ON ENTHUSIASM

i worked with this guy once who was obsessed with early 90's aerosmith music. this was in 2003. at staff parties he would insist we put on some aerosmith, a suggestion he could always back up because the albums were always in his car. he had an idiot savant's memory for phone numbers, birthdates, and the years when films were released. you don't want to hang out with guys like this, but you do want to work with them. managers should be required to hire at least one.

IT MAKES A TERRIFIC LINE

shelley duvall readies herself in bernice bobs her hair.

it's a story about the disappointments and triumphs of young adulthood, as honest in sentiment as anything i've ever seen. it's a low-budget, flawed little picture, but it is almost entirely redeemed by the presence of shelley duvall and bud cort, who each possess a quiet charisma i would pay good money to acquire. you work yourself up to something, you mean to prove it, and the response is so underwhelming it could break your heart--a lukewarm smattering of applause. you have to learn to be charming because it doesn't come naturally, but the social world is difficult, unforgiving, and its moods change too fast. you eventually learn to be yourself, if you're lucky. ultimately, bernice is lucky. a story of ordinary melancholy. time to read the original.

IMAGINED CELEBRITY CHILDHOOD II

every thursday evening my mom and dad would have bobby mcferrin over for cocktails. my sister and i would come running to greet bobby at the door, and he’d scoop us up in his arms and call us “his favorite girls” in a funny high-pitched voice. "make noises for us, uncle bobby!" we’d beg him, and he’d always oblige, blipping and blooping and pounding his chest rhythmically, sending us into squeals of delight.

i can only remember one time when bobby didn't have a good time at our house. that was the time when dad argued with bobby over his version of drive my car, when dad said nobody should cover the beatles--dad was a beatles freak. bobby argued that his version added something different, something he kept calling "a new take," but dad was getting real upset and so was bobby. mom sent my sister and i to our room, which she didn't normally do, and we spent the rest of the night whispering to each other about the fight. we were really worried because we liked uncle bobby so much.

they must have made up, though, since uncle bobby was back the next thursday, happy as ever. he and my dad even hugged each other, and laughed more that night than usual.

this is part two of a continuing series.

I. agnes varda’s le bonheur (happiness).

this film examines the notion of quantifiable happiness. it so reminds me of my father’s life, or what i am still learning about my father’s life as i grow older. in the many times i have made life altering decisions, my father would offer me his definition of “quality of life.” to my father, happiness isn’t a question of all or nothing--not happy or unhappy--but is instead an entity which can be measured in levels--happier or less happy. in the logic of quatifiable happiness, the more happiness you have, the happier you will be. this is my father’s logic.
if asked, however, my father’s short answer would simply be that happiness is love.


II. for me, love and happiness are not entirely the same.
i’m not so sure that my happiness is a function of the love in my life.
j s e asked me recently if i had ever experienced a six-month period in which i was consistently happy. i can say yes, but only in retrospect. day by day, i can’t definitively say. i may not be a happy man. but maybe i am.

i had a happy childhood. i’d say around 53% happy. my family dissolved in two when i was ten. my dad fell in love with my nanny. he quickly ended his unhappy marriage to my mother to be with the love of his life, my step mother of 30 or so years. i was not allowed to go to my father’s wedding, so i am to this day unsure of the exact year of their marriage.

shortly after their marriage, i too left my mother to live with my father and my step mother. happiness was living with them. my father’s side of the family was a far happier family than my mother’s side. this was entirely clear to me then and it still is today. when i was with my maternal side of the family, i was less than a happy child.


III. i fell for juliet a year ago, and we were married almost instantly. she is the love of my life, and i am happiest in her presence. you see, j s e is a happy person. this is not to say that she is care-free or without highs and lows. but happiness is her air. she is clear in her joy. i see it in her eyes, her face and in her body. it is her voice even in her printed word. life is happiness for my juliet.

i was profoundly moved and stirred by agnes varda’s le bonheur. it is available to rent from netflix or at your local independent video library. or to own from criterion.

if all is happiness
then happiness is this
and happiness is that.


tv screen shots by r s e from varda’s short film, du côté de la côte (1958)

there was a saying once, but for the life of me i cannot remember what that saying is. i was trying to remember it in an ascension. i stopped by the mall, i needed to buy a gift. i remembered the donna karan store. i used to buy all my clothes there. i bought my last big shoes at a shoe store near the escalators. i used to work in the mall. i used to work at lenscrafters. i used to work with terry & betty.

betty was a lab technician. she was older. how much older, i don't know. the same goes for terry, except he was an optician. i used to know their last names. i cannot remember them now and i can't remember the saying either. i don't remember liking them very much, terry & betty, but i did like them in a way. i got along with them fine. i think that's the way everyone felt about them.

