wondertarium

Hello again pals. I've been away for a while. Things have been afoot. Spent quite a while searching for, finding, buying, moving into, getting settled into, our new house. I dub it the Tricky Wondertarium. Me and Mrs. Tricky are quite happy with our new pad. Other things have been going on too, but those things aren't nearly as cool so no need to mention them. Come visit soon!

not too intersting but thankfully brief

1. The twitter and reader stuff continues. I suspect I'm a little bored with myself. Don't find much worth reporting.

2. For instance: I bought a new pair of shoes. Brown shoes. Very out of character for me. Very adult shoes. Snazzy, but adult. When I wore them to work they started squeaking. Lots of shoes squeak. But I work in a library. Might as well be a farting clown strolling through the stacks. I have this problem with many of my nicer shoes. But I really wanted to wear these particular shoes so I got online and found some possible solutions. One of which I tried out: lip balm. It worked. Lip balm will cure your squeaky shoes. Is there anything teh interweb can't teach us?

3. See? That just wasn't terribly interesting.

4. I am getting a piano. That could be interesting.

5. I don't do much these days but work and train. The training is going well and I am in a nice little groove. My body composition has changed noticeably. Whiskey gut long gone. Alas, there is no demand for hirsute, middle-aged fitness models. Timing is everything they say.

6. Finished reading Bolano's 2666. Nothing like 900 pages of darkness and death. But you have to admire his...brio? cojones? as a writer. He was swinging for the fences. More on that later perhaps.

7. This is funny.

not failing better

1. Saw a couple of shows last week: William Elliot Whitmore and The Pogues. Both enjoyable though neither one blew me away. Which given my love for The Pogues is perhaps surprising. Others who saw the show absolutely loved it. It would be tempting to chalk it up to my tendency to be critical mixed with sobriety--who the hell sees The Pogues without having anything to drink?--but I don't think that accounts for it. Shane Macgown can still sing but he has clearly suffered some serious neurological damage as a result of many years of various types of self-abuse (it was interesting to see him having just read the Oliver Sacks book Musicophilia). He doesn't walk, he shuffles like a much older man and his speaking voice, unlike his singing voice, is often incomprehensible. Combine that with a little knowledge of the band's turbulent history and it couldn't help but color my perception of the show. I never got the feeling that they were truly happy being on stage playing their music. I hope I'm wrong. All that said, I'm glad I got to see them and I particularly enjoyed "Body of an American."

2. Although the economic shitstorm has rained on my household too, and we will certainly feel some pain next year, we have nonetheless enjoyed the fruit of some good fiscal karma. I am no longer propping up Citigroup so without any further government money they are sure to fail.

3. I'm no economist, thank you God, but I can't help but think that the shitstorm is the correction. And that while we may need to mitigate its worst effects we cannot simply wish it away by throwing money at it. We are being shortsighted. The most broken parts of the system truly need to fail for the longterm health of the system itself. But it appears we will continue trying to play the rigged game while avoiding the accounting.

muddle

1. My aunt--Grandma's sister--died yesterday. She was the last of her generation of my family. They are all memory now. The last few years had not been particularly good to her and I understand that she'd been suffering quite a bit from various medical problems for several months. She was genuinely a kind and loving person.

2. My family has shrunk dramatically in the last few years. It was never all that big to begin with. One of the more profound lessons of age. I know there are some sad days out there waiting.

3. Routine and distraction are valuable but we can rely too heavily upon them.

4. I am muddled.

turn and face the strange

1. I am mostly retired to my tee-totaling cocoon these days.

2. I am dry, and to be honest, so is my flow of words. Haven't had too much to say.

3. This hasn't felt like a problem really. Maybe that's a problem.

4. Mostly I think I'm in kind of a liminal place.

5. I sleep for long periods, but still not very well. I think I am more tired lately because I am going to the gym more often and with a renewed intensity of sorts.

6. So overall I am healthier but still observing the changes taking place.

7. I've been reading a lot.

8. I am forced to acknowledge that I could lose my job (simply within the realm of possibility mind you--what is quite certain is that there will be no raises for at least two years possibly longer) as my employer has announced that there will be jobs lost.

9. They announced this on the same day that they announced they were halfway to their record-setting fundraising goal. It would be hard for an observer to avoid the conclusion that the purpose of an academic institution is to grow the endowment at all costs.

