Musings: The Barbarian Invasions Continue

Leaving the house today to walk to campus, my partner and I noticed that the rich barbarian undergrads next door--they of the BMW and the Jeep Cherokee in the driveway, of the garbage on the lawn, and the ratty couch on the front porch--were hosting a stack of crumpled Bud Light cans all over the front lawn, just steps away from one of their gas-guzzling expensive vehicles.

Now, I'm not one for neighborhood policing, or gated communities, or homogeneous middle-class living, I swear it. But could you spoiled little assholes at least make the slightest bit of effort to step up the evolutionary scale and join civilization? Christ, for proprietary's sake, even if you're refuse to adhere to the common sense (and humane) convention of not driving-while-shitfaced, could you hide the evidence of your drunken attempts at vehicular manslaughter?

Idiots.

Musings: Ah, Gouranga, you big galoot.

Bizarre email in the junk-mail folder at work today, sent from someone called Neateye, and reading as such:

Call out Gouranga be happy
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga!
That which brings the highest happiness

Needless to say, I was intrigued, and did some googling--ah, my procrastination knows no bounds!--and discovered that I have been enfolded into an Internet-wide phenomenon: http://www.joewein.de/sw/spam-neateye-gouranga.htm#example.

Speaking of Internet-wide phenomena, I am searching high and low without success for an mp3 of John R. Butler's "The Hand of the Almighty," which may be the funniest country song I've ever heard. Where oh where oh where?

The Whining Stranger on Sport: Back in the Hunt--Finally!

The thirteen year old boy has become a thirty-two year old man, but he's no less giddy than the adolescent he was in October 1987.

Back to the playoffs again at last.

Proustian Years in Review: Part 5: 1987

For me, 1987 was:

• a white sweatshirt bearing an image of Bill the Cat, which I wore to a football game on Saturday, 3 October, the day before the Tigers clinched the AL East pennant against the hated Toronto Blue Jays.
• copies of The Beatles' Abbey Road and The Beatles [aka "the White Album"] that I bought in summer with earnings from my paper route.
• a yellow hardcover journal that I bought at the drug store in the neighborhood, and which began the long string of diaries I continue to keep to this day.
• a pair of oxblood penny loafers that I wore with my school uniform each day, and with jeans on weekends.
• paperback copies of Animal Farm, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and The Catcher in the Rye, read on the couch in the basement or curled up under the blankets in my bedroom.
• chocolate cream sandwich cookies and turkey sandwiches made on croissants and consumed with big cold glasses of milk.
• my beloved beat-up Tiger cap.

And what, may I ask, was 1987 for you?

The Whining Stranger on Sport: It's Been a Long Nineteen Years; or, One is the Magic Number

As I write, the Detroit Tigers currently lead the Royals 1-0 in this afternoon's game. If the Tigers win, they have clinched a spot in this year's post-season, making it to the playoffs for the first time since 1987. Nineteen years. Nineteen long years I have waited since the last time they were even in long sniffing distance of the World Series.

When the Tigers last clinched a playoff spot--with a 1-0 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays on 4 October, 1987, in the last game of the regular season--the number one box office-earning film in the country was Fatal Attraction; Ronald Reagan was the President of the United States; the number one song on the radio was Whitney Houston's "Didn't We Almost Have It All?"; and the above Calvin and Hobbes comic strip was part of the Sunday funnies.

Long time.

And in the time I've written this entry, the Tigers have scored four more runs. 5-0.

Musings: 100 Days of Curmudgeonly Sentiments Continuing--

Things to keep a prematurely grumpy old man grumpy as September wears on:

1. Academic departments that decide suddenly to ration out how much paper each faculty member receives each semester. "Um. Pardon me for printing out drafts of the academic articles, book chapters, short stories, reviews and lecture notes that lie at the heart of my job description and tenure expectations."

2. Nose-diving first-place baseball teams that seem determined to relinquish their lead just before playoff time.

3. Any vehicle with "F-150, F-250, or F-450" in its name.

4. Bigoted politicians who don't attend AIDS conventions ostensibly because it will link them publicly to a "queer" cause.

5. Fantasy football draftees who underperform. Yeah, I might be talking 'bout you, Cedric Wilson.

6. Thirty-dollar mp3 player covers supposedly designed for certain models of mp3 players but which don't fit properly.

7. The jerk campus police officer who ticketed my car when I was parked illegally to play basketball. The lot was half empty, dude!

So we beat on, boats against the current, and all that--

Musings: Serendipitous Weekends

So, the Whining Stranger walked into a serendipitous proposition this weekend, my friends. My two serious homebrewer friends invited me to be a judge for a regional beer-brewing competition. That's right: a weekend of sipping porters and California commons and altbiers and filling out comment sheets, in which I scored each beverage on its appearance, its flavor, its aroma, and its "intangibles." Granted it's been a long time since the WS started drinking in the a.m. hours (ah, for my lost salad days), so pacing was a bit of an issue, but overall it was a swimmingly pleasant weekend of foam and hops and good food (prime rib dinner on Saturday night!). A charmed life.

