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Query letters

He buries the recommendation a bit, but AP is absolutely right: the blog Query Letters I Love is, indeed, inspired.

Yes, it is, as the Germans call it, pleasure at the expense of another's misfortune. But the pleasure is oh so sweet. I would go so far as to say that it's the most fun I've had on the internet with my pants up.

Read the archives. Read every last entry. If you're at all like me, you may well fall out of your desk chair a few times.

My favorite right now:

"Freebird"

Logline: A recovering drug addict tells stories to her young son about a family of egrets living in a field outside of their trailer. These animations reveal her experiences as a Southern rock music groupie, and help the boy understand his relationship to a deceased rock and roll legend.

That's a movie?

Go! Quit perusing this boring blog and go!

Dr. Seuss v. the Japanese

I noted over at Blog that Mr. Blog, although he's made a bit of a hobby out of WWII propaganda cartoons, has yet to discover the contributions of Dr. Seuss to this fantastic genre. So it falls to me. Click on the links below to check out a couple.

America, Fuck . . . NO!

The sneering rat! Gimme some war bonds!

And the biggy:
Hey, yeah . . . we should lock those yellow rats up! (Fortunately it looks like they're mostly coming from Washington, and just passing through Oregon.)

Also: this one isn't racist, but it is damned funny.

These cartoons were found here and here, and there's more where that came from. I wonder if anyone at the Lorax is aware of them?

FLOG needs a new keyboard

I was pretty amazed the length of the three posts below, until I realized they happened thanks only to FLOGette's computer (while her paralegal scholarship was out of town). I hadn't realized how inhibitive my laptop's broken keyboard is to my free expression. I can't write anything on it without exhaustive corrections.

poop fart tits.

Grey to grey

A few of my friends in the past couple of years have been rather shocked/impressed/appalled by my late-term embrace of indie rock and other music I used to reflexively shit on.

Well, don't get used to it. Yes, I'll admit that I was being unnecessarily contrarian when I'd veto your Flaming Lips and your Modest Mouse and your Stereolab for the Allman Brothers, Metallica, and Hank Williams Jr.

But I doubt I'll ever have the temperament to seek out and embrace new bands the way many of my friends do. As a fellow history student once said when a political science professor asked whether the class had been tracking Senator Jim Jeffords' disalignment with the GOP, "I'm a historian. I'll know about it in 20 years, if it matters."

It's my natural reaction to give things time to establish and prove themselves. Most of the music I hold dear was produced well before my birth. And I've approached newer stuff pretty conservatively. I met Radiohead after OK Computer, Public Enemy after It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Wilco just after YHF, etc. I was very cautious in getting back into the Beastie Boys post Check Your Head, because it was so uncool to like them in 1988 (as I still did, having been in London for 6 months). It's taken me a decade to actually like Nirvana.

While my approach to music precludes my ever being totally hip, who gives a shit? Being hip must be exhausting; I can think of nothing worse. I found being stoned and listening to the Stones was the easier course in high school, and that reasoning still applies. Let others cry, sweat and bleed in pursuit of the latest thing. I'll wait and see what they come up with, and then groove to the music.

Which brings us to our very buried nut graph.

Part of being an eternal latecomer to everything is the ability to discover an artist's discography in two directions at once. You start at the breakthrough album, and dig backwards while awaiting the new releases.

Speakerboxx/The Love Below,, for example, marked the first time I'd paid any attention to Outkast outside of strip clubs. So while others fretted over their inevitable breakup, I relished delving into FLOGette's collection of their earlier albums.

And when Brandon dropped Modest Mouse's Lonesome Crowded West on me a while back, it meant I'd eventually work my way around to This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. when the newer albums wore out their welcome. I just did so this week, and by god the bugger's fantastic. Based on the experience of Good News, I've taken to thinking that Isaac Brock's ideas sound best and ring truest when they're not fully formed and polished. So Long Drive sounds fantastic. As musically inventive as Moon & Antarctica, but with the spontaneity of Lonesome Crowded West.