terry was a peculiar man. he was an adamant smoker with wire-like
once-blond hair. he was a tiny man. he wore the same clothes everyday. his diet was horrible. he ate chick fil-a sandwiches religiously. maybe a corn-dog for variation.

terry was sort of scaly. he drank pepsi after pepsi, yet i remember him being extremely laid back. non confrontational, easy going. he was not a particularly happy man, nothing about him hopped up and down like the caffeine and nicotine would like you to think. he was a contradiction.

he had a bizarre sort of existence. a presence, you might say. sort of like a burp or a cloud of smoke. at the same time, terry was also a nice enough sort of fellow.

he gave me an accordion once. i'm not even sure how the subject came up. he used to play the accordion and he still had one. confused and moved, i took it. i may have even needed one, i can't remember.
that was really nice of the guy. he just gave it to me.

betty was cut from a similar cloth. she was not in the best shape. she was divorced i think, but i can't be sure. a mother of a boy, maybe he was grown. she was a smoker and her caffeine of choice was coffee.

betty was a little rough shod. she wore her years of service on her skin and hair, in her clothes and in her speaking voice. she was not well off. she was past her good point. something had past anyway. and of course, you could also tell she had a past.

something about her in retrospect gave me the impression that a man had not been so good for her. she wasn't looking anymore. she was who she was. it was a fact. i don't get the feeling that betty had lonely nights. maybe she did, i don't know.

in the lab, betty was a confident enough lab tech. she was not particularly brilliant but smart enough to know when she could not handle something. she would not try to hide it. she would gladly step out of the way if she thought that you could do it better. the concept of her knowledge was understood and that lent an air of confidence for me.

i remember once showing betty how to mix the plastic polish. i sort of comically exaggerated the instructions for the process.

you see, you have to put your hand in the jug of white polish powder while filling the jug with cold water. mixing with your hand, smoothing and swirling until the powder was gone and the polish liquid became a milk-like consistency....well you get the idea.

anyway, betty thought my demonstration was very funny and said that i made this work so much more fun.

betty like terry and i got along just fine. other folks that i worked with at the time drove me nuts in aggravations and confrontations. not terry & betty. i don't remember liking them very much, yet in retrospect i think they were alright.

when i think back on it, they were very good friends. good friends for each other. they often ate their food together and smoked cigarettes together. they laughed and were generally empathetic towards one another. and i think that they generally liked everyone else as well.

terry & betty. terry & betty.

terry & betty make me think of lorraine, the white witch and pathological liar, but that is an escalator ride for another time.

image: x-ray/optical composite of abell 2029
(credit: optical: noao/kitt peak/j.uson, d.dale; x-ray: nasa/cxc/ioa/s.allen et al.)

mantis -part one

i was sent to a suburb of chicago, a town called naperville, for job training. i was on my own in a strange town. i felt a great sense of freedom but at the same time a looming dread that i was going to disappear on this trip. for instance, when i arrived at o’hare, the car that was to meet me was not there. i had a phone number for the training facility, but it was a sunday and there was no answer when i called. i had the address but i had no idea where i was in relation to naperville. i felt anxious and annoyed.

i decided to just wait it out at the airport, thinking perhaps my transport was stuck in some situation and would be along shortly. i bought a pack of cigarettes. i didn’t smoke, but i thought that i might use this trip to change things about myself. smoking seemed like a radical shift and i was bored and started plotting other ways to transform myself.

my grandfather told me to be careful on this trip, that chicago was a big town compared to my small town life and i would be a target for all sorts of nonsense if i didn’t pay attention. indeed, when i was on the pay phone trying to get through to naperville, my little boom-box was lifted by someone and it and the person had vanished. i was pissed off and embarrassed that within minutes of being on my own, my grandfather’s warnings had turned out to be true.
i was a small town local yokel target.


i finally took a cab to my address in naperville. i arrived at my hotel around ten that night and checked into my room. it was small and i felt trapped, so i decided to take a walk. i crossed the overpass of the highway and off in the distance i could see the lights of a strip-mall with a tremendous, empty, sunday night parking lot. the training site was located in this strip-mall. looking at the dark facility, the crappy hotel, and naperville made the dread of disappearing come back to me.

as i was heading back to the hotel, i looked straight up and into the sky. there was a loud clap of thunder and a flash of lightening as a torrential rain storm came down upon me. it was as if i had caused this deluge by looking up; within seconds i was soaked to the bone. i didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so i think i did something like both. i chalked it up to the experience of living life; besides, it sort of erased my loneliness for a bit. i was hungry now and the small restaurant in the hotel was still open.


