This thing was written in eight minutes while looping the tune below. The Stylistics. Man, oh, man…..the Stylistics were smooth. Smoooooth.
Here is your horoscope, courtesy of data visualization master David McCandless and coder Thomas Winnigham. This horoscope applies to you each and every day until either the day you die, the day the sun burns out, or the day you perish in the raptor and/or zombie apocoplypse. I just saved you hours of time reading other, less accurate horoscopes. You are welcome.
ARIES: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along…your lucky number is one.
TAURAS: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is two.
GEMINI: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is three.
CANCER: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is four.
LEO: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is five.
VIRGO: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is six
LIBRA: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is seven.
SCORPIO: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is eight.
SAGITTARIUS: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is nine.
CAPRICORN: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is ten
ACQUARIUS: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is eleven.
PISCES: Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along……your lucky number is twelve.
Oh, and here are some animated GIFs that should dance to the Stylistics tune you cued up when you pressed play up there at the top. That’s a damn fine tune. Damn fine jackets in the video, too. Damn fine dance steps. Damn fine harmonies. Yeah, yeah, yeah…the thrid one does not truly go with the Stylistics tune. Two out of three is not bad, though. According to Meatloaf. And the baseball hall of fame.
This thing was written in one hundred four minutes while looping Michael Stanley Band’s “Let’s Get The Show on the Road” and REM’s “Green Grow the Rushes” over and over and over and over and over and over…….
Last Saturday morning, a friend visited my amazing relationship therapist, Ellen about whom I have written many times here on this site. The friend needed some relationship advice. Her situation was confusing and, as I always do, I suggested “you should talk to Ellen….she is amazeballs.”
Ellen is, indeed, amazeballs. As you can see here, on July 22, 1999, she handed me that awesome title up there…..”you do work the same way you do women”…..as a few lines in my journaling notebook. She was right. I used to “do work” the same way I “did women”. Which is why I sought her out in the first place like an intelligent pig seeks out tasty truffles.
Here is Ellen’s card. If you need to talk to Ellen…..ever….give her a shout. Give her three things for me. A hug. My eternal thanks. And my love.
Whenever a friend goes to Ellen, and periodically just to pass the time, I leaf through the three notebooks of block printing and vague scribbles I made during those many, many sessions with Ellen, devoted to getting me over the behavior of “doing work the same way I do women.” Back to the therapy thing later. First, some John Green.
Also discussed here previously, John Green writes the most amazing stories characterized by strong female leads, artful turns of phrases, perfect word choices, and flawed, imperfect characters…..often with a redemptive aspect. Or death. John Green writes about four things. Love. Redemption. Death. Imperfection.
Had I not stumbled upon Ellen back in 1998, all of John Green’s books would have made excellent substitute therapy. You walk away from reading them smarter than when you walked in and desirous of being the best damn partner and friend in this galaxy and any tangential galaxies. And adventure. You walk away from each Green book desirous of adventure. And, of course, thinking of redemption, love, death, and imperfection.
Go buy all his books and read them. They are chew toys of books….you can knock them off in an hour or two. If you don’t have that extra ten hours to devote, here are a few most excellent excerpts from John Green books. Homeboy can certainly turn a phrase.
“That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.” — Paper Towns
“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.” — The Fault In Our Stars
“I’m starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.” — Paper Towns
“You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.” — An Abundance of Katherines
“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.” — Looking for Alaska
“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.” —Looking for Alaska
“Everything that comes together falls apart. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you stopped suffering when they did.” — Paper Towns
“Maybe there’s something you’re afraid to say, or someone you’re afraid to love, or somewhere you’re afraid to go. It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt because it matters.” —Will Grayson
“Those awful things are survivable because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.” — Looking for Alaska
“Anything that happens all at once is just as likely to unhappen all at once, you know?” — Will Grayson
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” — Paper Towns
“maybe tonight you’re scared of falling, and maybe there’s somebody here or somewhere else you’re thinking about, worrying over, fretting over, trying to figure out if you want to fall, or how and when you’re gonna land, and i gotta tell you, friends, to stop thinking about the landing, because it’s all about falling.” — Will Grayson
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.” — Paper Towns
“Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s just something you are. [But] I do pick you. We’ve been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I’d pick you.” —Will Grayson
“If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” — Paper Towns
“He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment—because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.” — An Abundance of Katherines
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” — The Fault In Our Stars
“At some point, you just pull off the band-aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.” — Looking for Alaska
“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” — An Abundance of Katherines
“When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost – the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.” — Will Grayson
“I feel like my life is so scattered right now. Like it’s all the small pieces of paper and someone’s turned on the fan. But, talking to you makes me feel like the fan’s been turned off for a little bit. Like things could actually make sense. You completely unscatter me, and I appreciate that so much.” — Will Grayson
“But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” — The Fault in our Stars
“You can love someone so much… But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.” — An Abundance of Katherines
John green writes amazing passages and moving books. The man can pull feelings out of you that you never knew existed.
Over the years, I have been quick to dismiss choice for matrimony as a result of terrorist activity. For years I have said that the reason I chose to get married in 2002 was a direct result of 9/11/2001. That’s not to take away anything from my ex-wife….we shared a lot of laughter and such during those five years we were together…it’s just that I imagine I would have married anyone with whom I was throwing around “I love you’s” when I got trapped in Saalfeld, Germany on 9/11. Given that me being in love is as rare as the periodical cicada of the genus Magicicada, the confluence of those events was odd.
I spent September 7-9, 2001 in New York City with a group of friends from California and New York City. One of the friends was the lead writer on MTV’s “Celebrity Death Match” and we had a most excellent tour of the MTV studios, followed by a significantly large amount of cocktails and the Jets home opener on Sunday. Immediately following the Jets loss to the Indianapolis Colts in their home opener, I drove to JFK and took the red eye to Frankfurt, Germany for some work meeting things. I had been dating my soon to be fiancé for almost six months on September 9, 2001.
Our meetings were in Saalfed, Germany…in the old East Germany……seven hours east of Frankfurt. Or five if you drove really, really, really, really, really, really fast. I generally made that drive in five. Saalfeld was founded somewhere around 1010 and the hotel where we stayed while in Saalfeld was built right around that same time. As was the manufacturing facility where we had our meetings. It’s a pretty, little city. Looks like this:
When the planes hit the World Trade Center, we were in afternoon meetings and one of the administrative assistants pulled my CEO and I out of the meetings. With a pained look, she brought us down to her computer terminal and showed up the towers on fire. After seeing what was what, the CEO and I walked back to our hotel. He tried to call his wife and children and I sat there watching people jump out of the windows at the Word Trade Center on the ten inch black and white East German television bolted to the wall. It was right about then that, for the first time in my thirty-seven (then) years that I realized something might be more important than work, work, work and solitude. I envied our CEO trying to reach his wife and children and thought that looked like a cool thing to be able to do as an adult when the shit hit the fan.
This was the hotel….it was really, really, really old.
This was the room with the ten inch black and white East German television…..
Two years into relationship counseling, in 1999, Ellen made me write out this list here….a description of what I though the perfect relationship was. A few months back here on Mind of Mully, I shared the sixteen traits of the perfect mate Ellen had me write. This paragraph was another exercise. And not actually putting it to use seemed to be about as smart as taking tennis lessons for four years and then never actually playing tennis with another person on the tennis court. You may as well play someone if you are learning to play, right?
Our return flight from Germany was scheduled on 9/12. Clearly, we were unable to make that flight, given the grounded flights, air space bans and new regulations. Three days later I was on the first flight that landed Cincinatti since 9/11. We were the first flight landed at CVG since 9/11 and as many times as I have connected through Cincinnati at all hours of the day, I never experienced silence in that airport like I did on 9/15. We walked off the plane to deafening silence. Nothing. No other passengers and only security guards. Out of thousands of weekly walks through airports over the years, that walk was the most memorable.