10. Things have changed a lot in seven weeks.

stuff, grub, flicks

1. The new year greeted me with a nasty head cold that lasted longer than it should have because I tried to go back to work too soon out of boredom.

2. My two week long holiday vacation was nice. Stayed at home mostly but did make one brief trip to Nashville to see some old pals and a couple of new ones.

3. Ate some good grub recently, guess something's gotta replace the drinking:

A. Banh Mi from Lee's bakery on Buford Highway.
B. Tortas from Holy Taco in East Atlanta.
C. Al Pastor torta from El Pastor on Buford Hwy. Sort of like a Mexican gyro, meaty, greasy, good. And huge and cheap.
D. Bbq at Jack's in Nashville. I like the shoulder and the sausage best, but the brisket is pretty good too. I prefer the KC style sauce with some Texas as backup when I want a bit of heat.
E. Burgers at Flip, the hot new spot in Atlanta. I had the pork belly and the hangar steak, both were very good. I didn't try the Foie Gras milkshake. Nor the Krispy Kreme.

4. Saw a few movies recently:

A. The Wrestler. Much better than I would have thought. Rourke is, as everyone is saying, perfect for this part. What I liked best was that a movie was the perfect means for this story. Nothing was really missing, nothing was really extraneous. It worked.
B. Gran Torino. Was there a cliche or stereotype that didn't make it into this movie? Sort of Dirty Harry meets the after-school special. Still managed a certain charm but come on. This could have been so much better.
C. Nobody's Fool. I'd never seen this before and I had just re-read the book. Paul Newman was excellent but this was an example of a movie being a terrible vehicle for a story. You simply can't do justice to the narrative complexity and depth of character development present in the novel in ninety-some minutes.

Florida pt 4

Some random Florida sights, including the world's largest Confederate flag. We stopped to talk to the Sons of Confederate Veterans members who were working on erecting a memorial park beneath the flag. It seems that the flag is actually too big--it takes a powerful wind to make it fly. Most of the time it hangs limp.


The ingeniously named strip club in Gibsonton: The Liquor Box.



The roosters of Ybor City. That big fella was the Cock o' the walk, watching over his hen harem.

Florida pt 2

A few of the murals inside of Showtown. I especially love the "Ringmaster in the Sky" painting.

Florida pt 1

So the trip to Florida was quite an experience. In Gibsonton we visited the Showtown restaurant and lounge. It's a colorful place, in every sense. The building, inside and out, is covered with murals. The pics below are just a sampling.






The winner of the Showtown beauty contest below. The loser is the pretty blond in the pic above.

off to see the carnies

Well I'm off to Gibtown pals. Be back in a few days.

In other news, The Pogues are coming to Atlanta in March. How bout that? That makes two of my favorite acts ever in the course of one year.

carnie yarns round a bottle

Next week I'll be heading to Gibsonton Fla, aka Gibtown, with a couple of old carnies to hang out and drink and listen to other old carnies tell stories in places like this and this.

How could I pass on that?

Should be interesting.

hibernation and happiness

1. We have had our first real cold weather of the season. It makes me want to hibernate. The last few mornings I have wanted nothing more than to crawl under the covers and stay there all day.

2. I wish Obama had done better with his attorney general nominee. Holder promises to perpetuate the completely useless and ridiculously expensive war on drugs.

3. Been doing better about keeping up with pals lately. That makes for happiness. Still folks I need to see though.

4.That said, bearing witness to someone else's intense pain and suffering is difficult. Words just seem so...not just useless, but somehow inappropriate at certain times. Platitudes can be insulting. I do my best to be present, and hopefully, supportive via my presence. I'm not sure what else to do.

5. I pulled my first 500 lb. deadlift since my back troubles earlier this year. Pulled it with a trap-bar, which is a little bit different than a conventional deadlift, but it was still a good, solid pull and I have more in me. But I don't hurry with this stuff now that I'm a middle aged dude. Slow, steady improvement is the philosophy these days.

he felt bad

Kingsley Amis on hangovers:

He lay...spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum....He felt bad.

Yup.

enough

1. Goddamn Google grammar Nazis. Just try typing Google with a lower-case g. It is a proper noun after all. And don't even think about using contractions. Did Orwell write this code? I can't type a paragraph without half a dozen red underlines.

