The Dancing Sausage Web Journal: March 2002 Archives

« February 2002 | Main | April 2002 »

March 31, 2002

Just Another Word For

I had a really great night last night. One of my co-workers was having a late Passover Seder and so another of my co-workers picked me up and took me there, in a car even. It felt like it had been years since I rode in a car and because the car smelled like cigarettes and the air fresheners you use to cover them up, like old boyfriends� cars, it was somehow nostalgic. And exhilarating. The coworker having the party lives in Washington Heights, where I�ve only been once before; its slight hills and slightly different mix of bodegas and Starbucks seemed very exotic. And the coworker with the car, a gallant soul who has taken it as a personal mission to chaperon newcomers around wherever he is, whether he knows the area well or not, drove me by Gracie Mansion afterwards (that�s the mayor�s house) and told me about his days working as a doorman on the Upper West Side and his earlier days growing up in Poland.

It took a while to figure out why the evening seems such a crystal of perfection. It wasn�t all that novel; I was going through the exhilaration of being mobile without mass transit, and having some really intense conversation after weeks of self-imposed seclusion in my house, sure. But I didn�t even leave the bounds of the five boroughs.

It occurred to me at some point that it was the first period of contiguous hours in some time when my brain wasn�t spending all its free moments calculating whether I was far enough away to survive a nuclear blast in mid- or downtown Manhattan. I do that every day on the way to my office, which is thirteen blocks from Times Square. Some nights I think about sleeping in the basement.

I beat Final Fantasy IX today. This is a problem. For the last few weekends I�ve devoted inordinate amounts of time to the game to the detriment of my pets and laundry. It was very explicitly escapist. Nonproductive weeknights are easy enough to excuse on grounds of fatigue, but I was wasting whole days on this game.

It was an imperfect escape; the plot of the game is your work to foil a suicidal lunatic -- your half-brother --who intends to take the planet down with him using weapons of unimaginable destruction. Same thing as anime. Nuclear weapons are hiding everywhere.

Television could not offer this kind of escape because it requires no participation. The Final Fantasy games need just the right amount of nudging on your part to keep the plot unrolling. Little catlike creatures give you hints; a question mark appears over your head when you should interact with something on the screen; the signs are all there -- the ominous music, the flashing and shuddering -- when you�ve got the big boss on the ropes. It�s so reassuringly doable. Yes, the lush little planet you have come to love is threatened, but with a little knowledge of your party�s strengths you are going to save it.

I simply don�t hold that kind of sway with Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.

God knows I wish I did. I think about going to school for international policy or government, but you can�t just fly your airship right up to the doors of Congress to solve the problem, nor can you equip diplomacy. My boss keeps alluding to my inability to be politic as if it�s a congenital defect. I can�t think of any way I can help, with my skill set, and starting from a part-time desk job at a leftist nonprofit I don�t see that my role in all this will be anything other than to sit back and wait to get nuked. And don�t get me started on activism and civil disobedience, because I�ve fucking tried.

The only time I ever binged this badly on role-playing games was when I was home from college one January avoiding dental work and hating myself for it. I was depressed then. This time I didn�t figure I was depressed; work was going OK, the love life was pretty good. The amount of time I was playing was depressing me. But then, it�s the same question of origins I had after September 11th.

War is just another word for depression.

Is it? Or is depression another front of the war? I want to run away from the city, too, to find a job at a little newspaper someplace, or an organic farm, or France, but I always have those kinds of escape fantasies once I�ve fallen into a rut at work. Is a lack of novelty the problem, then, or is it the sporadic outbursts of novelty which make everything else seem so crushingly slow?

Posted by me at 2:57 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2002

Thoth Wins!

Thoth, the street performer about whom I wrote an article for the Village Voice, was the subject of a documentary film which was nominated for an Oscar, and apparently it won. Though not without Thoth getting harrassed by guards for performing on the red carpet before the ceremonies.