Correct Wine & Cheese Pairings
Fresh and soft cheeses love crisp whites, dry rosés, sparkling wines, dry aperitif wines, and light-bodied reds with low tannins. Wines with apple, berry, stone fruit, tropical, melon, or citrus flavors work best. Avoid big, tannic red wines like Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Bordeaux, and Bordeaux blends.
Semi hard and medium aged cheeses have a firmer texture and stronger flavors. They need medium-bodied whites, fruity reds, vintage sparkling wine, and aperitif wines that offer a balance between acidity, fruit, and tannin.
Cheeses: Havarti, Edam, Emmental, Gruyère, Jarlsberg, young Cheddar, Monterey Jack, Manchego, Tomme d’Alsace Pair with: Chardonnay, white Burgundy, white Bordeaux, Pinot Blanc, Viognier, white Rhône blends, Riesling (off-dry), Gewürztraminer, Champagne, red Burgundy, Pinot Noir, Beaujolais, Dolcetto, Barbera, Zinfandel, Merlot, vintage Port, young Tawny Port, Amontillado sherry
Stinky cheeses call for light-bodied wines with demure aromatics that complement rather than compete. Cheeses: Époisses, Taleggio, Morbier Pair with: Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Sauternes, red Burgundy, Pinot Noir
Blue cheeses need wines with both oomph and sweetness to balance their bold flavors and usually very salty, savory body. Cheeses: Stilton, Gorgonzola, Roquefort, Cambozola, Bleu d’Auvergne Pair with: red Port, Tawny Port, Sauternes, Oloroso sherry, Banyuls, Recioto, Tokaji
Harder cheeses love full-bodied whites and tannic reds. Their nuttiness also works with oxidative wines like sherry, and their saltiness makes them terrific with sweet wines.
Cheeses: Aged Cheddar, Cheshire, Comté, aged Gruyère, aged Gouda, Pecorino, Manchego, Asiago, Parmigiano Reggiano Pair with: Aged white Burgundy or Bordeaux, white Rhône blends, sweet Riesling, Viognier, vintage Champagne, Vin Jaune, red Burgundy, red Bordeaux, Cabernet Sauvignon, Barolo, Barbaresco, Nebbiolo, Petite Sirah, California red blends, red Rhône blends, Zinfandel, red Port, Tawny Port, Madeira, Sauternes, Oloroso sherry.
And for crying out loud, when you pair up and serve up wine and cheese, toss some tasty nuts in there for a change of snacking pace. Get some roasted pine nuts. Even better? Google “Vino Volo”. Buy three pounds of Vino Vola’s marcona almonds…..brown sugar covered almonds with rosemary and sea salt then……(wait for it)…….carmelized! They. Rock. Marcona almonds are so tasty they will make you sob like a baby. You are welcome.
Back on point. The correct musical pairing for all John Green books is either REM or the Michael Stanley Band. In re-reading all my John Green books on plane rides from June 18 to August 18, I listened to all REM and Michael Stanley Band songs and documented them. Scribbled poorly in the back pages and on random margins. Which is why you never want to borrow books from me. Unless you are a fan of scribbled margins and random underlying. Feel free to listen to Michael Stanley Band songs and REM songs when you dive into some Green. Again, you are welcome.
Ellen had me do a lot of exercises between 1998 and 2001. Lots and lots and lots. None made much sense on their own. In retrospect, read through at the same time years later when a friend visits Ellen for a first session, they pull together nicely. Like a Seinfeld episode. Ellen is the Mr. Miyagi of relationship counseling.
At the time, when I was without a doubt the worst relationship partner and an average to slightly above average friend….self absorbed 73% of the time and sleeping the remaining 27% of the time….. I thought it was a silly exercise. She said…….in less than three pages, write out who you want to grow into one day” I wrote this in 1999:
When I wrote that, I was 7% of that description. 8% on a good day and 4% when I was being careless. Or when I was hammered.
Each year when 9/11 week rolls around, I remember walking through that eerily quiet Cincinnati concourse on 9/15/2001 and thinking “man, it’s time to get married”. This year on that week, leafing through Volume One of the Ellen Journals and seeing those three pages, I realized that the marriage, being a husband (albeit for a brief period), and the subsequent years have gotten me to 68% of that description. That’s pretty cool And since I’m going to live to be 173, I have a full 124 years to get the remaining 32% nailed down. So, that’s even more cool. Plenty of runway.
There are countless saying like “he who dies with the most toys wins”. I think if you and I had John Green out for bourbon flavored drinks and we asked Mr. Green to please complete the following sentence…”She/He who dies _______________”, Mr Green would answer with this. “She/He who dies with more relationship beginnings than ending….wins”. And that would be the right answer.
If you are with someone right now and it’s clicking on all eight cylinders, I hope that is your last beginning. If you are not with someone, yet want to be, I hope your next beginning is your last first beginning.
As promised two weeks back, we have begun populating a YouTube channel with all seventeen months of Two Non Blondes mediocrity. If you grow weary of reading here and looking at pictures and such…..you can tune in over there and listen to good music, done in a mediocre fashion. Yet, with enthusiasm, vim and vigor. By August 1, 2014, we should have the full catalog….1,973 songs…..up on the YouTube channel.
This thing was written in twenty-seven minutes while listening to the Two Non Blondes cover (sort of) of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song “By Thw Way”. It’s a cover. Sort of.
My senior year at Miami University, I took a two credit poetry course as an elective. It was a wonderful course. The professor was stunningly beautiful….not that this means anything because genetics are handed to you during that whole zygote process and makeup is relatively easy to apply…….she also had a beautiful mind. A beautiful mind is 3,907 times more attractive than genetics. When I choose to fall in love, it is always with the mind…..that is a fine rule to follow. Write that down. You are welcome. She was my singular college professor crush. Unrequited. She could recite Dickinson, Wadsworth, Longfellow, Whitman, and Tennyson from memory. And Yeats & Keats. She loved her some Yeats & Keats.
During the second week, the instructor asked me to please explain five similarities and differences between Yeats and Keats. Not having completed the reading and nursing a pretty significant hangover, I replied simply that “Yeats was Keats…………with a “Y”. That reply got me a ten page assignment comparing and contrasting Yeats and Keats
That two credit course began a long and torrid love affair with poetry……and with Yeats and Keats.
I spend roughly, or precisely, six hundred twenty-four hours per year on planes and have spent (roughly or precisely) six hundred twenty-four hours on planes each year for the last twenty-five years. When you take six hundred twenty-four hours and divide it into days using something I like to call “math”, you get twenty-six days. Never fond of speaking with strangers anywhere I am assigned to sit (e.g. my favorite seat….3B….on planes, the bar area of a sushi bar, any bar in any airport or hotel, ad infinitum) because the vast majority of strangers will bore you to tears or make you want to stick knitting needles in your ears with their stories, those twenty-six days in the air tend to be an excellent adult “time out”. Twenty-six days of solitary confinement with alternating periods of silence, Motley Crue and diagraming poetry. Diagramming poetry keeps your mind fresh and….you get to read a bunch of poetry. Thanks to that ridiculously beautiful professor and that two hour elective course at Miami University,
I mostly do Yeats, although Keats pops up now and then. Yeats is Irish…..which makes him a better writer.
Yeats
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Yeats, Yeats, Yeats……..soooooooo, we have Yeats’ three principles of the mind in “A Vision A”. Hanrahan is the romantic primitive, Robartes is the intellectual, and Aedh is the starcrossed lover, speaking that poem up there. And those three can be traced to Yeats digging Plotinus, whose philosophical writings had three principle…..the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. And if you trace Plotinus back, you’ll end up at his teacher Saccas….and if you trace Saccas back you end up at Plato.
That ten page paper as punishment for a flippant reply did not go to waste. Not even a little bit.
Keats……”Bright Star”
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –
No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death
New Kittens…Yeats, Keats, Dre, and Eminem
These little bastards living here for the next two weeks……named after poets.
Birthday Gift for You
Today is my birthday and, like Joey on the dead series “Friends”, I am a giver. I’m giving to all you loyal Mind of Mully (Whatever One) the following.