the lady at the cash register showed me to a booth, looking at my wet clothes with a combination of pity and something else. she brought me a menu and some extra napkins to dry off. i decided that i would have a steak and in the spirit of transformation, it would be the last red meat for me, forever! i would become a vegetarian, a smoking vegetarian, for no other reason than the sake of metamorphosis. i instructed the lady to cook my steak rare, flip it for five minutes only and bring it to me. i ate it and for the first time in this long day felt free and full of life. i was in a new place and i was a new person.

after this ceremonial meal, i bought another pack of smokes because my first pack was soggy. the rain had stopped so i stepped out of the hotel and walked to the fence at the edge of the property. i breathed in a dizzying puff and stared at the highway that in the distance disappeared into black. i remember thinking, maybe even saying it out loud, this chain-link fence, is the only thing keeping me from just walking off in the night.
it was the only thing in this world that kept me from vanishing.

(1) there was this girl in the ninth grade whose favorite band was 311. on the date of the lead singer's birthday she brought a bunch of balloons to school. she carried them around with her all day long.

(2) the unpopular kid in my sister's grade in elementary school got in trouble once for stealing money from his parents. he got caught after bringing the money to school and handing it off to his classmates, offering them five dollars each if they'd be friends with him.

(2a) this same unpopular kid also got in trouble for swinging a pair of binoculars around wildly and accidently hitting another kid in the face. this happened in the school bathroom, i think.

(3) when i remember all the times my mom took my sister and i to water parks because we wanted to go--my mom, who to this day doesn't swim, and how awful, really, is it to watch other people at water parks--it makes me want to cry.

(4) my friend jamie from high school: her mom's favorite band was crowded house.

these stories have nothing to do with one another except that they occur to me a lot, and there's often no context in regular conversation for me to bring them up. i've tried, in regular conversation, but in those cases i have to shoehorn them in and by that point they fail to make the impression i think they could make,
if there was a context.

there's got to be an application for crap like this.

in brief: embarrassment

i have a long memory for embarrassment. it is so long, in fact, that embarrassing things that took place years ago can make me grumble and shake my head in public, forcefully and without warning, walking down the street like a crazy hobo. they're mostly mundane things--moments that make for boring stories--but still they nag at me like little, skipping demons. this feeling must be fairly common.

what occurs to me most often? here are the greatest hits of my life so far:

-using the word "indignance" instead of "indignation" in front of my favorite professor in college

-calling an unpopular girl a "fag" behind her back in the seventh grade, failing to realize not only the ugliness of that word but also that calling a girl a "fag" doesn't make any sense

-visible sweatpits (various instances)

-the day in fifth grade when i wore my sister's acne prescription foundation

-mispronouncing "episcopal" for the duration of a presentation when i was twelve

-that one time when i insisted the film "the princess bride" was based on the book "the once and future king" for about two days

ridiculous, i know.
but surely everybody has things like these?

in memoriam

last summer, rhan and i took a trip to denver with our good friends to see bjork and joanna newsom at the red rocks. we were gone for two or three days and it was a wonderful trip--my first to denver and my introduction to the phenomenon of joanna newsom live. many happy memories.



around this time, i was mother to a blue betta fish named cassavetes. he was a pretty enough fish, though surly, i felt, and i parented him recklessly from the start. once i accidentally dropped him in the sink and panicked like an idiot--cassavetes naked and flopping around, me too squeamish to pick him up with my bare hands to get him in the bowl, finally fumbling for silverware and spooning him in. and that was the first day i got him home.

so we go to denver, and i suppose it should have occurred to me that i couldn't leave him unattended for that long. but it didn't, because i was an optimist.
or i didn't care. who can say, really?

so we get home after a few days and i see that the bowl is miserable, the water all clouded over and dark. i look for the fish; cassavetes isn't moving. still optimistic, i think for a moment that he's alive but not moving, as bettas are given to periods of total inertia, but after an investigative poke with the blunt end of a butter knife, rhan declares the obvious: "that fish is dead." dead. expired. ceased to exist.

so we flush little cassavetes down the toilet and abandon his scummy bowl to the dumpster. an ignoble end to a pretty rough fish life, even by fish life standards.

i was to cassavetes the fish what a lifetime of hard work and alcohol was to cassavetes the man, minus the lasting influence and legacy of brilliant films.
though in my defense, cassavetes the fish never expressed any interest in filmmaking, at least not when i knew him, so maybe there were no regrets where that was concerned.

anyhow, i offer this post in remembrance, as much as it makes me sound like an awful, awful person. never let me have a fish again.