Today though I need to start filling this 30GB of mp3 player space. Any recommendations for must-have songs? Upbeat suggestions are especially welcome since this technological investment was especially made in the interest of charging me up on morning walks to campus, before I go teach. The mp3 player-filling is, of course, another procrastinatory measure when I should be doing scads of backed-up academic work. But all I really want to do is pile into my easy chair with headphones on and a Haruki Murakami novel in my lap. Sigh.

Oh, and go Tigers. Two weeks left to the season and then cling to the AL Central division lead.

The Whining Stranger on Music: An Epochal Announcement

Last night, the Whining Stranger joined the 21st century.
His music appreciation habits will never be the same.

Musings: On Mortality, Mine

Debated for a while today whether or not I'd write about this, but then talked myself into it, if only to fashion a procrastinatory measure that keeps me from addressing the five-item to-do list on my desk here at work.

This morning I went to the doctor for a follow-up visit, in part to talk about test results from an MRI I had a couple weeks ago. My doctor recommended the MRI because of my father's death--as a relatively young man, from a brain aneurysm he didn't know he had. The MRI itself was a new (and unwelcome) experience for me, a here's-what-it-feels-like-to-be-shoved-in-a-coffin-for-forty-five-minutes revelation, but with more clanky sound effects than the dead usually have to endure. But whatever. I had the test and pushed it to the back of my mind, to be left aside until today's follow-up.

On the drive though, I--of course, being an imaginative sort--let my mind wander a bit into what-if territory. "So, Whining Stranger, odds are if there was anything really irregular she'd have called you right away, but on the other hand, she may have needed a couple weeks to think of how to let you know that you're in grave danger, that there's an aneurysm in your head, waiting to send you careening toward an early exit." Now, you might think that an anxiety sufferer like me would be sent into pre-emptive convulsions over traveling down such a hypothetical path. (Remember that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters, when Woody Allen sits waiting for test results, convinced that he's about to learn he has an inoperable brain tumor...?) Oddly enough, though, I didn't feel that expected tightness in the chest or nausea in the belly. Instead, mostly calm. A settled searching through the "These are the things I'd do" if I were staring eye to eye with the Fella in the Brite Nitegown.

I'd probably want to quit teaching. (Sorry, kids, but I hope you understand.)
I'd commit myself to writing more. Maybe dash off two or three more inconsequential stories in my remaining days.
I'd make sure that the people I love know how much I love them.
I'd eat sushi every day damn day, and let the dog eat steak.

As it turns out though, everything's OK in my head. (Well, on the aneurysm front, anyway-- I'm still an anxious cat, but that's not terminal.)

And rather than spend the morning thinking about final wishes, I cruised home with the windows down, singing "Louie, Louie" loudly with the stereo. And my partner was waiting with a hug when I arrived.

Shoo, Grim Reaper. I got things to do.

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day: 13 September 2006

"Young Americans" by David Bowie (from the album Young Americans, 1975)

"Do you remember your President Nixon? / Do you remember the bills you have to pay? / Or even yesterday?"

For undergraduates in Mercedes and brand-new SUVs. For twenty-year olds who have their cellphones pulled from their bags to make that frantic call the minute I announce class is over. ("Who are you calling?" I want to ask. "What's so important?") For stupid Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirts. For senses of entitlement combined with suspect work ethics.

This one's for you.

The Whining Stranger on Politics and Current Events: On 9/11

Given my profession, it's no surprise that I believe art and literature have a messianic propensity for salvation--or at least for offering the understanding of experience, the shaping of chaos into form, that seems to offer salvation as we stumble through our lives. Today I try to remember my early reactions to that tragic morning, five years ago. The disbelief that clouded my early day as I watched mass murder on television. The uncertainty that seemed to hover in the air in the weeks that followed.

This, of course, was all before insidious politicians tried to shape circumstance for me. It preceded the appropriation of grief to encourage a blind faith in unjustified violence. Before garish magnetic ribbons on the backs of gas-guzzling vehicles criss-crossing the empire's highways.

Five years later, one of the best responses to 9/11 is still one of the earliest: Toni Morrison's poem, "The Dead of September 11," which I first read in Vanity Fair around November of that weighty autumn. Read it and think about Morrison's compassionate response, and how it makes so much more sense--it shapes the chaos so much more efficiently--than so much of the nonsense that's followed in the half-decade since.

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day: 11 September 2006

"Pink Moon" by Nick Drake (from the album Pink Moon, 1972)

Before this tune was co-opted by Volkswagen for an ad campaign at the turn of the millenium, it was a moody, semi-lost artifact by a moody, semi-lost folk singer who died too soon. It's appropriate for a rainy Monday (and a day of needful memorializing) as the autumnal equinox creeps in.

