Thinking of the lyrics in English, I asked, "Jorge, which word means 'cigarette'?" because none of them sounded anything like it. He nodded and said something very poetic about friendship and hope and the future -- but no "cigarette". I took a minute and thought about this, and then I said, "OK, but every once in a while add in a 'Rebel Rebel', will you?"
- Wes Anderson
"The Strange Case of the Rum Bandit"
Wednesday proved a tense morning here on Tuxedo Square.
Every Tuesday night, my grandmother meets with her Mary Kay unit to discuss whatever needs to be discussed in the day-to-day happenstance of make-up and pyramid schemes. Well, this Tuesday, an unidentified individual entered the house and proceeded to raid my grandmother's liquor cabinet, which is usually locked in the event that one of her brothers comes over. The intruder, who we've nicknamed The Rum Bandit for his favoring of one particular bottle of Bacardi Puerto Rican Rum, having partaken of her hard liquors and three bottles of beer as well as the two remaining hamburger patties in her crisper, then proceeded to make a series of long distance phone calles.
It should be noted, however, that The Rum Bandit was mindful enough to use the calling card his mother got him for Christmas. Our phone records indicate that he made calls to three different phone numbers, two of them Kansas City numbers (though one of them was traced to a cellular tower in mid-Missouri) and a San Antonio number we suspect was actually transmitted to the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.
...
Okay. Yes. It was me. Once more, I indulged myself in an act of solitary drinking -- hey, I would have gladly did some social drinking, but I've yet to make any friends here through a staggering lack of effort -- and a little drunk dialing. I've decided to rationalize it as my attempt to take a part of my old life and see if it fits into my new life. I'm sorry to say, it does not.
I woke up in bed on Wednesday morning with a hangover and a sense of dread and confusion. The last thing I remembered was hanging up on Prewitt and puking in the downstairs bathroom right before I passed out. Which begged the question, how the hell did I make it into bed? Did my grandmother help me? Had she discovered my wanton display?
The evidence was inconclusive at best. I found my pants in a pile of the left-side of the bed, which is odd because I'm a right-side boarder. A trip to the downstairs bathroom uncovered the spectacles I'd left behind, as well as the phone I'd used and my last bottle of beer. If my grandmother had found me, wouldn't she have picked these things up? Or did she leave them there for me to take a long look at, the same way you're supposed to hold a dog's face down in its own filth when its housebreaking proves lackluster? And what about the basement? The lights had been left on, as well as the TV. Wouldn't she have at least turned these things off? But what of that bottle of rum that'd been left out on the bar since my great uncle had spent that week sleeping on the couch? It had been replaced in the liquor cabinet, and certainly not by the mysterious Rum Bandit.
Had my inebriation been discovered, or miraculously remained a secret? I'm afraid the mystery remains unsolved, and this alone is reason enough for me to give up the mixed pleasures of drinking alone. At least when I did it in Columbia, when I woke up, I had Caleb or Brent or Kate around to field that inevitable question of "What the hell did I do last night?" That's a question I just can't bring myself to ask Granny.
When my grandmother awoke some time after I'd cleaned up my messes, she greeted me warmly enough. I'm typing this at the bar in the basement, and I can see that the liquor cabinet remains unlocked. All of this would lead me to believe that I just stumbled upstairs on my own, and Granny passed out in her upstairs office as she's want to do. The only thing that leads me to believe otherwise is the simple fact that my family tends to be pretty cool. I was downstairs on the phone when Granny came home from her meeting, and if I remember correctly, she fixed herself a drink...
And as I gaze at the transparent liquor cabinet, I can't help but notice the strange absense of that bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.
"The Finer Mysteries of Shaq and Kobe"
It's occurred to me that I am who I am because I grew up with a mother and a sister.
There's this part of me that wants to parse this to you by means of intellectual discourse. That wants to tell you I once read that writers are often close to their mothers, because woman have traditionally been the keeper of family lore and the storytellers of their tribes. That wants to recount Joseph Campbell's assertion that in the myth of heroes, there's often some seperation between the young hero and his father -- Moses was abandoned, Hercules was the bastard son of Zeus, Peter Parker let his father figure die -- that signifies the fact that without a patriarch to guide him into adulthood, the hero's often forced to figuratively "become his own man."