First, for those of you feeling emotionally precarious or the need to feel alive again, we are re-opening the Mind of Mully Indefinite Time Period videos on YouTube and…..perhaps more importantly……we are going to start making more Mind of Mully Indefinite Time Period videos. Here is one to get you warmed up. You don’t want to pull a hamstring.
There are many of you who simply visit this page and have not seen our Two Non Blondes videos….like the one there up at the top. This week, we are opening a Two Non Blondes YouTube channel where you will be able to see really awful things like this cover of Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me”
And outtakes…..which are actually far better than the really awful two minute sections of songs we post to Facebook. Outtakes like this one……
Happy birthday to me.
Finally got my damn pony…..and three out of four on the “to do” list isn’t too shabby.
Two years ago, at a 2 Chainz show in Chicago, it struck me that you can substitute most of Dr. Seuss’s characters into rap songs for any of the words you may find objectionable, while still retaining the beat and the parts of the songs that you may enjoy. For example, below you will find the words many people find objectionable in “Fucking Problem” (Drake, 2 Chainz, & Kendrick Lamar) with the story “The Sneetches” from Dr. Seuss’s collection of short stories “The Sneetches and Other Stories”.
Give it a try. See? It works with any Dr. Seuss book and every rap song. Yep. As always, you are welcome.
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Star Bellied Sneetches, I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Plain Bellied Sneetches I got a Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Star Bellied Sneetches, I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Plain Bellied Sneetches I got a Sneetches problem
If Fix-It-Up Chappie creates your Sneetches problem
Bring your bellies to the crib maybe we can solve it
Hold up Sneetches simmer down
Takin’ hella long Sneetch give it to me now
Make that thing pop like a semi or a nine
Oh baby like it raw with a shimmy shimmy ya
Huh, ASAP get like me
Never met a yellow Sneetch….. fresh like me
All these Star Bellied Sneetches wanna dress like me
Put the chrome to your dome make you sweat like Keith
Cause I’m the Sneetch, the Sneetch Sneetch, like how you figure?
Getting figures and painting Sneetches, she rollin’ swishers
Brought her Sneetches, I brought my Sneetches, they getting bent up off the liquor
She love my licorice, I let her lick it
They say money make a Sneetch act Sneetch-rish
But at least a Sneetch Sneetch rich
I be paintin’ broads like I be paintin’ bored
Turn a plain belly Sneetch out have her star bellied…..beast
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Star Bellied Sneetches, I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Plain Bellied Sneetches I got a Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Star Bellied Sneetches, I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
If Fix-It-Up Chappie creates your Sneetches problem
Bring your bellies to the crib maybe we can solve it
I know you love it when this beat is on
Make you think about all of the Sneetches you’ve been leading on
Make me think about all of the rappers I’ve been feeding on
Got a feeling that’s the same dudes that we speakin’ on, oh word?
Ain’t heard my album? Who you sleepin’ on?
You should print the lyrics out and have a painting read-along
Ain’t a painting sing-along unless you brought the Star Off Machine along
Then ju… (Okay, I got it)
Then just drop down and get yo’ eagle on
Or we can stare up at the stars and put the Beatles on
And that beach you talkin’ bout is not up for discussion
I will pay to make it bigger, I don’t pay for no reduction
If it’s comin’ from a Sneetch I don’t know, then I don’t trust it
If you comin’ for my head, then McMonkey McBean get to bustin’
Yes Lord, I don’t really say this often
But this long beach Sneetch ain’t for the long talking, I ………beast
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Star Bellied Sneetches, I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Plain Bellied Sneetches I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
If Fix-It-Up Chappie creates your Sneetches problem
Bring your bellies to the crib maybe we can solve it
Yeah Sylvester McMonkey McBean, this the finale
My pep talk turn into a pep rally
Say she’s from the hood but she live inside the valley now
Vacate in Atlanta, then she going back to Cali
Got your girl on my line, world on my line
The irony I paint ’em at the same damn time
She eyeing me like a Sneetch don’t exist
Girl, I know you want this scene
Girl, I’m Sylvester McMonkey McBean
Aka Benz is to me just a car
That mean your friends need to be up to a par
See my standards are pampered by threesomes tomorrow
Kill ’em all dead bodies in the hallway
Don’t get involved listen what the crystal ball say
Halle Berry, hallelujah
Holla back I’ll do ya, Sneetch
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Star Bellied Sneetches, I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Plain Bellied Sneetches I got a Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Star Bellied Sneetches, I got a Sneetches problem
I love yellow Sneetches, that’s my Sneetches problem
And yeah I like Plain Bellied Sneetches I got a Sneetches problem
If Fix-It-Up Chappie creates your Sneetches problem
Bring your bellies to the crib maybe we can solve it
This story was written in one hundred thirty-seven minutes while listening to Government Mule’s “Soulshine” a few dozen times. If you care to listen to the proper background tune whilst reading, click that button. If not, don’t. Your choice. People like choices.
This is the beginning of the story………………………………..
If you like stories, this is a story. The best part of the story happened four years ago today.
First, an admonishment I received from an HR department ten years ago. I used to like to make bumper stickers. At the beginning of one project, I made bumper stickers that read “sometimes you say the serenity prayer…sometimes you say ‘fuck it’ and throw it into fifth gear.” The lesson (as you may have surmised) was that we were under the gun and had to get the project completed in a very short period of time. Human resources did not share my sense of urgency, my love and command of the English language and the certain je ne se qua that is my leadership style. There were no further bumper stickers after that one. That was a damn fine bumper sticker.
This is not just a single story……it is several stories that happened over a four day period in 2010, culminating in “The Decision” by Lebron James where he announced on national television, in possibly the worst television show ever broadcast to take his talents to South Beach, while I lay in bed, discharged from the hospital after a five day stay and six hour surgery, all whacked out on pain pills and champagne….four cats batting at my catheter pee bag like Napoleon Dynamite batting at the tether ball game during recess. More on that later. The laser focus here is not on the cats or the pee bag or the catheter or Mr. James. The laser focus is on a fascinating Sunday with Stevie J Clark. And I have had more fascinating, surprising and interesting days than China has rice. These are several stories. Vignettes, if you will.
These four days were precisely four years ago right………….now. LeBron James had his ESPN “The Decision Special” on July 8, 2010. His ridiculous television show took place six hours after I was discharged from the hospital; a hospital that shall remain nameless to protect both the guilty and the innocent. I had the first part of my colon and the back of my bladder removed on July 2, 2010. We had the “ high on Jack Daniels & Coke and other assorted things John Lennon filming session” (link below……and that is what this story is about) on Sunday, July 4, 2010. It makes for a damn fine story. A story about saying “fuck it” and throwing it into fifth gear, a story about one of my favorite days ever, and a story of solid friendship.
Two evenings ago, a friend (who proudly proclaimed she writes like Emily Dickinson) told me I write looooooooong things. I do. I am verbose, yet precise and detail oriented. God and the devil are both in the details, depending upon your point of view and whether you are a “glass half full” or “glass half empty” person. I am not so much Tolstoy-long, but definitely Faulkner-long….with the improper paragraphination, the run on sentences (using ellipses as a crutch)…yet, without Faulkner’s flair for the dramatic and allegory. This one is going to be long. Very long. Longer than the longest one ever…the explanation of Match.com and probability theory. This one is almost as long, but not quite as long. Here. Have a look………..
See? That’s a pretty long piece. It is a rock solid, ture piece. This piece will be longer. Get a cocktail. Or a bottle. Just don’t ask for any of mine. I have to write this thing and I am damn thirsty. I can’t do everything for you. Get your own damn cocktail.
This is the intro to the story……
The intro is also long; however, you need some background to fully appreciate the “ high on Jack Daniels & Coke and other assorted things John Lennon filming session” (link below……and that is what this story is about) that subsequently happened on Sunday, July 4, 2010
In April, 2010, the evening before I was to fly to New Orleans for both a spine surgery convention and, more importantly, Jazz Fest, I had the following feeling in my stomach for seventy-two hours. The feeling of an angry, rabid mule, possessed by Satan (or perhaps the spawn of Satan), kicking me in the stomach. Repeatedly. With the mule getting progressively angrier with each kick. My flight to New Orleans was at 9 a.m. At two a.m. I jumped in the car with my briefcase and suitcase and drove to the hospital so that I could get fixed up and make my flight. Because Pearl Jam, Government Mule, and Elvis Costello were all playing. And I really, really, really wanted to see Government Mule cover Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” once before I transcend and become some sort of god on another celestial plane.
