Bill's Notes

I work near a pet shop. So this afternoon I decide to take another look at a puppy cocker spaniel that I first took a look at the other day. Well, when I looked in the first pen, instead of a spaniel was a bulldog. Wow! Loved this guy. Named Frank. Looked like he should have a beer and a cigar in his paws, and he was only 10 weeks old. Fine-looking ugly. So I thought, what the hell, maybe I'll take a look at the price.

Three thousand. That's not pesos. That's not pesetas. That's not Australian dollars. That's American Dollars.

Are they kidding? $3,000 for a pure breed dog? For something that may run out in traffic and get itself killed? For something that licks itself and has to be trained not to poop on the carpet? For $3,000 I want it to clean the apartment while I'm gone, and have supper prepared for me when I get home. And when I'm particularly good, for $3,000 I think he should give me a biscuit.

So forget the bulldog. If I want a bulldog I'll go to bulldog rescue, get two that aren't fixed, and breed them and make lots of money at $3,000 a pop.

Turning my attention from Frank (who still may be the coolest dog ever), I spied a Great Dane puppy. Another of my favorite breeds (along with Giant and Standard Schnauzers, and English and Cocker Spaniels). The Great Dane puppy was already 20 pounds and was doubling in size every 12 minutes. He was $700. But I was more worried that he would eventually be too big for the earth, if he continued to double in size for another few hours. Then I spotted the cocker spaniel ... he was something like $400, I think. Maybe $500.

So I'm thinking ... people actually shell out this kind of money for dogs and then abandon them to a rescue? Sometimes I don't understand my own species.

If you want a dog, commit to keeping the dog.

UPDATE: The English bulldog is down to $2,500 today. The Great Dane has fallen a few hundred, too. The cocker remains steady at $700.

Today is my birthday and I didn't remember until yesterday, birthdays not being a big celebration thing to me. So today I'm sick as a dog, even sicker today than yesterday. I have a deadline today (in okay shape) so I have to go to work even though I'd normally stay home. I'm tired and trying to sleep in a bit.

7:30 a.m. the phone rings. I only answer since it must be something wrong. No one else would call before 9 unless it's bad news. Not when I have a cell phone. So I stagger, barely conscious, to the receiver. And it's my mother, morning person and slightly histrionic anyway. Ebullient. Effusive. Yappy. She sings Happy Birthday into the phone. Too loud. And then she talks way the hell too loud. When I tell her I'm sick, she doesn't get the hint and let me off the hook. No, she wants to discuss it in detail. "Is it your stomach? Are you sick to your stomach?" Ack. I tell I have to go and hang up.

Nice way to wake up.

Yeah, I'm 41. The prime of life, right?

that the Electoral College includes numerous defections and elects John Kerry president.

Can you imagine the uproar?

The only reason I'd want it to happen (which i don't) is to see both sides defend the result. Think about it. The Dems would have to justify electing a president who won neither the popular nor electoral votes, and more important, would have to rely on the letter of the law. The Republicans would have to rely on vague statements of fair play. It would be fun to see both sides reverse their arguments, wouldn't it?

Just watched the West Wing, a show I've only seen a couple of times. I see the appeal. Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where Hollywood writers controlled all the outcomes? Where the threats were only real enough to make the heroes' efforts more appealing, but not enough to actually, you know, hurt people. Yeah, I'd like to live in that world.

I've written a bunch of pieces lately, some humorous, some semi-confessional, some with a faux-literary bent. And yet the only thing that draws comments is a piece on global warming. Do you folks only want to argue with me?

So, global warming. I did a ton of stories on this particular subject over a dozen years, so I know something about this. My opinion is this: Yes, it appears we are going through a warm period. Whether this is caused naturally or caused by man, I don't know. Neither do you. Whether if man is causing it and the earth will rebalance, we don't know.

I do know this much: You better hope that industrialization isn't causing global warming. Why? Because of the way oceans store heat, there is a 50 year lag. If this is a manmade phenemenon, we're utterly screwed. Because even if we stopped burning anything today, we'd still have to pay for the last 50 years of burning, at least.

As far as DDT, I'd keep it banned.

As far as environmentalism, last time I checked, the Republicans were the party that started the EPA, and no one is talking about disbanding it. The GOP may not go along with everything the environmentalists want, but that's understandable, isn't it?

The big environmental issue to me is sprawl. You've heard me pontificate on that as well. But I have no ideas on the answer to that. Seriously. Exhurbia, where I've lived, is pretty much an isolated hell-hole of traffic and strip malls, filled with angry or bored people, living on what used to be beautiful rolling hills and truck farms. There used to be a quick respite from the city. Now the sprawl just keeps going.

But what can we do? We already have skyrocketing housing costs. Less development would mean less affordable housing, not more. I dunno.

Not quite smart enough to close the car door all the way last night. That left the light on all night, apparently. Currently waiting for a tow truck to give the car a jump. Good thing I got up early ... so I guess I'm not that dumb. Good thing I'm doing all right on my deadline, too despite traveling for a week and that I've been sick as a dog the past two days. So I can get there a little late. Or rather, not as early as I'd hoped.

In the comments at Belmont Club, I saw an interesting link to a quote. While the comment concerned the War on Terror, I was thinking the concepts applied to graduate programs in English even better, especially the nonsensical ideas of the social construction of reality and that there is nothing outside the text.

Grand strategy, according to Boyd, is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat. [Emphasis mine.]