The Whining Stranger on Politics and Current Events: In the "...Which Everybody, Including the Deceitful Clown Pictured Below, Knew, Of Course" Depart

Today's top headline: "Senate: No Prewar Saddam-al-Quaida Ties."

No shit, really?

Who here besides me imagines this cat in his undergrad days, tossing water balloons up like a hyena, and piling into his Range Rover with open liquor?

The Whining Stranger's Song of the Day: 8 September 2006

"Alice Childress" by Ben Folds Five (from the album Ben Folds Five, 1995)

An enigmatic melodic number by the piano-based trio that played, by their own description, "punk rock for sissies." I was perplexed by the meaning of this song for ages, given that it namechecks (or seems to namecheck) a famous African American playwright in the title and chorus. Turns out though, that the lyrics were contributed by Folds's ex-wife, Anna Goldman, who wrote the words for a hospital patient she knew. (This info, unverified, comes from The Ben Folds Knowledge Base.) Nevertheless, it's painfully sweet in its melody, and the piano chart is handsome.

The Whining Stranger on Books and Reading: We Have a Winner!

Back in July, recall, I issued a summer writing challenge to the writerly readers of this blog. Write a 500-word short story on this theme: For fear that my mother would sell the house before I returned home again, I made sure to write a sentence in permament marker in the closet of my childhood bedroom. I set the deadline as Labor Day. I said there would be a prize.

I've chosen a winner.

First off, though, let's remember who entered the contest:

1. EDW, "It's No Story I Can Tell."

2. Jami, "Permanence Marker."

3. Paperback Writer, "['Writer's Block']."

Secondly, let me say that I really enjoyed reading all three writer's efforts. It's fun to see how different creative people approach the same topic. I like the different styles, and the different approaches. I like how EDW, for instance, takes a perspective you don't expect.

But there can be only one winner, I'm afraid.

And that winner is--

Jami, for "Permamence Marker."

I'm a fan of quick cuts, brevity, non-sequitir prose, and Jami's entry had all of that. And so, Jami, contact me, and I'll send you your prize: a used (I prefer the term "previously loved") of my all-time favorite book on writing, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which I'll send your way from AbeBooks.

Musings: Conversations, Welcome Correspondence and Frothy Ales

Cool autumnal rains made Labor Day weekend a time of acceptable transition. Summer is over, school has begun, I am lost to books and classrooms and sharpened pencils and striped ties again for the better part of the next four months. On Friday we celebrated with dinner out at a favorite restaurant. On Saturday we attended films on campus, and then went for a dinner and drinks get-together at a colleague's that took us into the early morning hours and carried us home with ample wine and beer in our bellies. Sunday saw me at a beer-tasting. (Yes, you read that right.) I drank different style beers all afternoon before we headed out for Thai food and more beer and wine with other friends, till 3 a.m.

Sunday afternoon we walked the dog in the rain. I napped on the couch. We had tilapia and green beans and couscous and salad. Sunday evening saw me smoking and reading Ralph Ellison in a comfy chair and drinking scotch and listening to the patter of rain and the swell of jazz from the radio.

And this weekend I found out that another story of mine has been accepted for publication.

Life.
Is.
Good.

Will decide on the winner of the Summer Writing contest soon and decide on a prize for said victor. I'm still open to late-entries if you get 'em in quickly.

Musings: On Poll Results and First Weeks of Teaching

So the poll results are in for August. Apparently nobody (but me) gives a rat's ass whether the Tigers win the World Series or whether Barry Sonnefield makes the right casting choice for Jack Gladney in White Noise or if Philip Roth gets his Nobel laureate due. But you do care about fixing that mess down in D.C. that's contributed to our world getting progressively more miserable since early in 2001. (Not to mention that some of you think I'm underpaid. I am. Criminally.)

Meanwhile, your old pal, The Whining Stranger, survived his first week of teaching without too many public speaking panic attacks or confrontations with water-balloon-toting or vodka-swilling hyenas. I was a bit put off by one student in one of my classes who confidently announced to me in his introduction that he doesn't like using intelligent words to discuss literature nor does he find much joy in sitting around talking about books. I told him I expect plenty of both, so hopefully there won't be too much trouble there. Otherwise, the student population in my classes seems eager so far, though my jokes are only earning resounding laughter about 62% of the time thus far. The generation gap is widening, I fear. I need to incorporate more physical comedy into my schtick. Nothing goes better with a good literary discussion than a well-timed pratfall.

And Mom called this morning to say that she scored free tickets to see Steely Dan and Michael McDonald. I'm happy for her. She was envious when she heard my glowing review back in July.

The Whining Stranger on Books and Reading: One Last Call To Scribes, Would-Be Wordsmiths, and the Literarily Inclined

Calling all writers again. You might recall that back in the dog days of summer, I issued this 500-word Summer Writing Challenge. The deadline is Labor Day--Monday, the end of this last weekend of summer.

To submit your final entry, please link your story to this post. I'll judge the winner sometime last week and send out a prize.

And tell your writerly friends!