I pitched an article about Thoth initially because I thought he was nuts, or, I don't know, maybe just because he was fascinating. It's one of what I hope will be the few times where I succumbed to the kind of doily-burgher features impulse that Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson rail against, though I know it'll probably happen again. Fortunately, the experience of being exposed to anyone on their own terms tends to make it harder for me to hold them at arm's length. I still find it puzzling that Thoth wants to foster human understanding by singing in a language only he understands; it's the same kind of thing I never understood about Brecht. But the conversations I've had with him between his bouts of fiddling were a balm right after September 11th. He was there in Angel Tunnel, and I knew he'd be there, thinking with both sides of his brain (one of his tricks is writing mirror image words with both hands, at once) and not flying a flag.

Posted by me at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2002

The Tingley Report, or Full Waffle Jacket Watch

As of 9:03 p.m. EST on Tuesday, March 19th, there were no new posts on Full Waffle Jacket. FBAEW.

Posted by me at 9:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2002

Slid

In this story, there was a fat boy I liked. (A surprising range of stories start that way.) This boy had curly, close-cut hair and a pair of narrow green eyes which should have been a warning.

We both worked at the animal shelter. It was one of the places that seemed right for me, along with karate class. Dogs were very appealing when I was twelve. They�d look right at you, and you could give them the crookedest smile back and whisper whatever endearments came to mind, and it wasn�t going to unbalance the universe.

I liked the boy because it impressed me that he liked dogs, too, but he wasn�t just there for the dogs. He bought himself a uniform to be just like the animal control officers. It was tan all over, so he looked like a sandstone cliff. There was something so awesome about it that I watched him whenever I could. We�d be called to wash dogs together; I didn�t watch where I was shampooing. Sometimes I made my hand brush his through the suds. He cooed baby names at the dogs. You couldn�t say we ever made conversation.

He learned the code the officers spoke to each other on the radio, and, because this made the code more mystical, I learned to speak it too. Only one of us could work the radio at a time, so when he was there, I would watch him frown at the bad news. Sometimes he would casually ask me to get him a Pepsi, staring nonchalantly at the map of the city above the radio.

One day he grabbed me around the shoulders and we walked all the way from the back of the shelter to the front. When it didn�t happen again, I asked his favorite officer whether he ever talked about me. He�s young, said the officer. I think he gets confused about girls.

The boy rode along with the officers; I followed. We hung around after hours. I heard things the officers didn�t say on the radio. The most senior officer sneered jokes about black women menstruating. The youngest shared tips on making explosives. The boy talked with the officers about shoot-em-up movies. I usually didn�t get to stay as long as he did.

I stopped working for the shelter when I stopped believing the fundamental dogma that any animal is safer dead than homeless and roaming the streets. Or maybe it was because one of the officers commented on my breast size. I was fourteen, anyway. I didn�t need dogs; a guy from another school started phoning in with endearments. The boy from the animal shelter turned fifteen. One day, trembling with adrenaline, he tried to choke my best friend for turning off his computer before math class.

Our high school had an inter-grade Rivalry Day, whose purpose was to remind the freshmen that they were smaller and frailer than the seniors. There was a pie-eating contest and a tug-o-war over a pit of mud. It was a great day when I figured out the teachers took that afternoon to go drink margaritas and gossip at a local Mexican restaurant, and tagged along. But my first year, I was on the field with all the other wretched half-grown kids in the rain of water balloons, trying to sidestep the weapons of the worst boys, who filled their balloons with urine.

Someone grabbed my arms and pushed me roughly towards the mud pit. Twisting, I tried to get a look at the abductor�s face. Hands and front covered with mud and pie. The torso like a wall, trembling mad.

I could struggle; I could claw; I could yell; but I had learned about calculated disinterest by then, and it pleased my center of gravity to do its own work. I slid softly out of his arms.

