dick swinging in wind

I'm planning a trip to California. Each time that I do, I think back to my first time there. I drove from New York to San Francisco with Carv, my college roommate sophomore year, and I'll never forget driving-thru an In-And-Out Burger outside Hercules(, Ca.) and hearing, for the first time, the voice of the intercom attendant ask me, "You want fries with that, dude?"

I think of how, over lunch, I asked Carv's brother Thomas what to do in case of an earthquake, and he instructed me to head for the nearest exit at the first twitch of a tremor. As fast as humanly possible, he said in all seriousness, knocking aside children and the elderly as necessary. He told me to find an open space outdoors, away from anything that could topple upon me, and curl up in the fetal position until the shaking stopped.

I think of when I challenged Carv's friends' each to come up with a single image that best captured the essence of CALIFORNIA. The most memorable answer: a pick-up truck filled with lawn mowers and Mexicans.

And I think of my very first excursion upon visiting the San Francisco peninsula. Our mission objective stood atop a cliff off Highway 1. There were NO TRESPASSING and U.S. MILITARY signs all over the place, but not a soul around. Just an abandoned military bunker built into the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was one of several such installations built by the military, fearing a mainland attack after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

(I found this picture online, taken in the '70s or '80s, of a WWII bunker off Hwy 1. It might be the one Carv and I sought out, but if not, it's close enough to give you an idea.)

It may seem a strange excursion choice for Carv to suggest to a guest visiting the West Coast for the first time. However, it was totally in line with Carv if you knew him. One of the things that I always admired about him was the way he tended to militarize anything he did. For example, in college, we didn't go to the supermarket; we went on a grocery acquisition mission. To go check out a party was a keg reconnaisance sortie, etc ... Any action, once militarized, carried that much more weight of purpose. There was the illusion of lives in the balance in every activity. In short, it made even stupid shit seem important.

Also, it may have been that this first choice of excursions was meant to dash the notion of San Francisco that I'd had -- that most have -- as it being the gay nexus of the universe, more gay than even Vassar campus. Nothing could be farther from gay than visiting an abandoned military installation, right?

Or we may have (probably) just been drinking beforehand and thought it was as cool a place as any to check out with a good buzz going.

And it was cool. Imagine looking out through a hole in the bunker wall, sized to the diameter of a howitzer's barrel, and see pristine Pacific blue. And looking out and imagining what the soliders manning the bunker must have been on the lookout for -- the Japanese navy massing on the horizon during WWII.

Fucking cool.

Like the shitstupid sophomores we were, we decided it'd be awesome to climb down to the base of the cliff and see if there were any sea lions or tortoises swimming in the rocks below. Dressed in shorts, T-shirts and Tevas, we proceeded down a cliff face that, in retrospect, demanded repelling gear. We got about a third of the way down before we realized we couldn't go any further. And when we started to climb back up, we realized it was even more difficult to go back up than continue going down.

So we scaled the face of the cliff sideways until its steepness relented, and slowly but surely, down we went. The sun was cooking us against the rock, and fatigue was setting in, but Carv solidered on like he was a commando assailing Hitler's Eagle's Nest, and I fed off his conviction. I tried to ignore the sound of the waves slamming against the cliff below. Having only been to beaches in New Jersey and North Carolina before then, I wasn't used to hearing how fiercely the ocean interacts with a cliff. And I certainly wasn't accustomed to seeing this interaction from 60 or so feet above, scarily over my shoulder just beyond my sandal heels.

At the base of the cliff there was scrub brush and seaweed through which we scrambled and, like two frogmen, emerged upon the beach. Only then did I experience what I imagined California to be like-- the cloudless sky blue, a strip of beach wending down along the coast, the ocean lashing at its flatness with a tidal pulse.

Except no people. I imagined on such a perfect day, people would flock to this place. But except for a few people off in the distance, no one was taking advantage of this deserted island-grade stretch of beach. When I mentioned to Carv how I'd be down here swimming every day, he encouraged me to take off my sandals and walk along the water. Only then did I realize it was brutally cold. Carv explained the water current along the California coast originated in the Aleutian Islands and, being Alaskan, was fucking cold ...

which reminds me of a joke told by Carv's brother ...

---

A polar bear and his son, a polar cub, are sitting on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, and the cub says to the bear, "Daddy, am I a polar bear?"

The bear looks at his son, smiling. "Of course you are. We're both polar bears."

