Rapid aging

There is no easier or more certain way to feel about a hundred years older than to spend a few minutes watching Sunday Morning on CBS. Goddamn, but this show has all the energy of a two-hour Geritol ad. And don’t blame the current host; he just fits the profile. This show was as soporific with Charles Kuralt - God rest him - as it is currently under Charles Osgood.

I’m all for “thoughtful,” “high-quality” news programs, but must they move at 33 rpm in order to be serious and worhthile?

Workplace ruminations on a Friday

Thus far today it’s been exercise (no, not at work), monitoring the desk, attending a meeting, some LaVena Johnson work (non-blog) on the side, and lunch. Four hours to go. Time crawls.

One of my co-workers asked what plans M and I had made for the weekend, and I drew a complete blank. I don’t think we’ve made any. We haven’t been to a movie in what feels like twenty years; maybe we should do something about that. Of course, there’s always stuff to do around the house. Speaking of that, hope to add an entry or two to the domestiblog this weekend.

It occurs to me that Fridays (the end of the Friday shift, actually, the conclusion of the work week) mean altogether too much to me. It always feels as though I can suddenly breathe again. Conversely, Sunday evenings feel like the onset of emphysema. Always.

No, that’s not good.

Okay, back to it.

Ignominious defeat

To open this week’s installment of “As the Purple Stallions Turn,” let’s hear from Ladd Biro, wiseacre fantasy football expert (there’s no other kind of FF expert, actually) at the fantasy site of The Sporting News. Take it away, Ladd:

Fantasy football can stress you out; but it also can save your life. We all know the first is true, but I learned this weekend the latter is as well.

One of my league-mates developed a severe case of diverticulitis early Sunday morning which required an emergency procedure to remove part of his colon, leaving him with a semi-colon (Ba-dum-pum). The first words he spoke to his wife upon regaining consciousness were, “How’s my fantasy team doing?” I’m not making this up.

This is a man who understands his priorities.

I share this with you so that you can admire my relative calm after having lost this weekend to something called Westbrook36. It gets better: my team’s wholesale haplessness gave Westbrook36 its first victory of the season. Yay me. Suffice it to say that I got merely average overall production from my players, while W36 got player-of-the-week performances. It was like running into a buzzsaw, only without the subtlety.

I dare to say that things look more promising this week, as the Stallions take on MDSkinz, the team belonging to the man hisself, Oliver Willis of blogging fame (and our league commish). An appalling number of OW’s players are off during this first bye week of the season; he’ll be hard-pressed to find substitutes. If I can’t take advantage of this, I’ll…stamp my foot in frustration, I guess.

And my acne cleared up, too

Less of this, please

The relative quiet in this blog space is due to a handful of factors. Firstly, I’ve been fairly busy at, ah, you know, the place where most of the blogging gets done. Additionally, I’ve been doing more non-blog-type writing; I’ve found that this tends to bleed off a lot of the energy that would otherwise go into the web stuff.

There’s a third factor, though, which is actually intentional rather than incidental: I’ve been on a bit of a political fast, and I have to say that I’m really enjoying it.

Just about all of the feeds in my RSS aggregator are politiblogs of some stripe or other, and I’ve studiously ignored nearly all of them over the past week. As for political news in the regular ol’ mainstream media, I’ve avoided it. Sunday morning bobblehead shows? Ha! Blew ‘em off!

The result? I’ve lost nearly three pounds!

Okay, it’s more like two pounds, but it’s the non-physical consequences that have been more interesting. For me, political stuff has always been the most common blogging topic because it’s so easy, what with the war(s) and the malfeasance and the crimes against liberty and stuff. All you need is indignation bordering on gamma-fueled rage, and you’re good to go. Lord knows, though, that there’s no dearth of politibloggers, most of them much better at it than I am. One more source of such editorials - or one less - shouldn’t really matter all that much. As Yama, God of Death, once said in the ultra-cool Roger Zelazny novel, Lord of Light:

There are leaves and feathers enough in the world for me to have labored so long only to increase their number.