Sometimes this scene deserves another observance. I go to rallies and watch protesters being taken away, screaming, I am not resisting. Sometimes a friend puts out a hand to help me up, and I say the same thing, as a joke. Sometimes in bed, I gather my various parts away from my partner, thinking, Not yours to own.

* * *

From The Vaults:

Well, in a fit of frustrate procrastination, I just declared to my modmates that for the rest of my life I'll do nothing but write email and eat pie. (We love our mod kitchen. Eric cooks. He made us apple pie. We love Eric. Sing praises to Saga-- whence we steal our apples-- and to Eric and to mod life and to pie!) Marian paused for a moment in putting away groceries, and looked at me in the obliquely disapproving way she's perfected. "Your messages would get kinda boring," she said, bluntly. I found this to be astute. So my message for this evening is:

If you're gonna write, you gotta do more than eat pie.

With that, I gotta go start my paper for my Latino Poetry class.

Lovies to all,

G

--to xq 10/15/96

Posted by me at 10:25 PM | Comments (1)

March 15, 2002

Metropolis and Hiroshima

I saw the anime Metropolis the other day and I have a lot of thoughts that relate to it, but I've been revising a review for moviesareawful.com for three days now and it still isn't coming together.

Let me just say this: my eyes were in Art Deco heaven; the soundtrack uses a jazz repertoire that was pretty clearly devoid of any American reference points, which made it awkward in some places and refreshing in others; and once again it occurred to me what a good thing it probably is that so many of the teenagers I know are studying Japanese.

Metropolis, like most science fiction anime (and some nonfiction; see Studio Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies), bears the white shadows of Hiroshima: the action hinges on a colossal weapon with the ability to wipe out all of humankind (with the usual boy-meets-robot, boy-loves-robot, robot-ponders-meaning-of-its-existence, boy-loses-robot-in-cataclysm-of-interplanetary-scope trajectory).

By contrast, the government as well as the cinema of the United States currently seems to indicate we live in the only place on earth that has lost the collective memory that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atrocities. Witness the equation of the bombing with other murderous American actions, like My Lai and the genocide of the Native American peoples, in recent speeches by bin Laden and Bobby Fisher, among others; also check international news sources; then go back to your CNN. We've got a president who's rattling his nuclear arsenal and an attorney general who seems about ready to go Strangelove on us at any second. (My dad has another suggestion for anointing Ashcroft that doesn't involve cooking oil or Clarence Thomas, but which does require the sacrifice of some not-so-precious bodily fluids.)

We've always explained away Hiroshima by saying it had to happen to prevent the loss of life elsewhere, but others have not been as willing to write the atrocity off; their movies, thank god, are extremely popular with the kids right now.

Posted by me at 9:22 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2002

Leavin' weather.

Sometime this morning I woke up fevered from another nuclear holocaust dream. Sometime last week my neighbor got robbed. Sometime tonight I have to take out the garbage; I don't think I'm gonna even though it's spilling over the rim of the can; I've been sleepwalking through work so bad I didn't even recognize the week's almost done.

What have I been reading? Some half-dozen undone books round the house. Something I've been eating makes me round but goes right through me, don't know what. What have I been writing?

Something's up. Everyone's online tonight. We're all thinking about someplace else; wanting to talk to it. The weather. Got my windows open. The kids from the writing workshop are scheming to see each other this summer. Good weather makes you ponder driving, think about leaving; the summer on the road and time to run away.

yeah, you know you don't want me to come to Seattle. we should meet halfway. nobody we know has taken a job there.

