riley dog

And that "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" seem like transparent attempts to create out of thin air holidays that are nakedly about nothing but celebrating consumer consumption at its rawest, most primal. Or, greedy. I observe in this regard that all local media in the NYC area yesterday sent reporters to the Valley Stream WalMart where raw consumer consumption last Black Friday got someone trampled to death. This year you will be relieved to know, as every goddamn local TV and radio station reported, nobody got killed on their way to enjoying the bargains they need in order to correctly celebrate the holiday that Fox News informs us is properly understood as a celebration of Christ, as opposed to something not Christian, but perhaps pagan, or maybe pro-big government and anti-free-market.

And people bitch about Kwanzaa being "phony." Maybe they should call it Cyber-Kwanzaa Wednesday and give everyone 15% off tube socks and Wiis. Legitimacy at last!

The other thing is, for a world-historical triumphant ideological titan, capitalism sure seems to need a shitload of silly propaganda to keep people believing in it.

Just the other week I was driving into NYC and heard some goofball on one of the news stations explaining how "nobody ever knows they're in the middle of a bubble," which may be true, but is hardly the same thing as saying that bubbles aren't totally fucking obvious to people who aren't getting rich off nonsense. (Toej: "Nobody on coke realizes they aren't actually incredibly cool.")

If you missed the imbecility of the 90s internet bubble, say, well, how hopelessly dumb were you? The housing market stuff of the oughts also was kind of obvious, and not even in retrospect. A "bubble" doesn't mean anything else but a lot of people buying into a lot of happy horseshit and then flinging it around. Guess what the people who said "nobody could have seen that coming" are covered in.

the coming of
THE WASHING-UP ARTIST

He is trampling out
THE CLEAN HOUSE ARTIST

where the grapes of wrath are
THE BATH ARTIST (II)
The truth is, I accidentally let out the water, though not the bubbles, from the tub. Refilling, with more soap, is what yielded that superior foam. Art is the genius of utilizing accident.

I am dating again – well, the one date, with a man who didn’t ask me any questions about myself. It ruined the pace of things. I had to maintain a constant brainstorm of conversation topics, mostly replicating material from his profile – falsified – he’d lied about his height. “What do you do for a living?”, “Where are you from originally?”, “Do you drink much coffee?” I asked, and he said optometrist, Baltimore, no, though we were in a coffee shop and he was drinking coffee, which, iced and milk-pale, had touched his breath already, that dad-smell. “I might do that at home,” I said, pointing at the glossy violet quotes stenciled on the walls of the café, letters in a dissonant overlap. I began tearing my napkin into tiny pieces. I didn’t know how to end a date properly – was thirty minutes enough? The napkin was indigo blue with “Indigo,” the name of the café, patterned over it. I tore it to separate the letters – i, n, d, i, g, … – and formed a lush pile in front of me, until he answered one of my questions with unanticipated enthusiasm, and his dad-smelling breath blew the pieces over me in a sudden napkin rain.

Afterward, I found bits of it caught in my hair. I combed them out with a slow flourish. The cat watched for a little while and then fell asleep, curled by the window like a seashell. At the sound of cars, her ears flickered in sleep, affected by the world in only this small way. At what degree of loneliness does owning a cat become a cliché? I don’t want to leave our apartment again. I’d rather stay here and do domestic things – bleach down surfaces, iron your clothing, clean the tarnished silver with a chemical reaction, boil a chicken carcass into stock. I want to research the history of the clawfoot bathtub, to discover where it got its cruel, curled feet. I want to paint the rooms, roll a creaking roller over the gray wall. That’s the part I was most looking forward to – I would have painted the back of your shirt when you weren’t looking. There wouldn’t have been any brainstorming, or any new dates with uncurious strangers, to scrape me empty like a vanilla bean. We would shut the shutters, and if an ambulance sirened violently outside, it wouldn’t be headed here.

Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day's knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the "hint." Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it's hard to build on a smooth edge.

Don't research
Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.

Don't be ceremonious
Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.

Kill your word-processor
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don't write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they're at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can't transmit a virus.

Realtime communications tools are deadly
The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention. The more you can train your friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

CM: The best part is that the feeling of hopelessness is gone. Three or four years ago I just gave up on the idea that I would ever write a novel. I didn’t have it in me, it was just this dream that I had all those years and I needed to let go of it. Now, that fear of not having it in me is gone and I have the feeling I can do it again.

         The worst thing has been the anxiety around the fact that all these people are looking at me now with expectation. It has changed from, "wouldn’t it be nice to one day have a story accepted by The New Yorker?" to "when are you going to have a story in The New Yorker?". That has been the worst part. This year on January 1st I was at the end of a drinking binge and I knotted a sheet around a pipe and tried to hang myself. I almost succeeded. I fell unconscious but I must have been kicking because my wife heard. She came in and got me down and they incarcerated me in a psychiatric hospital for a while. What had finally put me over the edge more than anything else was the feeling that now that I had proven I was capable of writing, I would be expected to write and I was bound to disappoint myself and everybody else. There is no middle period where you can relax and enjoy what you’ve accomplished. You go from the desperate anxiety that you’ll never be able to write to the desperate anxiety that you’ll never be able to write again.

Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his?

Imagine that I were to ask you to dress up as a baby and lie in a manger. Would you attract a comparable crowd of shepherds plus livestock and anything upwards of three kings from the East?

In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying in a manger.

Logic would dictate that at least one of them would be visited by shepherds, wise men, or kings from the East, right?

Wrong. The results—codified and analyzed on a specially devised and integrated grid system known as blsht—were astonishing. All 323 volunteers experienced a quiet night in. In other words, they waited up all night, but no one—specifically, 0.0000 percent of a total world population of 6,783,940,189 human beings—bothered to come by.

So what does this blsht metric tell you about your appeal, compared with the appeal of the baby Jesus?

It tells you this: he was special.

And—here’s another thing—you are not.

“Glen ‘Big Baby’ Davis”