But my god, the rambling. The only thing I intended to do when I started this post was to point out one of the best lines about the Pacific Northwest I've ever seen or heard, from Long Drive:

"Here things go from grey
To grey and back to grey again
And they get green and go to grey
And then back to grey again"

Awesome.

Some long, weird posts, huh? This is what finals studying does to the brain.

By the way, that photo at top is mine, but I thought it went well with Modest Mouse discussion.

Animal farts

I'm new to animal farts. My first two dozen years, I only lived with humans and cats.

Humans, I knew, farted a lot. I don't know if my family is uniquely prolific, but we are uninhibited. My mother would often lay a room-shaker and then blame it on "barking spiders." My brother and I, as kids, perfected methods of collecting and essentially huffing our farts. We hated each other's, but would compare the finer points of our own, which we nosed like fine wine. (We'd even rate them, like alcohol, on a scale of "proof," a method Mike later took to extremes by igniting his farts like gunpowder.) Even my dad, eternal voice of reason among the unruly Welsh, would not hold back, although often his emissions had the tone of a muted trumpet -- a little stifled. My own farts sometimes sound that way. Depends on my stress & caffeine levels.

Yes, I've always known humans farted. Although a friend in grade school, a bit of a science wonk, once laid some knowledge on me to the effect that "the average person farts 18 times a day," and I mis-heard "person" for "Christian." (He was Jewish.) For about a week I pondered how different creeds might fart differently -- did unleavened bread play a role? Or pork? -- until he set me straight.

Anyway. Unlike humans, cats never fart. Maybe when they're very young, still getting all their bacteria and enzymes straightened out, an indiscreet toot might escape. But an adult cat, properly schooled in feline etiquette, will never soil the air. Slobber on your neck, yes. Dig a claw into your nipple, yes. Gnaw your fingers, yes. Use your crotch as a spring board, yes. Vomit globs of hair on your bathroom floor, yes. But no farting.

So nothing in my life had prepared me for my first dog, who I came to terms with last year. Here's this creature many times smaller than me, with a steady diet and a marked aversion to beer, who without fail produces the most offensive odors I have ever smelt.

And I'm no shrinking violet. I once earned my entire fifth grade class a five-minute recess, subsequently extended to 30 minutes, on the strength of a single fart. (Got repaid with scorn, too. Rather than thank me, my peers mocked me to tears. Kids suck.)

Dogs don't just take the odor to another level. They are amazingly perverse about the whole thing. My dogs, in sleep, will lay a fart, then wake up to smell it. At one point during Zuma's puppy-hood, I got sick of always smelling his stench, and started giving him covered wagons and teabag farts. (Yes, I too am amazingly perverse.) He responded with wild-eyed enthusiasm; I think the sick bastard was actually flattered. My other dog, Pepper, loves to stick his snout right in my crack while I'm changing clothes. I feel his cold, wet snout, then hear a little inhalation, followed by a quick "huff!" When I get mad, he just looks at me with his big brown innocent eyes.

Dogs, of course, also love plain old feces. Cat poo? My litterbox was a disaster area until we blocked it off from dog access. Horse poo? Any hike on a horse trail is a teachable moment. Cow poo? Shit, don't get me started. Out at Mount Pisgah there are a couple of pastures where somebody runs dairy cattle on a grazing lease. Cow pies about every ten feet. The way those pies harden in the moist western Oregon autumn climate is about like a lava flow cools: within the thin, hard crust, they flow like a milkshake. My dogs will bite through the crust and I'll come around a corner to catch them standing there, just lapping up the oozing innards. And if dogs could grin, yes, they'd be wearing a shit-eating one. I shout them off one and they just go to the next. Ten minutes later they puke pure cow shit.

I get the feeling that a dog's love of farts and feces is genetic. Either it's part of their scavenging nature, and they seek out poo to glean what nutritional value they can from it; or it helps them track prey: you are what you eat, and dogs are forensic geniuses who can profile a prey's behavior based on its past eating habits. No? Well, then why do you think they like poo? Is it 'cause they can't eat chocolate?