Posted by me at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2002

The Gus Sindex, 2002

Number of hours I have spent playing Final Fantasy IX: 70

Number of Pokemon toys in my bedroom: 15

Percentage of a century I will have lived as of this July 16th: 25%

Approximate number of people I interviewed for my Div III (senior college thesis): 15

Number of those who were my peers: 7

Number I considered friends by the time I finished: 6

Pages in the final draft of my Div III: 111

Number of months it took me to complete: 6

Approximate number of people I interviewed for my latest article, on the AmeriCorps VISTA program: 40

Number of those who were friends of mine: 1

Pages in the fourth (most recent) draft of the VISTA article: 13

Number of months it took me to complete: 4

Number of drafts ago that my editor told me this was the equivalent of a Columbia journalism school masters� thesis: 2

Number of times the editor used frustrated exclamation points, �what the heck...?,� and �fucking,� respectively, in her notes on my last draft: 32:2:1

Ratio of what I spend monthly on rent to what I spend on telecommunications bills: 1:1

Percent of my salary that goes towards rent: 11%

Number of cockroaches I have seen in this house since I moved here in October of 1999: 6

Rank of my boyfriend among friends I consider most likely to walk a dog wearing a sweater: 1

Days after this occurred to me that James actually said, unprompted and without irony, �There is nothing cuter than a dog wearing a sweater�: 1

Approximate height, in inches, of the dog James grew up with: 9

Posted by me at 7:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 7, 2002

From The Vaults: I Hate New York In June

Excerpted for a piece I wrote for the Omen in April(?) of 1999

MY SPRING BREAK

This spring brake I went to NewYork city I did not go with my mom or dad i went With my freinds. Newyork City sucks it is the dirtiest, ugliest, yuckiest jo-jeezly city in the yoonerverse. I would rather be throne in that really bad pit of Dante�s Inferno you know, the one with the hippopotamusses. I hate those lyin cheatin hippopotamusses.

New York is a pit to which I am unfortunately damned, as someone who wants to work with the printed word. This is my biggest problem with New York. I am not afraid of muggers anymore, because there are people up and going to and from work at all hours, and so the city feels safer than Northampton at night.

My problem is that so god-awful incredibly much power is amassed in New York. Just about every major media company has its headquarters there, not to mention banks, business, and things like the U.N. It deeply bothers me that because New York has a lock on my market, I may well be forced to live and work there someday.

The city is fantastically repulsive. You�d be hard-pressed to find a square inch of surface which is not covered in sticky black smeg. The subway�s the worst � it�s got urine, vomit, fecal matter, all that stuff which makes New York great. Trees and other living things, including people, are of marginal importance to the city�s master plans, at best.

Not only that, but the city is just plain depressing. Generations upon ages of immigrants have arrived there, sweated, suffered, scraped, and still come up with nothing but a faceful of �No _______ Need Apply� posters, visible or implied. There is still a feel of the old-style tenements about the city, the ones which eventually got banned because ventilation was so poor that people just smothered.

And yet everybody thinks New York is God�s pearly heavenly discotheque, sent to redeem us of our sins of small-town tackiness. The worst sycophants are kids from New Jersey, who invariably seem to consider themselves the anointed heirs of all things New York, from the Algonquin Round Table to CBGB�s, if they even make it up there on the odd weekend.

Even the buildings themselves have this kind of attitude. We�re the shit, they say, crowding out the sun. We�re bigger than you. In fact, we�re bigger than God. Don�t misunderstand me; I like feeling small. The plains of Montana are great, because the sky is so huge that you think you�re going to get crushed. I just don�t like it when people get so biggity, building all these suffocating skyscrapers. They�ll all be condemned and torn down someday anyway.

Every time I�m in New York and I mention how much I hate it, I get an earful of shit for being from Los Angeles. I get lectured about how racist LA is, how it sucks up more than its share of federal funds and natural resources, how everyone there is into healing crystals and high colonics and doesn�t know jack about classy things like literature (which is patently untrue. Los Angeles is just another place to live, not some ungodly freakshow. We have our own everyday culture, but everybody seems to ignore it in favor of demonizing us as legions of Hollywood.)

