PHO AND SEX DON'T MIX

My pho lunch just now was tainted by a large plasma screen displaying a show called “The Doctors”. It was a very instructive program. The main lesson I learned was that doctors are obsessed with women’s sexual issues, which might explain the trouble I have getting my doctor to spend more than five minutes with me. Some other facts I picked up: women fantasize about sex 1.7 times a day during ovulation, and only .5 times a day during other times. Also, high heels force a woman’s feet to conform to the same attitude they assume during orgasm. This is all endlessly fascinating, of course, but more of a distraction than an enhancement to the pho act.

ARCHIVE: SOCIAL OBSERVATION

Remember when the word “harvest” used to conjure bucolic images of pumpkins and hired hands lying indolently in the fields? Nowadays it’s more likely to be referring to skin grafts or bone salvage, yet more examples of horror movie topics that have become routine medical procedures. Another word that I find disturbing these days is “matter”. Not as in “what’s the matter?”, although now that I think about it, hearing that question implies that I have, completely unbeknownst to me, an odd and troubled look on my face. Could it be my nose hairs, which I admit I don’t monitor with as much diligence as I should? No, I refer to “matter” as in “brain matter”, a term used by people who imagine you’re dying to know what a gunshot victim really really looks like. And those are my Tuesday morning thoughts. You’re welcome.

I AM A MARKED MAN

The extortionist at the Belmont Saturday night marked my hand with an indelible permanent marker. I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t tattoo my ass, but shit. Two days later, and it’s still as strong as ever. I feel like a male Hester Prynne without the fun part, unless you think sitting a few feet in front of a giant speaker, blood trickling from your earholes as a band performs way out on the cutting edge, creating pure white noise unencumbered by such bourgeois trappings as words and music, is an orgasmic experience. What was kind of strange was I looked out on the crowd, and they were all doing white-guy head bobs, even the black guys. Even Devon, although he was bobbing twice as fast as anyone else--to the extent that I began to wonder if I should ask around for an epi pen to stab him in the heart with. Boy, wouldn’t he have been pissed if I had jumped to a false conclusion! But ever since seeing Pulp Fiction I’ve wanted to stab someone in the heart with a needle, and the chance to do so doesn’t come around any day, so maybe he would understand. At any rate, I’m still walking around with a fucking B on my hand, severe hearing loss, and no heart-stabbing experience. Man, life sucks.

ARCHIVE: LA GIOCONDA

Your conscious mind is a petty tyrant, narrow and prejudiced, resistant to change, dictatorial, and prone to flatulence--kind of like your dad. There are all sorts of tools arty types can use to trip up this cranky old gent, and one of the best is the blind contour drawing, in which you watch your source but not what your pen is recording. The result is always illuminating. Plus it makes a great excuse. If you do a conventional drawing, and it looks like shit, you can always say “It’s a blind contour drawing! Duh!” and feel superior to your betters.

ARCHIVE: JEANS IN A HEAP

You know what I think is a crime? Well, besides murder, robbery and anything having to do with Wall Street? The fact that artists aren’t allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they want. We have to work at regular old jobs, some of them not even art-related, just like ordinary people. We have to waste our time on relationships and child-rearing instead of doing art and thinking about doing art and playing around on the internet while we think about thinking about doing art. It’s just not fair.

ARCHIVE: GLASSES IN BAGGIE

My glasses were in a baggie for a reason, but I just can’t remember what the reason was. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t do anything without a reason, even if it’s a really really stupid reason. Maybe it’s just because it looked pretty. That’s a better reason than most.

ARCHIVE: WHITE COLLAR CRIME

I seem to have lost my moral compass. I keep it in the sock drawer, way in the back, but it’s not there. Did someone pilfer it? I’m not trafficking in irony any more, so I’ll leave that one alone.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHY I GAVE UP ON TWITTER

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF ME (THIS IS FROM THE CHAPTER ON LEAKY AIR MATTRESSES)

Ach! Every year, just when I think the phrase “me time” has finally been retired to the graveyard of dumbass discredited narcissistic new-age claptrap ideas, my local public radio station lights up the airwaves with another fundraiser marathon. Sorry, this post was going to be about my leaky air mattress from 2006. I got distracted. Now it’ll have to wait another year. Sorry, those are the rules.