Some time passes, and the son turns to his father again, pulling at his fur. "Daddy daddy, are you sure I'm a polar bear?"

"As sure as sure can be!" the bear laughs. "You're my son. I'm a polar bear; you're mother's a polar bear. So that makes you a polar bear, too."

Some more time passes. Once more, the son pulls at his dad's fur. "Daddy daddy, are you really sure I'm a polar bear?"

"Yes!" the father exclaims, exasperated, "Not only are your mother and I polar bears, but our parents -- your grandparents -- were polar bears, too. And their parents before them! And their parents before them!

"For Neptune's sake why ..." the father begins to ask, calming himself down, "Why do you keep asking this question? What makes you think there's even the slightest possibility that you are not a polar bear?"

The cub looks up at his father.

"Because, daddy, I'm fucking cold."

---

... so, Carv was explaining to me how the ocean didn't warm up until you got farther south down the coast of California. We were making our way down the beach, and when I looked up next, the beachgoer we'd seen earlier in the distance walking toward us was now pretty much on top of us.

I don't remember anything more about the beachgoer, except to say that he was a dude who was obviously in shape by the tone of his muscles -- and that his dick was swinging like a rope in the ocean breeze as he passed us, smiling.

Then, as if they materialized out of thin air, like in the old SNL commercial for Bud Gay, naked dudes were everywhere on the beach. Naked dudes lying on beach towels. Naked dudes throwing a frisbee. Naked dudes rubbing suntan oil into one another's shoulders ...

Carv and I went from speed-walking to a flat-out sprint in less time than it took for a swinging dick to swat both inner thighs. We ran as if naked dudes were raining down upon the beach from above, parachuting with their dicks flapping like weather socks in the wind as they descended.

When we finally left the gay beach in a cloud of sand, found the staircase to the road above and climbed into Carv's car and drove away, I don't remember exactly what I said to Carv. Something along the lines of ... "Is this the first place you take all your friends who've never been to California?"... or "No, you were right about San Francisco ... it doesn't hold a dick in the wind to how gay Vassar is."

Whatever I said, though, of this I'm sure -- it wasn't nearly as funny as Tom's polar bear joke.

squirrel falling out of tree

Walking home from the nearby Giant Eagle supermarket this morning, I saw a squirrel fall out of a tree. It fell directly in front of my path, exactly one concrete square ahead of me on the sidewalk. And it fell on the concrete from a low-hanging branch, with a fur-muffled thwack.

(This squirrel photo was actually copyrighted
by a douchebag who spends his free time
photographing squirrels and chipmunks.
On principle, I refuse to credit him here.)

I laughed audibly. I don't particularly like squirrels, ever since Vassar, where they roamed the campus without fear and, more irritatingly, with a sense of entitlement. However, my laughter's source was not in malice. I had no wish for a large predatory bird (a Giant Eagle?) to swoop down and snatch the fallen rodent. Nor did I find joy in the small animal being hurt, because it wasn't. In a blur of brown fluff, it righted itself and scurried off uninjured, for the base of the tree from which it had fallen.

Rather, I laughed because I looked in its rodent eyes and saw my same surprise of it falling from the tree before me reflected therein. Its eyes said, "I can't believe I just fell." Or maybe more precisely, "I can't believe I just fell where you (a human being) could see me fall." As if it had just broken some squirrel code -- don't ever let the tall, two-legged ones see you fall.

It scurried off -- not out of fear or instinct -- but because it hoped no squirrels in neighboring trees witnessed its fall. And if they did, an ultra-quick exit from the scene might -- just might -- erase the faux pas from their memory. The same way you quickly righted your chair in the 5th grade, after leaning back on two legs and falling backward in the middle of class.

At least that's what I was thinking when I crossed the last street before my block and caught the curb with the lip of my Teva toe. It wasn't enough to trip me up, but it did jostle the coffee cup in my hand just enough to belch a few beads of hot coffee out from its sipping lid, over its rim and down into the soft skin between my thumb and forefinger.

It didn't burn badly enough to trigger my dormant fear of coffee somewhere buried in my subconscious, but it was enough of a nuisance that I shouted "Fuck!" out loud. And, to my immediate left, a playground full of grade-schoolers stopped playing at recess, and their teachers stood and lasered their gazes into my face.