Wow. I'm rambling again. I planned for this post to be about horse farts.

Yeah, so, even my adjustment to dog farts did not prepare me for horse farts.

I've never spent much time with horses. What little time I have spent has been primarily front-end: giving 'em carrots, stroking their noses, hoping they don't bite your fingers. I've ridden a horse as many times as I've ridden an elephant -- once -- and I thought the elephant had a much smoother ride.

But last May FLOGette and I took a little vacation at a "resort" in eastern Oregon, just outside Frenchglen. It featured "modular cabins," better known as "trailers," and apparently had a resident, free-roaming horse.

Very down-home, I know. How rustic and cowboy-ey. Only trouble was, every night when we repaired to the lanai for our sunset cocktails, the damned horse would come begging for carrots. And, as we were the only guests at the time, it would stand next to the lanai whether we gave it carrots or not, and would not leave until we went inside.

And it would fart. I had never seen or heard a horse fart before. What they do is raise their tails, hold real still, and let loose a very long fffffaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh. From the sound you can tell that this is no human or dog fart. You can almost picture the gallons of emission coming forth, as though a natural gas valve had been thrown wide open.

fffffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

This fucking horse had the same atmospheric effect, outdoors on a windblown desert bluff, as my dogs do in small, unventilated rooms: the sensation of suffocation. Have you ever been driven indoors by a fart? No? Has a fart ever made you close the window? No? Then you've never met the business end of a horse.

My bad pages

FLOGette's in Portland for the weekend, and it's my declared intention to spend the duration honing myself for Monday's Con Law II final.

But tonight at about 10:30 I got fed up with equal protection law. Rather than doing the rational thing -- going out for a cocktail -- I decided to thumb through my "creative" notebooks from high school and college. This, combined with unnecessary guilt over my dearth of posts here over the last few, er, months, means you get a few rather embarrassing glimpses into the mind of me six to seven years ago. Complete, & unedited, exactly as they were scrawled, minus beer spills.

Without further ado,

He took a furtive peek through the blinds before stepping out the back door. Walking hunched, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground, he made his way down his street and turned the corner. He walked several blocks before doubling back, going in a large circle. Finally satisfied, he stepped into the Albertson's by his house and bought a honey jar, some flour, a candy bar, and some Nyquil. Leaving the store, he scurried home, anxious to get well. He stepped in, tossed the food on the kitchen counter, and took the Nyquil to the bathroom.

He put it in the medicine cabinet and rushed out to the kitchen. With frenzied fingers, he tore open the bag of flour, tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and poured. As the flour tumbled out of the bag, some reaching his mouth, some going up his nose, ans most going everywhere else, he collapsed on the floor. He was now well. For a few hours.

A semi-clever conceit clumsily executed! Oh well.

--------------

My uncle took one look and told me it was dangerous. Unstable. You'd be better off with a pony.

But I knew he was being ridiculous. Typical.

Aye chi wa wa this just aint working. Big Pooh Bear heavy.

I opened the sofa and climbed in. Not as nice as before. That pony made an awful mess in here. That's the last time I have Timothy over. What a douchebag. Now that's what I call some hoopla.

"Yeah, you are full os shit. Tastes like saeukraut. FUKOFF.

Everybody blew up. That's when the troubles started.

Can't get enough. That's what I said. Can't even eat that shit anymore, but I have to.

Now that was interesting!

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This next one at least has a title. Tradeoffs, though: no ending.

Blue Lou, Walter & The Wood Chipper

Blue Lou kept yodeling and the barkeep would be damned if he was going to stop him. The yodeling, inaudible at first, had gradually crescendoed until it gripped the barroom in a temporal stranglehold. Blue Lou yodeled about a lot of things that day -- sex, cars, metaphysics, the finer points of a quality marmalade ---- but wool was not one of them.