IT WAS EVER THUS

This here is from 2006, during Virginia's Senatorial race. Nothing's changed. I used that word "thus" up there in the title to identify myself as an elitist, but not a snobby elitist, hence the "this here" to begin copy. But an elitist nonetheless, hence the "hence". For that matter, "nonetheless" has 9 letters or more, which is elitist--I could easily have used "anyways". Heck, "marvelous" has 9 or more letters, and WTF?? (that one shows I'm in touch with the kids ((but not inappropriately))) Obama is accusing Romney of elitism?? I voted for Obama precisely because he's an elitist! Don't be calling Romney a goddam elitist! (cursing shows I'm a salt-of-the-earth elitist.) I swear, Obama's political advisors have just about run him into the ditch. They've undermined just about every moral position he ran on, leaching the enthusiasm from his base. Good thing the Republicans are so besotted with Tea, spiked as it is with venality, selfishness and fear. And that's Today's Chuckle.

MY EEG

A bit of serendipitous synergy: I noticed today that the curve of my new glasses matches perfectly the arch of my eyebrows and the furrows of my forehead. It’s as if the glasses were plonked onto the calm fleshy surface of my visage, radiating epidermal waves that eventually crash against the rocky shore of my hairline, sending out white foamy sprays of...well, of hair. That didn’t end too poetically, I grant you that. Man, I am sick unto death of granting people things. Sometimes it seems like that’s all I do. I begrudge the granting. I’m a vengeful begrudging grantor. So anyway, this perceived synergy: in order to manifest it to the world at large, I have to maintain a constant air of mild surprise bordering on bewilderment, as if I’d been talking to a prominent matron and seen a beetle emerge from between her plump, scarlet lips. Not a problem.

MY ANNUAL REMINDER

This here is Ed giving our goldfish pond a Spring cleaning--an annual reminder of the farsightedness of my decision to get into the art game. Arteests have to protect their hands, you see, not to mention their delicate and hair-trigger minds, which must be shielded from manual labor, business meetings, and anything icky in general. I think it’s fair to say that artists are the world’s elite,  a breed that has risen just a little bit higher on the evolutionary scale than the rest of you. We’re special people, with special needs--in fact, I’ve heard that very term applied to me on several occasions. And in exchange for allowing me not to have to muck out goldfish ponds, I provide you with sketches when I feel like it. Wonderful sketches filled with the drama and pathos of ordinary mortals, the something of victory, the something of defeat. That I’m able to maintain an air of humility while performing these feats is nothing short of flabbergasting. Now if I can only work money into the equation, I’ll be a happy camper. Except camping is icky.

A QUESTION FOR MY REPUBLICAN FRIENDS, AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Here’s a sketch that was done by my new iPad app, Paper. But enough about that. Time for a rant! I can hear you all shouting YAY! Because that’s what I choose to hear. It’s my brain, after all. So here goes: very few of us can afford to pay out of pocket for bypass surgery, or a knee replacement, or chemotherapy. But we all recognize that these and a hundred other unaffordable things are good to have available to us. Who among us would deny our mother or best friend treatment for her cancer? Some of us recognize that the only way for our society to make this happen is for us all to throw money in the pot, even the young and healthy among us, because at some point in our lives each one of us will be recipients in one way or another. And these same some-of-us folks acknowledge that the only way to make sure we all contribute is to make it a mandate. Prominent among this group of knowledgable people were--surprise--Republicans, who first floated the notion 20 years ago. What has changed since then? Tell me, Republican friends! Was your party proposing that we subvert the Constitution? Were they advocating that we leap onto the slippery slope to a socialist state of freedom-sapping tyranny? Tell me! I’m all ears.

MEETING NOTES FROM OLDEN TIMES

Calling a meeting should be grounds for immediate dismissal, if not termination with extreme prejudice. It’s a form of harassment. Meetings are black holes--scientists have proven this--in which man-hours (and gal-hours too) are forever lost in a split second. Once at my last place of employ I walked into a meeting on Monday morning and crawled out on Thursday afternoon with no memory of the intervening days and missing my trousers. Have I made my position on this topic clear?

