Spango Dips

1. Amber Coffman
2. Angel Deradoorian

Man, I know who’s going to be jealous when this list starts to circulate.  Angel Deradoorian.

Hey zero readers,

I am in possession of an all-or-nothing personality, meaning that in my personal affairs there appear to be no options between the extremes of commitment to perfection and total rejection. That is, If I’m going to do it at all, I’m going to sweat every detail. Nothing irks me more than being forced into a position (usually as the result of time constraints) where I have to do something half-heartedly; it always seems like a weak-tea compromise. As a result, I have done a few small things in my life of which I’m immensely proud, and have let a hundred times as many potential things die in preproduction because I felt I couldn’t do them as well as they deserved to be done.

This may shed some light on my long absence from posting. I think I’m capable of recognizing now that this measly blog doesn’t have to reflect every facet of my personality, that it doesn’t have to be brilliant, and that it shouldn’t be a chore to maintain. So I hope to develop a more relaxed attitude toward the practice of blogging, and in so doing become once again a semi-regular presence on the bustling pages of pers.picacio.us.

Where to begin, I don’t know. Writing movie reviews was, for me, probably the most enjoyable and least stressful way to contribute to the blogosphere, so I think I’ll restart that engine. With the end of 2007 somehow horribly fast approaching, I’ll be starting to think about best-of lists, so the timing’s certainly right. I know I was also once talking about album reviews, and I gave it a try in private, but I think I lack the focus to evaluate albums in the form of a monologue. Somehow they always seem too broad and too rich to distill into a single paragraph. No album is one thing (except maybe Weezer’s Make Believe). Songs, however, are a different story; more often than not, they are one thing. And if the task of the critic is to name that thing, then I can whip up a paragraph about a song lickety-split. I was thinking I could try letter grades for song reviews, but that’s so condescending. And the Pitchfork scale of 0.0-10.0 seems simply too big. Maybe I can just stick with stars; although it’s customary for music reviews to go to 5 stars rather than the 4 that’s more common for movies. Cripes, maybe I should just abandon the whole th—NO! I will figure this out. My ratings scale for songs doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be “personal.” It can just work.

I’ll get back to you.

Putting ointment in a cat’s eyes. Cats don’t like it when you try to do that.

A gang of reviews to come soon, O Readers Naught.

Not the actual Bill O’Reilly, but a guy who, in retrospect, seemed to look up to Bill O’Reilly as an ethical model, was in front of me in line at the gas station food mart today. This guy—a paunchy little homonculus with beard and sunglasses, the kind of guy you just know owns or has owned or intends someday to own a pitbull—was buying a 44oz fountain soda, which at this particular establishment will set you back $1.59. The 44oz is the value-incentive size, being that the next size down is a 24oz-er that goes for $1.49. I discovered this when I went to investigate the soda cup sizes myself, which investigation I thought to undertake after personally witnessing the exchange between Paunchy Homonculus and the rangy, cheerful Vietnamese register clerk, which went like this:

CLERK: One dollar fifty-nine.
PAUNCHY HOMONCULUS (very brusquely): One forty-nine.
CLERK: You buy forty-four ounce soda, it one fifty-nine.
PH (actually, seriously eager to fight): Thirty-two ounce. One forty-nine.

PH (exiting): Thirty-two ounce.

So, if you’ll indulge me, let’s tally up every offense that this astonishing asshole perpetrated in this thirty-second exchange.

1. He lied when he said he had a 32oz drink. It said “44oz” right on the side. I could see it from my place in line, three feet behind him.
2. He lied by implying that the store even sold drinks in a 32oz size.
3. He made up an imaginary price for his imaginary drink size.
4. In defending his lies, he became hostile with an honest employee of the establishment he was patronizing who was trying to do his job, taking advantage of his (the employee’s) tenuous work status and difficulties with the English language.
5. He deliberately stole ten cents from this gas station, which was his intended objective all along and the final end served by offenses 1-4.
6. This isn’t really a separate offense, but it’s absolutely worth noting the capital-C Crime in all its fullness: he concocted this plot the moment he stepped into that food mart. I’m pretty sure of this. This suggests that he sizes up every store he goes into in this way, seeing what strings he can pull, finding people he can lie to and threaten and bully so that he can effectively simulate stealing from the store since he’s too fat to do it the traditional way (by running). This is the same impulse that might lead someone to place one of his own pubic hairs in a bowl of soup and then demand the restaurant compensate him the cost of the bowl and interrogate the waitstaff. OK, maybe I’ve gotten a little paranoid by implying it’s habitual, but he really seemed proud of himself today. Anyway, what underlies behavior like this is, at best, an impish refusal to play by the rules, and at worst, a total lack of social conscience; a committment to taking whatever you can get by whatever means necessary, as long as you don’t get caught. This is frequently termed sociopathy.

I only have so much rancor and loathing within me, and there are oh so many worthy targets hovering about from day to day, vying for a taste. Most days it all goes to the Bush administration and its organized media-apparatus (which counts among its minions A1 shithooks like Bill O’Reilly), on the grounds that this cadre does damage to the earth on a scale totally unmatched by any other machine currently in operation. But on days like this, when I run into a mini-O’Reilly—someone employing all the same tactics for far pettier prizes; in this case ten fucking cents off a fucking Pepsi—I lose the larger picture entirely, and I just want to hit this person with a flying elbow off the top turnbuckle. He becomes, for one brief shining moment, solely responsible for all the world’s ills.

