Better than porn

What Next?

While Cook Liberry was searching for a new Director (University Librarian), the boss of Technical Services (my boss's boss) was Acting in that role. Today there was an impromptu gathering of Aunties to celebrate her now-finished tenure--the new Director starts tomorrow.

There was much tittering and muttering, and much cake and ice cream.

As I was leaving this get-together the formerly Acting Director and once again mere Director of Technical Services (Boss of my Boss) said "I don't know what the new Director is going to do about your job, Geoff. You have a wide range of skills. We'd like to keep you in some capacity."

Thanks for the heads-up. Sounds to me as if my current position is being shit-canned!

Dead Guitarists I Admire, Part III

Unfortunately this is live concert footage poorly synched with the studio track of 'Walk,' but it's all I could find. Dimebag Darrell turned a simple hook into a killer song (my wife, who loves Abba and the Bee Gees and Blondie primarily, considers this her favorite song, and thrashes around like mad when she plays it. Her favorite line? "Can you hear the violins playing your song?"). His soloing is mind-bendingly inventive here. Some motherfucker shot him in the head during a concert a couple years ago. Now he's dead.

#57

The commercial for Tempurpedic mattresses features a young lady in pajamas jumping on one side of a mattress fashioned from "space-age foam" while an unmolested wineglass stands firm before her bouncing feet. We have a Tempurpedic and typically I'd agree with that infomercial's assessment of the stability of its product.

But while reading Absurdistan I was beset by a storm of guffaws so potent the resultant quaking could have bounced an entire wine cellar off our Tempurpedic and clear down York Road to the Chesapeake Bay. I'm afraid A Confederacy of Dunces has been dethroned as the funniest book I've ever read.*

In Gary Shteyngart's novel the Apocalypse doesn't arrive with a bang or a whimper, but with great gales of laughter. In fact, the Apocalypse is unfolding around us right now, a great drama of hilarious doom. Laugh while you can.

*Mr. Toole's masterpiece, remains, however, a superior literary achievement--Shteyngart's is funnier, but less substantial, and does lose its potency about two-thirds of the way through. Buy them both!

US Tax Dollars at Work

The Matriarch

Because my in-laws have a new house, and because my father-in-law's birthday is imminent, some relatives from Canada are coming down for the weekend to eat steamed crabs. My in-laws' new house is directly across the alley behind us--just now Ma was here bringing me food* and telling me I should soak my dishtowels in Clorox--so we'll have some spillover guests staying with us.

This sent Cha into an extremely rare cleaning frenzy. She washed curtains, dusted behind things, and actually threw junk away--unheard of! Why this sudden urge to tidy? Ate (pronounced Ah-tay) is coming. In Filipino culture, the oldest female sibling is The Boss of the family and earns the title Ate. Last night Cha was panicked because she didn't finish cleaning one of our four bedrooms--her catastrohic 'studio.' "Who cares?" I told her. "Nobody goes in there. We have plenty of room in the guest room."

"You don't understand. Ate is coming. She cares. She will see." When I got home from work there was Cha, precariously perched on a stool, cleaning dust off the ceiling fan. Ate could stand on a stepladder and she'd still be too short to see up there. But anything that gets my dear wife to tidy is a blessing--anything that gets her to throw junk away instead of squirreling it away in the attic is a godsend. I wish Ate would show up monthly, because typically I do the cleaning (what little gets done, anyway), and I have to work around great mounds of art supplies, tubs of misceallany, HSN products bought and used once and left where they are, remnants of Green Party/Young Audiences/Community Association fundraisers, toilet paper and paper towel tubes and plastic containers that will be used in something someday, socks, bras, panties, nail files and hair clips, musical instruments from Africa bought on sale, Big Gulp cups, etc. The house seems empty now that the mess is gone.

Ate is four foot four inches tall, and the fear she invokes cracks me up. Everybody younger than her has to take her hand and touch it to their own forehead saying "Mano po." I look forward to the lecture about children, which I get each time I see her. "You should have had children ten years ago. You could have five by now. You are getting old. If you didn't want children there's no reason to get married." Because Cha and her two sisters have no kids, my in-laws have no grandkids. This is scandalous, and causes much muttering in Tagalog. The only subject more important is who has become tabacho(fat). But these are by no means dour people despite their heavy Spanish Catholicism and mysterious tribal ways. Once the obligatory lecturing is out of the way, they're great fun and I like seeing them. Aunt Emmy will be here with her Japanese husband Ken. He's got business interests all over the place and is an interesting guy.

*I agreed to sign on to a second mortgage for a second house with Cha, Ma, and Leesha primarily because I want the in-laws nearby where we can help them as they get older. Secondarily because the house is a good investment, even though we could use the money spent to fix up our own house. Thirdly because I knew Ma would bring me food every day.

**The photo is not our Ate, of course, but I'm sure she's somebody's Ate. Taken in Banaue, Philippines.

#56

Hold on to your hats with this one. P. D. Ouspensky begins with a problem proposed by Kant--that 'space' and 'time' are simply constructs of consciousness--and runs with it. Boiled down to its barest argument, Tertium Organum suggests that the world we perceive is an artificiality; we cannot perceive the world as it is because our perception is self-limited. Lots of analogies about how two-dimensional beings would perceive three-dimensional objects passing through planes lead Ouspensky to suggest that we fail to understand what we see. His answer? What we perceive as 'time' is actually the movement of fourth-dimensional objects through our plane of existence. It is possible according to Ouspensky to achieve the consciousness required to understand the 'realm of causes,' because the technology exists in our mystical traditions going back millenia. The Fall of Adam and Eve actually marked the imprisonment in Matter of Spirit. We can liberate ourselves with proper training and devotion.

Elaborate bullshit or the key to higher consciousness? Doesn't matter to me so long as it entertains. I loved it. Any book capable of rationally marshalling disparate figures like Hegel, William James, Lao Tzu, Madame Blavatsky, Jacob Boehme, Sufi mystics, the Mahabarata, Plato, and Plotinus can't help but challenge a three-brained being.

Dead Guitarists I Admire, Part II

SRV's performance of Texas Flood at the El Mocambo, 1983 My first concert was SRV at the Towson Center when I was 16. My head blew clean off into the stratosphere. Stevie suffered major addictions (Keith Richard visited him in rehab and told him he better chill--imagine how sobering that must have been!), but got clean and was at the top of his form when Eric Clapton offered Stevie his seat on a doomed helicopter. Now he's dead.