So professors did to themselves, on purpose, what military strategists attempt to do to enemies. The professors created insane internal department dialogues on various literary theories using discredited and laughable psychological, biological, philosophical and economic concepts. Sometimes I think the Commonwealth should sue the professors for fraud and seek the return of all salaries during the years they've taught ignorant theory instead of literature. Of course that won't happen, but their defeat is inevitable as reality slowly imposes itself on the department.

We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists
when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality. - Goethe

Wish I'd read that 15 years ago. Would've saved me the effort of writing a 50-page short story that tried to say the exact same thing. Except I never quite got there. But I don't feel bad. It's not like I thought I was as smart as Goethe.

And yeah, I think schnauzers who die in battle (Battle!) go to Valhalla. What of it?

On the Arctic Ice Caps. Melting, yes. Unusual, no? Polar bears going extinct? Nope.

But what do I know? Junk Science has more info.

One thing we professional journalists know that most don't: Science journalism is one of the most heavily politicized sections of the newspaper, and one of the biggest sources of liberal bias.

Oh wait -- I thought I wasn't going to get political. Damn. Two hours into it, and here I've slipped. Damn. OK, that was the last one.

In the short story Hills Like White Elephants one character exclaims, Can we please please please please please talk about something else?

That's how I'm continuing to feel about politics. Done with it. Glad the election is over. Over at Ken Layne, they're talking secession. Okay, now that's a fun subject.

I suggest we divide the United States into 50 free and independent states, with the proviso that we have a small federal government to manage interstate commerce, protect civil rights and provide for the common defense. Anyone think that's a good idea?

For a weekend, I thought I'd left some pretty important papers in San Diego. It turns out they're here in the office after all. Whew!

Fortunately, I didn't stress too much.

I'm a little late on this issue, as usual :)

Mark Shea gets it on the gloating on Arafat's death:

[F]orgiveness is for real sin...It's for miserable, dirty bastards who knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway.

God does not delight in the destruction of the wicked, but wants salvation for all. Mark Shea is also right when he says:

I think rejoicing over *anybody's* death and cheerfully anticipating their damnation is both wrong and highly dangerous to the soul.

Arafat, it is safe to say, was a bad, bad man. But we can't allow his badness to destroy our souls. That's the biggest threat of terrorism ... to get us to turn ourselves over to hate. Forgiving an SOB like Arafat breaks the power of the enemy.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Always thought the end of this sonnet was a sentimental cop-out. Someone who is old enough to have dead friends and broken love affairs and has rehashed them in his mind until he brings tears to his eyes has a friend who restore those losses, end those sorrows and restore the lost time with a mere thought? Who is this friend? Where I can meet this person? Does everyone else have someone in their life who can do this for them? Am I missing something?

Only God can restore the years the locusts ate, and restore the dead to the living, and regain time. Not art, Proust's heroic attempt noted. In the present, we can learn to live with our losses, and to fill our lives with new people and new service. But we cannot replace what is lost.

When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret, or pain, or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice, or human touch of hand.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I used to read this and think of K-. Southside Johnny on the radio I know we had to try, both of us 18 and headed to the beach every day reach up and touch the sky our whole lives lying before us like an unattended Pac-Man machine and we with four quarters and 20 confident patterns in our heads; dots uneaten, power dots there for the taking, a bunch of ghosts either in a box or moving in predictable ways, dreams undashed, hopes uncrushed, faith unlost, our hearts meaty and spicy and flexible and tender like so many uncooked enchiladas ... our souls unaware of the giant existential whack-a-mole game being prepared for us, ready to smack our surf- and cheap-vodka intoxicated heart-pastries straight into the simmering, unfiltered deep animal-fat fryer. There, completely unlike the tempering of steel, the enchiladas would cook through, the ingredients became fixed, and there was no un-deep-frying them and adding in a little more spice or a little less steak, no matter if you cried like Gilgamesh at the loss of his best friend Enkidu, no matter if you crossed the ocean in search of his soul. I know. I crossed the ocean. Both ways. I didn't find immortality, or K- (who was shacked up on this side of the ocean, anyway), but others ready to fry the ole enchilada a little more. If you follow my point and my doubtless ill-conceived decision to melange the hell out of my metaphors.

Or maybe well-conceived. 'Cuz I feel a little better now.

You hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better that they do
This boardwalk life for me is through, you oughta quit this scene, too
S----, the aurora's rising behind us, the pier lights our carnival life forever

How long is forever, anyway?

Questions for Discussion:

1. What are some of Bill Shakespeare's complaints about his life?

2. Do you buy his solution? Who is this watery tart that so soothes his losses?

3. According to the author, why is Proust full of shit?

4. What does the pier light? Use diagrams.

5. Count the metaphors in the most ridiculous paragraph of this "essay". Write the number down on a piece of paper and swallow it.

6. Is a heart really like an enchilada? Describe the difference between a burrito and an enchilada? Are either deep fried? Intellectual property theft alert: Will Cynthia Heimel sue for theft of this metaphor, or will she regret she ever made it and forsake it altogether?

7. Who is Madame Marie? Why is she arrested? How does this arrest subvert or vitiate the themes of the piece — or conversely, how does the inclusion of Madame Marie support the theme of this piece? Explain using clay.

8. Has the author crossed the Indian Ocean? If not, how does he know that immortality is not on the other side?

9. Fill in the blank: I know we had to try, reach up and _____________. True or false: K- used to raise her arm as if to _____________ more than 50 percent of the time when the song was played. When her arm was raised in that position, her boyfriend would start to slip off her shirt. Does that make them young lovers or fornicators? Be prepared to defend your answer on Judgment Day.

10. What is the salient difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man? How does this bear on the underlying themes of this piece?