There's this part of me that wants to say that growing up with woman has made me the wonderful person that I am today, but all that I really mean right now is that I'm really kind of girly. I do poorly when it comes to doing what men are supposed to do, and I'm afraid it shows when I hang out with my great uncles. On Christmas Day, I went over to my uncle's house to watch the Lakers - Heat game, and felt rather unaffected by this bout of male bonding, and I couldn't fathom why the media was trying to build up some type of conflict between Shaq and Kobe when these guys clearly just wanted to play a game.
The manliest close personal friends that I have -- with the strange and obvious exclusion of Dave -- are Adam and Will, and I think there are a lot of people who'd scratch their heads at my inclusion of Will in that number -- sorry, buddy. My point is that I've never had friends who I just had to watch the game with. I've tended to have friends I just had to watch WB melodramas wuth. And right now, I clearly recall a curious incident freshman year when me and some of the girls from the FIG were watching Ally McBeal and the prospect of "stripping down and doing Robert Downey, Jr." came up, and I just sat there thinking, God, do women only ever think about sex?
I often wonder what would have happened to me if I'd grown up with my father and somehow, I doubt I would have ended up a 22-year-old virgin who's written stick-figure comics, couldn't do a pull-up to save his life, and almost cried at the end of 50 First Dates the other day. In effect, I wouldn't have grown up to be me, and I'm not sure I'd really be much better off... but who knows what my life might have been with the masculine confidence of the Big Black Duck and an ability to intuit the finer mysteries of Shaq and Kobe.
"Clark in Love"
I had an epiphany, today:
I am nothing like Max Fisher.
I've spent too much of my time trying to score chicks, when I should have been starting up clubs and putting on plays.
I would elaborate... believe me, I tried to elaborate... but -- as is so often the case -- it ended up being far more trouble than it was worth...
"The Way I Feel Inside"
Everytime I hear this song, my heart almost swells up so much that I think it's going to burst and deflate and my life will leak out.
should I try to hide
the way i feel inside
my heart for you?
would you say that you
would try to love me, too?
in your mind
could you ever be
really close to me?
i can tell the way you smile
if i feel that i
could be certain then
i would say the things i want to say tonight
but 'til i can see
that you'd really care for me
i will dream
that someday you'll be
really close to me
i can tell the way you smile
if i feel that i
could be certain then
i would say the things i want to say tonight
but 'til i can see
that you'd really care for me
i'll keep trying to hide
the way i feel inside
- The Zombies
NEXT:
Storyboard
- Wes Anderson
"The Strange Case of the Rum Bandit"
Wednesday proved a tense morning here on Tuxedo Square.
Every Tuesday night, my grandmother meets with her Mary Kay unit to discuss whatever needs to be discussed in the day-to-day happenstance of make-up and pyramid schemes. Well, this Tuesday, an unidentified individual entered the house and proceeded to raid my grandmother's liquor cabinet, which is usually locked in the event that one of her brothers comes over. The intruder, who we've nicknamed The Rum Bandit for his favoring of one particular bottle of Bacardi Puerto Rican Rum, having partaken of her hard liquors and three bottles of beer as well as the two remaining hamburger patties in her crisper, then proceeded to make a series of long distance phone calles.
It should be noted, however, that The Rum Bandit was mindful enough to use the calling card his mother got him for Christmas. Our phone records indicate that he made calls to three different phone numbers, two of them Kansas City numbers (though one of them was traced to a cellular tower in mid-Missouri) and a San Antonio number we suspect was actually transmitted to the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.
...
Okay. Yes. It was me. Once more, I indulged myself in an act of solitary drinking -- hey, I would have gladly did some social drinking, but I've yet to make any friends here through a staggering lack of effort -- and a little drunk dialing. I've decided to rationalize it as my attempt to take a part of my old life and see if it fits into my new life. I'm sorry to say, it does not.
I woke up in bed on Wednesday morning with a hangover and a sense of dread and confusion. The last thing I remembered was hanging up on Prewitt and puking in the downstairs bathroom right before I passed out. Which begged the question, how the hell did I make it into bed? Did my grandmother help me? Had she discovered my wanton display?
The evidence was inconclusive at best. I found my pants in a pile of the left-side of the bed, which is odd because I'm a right-side boarder. A trip to the downstairs bathroom uncovered the spectacles I'd left behind, as well as the phone I'd used and my last bottle of beer. If my grandmother had found me, wouldn't she have picked these things up? Or did she leave them there for me to take a long look at, the same way you're supposed to hold a dog's face down in its own filth when its housebreaking proves lackluster? And what about the basement? The lights had been left on, as well as the TV. Wouldn't she have at least turned these things off? But what of that bottle of rum that'd been left out on the bar since my great uncle had spent that week sleeping on the couch? It had been replaced in the liquor cabinet, and certainly not by the mysterious Rum Bandit.
