remembrance in the stream of an otherwise quite decent breakfast. I knew the answer wasn't about to leap out of the pool at me. I would have to do this the old-fashioned way. Hop in the car, rev the engine a bit. Dust this dusty lai.

The North Korean had made vague references to a device known as the 'laperbeam'; he had told me, with all the fire his cold race can muster, that twenty-five years from now people will wonder how they ever got by without it. But the servant of a fool is a fool, and as I ordered my third mint julep--fortified with three shots of Bookers bourbon and a twist of Midleton's...for flavor--I realized what I was walking into: Nada. The Big Ambivalent. A gap five dark miles across had opened beneath me (with a twist of Hornitos Tradicional...for flavor), and I promised myself that right after my morning jog, a quick game of beach volleyball with the Waimanolo twins, my usual paddle-ski trek to the Makai Pier, a quick run to the Screaming Tiki God Drycleaners and Alterations While You Wait, and maybe a few more mint juleps, that directly after that, and a quick stop at Neiman Marcus for a new pair of 5-inch inseam Chino short-shorts, and a quick but mutually satisfying roll in the bayside hammock with Diane Masters-Humbertson, and perhaps a few games of pool with brother T-Mags, that right after that I'd get to the point. To the brass tacks. Just as soon as I finish waxing my jet ski. I swear.

Who Is Andy Bell, Higgins, ...And Why Is He Doing These Terrible Things to Me?

2004-09-10T13:50:00.000-04:00

Who Says Really, Really, Really White Guys Can't Jump About Six Inches Off the Ground?

We knew our predicament. Leaving Snow White chomping on her pea pod stems, we jumped a trolley for the Mainland: Allston, Harper’s Ferry, chipped fixtures and pool tables. T-Mags, he always hopes for the best; that’s what puts the spring in his Pro Keds. Me, I usually get less than that. Not that I’m one to complain. But if Lady Luck was smiling down on us, she had funny-looking teeth. And not a lot of them, either.

I'd spent a fistful of evenings on Oahu's main drags, taking in the kid music, enough for a smart man to know better. These kids like to dance, and these kids like to be kids, and these kids like kids, and...well you get the point. [BREAK: Am I alone in thinking the ONLY good thing on that Killers cd--which I can't believe I bought--is the line 'Somebody told me that you had a boyfriend/That looked like a girlfriend/That I had in February'? Is that the only way to make that particular point, or is it just me?] I was already out of my comfort zone in New England. Ask for a pina colada, you get a pineapple milkshake with a sneer at the bottom, a glare four pairs of mirrored aviators couldn’t block out. As for the music, well, Gabby Pahinui would grab his coconuts and run. Bands like jokes at the expense of Heaven-era Bunnymen were all the rage on Molokai. I’ll never forget sitting in the terraces at the Paradise, wrapped up snug in four or five Beachcombers, giggling like a Māori tribesman at a pick-up rugby match at Yale. Some kid backing away from his sinister little keyboard, head thrown back, like he just hit the last chord to the Concord Sonata, looking like he was wearing Jim Reid's scalp for a hat...

[Incidentally, how bad am I at this? My kingdom for a transitional phrase...]

T-Mags, remind me to ask Kahuna Mapua why it took our best and brightest 15 years to realize Ride sounded just obnoxious enough to get them laid. And here’s to our 125lb. guitar gods and their funny-boy pants. And here's to the little sisters, who allow them to ‘just, you know, crash for a few nights.’ And here's to those little sisters’ parents, who bankroll such things. At least until little sister makes Project Manager.

And here's to Scamper and Fooled by April, two Boston-area bands who know you can't make a good prechorus out of Merle Haggard t-shirts and PBR fumes.

Don Kalani, bartender to the fire gods…

2004-09-09T13:13:00.000-04:00

T-Mags, in my haste to finish off the last appropriate Mai Tai…rather, in my rush to proceed to the first inappropiate Mai Tai…I neglected to mention a blip on my character radar, noted first last night, as I was preparing to make my way to the Kamehameha. As always, I had taken my mail at the hotel pool, beside the palm tree grove dedicated to father’s snorkeling. Chuck Olowalu delivered it, as Lily is off on that fishing trip to Vanua Levu (her luscious skintone is matched by a native sensitivity to the migration of the Black Tip shark). One piece only: an invite. Apparently, the folks at American Express have recognized my weakness for the Tommy Bahama ‘Hibiscus’ Camp Shirt (nobody can wear just one!), and have finally offered me entrée into the Platinum, er, Canto of Idiotic Spending.

Stupid Old White Guy Benefits include:

The International Airline Program which, “provides a complimentary companion ticket to international destinations on flights originating from the U.S. when you purchase a full-fare First or Business Class ticket.” You know, for when I want to take my wife to visit my mistress in Tokyo.

Preferential treatment at fine hotels and resorts throughout the world, including “free room upgrade upon check-in,” and “a guaranteed 4 p.m. late checkout time.” I find this especially interesting, as I usually finish vomiting around 3 p.m. when traveling, and this affords me a full, post-hangover hour in which to pack my short-shorts.

Oh! And...“When you sail with one of our cruise line partners, you’ll enjoy complimentary Cruise Privileges benefits, including a two-category cabin upgrade or $300-per-stateroom shipboard credit…” Have they nailed my lifestyle, or what?

And! And! “Whether you need a conference room in Boston, a gift delivered in Paris, or help locating a rare edition of a classic novel, Platinum Card Concierge is at your command. Think of this as a team of consultants dedicated to smoothing your way wherever you are, whatever you may need.” Did you read that, T-Mags? Whatever I may need. I am absolutely salivating to hear the tone of the concierge’s voice when I make my first totally unreasonable demand. It will involve bait. And diamonds. Lots of diamonds.

The moral of the story is as yet unclear, but I will say that my conscience is on Orange alert….

2004-09-08T15:59:00.000-04:00

Luis, I hardly knew ye...

The idea, of course, is to break up the day, somewhat, if at all, if such a thing is even possible. All of a clump, you know...of the same mess. Would be nice to have a sunny-noirish voiceover smoothing out the shabbiness now and then. And the mustache, please, don't even get me started...

2004-09-08T15:54:00.000-04:00

Testing, one...two...three...interminable...testing...