There are two hospitals within a mile of each other near my house. I chose the one with the better ocean view. One is east of the 5 freeway, far away from the ocean. The other abuts the Torrey Pines golf course and has views of the Pacific Ocean from virtually every room. The former, east of the 5, has an emergency department…the latter has an urgent care. I pulled into the hospital next to Torrey Pines at two fifteen a.m. Monday morning, walked into the urgent care and said “I am broken…please fix me so that I may catch my nine a.m. flight to New Orleans to see Government Mule cover Black Sabbath’s “’War Pigs’.” The physician on call took my blood pressure, saw it was 237/130 and suggested some pain relief.
I replied….”perhaps I have not made myself clear…I have a nine a.m. flight to New Orleans and my car is in your parking lot with all my luggage because Pearl Jam, Government Mule, and Elvis Costello were all playing Jazz Fest and I have a spine surgery meeting to attend. You really need to get with the program here…fix me up and get me on my way.” Four hours later, after a CT scan that showed a pretty cool looking mass thing in my belly, they admitted me and gave me a most excellent room on four west, overlooking the Torrey Pines golf course, the Pacific Ocean, and the hang gliding port there on the cliff.
Plan your work. Work your plan.
We have a relatively broad family history of colorectal cancer in my family…..and that’s not part of this story. Give that we are Irish (God’s chosen people), everyone has beaten their challenges like a rented mule or a red-haired stepchild (your choice). Plus, my theory is everyone has cancer anyway…..some of it is just better hidden or dormant. So, why stress or have anyone else stress. I need someone to come to the hospital on April 19, 2010 who I didn’t really know and who knew no one I knew to get my briefcase out of the car and to bring me a few items I needed for that first five-day vacation next to Torrey Pines golf course. Hospital stays are like an all inclusive resort package…..you get free food and cable…..plus, you get free drugs. As much as you want of all three. And my room overlooked the damn ocean. It looked like this:
I had met Stevie J Clark four months earlier, in December, 2009 and he was the perfect choice. Called him on the phone and the convo went like this:
Me: “Stevie JC….it’s Mully…..can you please bring three books, a yellow legal tablet, and several pens to room 428 at (name of hospital redacted)?”
SJC: “Yep”
The conversation was that short. No questions……..winner, winner…chicken dinner. He showed up two hours later with three books, a yellow legal tablet, and several pens…then proceeded to go grab my briefcase from the car. He brought in the briefcase, asked “you need anything else?” When I said “nope”, he said “OK…well, see you…..” and left. That is why the only person I have ever had come to visit me in the hospital is Stevie JC. If you plan on getting hospitalized soon, PM me and I’ll give you his digits.
Yadda yadda….spent the next three months getting a bunch of tests and five scopes, my general surgeon thought it might be cancer and when the swelling finally went down, we scheduled some OR time on July 2, 2010
This is the end of the background intro section…………
I have a bunch of subcategories of rules, despite my disdain and general disregard for rules, in general. The most important rule subcategory is you do not do anything that harms children, women, or animals. Similar to this is you never judge anyone by his or her race, religion, gender, etc. Each hold similar heft. Secondary to these (by a large margin) is the three parter: I will not ride public transportation, wear a nametag or wear special shoes for work. All three are good rules. Another combo rule is that I will never ask anyone to help me move or take me to the hospital because the corollary is I do not ever want to help someone move or give them a ride to the hospital. Rides to the hospital tend to be intensely personal and who has the time to take someone to the hospital?
That being said, I used my car service to take me to the hospital for my surgery on Friday July 2, 2010. Not knowing what to expect….that was my first surgery ever (because God made The Irish in an indestructible fashion)….I spent the week before the surgery planning the video we were going to shoot in my hospital room with Stevie J. Clark. In my overnight bag were the following items, along with my hair product and tooth brush: fifteen large white sheets of poster board, a full set of many colored Sharpies, rolls of tape, an animal costume, my iPod, and a pair of dinosaur feet slippers. Stevie JC and I were planning the shoot for over the weekend, depending upon how the surgery went and other variables such as the tide, wind velocity, his ability to get my guitar and all his video gear past the nursing station, and whether the stars were aligned properly in the east.
Surgery went from 7 a.m. until 1 p.m. I cannot recall any of the surgery because I was asleep. Just imagine that it went really, really well and there were machines beeping, some sort of “HISSSSSSSSS” sound coming from the ventilator thing and Metallica playing in the background. Really loudly. That is how I picture it.
Here’s what it feels like when they spend six hours cutting out parts of your colon and bladder and then reattach the parts of your colon that still look good. It feels like an angry, rabid mule, possessed by Satan (or perhaps the spawn of Satan), is kicking you in the stomach. Repeatedly. With the mule getting progressively angrier with each kick. Similar to what brings you in, but with the extra added benefit of waking up with a catheter in your privates. For two weeks. While your bladder heals. The key to getting discharged is to get the two halves of your colon speaking to each other in a civil manner. The key to starting this conversation is walking….taking laps around the nursing floor as much as humanly possible. Hence, the dinosaur feet slippers and the iPod. If you are going to work out, you need music. And everyone loves dinosaur slippers. Everyone. Except, of course, commies.
The first day, Friday, I was able to make one lap. One very slow, very methodical lap. Like this:
On Saturday, I was able to make five laps. For most of the day, It felt like an angry, rabid mule, possessed by Satan (or perhaps the spawn of Satan), is kicking me in the stomach. Repeatedly. With the mule getting progressively angrier with each kick.
On Sunday morning at 10:30 a.m., Stevie J Clark called me, extremely drunk, from the beach with his partner in crime, J-Hof. I had allowed no one to visit up until that time because I was having a series of bad hair days. The conversation went something like this:
SJC: “DUDE! We are coming there at 1 p.m. to film!!!!!”
Me: “Are you stoned and drunk……or just stoned….or stoned AND drunk.”
SJC: “I can’t really give you those types of details on an open line, but I am at the beach with J-Hof, we have your guitar and the tripods and the cameras and we are coming there at 1 p.m. to film.”
Me: “No…that is not happening. I feel like an angry, rabid mule, possessed by Satan (or perhaps the spawn of Satan), is kicking me in the stomach. Repeatedly. With the mule getting progressively angrier with each kick.”
SJC: “Quit being a sissy. We are coming at 1 p.m. Make the signs and get ready for the video shoot. Quit being a sissy, Diesel”
(CLICK)
Me: “Stevie JC? Stevie JC? Do NOT come to the hospital. If you can hear me….do NOT come to the hospital. Dude, there is NO way I am doing this thing today….NO way. I cannot DO this. Can you hear me? If you can hear me, BRING WHISKEY!”
(DEAD AIR)
I had ninety minutes to make the signs with the Sharpies and the poster board, and line up a big shot of morphine at 12:59 p.m. (to go with the pain pump thingie they give you….because a bolus shot is a good idea when you have to shoot a video and It feels like an angry, rabid mule, possessed by Satan (or perhaps the spawn of Satan), is kicking you in the stomach. Repeatedly. With the mule getting progressively angrier with each kick. I also had to gather up my nurse friends to have them distract the charge nurse from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. (allowing us ample time to shoot), script the fake John Lennon/Yoko One “bed in” thing where they sang “all we are saying,……is give peace a chance”….thereby turning it in into “give Jell-O a chance instead.” And I had to write the lyrics for “Give Jell-O a Chance” And I had to clean up and put some hair product in….because we were filming. Oh, and I had to do some more laps to get the colon halves talking again.