It wasn't for a lack on Blue Lou's part of things to say about wool. Nay, trends in qualitative analysis of Bulgarian wool exports had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation in economics at the University of West Texas. He had dealt with wool in various respects throughout his educational and professional careers. If anyone so much as made a passing insinuation in conversation of their presumed wealth of wool knowledge, Blue Lou would pounce at them much like a sheep hound might pounce at a lone ewe bent on escape. He wore wool underwear, wool socks, wool pants, wool shirts, and a snug wool hat. Every day. If he sweat like a dog in the summer, he would be quick to point out that the same property of wool that gave him his daily heat stroke like clockwork -- its ability to maintain insulative integrity even when sopping wet -- would keep him snug as a bug in the worst winter rainstorm. His life in the summer months was one of quiet patience, tireless determination, and boundless resistance to suffering.

So he was crazy about wool. But it had nothing to do with yodeling. For wool was his business, and

And there it ends, before it could begin.

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Eugene is a place where streets are called "High" and "Friendly."
Eugene is a place where the weather generally stays uninvolved.
Eugene smells funny.
Eugene is pallid and pale, and definitely has a pallor. It is damp, dank and drippy. It often gets dreary and dark.
Eugene sometimes is drenched by the rain, sometimes dried by the sun. Each event is a mellow one -- perfect for dank nugs.
Eugene is a backwater, no culture exists here that wasn't somewhere else at five years ago. We were even late to join the schoolyard shooting trend.
Eugene is in slow-motion.
Eugene is an ugly anomaly in a beautiful state; drive two hours in any direction and you'll see what I mean.

Heh. I've been saying it since I got here, apparently. I hope the repetition of "Eugene" in that passage helps it show up high on Google searches.

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Here's one I actually remember writing, while I was sitting in the basement of my dorm.

Was Dylan living in a dorm when he wrote Subterranean Homesick Blues? {Er, no -- ed.} What is this place? What respect could they possibly have for us, to stick us in these barren boxes? The floor -- bare concrete, polished to imitate some strange vision of decency. The walls, with their welcoming 3-tone paint spread thinly over cement, climbing to the black-ribbed ceiling, criss-crossed by black pipes hanging below, six large utilitarian flourescent lights tacked up as an afterthought. Worn sofas, browned with use, sit up against the walls as if mistakenly left behind in an abandoned Goodwill warehouse. A table and chairs back in a corner. One on its back on the floor, staring up at the underside of the table. In the center of this . . . room is a tired, chipped up ping-pong table. It's a submarine.

What, the ping-pong table?

--------------

Now, a song of some sort:

Shredded holly and cube steaks
Frying in the pan
Lightbulbs started crashing down
I paniced and I ran

Struggling through the horseradish
I had an awful thought
Everybody's dyin' now
And the worcestershire's been caught

(Chorus)
And though the clowns are in the basement
And Roger's on the cake
I've never found a single use
For the moss dolls that I make

Cabbage concrete leaks on through
The pores within my brain
Whether or not you give a damn
Don't matter, I forgot your name

How much for the bicycles?
She asked me with a grin
I shrugged and grabbed a Kleenex
And wiped it off her chin

--------------

I shouldn't do this more often.

This blog sure is boring

Sorry about that. I might get up to some cryptograms later this weekend; tis that time of year.

There is also so much to tell you about Neighbor Man! My goodness.

And I guarantee FLOG will be more interesting in the new year. Really. Promise. I got me an internship with a judge, for which I am required to keep a diary. I'm thinking of just compiling the diary here for your "entertainment" and because it's an easy way to generate content. The internship is also guaranteed to be a good anecdote generator outside of the official diary, because I'll be in court two days a week, and entertainment-wise, a trip to court hasn't failed me yet.

I mean, last time I was in court, the guy in front of me was trying to get out of a speeding ticket by calling his 12 year old son as a witness.

DAD: And how fast would you say I was going, Donny?
DONNY: I don't know.
DAD: Was it faster than 35?
DONNY: No, I don't think so.

Meanwhile, he had been clocked on radar going 45. For fuck's sake, man, pay your fine and get out of here.

(What was I there for? Illegal fireworks and having an obnoxious brother.)