2. Please let this election be over. I'm not sure I can take even one more day. Of course I still have yet to actually vote. So I have that ordeal to look forward to.

3. How, please tell me, can anyone be idealistic about a political party? How? That says a lot about someone right there. And it doesn't matter which particular party they root for. And that's what it has come to: it's like a fucking football game.

4. People are selfish, ignorant and hateful. We depress me.

laxative

1. Nature itself conspired to deny joy to Philadelphia sports fans.

2. David Brooks talks about the flaws of traditional economics and talks up the behavioral economists. Two good bits regarding Taleb, the "Black Swan" guy: "Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face." Interesting. Of course our brains continue to evolve and one wonders what this new complexity might result in. One also wonders if this complexity is really all that new. But this is the thing when talking about evolution: time as a point of reference is tricky. "New" and "old" are such amorphous concepts but we throw them around without much thought as though they were somehow specific. Time, as Richard Dawkins points out (he annoys me but he is very good at explaining natural selection in terms even eighteen year olds in philosophy class can grasp), is one of the primary impediments to understanding evolution. The sense of time that our own mortal existence imposes on us is so far removed from the vast timeframes involved in natural selection that it is literally hard to imagine. So are we using outdated mental hardware? Maybe. Maybe that's always the case though. Aren't we always playing catch up in a sense?

I'm rambling a bit, but that makes me happy because I haven't been able to ramble as of late. Anyway, the other bit about Taleb:

Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk models, which try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which “believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action.” If recent events don’t underline this worldview, nothing will.

Yes. I don't have much to add here, I just like it when others reinforce my worldview. There's an inherent limitation for you! Everything is "metrics" these days and our metrics are supposed to explain everything, improve productivity and solve all our problems. Going along with the metrics program requires lots of pretending and a fair bit of cooking the books. (This is just another way in which The Wire was so brilliant: it showed what happens when institutions become obsessed with statistics) And we see what it's gotten us.

3. The enthusiasm for metrics has made its way into my academic world as of late. Which is really just what we need--to be more corporate! Two recent examples of my academic institution acting like a big corporate shitbag: they raised our parking rates, hey these things happen, but they refused to say this. Instead they claimed that they were "removing our parking subsidies." They'd never mentioned that any such parking subsidies even existed, but now they were going away and we would have to pull our full weight! I'm being kicked off of parking welfare! Second, in the wake of the financial crisis our institution announced that it would continue in its bid to raise 1.6 BILLION in funds. Why quit now when we're already halfway there? This is in addition to the already ginormous endowment. A few days later our president sends out a letter explaining that no budget increases will be allowed for the next fiscal year because of the financial crisis. This translates to: no raises coming folks. But he encourages individual departments to find creative budgetary ways to continue to fund merit-based raises. Bottom line: our institution is swimming in money, unbelievably filthy rich, but if employees don't get raises it is because times are tough and your local administrator is lacking creativity. Or you are lacking in merit. Bravo!

4. I have just discovered that I cannot truly do two things at once. I can listen to music and do something else but the music becomes pleasant background noise. But I cannot type or do most anything else requiring a degree of concentration while also indulging in the wonderful world of free podcasts that Br'er Bunni has introduced me too.

5. I am feeling less blocked. I think this is because I am sort of tired. I would try to explain that but this has already gone on long enough.

no confidence

1. It's that time of year when the heat first starts coming on at night. My allergies do not approve and my sinuses are a mess. I hacked up something truly frightening at work today.

2. My dog expressed her lack of confidence in Melville by chewing up my copy of The Confidence Man. I had maybe fifty pages left. I suspect that the book may have taken on some sort of a vibe that she could sense and thus she attacked it. I will have to attain another copy. Not finishing it would be akin to quitting with five miles left to run in a marathon. Tough read.

3. The Phillies appear poised to win the World Series. I said "appear" so there's no jinx here. But this is how a Philly sports fan thinks: hope fervently for victory while braced for crushing defeat. And losing at this point would probably top the long and colorful list of Philadelphia sports failures. I can only imagine the party they'll have in Philly tonight if they win.