J-Hof and Stevie JC rolled in at 1 p.m., sixty seconds after my bolus shot of morphine carrying my guitar, tripods, and cameras. They were hammered and laughing. Like, really hammered. And loud. The morphine bolus shot kicked in three minutes later, as J-Hof pulled out a two liter of Coke, three big 7-11 Slurpee cups, and a fifth of Jack Daniels…..and as we had cocktails, I no longer minded that they were really, really hammered and really, really loud. Nope. Not even a little bit. Because what was the charge nurse going to do? Kick me out and give them detentions?
Plan your work. Work your plan.
This was Keisha….she ran interference for us:
The nurses on our team distracted the charge nurse and shut us into my four west room for sixty minutes of filming. We made this knock off video of the John Lennon/Yoko Ono bed in and “give peace a chance” BBC interview in less than an hour. Looked at from any angle, in any type of lighting, it is not a particularly amazing video….however, given the utter lack of planning and thought that went into the video. And given the fact that our collective IQ’s during that single filming hour were less than the average temperature in Phoenix, we did OK. Phoenix in January, not Phoenix in July.
This link will take you to the “Give Jell-O a Chance” video. Have you been having cocktails? It is far, far better to watch after a few dozen cocktails:
That Sunday was one of my favorite Sundays ever. It was four years ago today. Thank you, Stevie J. Clark, for saying “fuck it” and throwing it into fifth gear. And thank you for the whiskey.
I took a cab home from the hospital several days later, once my colon started communicating properly again. The nurse walked in with the discharge papers, smiling, and asked “who is picking you up, Mr. Mulligan?” I replied “I have not met the man yet; however, I am going to bet he speaks with some sort of accent and was a nuclear physicist AND a brain surgeon in his native country….” Have you ever noticed that you will never, ever, ever, ever find a cab driver who says “oh, yep, I drove a cab in my other country, too.” Nope. You will never, ever, ever hear that sentence. They wheeled me out front in my surf trunks with my pee bag attached to my leg (see above……fourteen days with a catheter so the bladder could heal….this was day six. That is eight days shy of the full fourteen). The cabbie looked at the surf trunks and the pee bag with concern, I told him that it was made of a space age polymer, tested by NASA for years and he had nothing to worry about. Then, I asked him to please stop by a liquor store on the way back to Bird Rock. Because I was all hopped up on pain meds, had more waiting for me at CVS, and…..by golly….LeBron James was announcing his decision in less than three hours. And that LeBron decision needed far more than Percocet. Far more. The cabbie stopped by the liquor store.
I got home and followed the nurse’s instructions to change out the leg pee bag to the permanent pee bag and hung the permanent pee bag on the bed while I opened the champagne. Four minutes later, I fell fast asleep to the first seven hours of the ESPN special on “The Decision”. Poor time to sleep when you have five cats…as I did at the time. Little known fact. Pee bags dangling from bedposts are as attractive to cats as catnip coated real mice holding popsicles made of raw salmon. I awoke thirty minutes later to all five cats playing tetherball ( a al Napoleon Dynamite at recess) with the bed mounted pee bag. I screamed at all five of those damn cats (they scattered like the French at the beginning of WWII) rapidly changed my catheter back to the leg mounted pee bag (which was dead sexy anyway…..it’s HOW you wear something, not WHAT you wear) and proceeded to watch LeBron James tear another piece if Cleveland’s heart out in the most annoying fashion ever. This was precisely when Mr. James decided on “The Decision”. Those are the guilty pee bag tether ball players……….
That was this week, four years ago. That’s a pretty cool week. And I know cool weeks. Better than 99.6% of the population.
It was not cancer. We got that damn video shot and laughed non-stop about it for a month. LeBron got two titles. I got some cool scars. And if there is a lesson we all took away from Shane Falco in the god-awful and overacted football movie “The Replacements” it is this: “pain heals, chicks dig scars, and glory lasts forever.” Amen, Shane Falco. Amen.
This was written in forty-three minutes listening to the following tune eleven times. Feel free to cue it up as you read. Or don’t. Your choice. People like choices. This is Deer Tick: “Art Isn’t Real”. Enjoy
Last evening at 7:00 p.m., while I was on a business call in my hotel room, I heard the following being sung outside my hotel room. Loudly and off key.
“The sun will come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow
there’ll be sun
Just thinking” about tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow till’ there’s none
When I’m stuck in the day that’s gray and lonely
I just stick up my chin and grin and say oh
The sun will come out tomorrow
So you got to hang on
till’ tomorrow, come what may!
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow
You’re only a day away!
When I’m stuck with a day that’s gray and lonely
I just stick up my chin and grin and say….
The sun will come out tomorrow
So you got to hang on till’ tomorrow, come what may!
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow
You’re only a day away
Tomorrow, tomorrow I love you tomorrow
You’re always a day away ………..ayayayayayayayayayayayyyyyyy”
That “away ………..ayayayayayayayayayayayyyyyyy” spelling above is neither exaggerated nor misspelled. I asked the people on the other line to please hold, muted the phone, opened the door (right about when she hit “bet your bottom dollar”) and saw a slightly built (yet powerfully voiced) seven year girl standing down in the middle of the courtyard, belting out some “Annie”, I would have gotten video, but I had three people muted and on hold on my phone….while watching one of the most magnificent performances of that “Annie” tune in the history of mankind.
To get the full effect, you have to understand the layout of this particular hotel. I’m on the fifth floor of eight floors and in the middle of the hotel is a faux courtyard. Each room exits out onto a catwalk-like thing that circles the courtyard and she was on the lobby floor, looking skyward, and belting it out. Needless to say, the acoustics are quite solid. Here’s where she was.
More specifically, she was right where that yellow “floor wet, do not slip” sign is. They may have put that yellow sign there as an homage to her performance.
Next to her was her six (ish?) year old sister, staring at her with that wide eyed wonderment that generally only a six year old has for most all things in life. That was as cool as the girl singing….loudly, off key, and proudly. Three feet away were mom and dad. Mom was giggling and dad was hugging mom and smiling. That was as cool as the six-year-old sister looking up in wide-eyed wonder at her older sister.
This morning, I took the service elevator down to breakfast with the seventy (ish) year old London couple here for their first visit ever to the United States. We took the service elevator because two of the three elevators in the center of the courtyard are out for service and as we stood there waiting for several hours to go downstairs, the seventy year old woman (pointing at her husband) said “I’VE been taking the damn service elevator down instead of waiting, but THIS one here won’t use it.” I replied “I’ll most certainly use that service elevator with you”, which prompted her seventy year old husband to jump right in with a “me too!”
On the way down in the service elevator, after reminding them that we beat the British back in 1776, 1777, and 1778, I asked them about the first thirteen days of their trip and the woman regaled me with tales of Chicago, Mount Rushmore, The Badlands, and everything in between. She had the same wide-eyed wonder look in her eye as the six year old as she described everything they saw on a trip they had planned together for forty years.
I loved the parent because they stood back, watching and smiling, for the full four minutes. I loved that seventy year old woman because she retained the wide-eyed wonder that she had at six. Each were wonderful to watch.
A phrase far superior to “God bless you” when someone sneezes, “have a nice day” when you walk away from seeing a friend, or “have a great trip” when someone is going on vacation would be “may you see the world through the eyes of a six year old”. Because seeing the world through the eyes of a six year old…..each and every day….would be quite cool. Quite cool, indeed.
My forty-ninth birthday is around the corner and I love being 48.93 today. Moreover, I look forward to being 49 and then 50 because each year brings the most interesting people and things into my aquarium. For example, a seven-year-old girl belting out “Annie” tunes in the lobby of a hotel while her family cheers her on. These are the things that I have wished for each birthday, from my first year to this past year………
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
Two ponies
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
John Travolta’s white suit from “Saturday Night Fever”
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A son
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
A pony
Clearly my wish for a pony will never come true. For my 49th birthday my wish will be to look at the world with the eyes wide open of a six year old for a full twenty-four hours. That’s better than a pony. Much, much better than a pony
This thing was written in fifty-seven minutes while listening to Olin & The Moon’s “Worst Is On It’s Way” eleven times. There has been no fact checking. If you want fact checking or editing, you have come to the wrong place. Because six pages in fifty-seven minutes allows precious little time for fact checking. Or even snacks.