This last week the conversation took a weird tack as my friend Stephan and his mom, who hail from Queens, even got excited trying to one-up me on how evil the NYPD was compared to the LAPD. (Gee, I guess I can�t really claim to be an enraged progressive. My police force only churns out humdrum Rodney King cases, while their fine young men in blue produce Abner Louimas.)

No such criticism is ever leveled at New York, which has soooo much going for it. Like hot dog carts. Yessiree, we know that New York will be spared God�s wrath, come the endtime, because it has the nostalgia-inducing power of hot dog carts. That, and Seinfeld.

How about a little biodiversity, here? What happens when New York gets wiped out by disease or some kind of bombing? It�s just pigheaded and greedy to want to have everything concentrated in one big ogre of a city.

Spread some of that good theater and ethnic food and night life around to cities which deserve it, like San Diego, or Charlottesville, VA, or DC or Austin or Minneapolis or something, won�t you? I don�t want to live in New York. It�s all crusty with the sadness of a few billion people, their ethnic divisions, their hubris, and their failings.

I hate New York in Juuuune, how about yoooOOOOUuuu � everybody, sing it with me!...

Posted by me at 10:28 PM | Comments (9)

March 6, 2002

Drown Out Ashcroft

I have too many harebrained schemes, especially late at night.

Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 01:49:26 -0500

Subject: Drown Out Ashcroft's Song

From: GUS

I just can't stand it anymore. That godawful song John Ashcroft sang on the news the other day won't stop running through my head. (If you didn't hear it, it's here.) It's full of empty sentimental patriotism, it completely ignores the separation of church and state, and now the man is trying to force his staff to sing it. The insipid melody is harder to wash out of your brain than "Hit Me Baby One More Time."

Could anyone who gets this message please send me an audio clip, preferably you singing something (anything!) else in your own American (or Un-American) voice -- about the U.S., or a response to Ashcroft's song, or just whatever's running through your head (the tune with words you can't remember, the riff your band is practicing right now, your favorite hip-hop song -- heck, why not your grocery list, or the parody of Come On Baby Light My Fire your friends wrote in seventh grade?). I'd like to compile them on my website as a way of showing we're not all crooning along with Ashcroft.

Hook up your computer's mic and record something -- just a few bars is fine, won't clog the mailpipes -- and email it to me. It's going to take a lot to drown out Ashcroft's overstuffed, fuggy, authoritarian voice. Feel free to forward this to anyone else with vocal chords in any condition (or ASL signers / interpretive dancers with video cameras!)

love all

Gus

By the way, the lyrics, if you can't go to that link, run like this:

Let the mighty eagle soar

Like she's never soared before...

Soar with healing in her wings

Only God, no other kings

From rocky coast to golden shore

Let the mighty eagle soar.

and if you don't believe me that Ashcroft's making his staff sing, I refer you to the BBC.

Posted by me at 2:06 AM | Comments (0)

March 5, 2002

A Reason To Call For The Separation of Church, State, and Entertainment

Am I the only one to whom the song Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote and which he is apparently trying to force his staff to sing bear more than a passing resemblance to
"Eyes of a Child," the final credits song from the South Park movie? This coincidence might be eerie (John I-don't-want-to-hear-nuthin-bout-not-birthin-no-babies Ashcroft watched Bigger, Longer, and Uncut? even once?) if the whole thing didn't seem like a scene out of Dr. Strangelove already.

Posted by me at 9:39 PM | Comments (0)

March 4, 2002

Nothing. We have seen nothing.

There's a DDR seventh mix. I didn't know there was a 6th, even. You know, we're not going to be able to convince future generations that the United States is the greatest country in the world if the Japanese keep getting games before we do. We're going to see a rise in the number of Americans under 18 seeking Japanese citizenship. Mark my words.

The music is still just as plastic. The announcer is new, and more annoying. If I continue my loyalty to to a product long after the camp value is gone, is there any way I can justify it?

Oh yeah, and it's only for PS2. Damn you, Konami!