4. Life goes on, but I still fear that I may yet see my country go bankrupt.

5. On a happier note, I spent some time today listening to a recording of the Tom Waits concert I attended back in July. It's available via NPR and it's worth the long listen. Thanks to br'er Bunni for first making me aware of it.

clogged up

I have been mentally/emotionally/creatively constipated. That's how it feels anyway. My projects have been mostly domestic as of late and don't require constant tending. Routine and I have never been on the best of terms, except perhaps in the gym where I believe fervently in the amazing power of consistency, and even there lately the returns on investment have been poor. The weather will change.

Lately I have been enjoying a few songs:

54-46 was my number by Toots and the Maytals
Good Time by Alan Jackson
Paper Planes by MIA (can't go too far wrong sampling Straight to Hell by the Clash)
Mojo Box by Southern Culture on the Skids

My music habits as of late have tended toward songs rather than albums, in part due to the Jukebox in my favorite bar, and in part because of Itunes. Listening to so many singles has perhaps made me a bit impatient with songs that lack strong hooks. I've also been hearing the latest hip-hop singles at the new gym where that tends to be the radio of choice. It is a vast improvement over the music at the previous gym. Sometimes the latest popular rock songs are on and I find them to be no fun at all. Melodramatic, pointlessly angry, the same boring sorts of structures and chord progressions. No fun. The hip-hop on the other hand rarely fails to sound like a good time. Many of the songs have strong hooks and some approach structure in interesting ways. Hence the MIA tune, and a few others I recognize but don't know the names of.

I have also enjoyed hanging out with old friends the last three weekends. Thanks friends.

hard times?

The sky continues to fall but life goes on.

1. It might be wise for me to avoid reading Nouriel Roubini if only for my own sense of security. But then I've always preferred to know, even when the news is grim. And there's no denying that Roubini was one of the few economists who saw this coming from far off and raised the alarm when most other egghead number-crunchers were patting themselves on the back and crowing about how great the economy was. (Tangential note: most economists irritate the shit out of me. The conceptual foundations of traditional economics--rational actors and all that--are woefully inadequate. I am happy to see that the behavioral economics folks are rethinking all that stuff.)

2. Doing some timely reading:

The Confidence Man by Melville

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel.

3. For various annoying reasons, we've been without the interwebs at home for a while now. Truth be told, I don't miss it.

4. The gas crunch in Atlanta is over. One way they solved it was by allowing dirtier gas into the Atlanta market. Normally gas has to meet tougher environmental standards here because of all the traffic and the poor air quality and this was slowing down the flow of gas to the area. Honestly though, the way people reacted to the gas shortage here has made the financial crisis that much scarier to me.

5. Seems tis the month for catching up with friends. That's one way to offset the otherwise grim climate these days. So let's catch up friends!

6. I fear that no matter who wins, the next president may very well be fucked from the get-go.

married skin

I've been off for a few weeks settling into married skin.

1. Celebrated a birthday. Had a good dinner at the trendy new spot in town, which managed to live up to its reputation.

2. Celebrated a good friend's fortieth birthday. That was a fun, if too brief, weekend trip. We all came away with a good story.

3. Decided to ring in my new year with four weeks of fitness. (I found a new gym out here in the sticks where I'm staying these days. The new gym is the answer to my prayer. I now spend approximately eighty percent less time bitching about douchebags. And my training is reinvigorated.) So it's been lots of exercise, no booze, protein, fish oil, fruit and salads.

4. It was an active summer, just as it was last year. I enjoyed it, and I'm glad it is giving way to fall.

5. I will be glad when this election is over. Just get it over with.

6. The Wire is gone. Bye-bye Wire. I'll miss you.

7. Married life is nice. I don't get to see my wife as much as I might like now that a new semester has started but such is academic life (her's mostly, mine is somewhere on the inconsequential fringes, thankfully, of academia). The fabric of daily existence looks much the same as it did before but we are officially a team now. A unified front. We are one name even. And that does make things feel different, better.

8. I hope that you are well. Odds are if you are reading this that I have been thinking of you.

Hitched

I'm back here at my little shack on the fringes of the interweb.

I had a good excuse for being gone.

I'm a husband now.

Done good for myself too. A right pretty gal and smart too.

Thanks to all y'all who helped make it happen and to all y'all that came and celebrated with us. It meant a lot.