This is the beginning of the movie review.
Gus…..the swing set of tears….Cantor’s proof…..and saving your ten on the comparative pain scale for the correct time. Where to begin? Where to begin.
Turning a great book into a movie generally ends up with an outcome as solid as Coke’s idea to launch a “new” Coke back in the day or the marriage of Tori Spelling to Dean McDermott. There are a few notable exceptions to the rule such as “Fight Club” and “Primal Fear”. I loved “Fight Club” and “Primal Fear” as novels and was deathly afraid the movies would ruin the books. Each movie excelled in its own fashion. These “solid novel to movie” transitions are few and far between. Love stories are the most challenging.
“Fault of Our Stars” was another movie I walked into deathly afraid because I loved John Green’s book. It is an amazeballs novel where you can hear the characters breathe and shift positions as you turn the pages. I read John Green’s novel on a flight from San Francisco to New York City in spring, 2012 and remember pouring eye drops into my eyes nonstop so that the nearby passengers and flight attendants did not think I was having a hysterical nervous breakdown. If you want to cover up crying in a confined space, or any space, use eye drops. Write that down. You are welcome.
The theme of both the movie and the book, like all love stories, is that love stories end poorly. Hazel describes this at the beginning of the movie quite succinctly when she summarizes with three words. “This is real”.
All love stories, short and long, end poorly for someone…..often times both parties. Mr. Hemingway, in “A Farewell to Arms” wrote: “if two people love each other, there can be no happy ending.” Mr. Hemingway was wrong. I have said for years that there is a singular situation in which neither party hurts when a relationship is over…regardless of the life span of the relationship. The situation is this. Both parties go to their favorite restaurant, make out for ten hours, go to their favorite concert and then intentionally do a “Thelma & Louise” into the Grand Canyon, laughing all the way down and expiring at precisely the same moment. The odds of that happening re infinitesimally small. Like, maybe, 1 in 1,908,567,305. I made that number up. It’s still a really, really, really small probability, though. Do your own math. I can’t do EVERYTHING for you.
One day, when I am gone, they will erect statues in my honor, inscribed “Worst Boyfriend Ever”. From 1978 through 1998, I was the worst relationship partner in the universe and any other tangential universes. In 1998, I found an excellent family therapist in 1998 and walked into her office solo. Surprised, she hemmed and hawed for a bit before saying “you know I am a FAMILY therapist, right? And you are a single man.” I explained that while I was, indeed, a single man…..one day down the road I wanted to be the best damn husband in the galaxy and I figured if we started right away, I’d be in the correct position to be precisely that when The Random threw the correct person in my path. She laughed. We began a six-year relationship that has as the fruits of the labor a most excellent journal with Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” on the cover…because that was pretty funny. It was funny then and it is funny now. This journal cover. That’s still funny. 16 years later.
One of the first exercises Ellen had me do was to write down all the ideal traits I wanted in a partner and in the ideal relationship. In October, 1998, I took a weekend and went through countless legal tablets, scribbling action verbs, nouns, past participles, and truncated sentences. Out of all those semi lucent and partially coherent thoughts, I generated a list of sixteen items with; of course, one of those items having a subset of ten additional items. Because I like bullets. Below was the list then. It is still the list today. Should you choose to write down your list, your list will not change. Take my word for it. 16 items. I wanted someone with at least 11.
Back then, I never made anyone feel safe.
Last Friday evening, I spent a good seven hours discussing love and life with a table full of friends and shared the finest thing I have ever heard from a woman: “you make me feel safe.” We all talked through the best relationships we had ever been in and the consensus was that when you distill it all down to the very smallest portion….when you throw all the love you ever have had into beakers, put a Bunsen burner under the beakers to burn off everything that is NOT love….the things that are simply attraction or emotion or the three inch deep things, that is what love is. Feeling safe and making the other person feel safe. Gus is a wonderful character because without asking once “what can I do to make you feel safe”, he made Hazel feel safe as naturally as if he was blinking or breathing.
Gus was the rock star character in the book and the movie. Rock. Star. And one of the finest literary (and now movie) examples of the Cherokee parable about the two wolves. This Cherokee parable…….here is a refresher for those of you who have been out of Cherokee parable school for a long time.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” Gus fed the correct wolf.
By feeding the correct wolf, he made Hazel feel safe. That was damn cool.
Gus says “apparently the world is not a wish factory” towards the end of the film. Like Mr. Hemingway, Gus was wrong. In 48 years, I have had a single experience with a 16/16 person. As I watched “Fault in Our Stars” this evening, I thought of her and while I was able to spend more than a single day with my 16/16 person………my living, walking, laughing proof of Cantor’s first proof of the uncountability of the real numbers………..my own experience with there being an infinite number of numbers between zero and one………I would have accepted just one day.
Even if I had only a single day with that 16/16 person back then….that would have been an extremely worthwhile day. A most excellent day. Because 16/16 is rare. I’m eternally grateful to having that 16/16 time because I was able to identify closely with the truncated, movie version of Gus’s beautiful eulogy when it was read aloud this evening at the Fashion Valley cinemamoviesuperplex. I could have said the same thing about my 16/16.
“What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.”
Back to Gus.
As good as that movie was, that truncated version of the full eulogy Augustus wrote for Hazel did not do the book version justice. Here is the full version. And man, oh, man is that one of the finest love letters ever written. If you are not going to grab the book and choose to simply see the movie, take a read. That’s love. That is one hell of a letter.
Begin amazing letter……….
“Van Houten,
I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time—and from what I saw, you have plenty—I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently.
Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
I want to leave a mark.
But Van Houten, the marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous mini mall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your min mall becomes a lesion.
(Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.)
We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless—epically useless in my current state—but I am an animal like any other.
Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.
People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: ‘First, do no harm.’
The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox.
After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die before I could tell her that I was going
to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse.
What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is
funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.”
End amazing love letter(s). Good night and I hope each of you get at least a single day with your own personal 16/16. Because that will be a damn good day.
This site gets roughly 60 unique visitors a day with each visitor reading an average of 3.2 posts with each visit. I get about ten emails a week asking why it looks as if there’s nothing new. I write every day and, unfortunately, for the past year or so, most of it was derivative crap. That’s not to say that what is below is not derivative crap, it’s simply far less derivative crap that what I’ve been writing for the past twelve months. I heard the middle part to a most excellent love story via text last Tuesday while sitting on a plane. It is the middle of a friend’s love story and hers to tell….which she has been telling for a few years. And I have been listening, intently, since July, 2012. It’s a damn fine story. Then, on the little, bitty Delta regional jet from Salt lake City to San Antonio this afternoon, the GoGo wireless punked out, leaving a man who wears a 50 long suit stuffed into a little, bitty regional jet seat for three hours thinking about the middle of that beautiful love story. Which kicked off this derivative crap. That’s a damn fine love story you have going there, B. Bravo to you. Bravo to both of you.
I have always been a sucker for a good love story. “A Tale of Two Cities” was a love story wrapped in a revolution story with a dude getting his head chopped off at the end so that another dude could make out with the woman he loved in perpetuity. That is a damn fine love story. I read it when I was very young and that “tis a far, far better thing” ending was one of the first things I ever memorized. A long standing student of the game of love, yet an erstwhile and rare participant, preferring to watch from the sidelines…….I truly enjoy love stories because they combine two of my favorite things: stories and women.
My favorite love stories are the ones I hear in person.
Through the years, to couples (both strangers and friends), I have asked the following battery of questions until bread rolls or napkins have been stuffed in my mouth rendering me question disabled. And I have listened to the answers, intently and with purpose, for decades because they are some of the most fascinating stories of joy, terror, humor, anxiety, loss, redemption, and emotion that you’ll ever hear. And, I remember all the stories. The mundane stories and the fancy stories. They all tend to be very interesting stories. I remember them all.