Had my inebriation been discovered, or miraculously remained a secret? I'm afraid the mystery remains unsolved, and this alone is reason enough for me to give up the mixed pleasures of drinking alone. At least when I did it in Columbia, when I woke up, I had Caleb or Brent or Kate around to field that inevitable question of "What the hell did I do last night?" That's a question I just can't bring myself to ask Granny.
When my grandmother awoke some time after I'd cleaned up my messes, she greeted me warmly enough. I'm typing this at the bar in the basement, and I can see that the liquor cabinet remains unlocked. All of this would lead me to believe that I just stumbled upstairs on my own, and Granny passed out in her upstairs office as she's want to do. The only thing that leads me to believe otherwise is the simple fact that my family tends to be pretty cool. I was downstairs on the phone when Granny came home from her meeting, and if I remember correctly, she fixed herself a drink...
And as I gaze at the transparent liquor cabinet, I can't help but notice the strange absense of that bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.
"The Finer Mysteries of Shaq and Kobe"
It's occurred to me that I am who I am because I grew up with a mother and a sister.
There's this part of me that wants to parse this to you by means of intellectual discourse. That wants to tell you I once read that writers are often close to their mothers, because woman have traditionally been the keeper of family lore and the storytellers of their tribes. That wants to recount Joseph Campbell's assertion that in the myth of heroes, there's often some seperation between the young hero and his father -- Moses was abandoned, Hercules was the bastard son of Zeus, Peter Parker let his father figure die -- that signifies the fact that without a patriarch to guide him into adulthood, the hero's often forced to figuratively "become his own man."
There's this part of me that wants to say that growing up with woman has made me the wonderful person that I am today, but all that I really mean right now is that I'm really kind of girly. I do poorly when it comes to doing what men are supposed to do, and I'm afraid it shows when I hang out with my great uncles. On Christmas Day, I went over to my uncle's house to watch the Lakers - Heat game, and felt rather unaffected by this bout of male bonding, and I couldn't fathom why the media was trying to build up some type of conflict between Shaq and Kobe when these guys clearly just wanted to play a game.
The manliest close personal friends that I have -- with the strange and obvious exclusion of Dave -- are Adam and Will, and I think there are a lot of people who'd scratch their heads at my inclusion of Will in that number -- sorry, buddy. My point is that I've never had friends who I just had to watch the game with. I've tended to have friends I just had to watch WB melodramas wuth. And right now, I clearly recall a curious incident freshman year when me and some of the girls from the FIG were watching Ally McBeal and the prospect of "stripping down and doing Robert Downey, Jr." came up, and I just sat there thinking, God, do women only ever think about sex?
I often wonder what would have happened to me if I'd grown up with my father and somehow, I doubt I would have ended up a 22-year-old virgin who's written stick-figure comics, couldn't do a pull-up to save his life, and almost cried at the end of 50 First Dates the other day. In effect, I wouldn't have grown up to be me, and I'm not sure I'd really be much better off... but who knows what my life might have been with the masculine confidence of the Big Black Duck and an ability to intuit the finer mysteries of Shaq and Kobe.
"Clark in Love"
I had an epiphany, today:
I am nothing like Max Fisher.
I've spent too much of my time trying to score chicks, when I should have been starting up clubs and putting on plays.
I would elaborate... believe me, I tried to elaborate... but -- as is so often the case -- it ended up being far more trouble than it was worth...
"The Way I Feel Inside"
Everytime I hear this song, my heart almost swells up so much that I think it's going to burst and deflate and my life will leak out.
should I try to hide
the way i feel inside
my heart for you?
would you say that you
would try to love me, too?
in your mind
could you ever be
really close to me?
i can tell the way you smile
if i feel that i
could be certain then
i would say the things i want to say tonight
but 'til i can see
that you'd really care for me
i will dream
that someday you'll be
really close to me
i can tell the way you smile
if i feel that i
could be certain then
i would say the things i want to say tonight
but 'til i can see
that you'd really care for me
i'll keep trying to hide
the way i feel inside
- The Zombies
NEXT:
Storyboard
Comments