I rushed home like the squirrel back to its tree. Stupid squirrel. Stupid poetic justice.

the pleasure chest

I traveled to New York recently. Not only did I get to see some very dear friends, and have the opportunity to eat and drink well with them, but I also got to remember what it is about the city that I love and miss so much.

It's no one thing in particular. It's the snatching grasp of relief upon finding no line for a taxi at the airport upon arrival. It's a group of black teenage girls practicing a cheer on the corner of Smith and Hoyt while a man old enough to be their grandfather stands and watches, puffing on a cigar. It's eating affogato for dessert for the first time in a cozy Brooklyn restaurant. It's finding old MTA card in your wallet with $5 left on it, but then discover it expired yesterday, and just as you're about to pitch it, a subway attendant asks for the card out of the blue and changes its expiration date for you.

I could live there again; I would live there again; and I think it wasn't so bad working a dead-end job for a private investigator there. It had its moments, like when I had to go out and buy several hundred dollars worth of lubricating jelly for a case we were investigating. Actually the investigation had concluded; the case was on the verge of going to court, and our client's intellectual property lawyer needed product samples purchased from a local retailer to present as exhibits.

Our client (a large, family-oriented manufacturer of consumer goods -- think baby shampoo) did not like the fact that another company was selling flavored sex jellies under a name similar to their own. So I needed to buy only "Doc Johnson" brand lubricants. I did this on a Tuesday after a slice of Ray's pizza for lunch. I walked uptown on 6th Ave. to The Pleasure Chest.


Shortly after 1 p.m. on a Tuesday seemed as innocuous a time as any to visit an adult variety store and purchase several hundred dollars worth of lubricating jelly. As it turns out, I was mistaken.

The adult shop was packed wall-to-wall, and not with the perverts you'd expect to find doing weekday porno and sex toy shopping. They were almost exclusively women -- almost exclusively mother-daughter pairs to be exact. And they looked wholesome -- Midwestern wholesome -- as any group of mothers and daughters I'd ever seen. They could have just as easily been perusing designer clothing in the aisles at Macy's.

There was a giggling mother helping her teenage daughter try a pocket vibrator in her Jordache jeans. There was one teenager asking another if she would ever wear a string of golf ball-sized beads like the one she had dangling from her fingers.

As I made my way through the aisles of the store, I pushed past two mothers trying to decide between different models of inflatable Chippendales. At the very back, a daughter was asking her mother what the pinky-sized hook-like appendage jutting upward from the base of a modest-sized dildo was for. Her question went unanswered as her mom, wearing a blown-out expression, examined another, less modest-sized dildo named "The Bulldozer."

I went entirely unacknowledged by anyone in the store as I proceeded to fill an entire shopping basket with tubes of warming sex cream, "Sin-amon" flavored oil, and glow-in-the-dark gel. As I made my way to the counter, without a stray eye lifting in my direction, I wondered if I may have wandered upon some truly depraved mother-daughter nympho-cult that was ballsy enough to meet in the light of day right under normative society's nose. I wished (more than I wished for any thing at any time before or since) that I had gone to high school wherever these teenage girls went to high school.

I had already developed a pretext for why I was buying so much sex lube with a corporate credit card if the cashier were to have asked -- I was a production assistant for Hand Over Fist Films -- but the cashier rang me up for $300+ as stone-faced as if I was buying groceries at Garden Of Eden.

"Is this your typical Tuesday afternoon crowd?" I asked.

"No," the cashier sighed. "Sex In The City tour."

Apparently the adult shop had been featured in an episode of the show, and their next stop was the Gray's Papaya hot dog stand above which I used to live. A scene from the show had been filmed there, as well. On the way out, I noticed their charter bus parked along the curb, and my dream of a depraved mother-daughter nympho cult was dispelled. The world returned to making sense, kind of.

But, really, my job working for the private investigator didn't get any better than that, and I forget that about city living, as well. It's as two-faced as a deceitful lover -- for every thing you cherish and remember there's another you beg in your weaker moments to forget. The oppressive heat of the summer. The difficulty inherent in escaping on the weekend. The people oh so many fucking people all the time. Ugh.

I think next time I need to travel back to California.

sick and tired of the swine news

When a story like the swine flu dominates headlines nationally, the pressure to localize the news story makes the prospect of going to work each day grim. i've seen photos of the steelworkers who used to labor the mills along the rivers in this city-- those of the workers at the end of a shift, with expressions of utter dejection, soot-faced, exhausted and knowing the same waits for them the following day. minus the soot, i share their end of day labor expression.