What Yama said.

I once worked at a somewhat dysfunctional business where every day was a new adventure in stress. One of my coworkers ruefully reflected on the effects of this environment on her own personality. “Honestly,” she insisted as much to herself as to me, “I’m not like this.” This, of course, being the tense, oft-irritated person that she was from nine to five. She was right. And she left. So did I, much later, but then I’m a slow learner.

There’s something to be said for not being angry all the time. Hmp. Fucking anger.

Also, it’s a lot quieter these days inside the cranium, astonishingly so. It’s rather like those car commercials where the driver (or invisible narrator) demonstrates how much NVH (Noise, Vibration, and Harshness) is blocked by the vehicle’s QuietSteel construction. Very pleasant, I must say. There’s been mental space to think about other things, which is timely, since I really need to to be thinking about those other things, many of which are important in the personal sphere.

Of course, it’s not desirable nor even possible to permanently divorce oneself from things political, since that aspect of life is woven into everything else. The LaVena Johnson situation, for example, will be with me for some time to come. Perhaps this is less about avoidance of politics than about formulating an alternate approach to the political. Or to, uh, life. Well, we’ll see about that. For now, I just think I’ll be doing less political opining in future.

For all the likely benefits of that path, I do wonder: When so much of your online persona has been devoted to one thing and then you substantially reduce that one thing, then who are you?

The eight-ball says, “Ask again later.”

Hmp. Fucking eight-ball.

To the Richardson for President campaign

If I wanted to be put on your hydra-headed mailing list, I’d have fucking well asked for it. Having to repeatedly unsubscribe isn’t endearing you to me. Just so you know.

Do not call

People who can’t be bothered to re-register their phone numbers with the national Do Not Call list deserve to have their precious dinner hours and episodes of Heroes interrupted by Acme or whomever. Having to renew your registration every five years is not particularly onerous. You burn more calories changing the batteries in your smoke detectors twice a year - assuming that you actually do, of course.

Things that aren’t worth my time

In no particular order:

Petraeus - Betray Us - Souffle Us - Whatever.

The merry widower O.J. Simpson.

“Gym rage.”

Notes from the spiralbound

I read Tom Bailey’s On Writing Short Stories, his section on basic elements of fiction: character, plot, setting & time, metaphor, and voice. Wasn’t sure which of these elements to focus on at first. Thought about starting with plot as it’s such an eternal challenge for me; then considered voice, since it’s a strong point and integral to the way I approach writing - thought it would be a cheap and easy way to regain entry to the story in progress. But I kept backing up, backing up, until I found myself square at the start of the treatise, reading about character. Which makes sense, after all, because my concerns about the story just now have everything to do with character, its revelation over time, its role as the source in the development of the narrative.

So. After that, I reread “Poaching” from Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Such enviable writing; I hate Wolff a little. But I like his treatment of characters, the unfolding of character here. The language he uses here is so appropriate to the story - I can’t think of another word for it. My vocabulary needs work. I should compare this story to “Hunters in the Snow” sometime.

Your arms too short to tort with God

I know that I’m embarrassingly late to the party regarding the Nebraska state senator who’s decided to sue the Most High, but I’m smugly certain that no one has come up with a cleverer title for their post. Sit and spin, early adopters!

Inglorious victory

You hear the hooves a-poundin’, comin’ across the plains…Yes, friends, the second week of the fantasy football season brought hard-won success to your fighting Purple Stallions. Rather a slim margin of victory, as a matter of fact. Went into the Monday Night game ahead of my opponent by a mere six points. I had Redskins wideout Santana Moss yet to play, while my foe had the versatile running back Brian Westbrook of the Eagles. I fully expected a loss, but Philadelphia’s real-life inefficiency became my imaginary victory. Huzzah!

My place in the standings doesn’t look all that different from last week, except that a 1-1 record is much preferable to 0-2. Oh, yeah.

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