First day of school and first sky diving adventure questions pale in comparison to the answers to the following questions, asked with sincerity and in the correct order. How did you meet? When did you know you were in love? What did you do about it? Would you like another cocktail for the rest of the questions? Me, too! What made you the most nervous? Did you like his/her family? Really? Promise? How about now? Did you realize it was going to be an emotionally dangerous adventure from the get go….or did it take a while for it to sink in? What did you do to get over that anxiety? What was the first thing you laughed at so hilariously that you both cried? What were the courtship rituals? Who had the best one? Did you compete? Do you challenge each other? Did he/she open up new worlds to you? Really? Which ones? Do you make each other better? When did it go from black and white to full color? Were you more “safe” or “sorry”? How fast did you jump? Did the fall feel like it took forever? How was the landing? Did you stick the landing? What did the Russian judge give you on the landing? 6? That figures. Damn Commies.
And four dozen other questions. Perhaps five dozen.
Many times, with the best love stories, you don’t even have to ask the detailed questions. You can sit back and just ask “….and then what?” And listen. The “and then what?” ones are generally the best love stories.
I’ve never really answered those questions because unlike those people who sit across from me ……I am a runner. A world-class sprinter. I could beat Usain Bolt in the regular Olympics and Oscar Pistorius in both the regular Olympics and the Paralympics. This is one of the things that makes me such a good listener to these stories. And stories, like songs, help us figure out the most basic of our own questions. I would have asked Oscar a different battery of questions. More basic ones including gun safety and girlfriend protection
A long standing student of the game of love, yet an erstwhile and rare participant, preferring to watch from the sideline………..I truly enjoy break up songs because they combine two of my favorite things: music and women. If you have ever listened to our band Two Non Blondes, you’ll notice that 97.4% of the tunes we sing are break up songs. Break up songs are far more fun to play, especially to a crowd at 710 Beach Club. Because while only a third of the audience may be in love at any particular time, one hundred percent of that audience has been through a break up and will emote with each tune. Pearl Jam’s “Black”. Cee Lo’s “(Expletive Deleted) You”. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”. Johnny Cash’s “Hurt”. Cake’s version of “I Will Survive”, minus the bad ass bass solos. Ad infinitum. 97.4% of the songs we have done since 2010 are break up songs. 2.2% of what Two Non Blondes does are whiskey songs. The remaining tenths of a percent of the Two Non Blonde songs are love songs. We enjoy the angst. We also enjoy the irony.
Break up songs are infinitely more interesting than love songs. There are 3,908,904,873 ways people run into trouble and break up. There are only three or four ways that people spend that first three to six months falling in love. Therefore, there are only three or four basic themes to all love songs, while there are 3,908,904,873 specific themes to break up songs.
Unlike the love story questions, I only ask two questions regarding break ups. The only two questions I ever ask regarding break ups are: “Are you OK?” and “Is there anything I can do to help you through this one?”
When it comes to the “boy loses girl” and the corollary “girl loses boy”, that’s when things get interesting. This is when break up songs truly begin kicking the dog snot out of love songs. This is how Johnny Cash started his empire, how Bruce Springsteen won the hearts and souls of America in the late 1970’s and how (unfortunately) James Blunt was allowed to make all of his whiny albums.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day. Given that the average song is three minutes long, listening to 3,908,904,873 break up themes would take you 11,726,714,619 minutes….roughly mathematized, this would be 8,143,552 days. Twenty-two thousand years. Given that you’re definitely not going to live to (please add your age here to the number 2,200 and say it aloud), here are the thirty-one you may need down the road. You are welcome.
Pulp: “Like a Friend”
Dave Mason: “We Just Disagree”
Smashing Pumpkins: “Disarm”
Lia Ices: “Love is Won”
The Killers: “When You Were Young”
World Party: “Way Down Now”
Coldplay: “Violet Hill”
Hothouse Flowers: “It Will be Easier in the Morning”
Wilco: “Hummingbird”
Wilco: “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” (cover)
Wilco: “Via Chicago”
Wilco is well-represented….clearly, Jeff Tweedy had some heartbreak.
Bob Dylan: Stuck Inside of Memphis With the Mobile Blues Again”
Replacements: “Here Comes a Regular”
Replacements: “I’ll Be You”
Hayes Carll: “I Wish I Hadn’t Stayed So Long”
Third Eye Blind: “How’s It Going to Be?”
Blink 182: “I Miss You”
Eminem: “Love the Way You Lie”
Guns & Roses: “Estranged”
Rolling Stones: most anything from “Sticky Fingers”…and “Let It Bleed”
Foo Fighters: “Monkey Wrench”
Kris Kristofferson: “Sunday Morning Coming Down”
Johnny Cash: “Sunday Morning Coming Down”
People like choices….you choose between Johnny and Kris. My preference is the Kris version because it is the original; however, some prefer the Johnny version.
And, without question, the finest combination love song ever written or performed is the one up at the top by The Call. “I Don’t Wanna”. Like the best love songs and break up songs, you can hear it from one year to the next and make it a love song or a break up song. Which is, of course, most excellent.
To those of you in love: well played and good for you. I look forward to hearing your stories down the road. To those of you breaking up, feel free to borrow any of the tunes listed above. They all have their place, depending upon your circumstances and mood. B! I look forward to sitting at the picnic table with you and your man down the road, asking all the questions above and the many, many more not shared. I agree wholeheartedly with all those people who said “you two look awesome together and ought to live in the same city.” Yep.
As always, thanks for visiting and reading.
As promised in the title block above, here is your ocelot. Remember to fasten your seat belt while seated and to use the bottom cushion for flotation.
Question came in three months ago…how are these written. They are written on long, long plane rides. On the back pages of books. As all derivative crap should be written.
While looking at really cool clouds while other people discuss their travel habits.
The vast majority of Congress is bought. Here is a list of who bought our Congress over the last ten years:
Here is what the average election cost since 1986. That’s a lot of money.
For the first time in history, more than half (261 members) of Congress are millionaires. You do not have much in common with a millionaire. You don’t. Conservative or liberal…..you do not have much in common with a millionaire. Here is the median net worth of Congress from 2011. As Mavis is singing in this tune….” somebody said it’s different now, look, it’s just the same….. Pharoahs spin the message, round and round the truth. They could have saved a million people, How can I tell you?” Amen to that. The vast majority of our Congress members are not interested in “change”. They are interested in winning that next election and getting that campaign financed. Not with your $5. They don’t care about your $5. They want General Electric’s money. And the Koch brother cash. Amen.
You know why Congress’s median net worth is so ridiculously different from your net worth and mine? Because it is really, really, really, really expensive to get a seat in Congress. And once they get there, they never want to leave. Because it is really, really, really, really expensive to get a seat in Congress. And as much as we non-Congress member may hear about term limits and campaign reform, it will never, ever happen. Because it is really, really, really, really expensive to get a seat in Congress.
We can change this by making some simple rule changes and using the Congressional application below. I’ve saved us all a bunch of time by writing out the application and the rules. The single most important change will be that each person running for Congress will have a limit of $5,000 to spend. And each must fill out the application below, complete the tasks, and submit the papers required for all of us to read.
It should be harder to get into Congress than it is to get a college degree. It’s easy to get into Congress…provided you have rich friends and are willing to spew vitriol and do the dozens on your opponents. We can change this.
Congratulations and thank you for applying to run for Congress. Whether your goal is to be a member of the Senate or the House of Representatives, we sincerely appreciate that you would like to dedicate a portion of your time to public service. Only 535 of the 300,000,000 in the United States get to join the club annually and, as you can imagine, we need to have strict regulations regarding whom we allow in.
Below are the rules and regulations as of January, 2015, as well as the application form. Please fill out the application form below, complete the required tasks, and complete the essays. Submit them to your dedicated page at
You may spend no more than $5,000 per year, per campaign.
You must raise this money yourself: no PAC money is allowed. You must keep records for each dollar of the $5,000. For example, if you are selling chocolate cookies door to door to finance your campaign and Mrs. Jones purchases $20 of cookies, please annotate the following. “Mrs. Jones. 1135 Clague Rd. (SS # redacted).” Then, please have Mrs. Jones sign that line in your records.