Yesterday a woman reported symptoms akin to those found in swine flu, and Allegheny County sent a swab sample of her sinuses to be tested for swine flu. This was the headline news story, until the news broke that her sample tested positive for the influenza virus but was still inconclusive for swine flu. This was "breaking" news-- an Allegheny Co. woman had the flu, and it might be swine flu.

Why suspect the swine flu? Because the media's supersaturated coverage of the swine flu story has sensationalized this story enough to have everyone who listens too closely behaving like a hypochondriac. And if that's not enough, as is the case with this bullshit headline story (which, btw, I wrote, albeit with a figurative gun to my head) the news spins it to fit their needs. The story said not only did she test positive for flu and inconclusive for swine flu, but she also has "a travel history to Mexico" which does not mean she'd recently been to Mexico. It means she's been there before at some time in the past, that's all. Big deal.

What's crazy is it's not intentional to over-hype and fearmonger to this degree as the conspiracy theorists claim -- it's simply natural after those responsible for reporting the news become conditioned to working in an over-hyped and sensationalized environment, which the news station is. To be in the newsroom reminds me of the bees you see, close-up in the hive, under the camera lens of a Discovery documentary-- how they are flitting around and crawling over one another on the honeycomb. Busy. Fucking. Bees.

They've been so busy it hasn't occurred to anyone at the station yet to use their new favorite news tool, twitter, as a way of keeping the viewers up-to-date on the spread of the virus. This actually would be a sound application of technology, if the virus was the threat it's being made to be (which it isn't) and wouldn't be just another tool in the fearmonger's toolbelt (which it would be).

It'll be like a bear swatted the hive when I go in today; the first confirmed death from the swine flu in the U.S. was reported-- an infant in Texas. I'm just going to imagine my cubicle in the station is a hexagonal cell in the honeycomb, and I'll occupy this space and tolerate the buzz just like the steelworkers tolerated the heat and soot, until it's time to go home, and drink.

Here's a poem I wrote some time ago while living in New York for which I've developed a renewed appreciation of late.


Local Newscasters


My friend in TV says they’re all
drunks, every last one of them
from the evening crew to the morning
news first at 5AM.

Some show up sauced for work
like the rush-hour traffic girl
who booted a bellyful of bloody marys
her last time up in the helicopter.

Ask anyone in makeup how much
foundation the meteorologist must wear
to seal the gin inside his pores
before he goes on-air, and

listen for the lisp of the sportscaster
who outed himself after too much
champagne this year at the station’s
Christmas celebration.

Consider their lives spent
sticking to the cards, reporting the facts
in a rented suit and a voice paved
smooth over regional accent,

all in exchange for recognition
in line at the supermarket, maybe
an invitation to speak to the graduating
class of some local high school.

As proof, my friend points
to the anchorman, elbows
weighing down the end of the bar,
sipping his whiskey staring

into the mirror like a camera
obscura -- at the inverse of a person
he never knew. The person
we see on Channel 2 everyday.

best commercial ever

the hilarity is self-evident, and on so many levels.

"Booty is booty."-- Sir Mix-A-Lot

consider David Foster

Wallace, RIP. I am on the verge of finishing reading his last collection of essays entitled, Consider The Lobster. I've been reading the book like Charlie eats Wonka chocolate, limiting myself to only a few pages each day in order to prolong the experience. Last night I splurged and plowed through the collection's title essay in one read, and this morning I've got a Wallace hangover, which is precisely the opposite of a regular hangover, in that my mind is spooled up and sparking out in all directions.

This is Wallace's great gift to his readers. His prose confers upon the reader the experience of the author's wonderful thinking-- which is hyper-intelligent, expansive and surprisingly accessible. Reading him reminds me of the stream-of-conscious writing exercises we would do in early writing workshops. His writing leaves you thinking it's just rolling out from under his pen, but is so erudite and intellectual that it can't possibly be. It has to have been labored over and revised over and again and not even attempted until a rigorous groundwork had been laid down first. Exhaustive research on the subject matter must have preceded the writing, and then only slightly less exhaustive research upon a myriad of subjects tangential to the subject at hand, so that, by the end of the essay, you consider the author to be not only an expert on the subject, but also an entire solar system of subjects that orbit around it.