THREE PAGES FROM HEY STUPID #45

Back in the days when I worked in a little square office with no windows, I filled my spare time with this little email zine-y thing, desperate as I was to be doing something that wasn't aimed at advancing some commercial endeavor or another. I always made a point of doing these things in the evenings and pre-dawn hours, but my boss still suspected I was churning these out "on my dime", and he woul glower at me from his glass cubicle across the way. I just wasn't made for working in offices. Can't believe it took me decades to realize it. I tried hard to be a grownup and an employee, I really did. At one time I owned a house, a big car, I had a 401k, several neckties, the works. It just didn't take. It took me a while, but one important thing I learned was if you're a failure at something, that makes you a success at something else. It's like the 8th law of thermodynamics or something. Something equal and opposite happens. You just have to find out what it is.

SUNDAY MORNING TALKING HEADS RETURNS EVER SO BRIEFLY

GRASS IS NOT JUST GRASS

...except in great suburban swaths of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, where they pride themselves on thoroughbred seed pedigrees. I have seen Great Neck barons pull out their monocles and sniff at their neighbor thusly: “I see your fescue has been interbreeding again, old chap. This won’t do.” They powder their lawns with succeeding clouds of seeds, fertilizers and weed killers, most of which eventually turn up in the oyster you’re sliding down your throat. “Well, Walt,” you say, “that’s not exactly accurate.” to which my witheringly witty rejoinder is “Eat me.” In this age of birthers, 9/11 deniers, and Republican Presidential candidates, factual accuracy is a pointless elitist luxury. And if expensively manicured lawns aren’t worth pouring money into, what is?

I know I’m starting to sound like a cranky old anarchist (“Starting?” you snort. “Hey, I said Eat me!” I zing back. “No snorting on my blog!”) but that patch of mulatto sod above is infinitely more interesting than the pristine and unnatural swaths of PMS 355 that assault my rods and cones whenever I head beachwards. Just look at all the fascinating things going on in this little patch. It’s sheer beauty, I tell you! Why won’t anybody listen to me?    *whine*

THE ONLY GOOD THING TO COME FROM DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME

I can now see the dawn, but that's about it. Another case of unwarranted government intrusion into our lives--thank you, Osama I mean Obama. <--That’s how some of my more nutball acquaintances would begin this post. Me, I’m all in favor of Obama’s insidious plan to turn the US into a socialist prison camp. Way overdue, if you ask me. Back to DST, though. I can’t stand being robbed of an hour every year. Getting it back in the fall never seems to make up for the disorienting tear in the space/time continuum. But I guess if this and the War On Christmas are the kinds of things we get exercised about, we must have it pretty good. This moment of equanimity brought to you by A Good BM This Morning©.

CATCHING UP FOR MY BLOG-ONLY PALS

These are from my recent visit to Phoebus, a small community engulfed by Greater Hampton Roads. It's a bit run-down but very charming. I should remove that "but". A good deal of it charm comes from the slight decay, the odd juxtapositions, the sense that the place still thrives as a community precisely because it has been neglected by the movers and shakers.

And hats off to you who have not fallen under the thrall of Facebook. Yet. It's ony a matter of time. People will be coming door-to-door to check your computers and ascertain that you are in Facebook compliance. It was in that national security bill that was passed while we were napping.

TROUBLE IN ADLAND

Does anyone else see Trouble Brewing here? Two virile young men, albeit in pretty sweaters, their jet engines roaring on testosteroil, clearly fighting over the lass despite their pitiful attempt to put on happy faces, and one of them holds an axe? Is this not a Cry For Help? On the photographer’s part, I mean. He knows that once the bloodbath is over, the axeman will come for the lone witness. He’s hoping against hope that once the magazine comes out with this ad in it, Collier’s probably, some astute reader will drop their Postum and rush to the photographer’s aid. Sadly, the shutterbug is not taking into consideration publication lead times. Let’s face it, photographers are not the brightest snapshots in the album. As a class, they tend to be underexposed.