You have three avenues of expression to your voters…your dedicated page at www.wanttobeincongress.com, your Facebook page, your Twitter page, and your Instagram account. These are the only four tools permissible.
When a camera or a microphone is in front of you, you may only discuss the following:
You
Your plan
The benefits of your plan
The precise steps involved in the execution of your plan
The cost of your plan
The return on investment of your plan
CAVEAT & PUNISHMENT: Should you get in front of a microphone and not be able to explain the items above in your plan, you are grounded from all microphones for fourteen consecutive days. For example, if you bring up a plan to improve education and then say “we are still hashing out all the details”, you are grounded. If you blather a lot and use hyperbole in your plan explanation, you are grounded.
When a camera or microphone is in front of you, you are not permitted to make disparaging comments about anyone, throughout history. Should you truly feel the need to make disparaging remarks about someone else when a camera or microphone is in front of you, you may only make them about the following people:
Idi Amin
Adolf Hitler
c. Augusto Pinochet
d. Jean Claude “Baby-Doc” Duvalier
Anthony Weiner
Pol Pot
Joseph Stalin
We want you to focus the majority of your time on legislating. Because that is your job. Your job is not to get re-elected. That said, you may only serve two consecutive terms in either house, with a maximum of four terms in the combined houses. You may be a Senator twice and a member of the House of Representatives twice. After that, you need to go get a job that creates GDP in our economy
Should you be elected, you forfeit any right top be a member of any lobbying group, in perpetuity. Should there be reincarnation, you may serve as a lobbyist in your next life.
Should you be elected, you also forfeit any right to be the host of your own talk show on a twenty-four hour news program for a period of ten (10) years after you leave elected office.
Short Answer: Please Answer Each Question
Name: ______________________
State: ______________________
Circle One: Senate House of Representatives
Do you have a trust fund? (please circle one) Yes No
Please list all jobs you had before college that you used to pay for college and each job you had during college to pay for college:
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If you had zero (0) jobs before college or during college to pay for college, please print the following in the space below and initial your printing: “My mommy and daddy paid for college and I never really had to work until I got out of college.”
Please list ten friends (and their phone numbers) you have who make less than $50,000 per year. First names are fine. We will be calling all ten of these friends for a reference check: please let them know we will be calling.
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How much money did you make last year?
How much did you pay in federal taxes and state taxes?
Please list your primary tax shelters below
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5.
Please attach your high school, college, and graduate school transcripts here:
Did you serve in the military? (please circle one) Yes No
If your answer was “no”, please explain why you chose not to serve in the military. You had the opportunity to serve in the military and did not even have to run for that position…..you could have simply shown up and signed up. Right? Because now you are saying “I want to serve my country in Congress!” and, while we all appreciate that, most of us are confused as to why you didn’t choose to serve your country when you could have don so in the military. Is your desire to serve your country a new desire? One you did not have at 18? Were you too busy to join the military and serve your country when you were young? If so, that’s cool. Just help us to understand why you want to serve your country in Congress now, yet you did not have that same sort of desire ten or twenty years ago. When you could have done it quite easily.
Are you a lawyer? (please circle one) Yes No
What type of law?
Please explain, in 100 words or less, what you created while being a lawyer.
Are you a member of the NRA? (please circle one) Yes No
Do you own a house and write off the mortgage interest on your taxes Yes No
Do you understand that the mortgage interest deduction is the single largest entitlement program in the United States? Yes No
Please list all the “real” jobs you have held. (“real” jobs are jobs where you did something that created revenue that contributed to the country’s GDP, hired people, fired people, grew something, made something, educated a child, saved a life, etc)
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What are you planning to do once you finish your two terms as a Congressperson?
Long Form Answers: Please Complete 3 of the 4 Tasks
From January, 2015 on, all members of Congress must complete the tasks listed below and write the lessons from these tasks. Should you not wish to partake in any of these tasks, no harm…no foul. Stay in your current job. If you would like to serve your electorate, you’re going to need to experience some “life” things. Showing up for a $500 per plate dinner with your significant other no longer qualifies as experiencing “life” things.
1. Please go work in a restaurant or a suitable service industry equivalent for ninety days. Submit your pay stubs, along with a written report detailing what you learned during this experience.
2. Please go perform manual labor (concrete, asphalt, roofing, etc) for a minimum of sixty days. Submit your paystubs along with a written report detailing what you built/made. How did that make you feel? How tired were you when you got home? What friends did you make during your sixty days? Did you hang out with them after work? Please tell us about them and their families.
3. Volunteer at one of the following locations for a minimum of fifty days out of two hundred consecutive days. Submit a written report that includes biographies of at least fifteen people you helped through your volunteer efforts. Please include the following in the biography: person’s name, description of their family, where and how they were raised, how they came to onto challenging times, and what you are going to do to help them in the future.
4. Submit a ten page (single spaced) report comparing and contrasting the following schools of economic thought: neoclassical economics (orthodox economics, to some), Austrian school, Chicago school (Friedman), and MIT school (Samuelson). In your comparison, please explain how the Chicago school’s principles, in application (United States: 1970’s, UK: 1980’s), failed miserably. Also, in your analysis, please explain several theoretical economic theories that have been proven to be true in the real world (e.g. microloans for women in Africa).
5. Spend fourteen days at the Marine Corps basic training facility in Camp Lejuene, NC to learn basic safety skills and firearm safety from a professional Marine Corps drill instructor. Then, spend twenty-one days in a war zone. One (1) of these days in a war zone must be served in a morgue setting and two (2) of these days in a war zone must be served in a military hospital with amputees. Write a five page report that includes what you learned about proper firearm safety, as well as the three most horrible things you experienced or saw in the war zone.
6. Please write your initials next to the number six here, noting your acceptance of the fact that Ayn Rand is a fiction writer……..exactly like Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss. No more……no less. If you disagree with this statement, feel free to submit a well researched and throughout treatise on a real life country (other than Somalia) or city (other than Mogadishu) where Ms. Rand’s fictional work holds true. For extra credit, please note the For extra, extra credit, please compare and contrast Objectivism with the philosophy of Pastafarianism (from The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster)
7. Please explain the following in a single page:
What has created inflation in the past, both in the U.S. and in other countries?
What does “The Fed” do?
How can a company like Bank of America show a profit of $4.2B in 2012 and pay $0 in taxes?
What three primary forces caused the economic collapse in 2008/2009
Please explain the Glass–Steagall Act and what protections it afforded (feel free to use two pages for this)
8. What makes you different than anyone else running for your seat in Congress? Only discuss your background, your plans, the way you feel about your constituents, and the unique things you bring to the table. Stay positive. Sell us on how you are different. (five page maximum)
9. Please describe a situation where you played well with others (with whom you disagree) as an adult. How did you differ in your opinion? How did you come to a mutually beneficial agreement?
All of your writing will be published on your Congressional election page for the electorate to read. Your submissions will remain on your page for twenty years. Should you wish to change your answers, simply type “I AM CHANGING MY MIND” next to your previous submission, followed by your current position. Feel free to discuss why you changed your mind, or do not. Your choice. There is nothing wrong with changing your mind. It’s alllllllll good, as long as you own it.
By submitting this Congressional application and signing on the line below, you agree that you will give up your Congressional seat if you commit any of the infractions listed below:
Get in front of a microphone and make disparaging comments about anyone other than the seven individuals listed above
Saying something ridiculously stupid. An example of this would be saying “well, what’s to stop us from setting the minimum wage at a million dollars an hour?” You are in Congress and not allowed to say ridiculously stupid things like that. When you say ridiculously stupid things like that, we look silly to the rest of the world.
Compare anyone to Hitler or compare anything to Nazi Germany. Should you choose to compare anyone to Hitler or compare anything to Nazi Germany you will not only lose you place in Congress, you will not be permitted to run again and you will be forcibly moved to Canada.
Print your name here: __________________________________________
Sign your name here: ___________________________________________
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