Yet, Wallace gives you the impression through his voice that he's just writing off the top of his head. His shorter essays, like "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," could believably have been written sometime after he ate breakfast and before he took his morning shit. He's that good.

In addition to his diction's wizardry, there's also the way that he transcends the subject of his writing that I find so appealing. I was struck by this quality in his first collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The title essay was written for Harper's; it was supposed to be a magazine article about the experience of taking a cruise. It was supposed to be, you know, a travel piece. What it ended up being was not only an article fiercely critical of the cruise ship experience, but also profoundly critical of contemporary culture in general and what we conceive "vacation" to be.

He reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson this way, who was also paid by x publisher to write about y event and then, essentially, wrote whatever the fuck he wanted to write about. However, where the media event became merely the backdrop behind Thompson's political rants and chronicling of his drug-and-alcohol abuse, the event is a nexus for Wallace that he not only explores exhaustively, but around which he also discusses whatever seems to come to mind, no matter how far-flung that whatever might be.

"Consider the Lobster" (the essay) starts as a piece of reporting on the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine; it ends up moving from his own witty observations about the lobster festival to an examination of the festival-as-an-experience in general. He explores the ethical question of whether we can be morally justified in killing and devouring another sentient being that experiences pain, and how we rationalize our responses to this question. DFW admits himself to being unsettled that he can't justify his own appetite for animals anymore than a) he'd developed a taste for them and b) it would be inconvenient not to eat them.

Perhaps my favorite essay in the collection is "Authority and American Usage," a review about a reference book-- the Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner. Its opening line is thoroughly DFW: "Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near-Lewinskian scale?"

Here Wallace is at the top of his game. He proceeds to just goes nuts on the topic. His stated plan in the essay is simple enough; the essay is a review (like any review) meant to suggest why you should (or shouldn't) buy the book being reviewed. In order to explain why you should or shouldn't, though, he says he has to put the book into context. He then proceeds to summarize the historical context of English usage in America (no small feat) and familiarizes the reader with the major camps (Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist) and key shifting points in contemporary usage debates, in order to then make his argument for the book and its worthwhile contributions to the field. And he does it in such a way that this very SNOOTy topic of conversation holds your interest, even if you care as much about your own language usage as you do... say, the French.

He makes it interesting not only by drawing upon your attention with good writing -- by hitting the hot-button "near-Lewinskian" issues in usage and writing about them in an interesting way -- but in two other ways, as well. He personalizes the topic and generalizes it.

This is applicable to all of his essays-- not only does he know his shit, and write well about it, but in writing about it, he makes it his own and enables his readers to make it theirs, as well. In a nutshell, this is why DFW is great.

In "Authority and American Usage," the essay is filled with (footnotes of) personal anecdotes of his childhood and his mother's insistence upon correct usage, and hearing these particular insights into the writer's early years increases the reader's interest in his writing and the topic of usage. DFW then takes his fleshed-out understanding of usage and applies it to common parlance, to pop culture, to academic usage (I love how he attacks the phenomena of Political Correctness,) and (most illuminatingly) to politics, and beyond... it is here that he shows you how the lexicographical debates engaged in by a cloister of SNOOTs in these dense reference books actually have heavy load-bearing consequences in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, and he makes you (the reader) at the very least pause and look into the mirror and ask yourself, "Have I ever really thought about how I use the language that I call my own?"

DFW's ability to enact this pause in the reader makes him a great writer-- not merely "this generation's best comic writer" as J. Keirn-Swanson, of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, blurbs on the back of my paperback copy of his book. He may be the generation's best comic writer, but to laud him as such when he is so much more than comic in his writing, well... it's just flat-out irresponsible for Keirn-Swanson to characterize him this way.

I compared DFW and HST above, but in doing so, I didn't mean to suggest an equivalence in their writing. The contrast is stark. HST was gonzo journalism, the 60's counter-cultural literary equivalent to, say, today's shock jockeyism of Howard Stern. HST did not engage his subject matter like DFW in its journalistic writing, nor did he engage himself and his readers in its subject matter, as well.

I thought to compare the two writers because 1) they got paid to write pretty much what they wanted to and 2) they both killed themselves. The latter must have been at the forefront of my thoughts. Wallace's death in September last year passed here without mention in this blog, and after reading his last essay collection, I felt compelled to comment upon the man.

With HST, we lost a larger-than-life personality and celebrity that transcended the medium (journalism) in which he wrote. With DFW, we lost something larger. He not only transcended his medium, but he sought to transcend humanity through his writing, as well. He was less a great writer than he was a great philosopher who brought his wisdom and keen insight upon the world to us via the written word.

In praise of DFW, in my copy of Consider the Lobster, David Lipsky, on NPR's All Things Considered, is quoted as saying, "After reading him, I feel buzzed-up, smarter-- I'm better company."

While HST's death surprised few, given his uncompromising train-wreck lifestyle, DFW's death was truly tragic. I've read that it was a straying from his anti-depressant medication that led to his suicide, so his death can be viewed as largely accidental. I like to think of his death this way. I like to think of him as having slipped and lost his footing while doing our culture's heavy lifting, thought-wise.

I like to think if he hadn't slipped, and continued to write, we'd continue to gain a better understanding of ourselves, to be better company to one another. I think we lost as close to an Atlas as can arise in our time, and in a world that is increasingly less and less comprehensible, his absence will be sorely missed.

why twitter makes nothing better

I am still working for the news station, and thankfully so, given the declining state of the economy. Yesterday, in our afternoon news meeting, one of the meteorologists was bent out-of-shape when he discovered the news director wanted him to begin regularly twittering his weather updates.

I couldn't understand why. Perhaps he's just sick of jumping through all of the hoops being placed before him. In the 6 months I've been in the news biz, I've seen the duties of the station's meteorologists increase significantly as the station jumps head-first into every new media trend. The station has a (free) subscription text message service for weather and school closing updates. Each meteorologist has their own blog. The station has a facebook presence to which they have to contribute content. And now they've got to twitter, as well.

But I don't understand his adversion to having to twitter weather tweets. Since weather is so variable in nature, the science of meteorology fails with regularity to predict what is going to happen outside. When the prediction falls well short of the mark, I've seen the emails we get from viewers and loggers-on to our site. "Anyone could do your job." "A blind-folded monkey throwing darts at a weather map could give me a more accurate forecast." "You said there was going to be a light dusting of snow; I'm looking at half-a-foot on the ground right now, and it's still snowing!"

Meteorologists often have their science questioned and are dismissed as unfounded prognosticators whenever their forecasts go awry. So why wouldn't a meteorologist want an immediate way to get the latest change in the storm tracker out to people, in 140 characters or less? It's a quick eraser for the forecasting pencil. "The snowstorm isn't moving through the area as initially projected; expect 4 to 6 inches, up to 8 in higher elevations." (99 characters)

If I were a meteorologist, I'd want to twitter for two reasons. 1) The technology allows for changes in the weather to be addressed more quickly than my next scheduled email update or TV broadcast. 2) It provides yet another reminder to people how important the weather (and, in turn, my existence as a meteorologist) is. Win, win.

Making changes to weather forecasts is one of many useful applications for twitter. We've seen, in this past prez election, how useful twitter is in quickly disseminating information re: candidates for office. Performing and non-performing artists use twitter to remind fans and friends of upcoming gigs, showings, readings, exhibits, etc. Any marketing event or product or press release gains that much more of a audience if twittered with a tweet.

But, on the whole, twitter makes nothing better, insofar as society and our culture is concerned, and not just because talking about twittering tweets makes you sound like Elmer Fudd.

The advent of texting has the current generation (Generation "teXt"?) treating English language and grammar with the same, wanton disregard that mortgage lenders have been dispensing loans for the last decade or so. The advent of facebook (with a nod to MySpace, as well) has succeeded in bringing out the inner-sociable narcissist in all of us. And Twitter, in effect, has combined the two, in a soft-serve swirl cone that everyone seems to be licking and loving nowadays.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

(By the way, if you'd like an insight into why precisely we're in the shit we're in, economy-wise, watch the 60 Minutes report on World Savings here.)

While I agree with old man Stewart's reasons for shaking his fist at Twitter, my own gripe with the fad stands upon poetical grounds. Twitter, as I see it, is yet another nail in poetry's coffin. Not only because it is another techno-distraction to swerve our attention (and more importantly, our children's attention) from the page and thoughtful consideration of language, but twitter celebrates those character traits that are a bane to poetry, culture and society, in general.

... I was planning to continue here, by identifying those traits, arguing by way of example, etc., but it's almost dinner time, and my bottle of wine is calling from the kitchen... perhaps I'll get back to this later.