So then. Why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t I call this guy out? I guess because I was raised to stay out of other people’s business unless the stakes are a lot higher. I’m not one to lecture people on their behavior. But, so… does that make me polite, or chickenshit? Does one imply the other?

More to the point, if I rant and rave about the Bush administration’s ethical transgressions, and the overall declining standards of decency in this world, and then can’t find the nerve to stand up to an asshole like this, am I not just full of hot air?

As I hunchback my way through the door, the heavy-set girl usually behind the counter, who takes and dispenses orders wordlessly, is, in fact, in front of the counter, and actually exchanging words with a very tall, expensively-accessorized black man sitting at the table by the water cooler. They’re practically whispering, presumably out of politeness, so my usual efforts to eavesdrop are thwarted, but if his facial expression reveals anything, it’s that things could be better. But this doesn’t look like the usual clerk v. customer fracas, on the clerk side of which I have personally been so many times and therefore know how to read the faces of the involved; I can’t quite put a finger on it, but the emotional temperature of the scene seems instead to resemble The Remains of the Day. His face is twisted into a rictus; it’s not what you generally see when someone’s lodging a complaint. Complaints, also, are usually not lodged while the customer sits and the clerk stands. He’s not frustrated; he looks instead somehow destroyed. Her expression seems to convey the same sentiment, but that’s kinda how her face always looks.

I think I was sad going in, in fact I’m sure I was, but there’s something really vibrantly sad about this odd episode that I think would’ve struck me no matter my initial mood.

She ambles lazily back to the counter and scratches my ticket in total smothering silence as I order the food I only half-want. I sit, then, which I don’t normally do while waiting for take out, cross-legged, drumming on my arctically cold bottle of Mexican soda, nervously stealing glimpses of the destroyed black man who sits now at a diagonal from me, in an otherwise happily crowded room, with head in hands. Total fucking despair radiates from this man. I have never seen a man like this, a tall black man dressed for success-in-bed, radiate despair. It’s so surreal it makes me doubt my eyes, and it’s also hypnotizing. I cannot take my eyes off this man. I’m imagining him seeing me and in seconds I’ve got the dialogue that would ensue all worked out in my head.

TALL DESTROYED BLACK MAN: What the fuck are you lookin’ at?
ME: I’m looking at you.
TDBM: What the fuck for?
ME: You look sad. It’s amazing. It’s amazing to see someone who looks like you, look that sad.
TDBM (standing): Oh, it’s on now. I’ma make you look sad, punk.
ME: You’re seriously gonna fight me for looking at you, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, while the sun is still out?

But he doesn’t see me.

Then the heavy-set girl calls a number that I think for a second is mine. It isn’t. It’s the number of a woman behind me. I know this because a second after I realize definitively that the number isn’t mine, I hear a woman behind me say “that’s us,” and then I hear a kiss. A kiss, for “that’s us.” It is the softest jackhammer.

I’m slowly, tentatively, easing my way into a six-week diet engineered to purge my body of all the foods of which it might be intolerant. This is something I’m trying to feel empowered, optimistic and at the same time light about, and you’ll see in a minute why such an unimpeachably tranquil and positive attitude as mine is crucial to survival of this diet once I list all the forbidden foods.

Backstory: I’ve been afflicted by numerous embarrassing and confidence-bruising health problems for the past couple of years (including, but not limited to: severe G.I. distress and irregularity, recalcitrant seborrheic dermatitis, acne, cradle cap, geographic tongue, listlessness, depression/suicidal ideation, and psychosomatic aphasia—all in all it’s a real prize for the ladies I’ve become) and have now for a little over a year been working closely and aggressively with an N.D. to crack the case and pave the road to recovery. My mother (and benefactoress, given my status as health-care-have-not) and I chose the naturopathic route because I was convinced, on some deep level, that all these symptoms I was experiencing were somehow connected—mostly because they set on at roughly the same time and seemed to swell and break together—and I thought a holistic, “wellness” oriented approach would be more sensible. The doc and I played a miserable game of pin-the-tail-on-the-illness for a year, during which time I was taking various medications, both AMA-sanctioned and herbal, off-and-on, as prescribed by her intuition alone, given that my status as uninsured made the battery of tests that could give my maladies a positive I.D. laughably cost-prohibitive.

Without getting too deep into it, I took several courses of antibiotics in the spring, each of which made all of my symptoms vanish right up until the course ran out, at which time they’d re-emerge with newfound tenacity. Then, under suspicion that I had an underlying chronic yeast infection (not how it sounds) she put me on a kick-ass anti-fungal drug called Fluconazole, which really did wonders for me. But then, holistic healer that she is, she insisted that I get tested for food intolerances, surmising that years of eating foods that my body secretly hates could’ve caused the proliferation of yeast to begin with (I guessed principally sugars and alcohol, since we’re talking yeast, right?), and asserting that I ought to do something proactive to ensure my long-term health. She also intimated that six weeks or so of abstinence from these foul foods could do away with at least some of the intolerances altogether.

So in the spirit of investigation, and since my symptoms have returned (albeit with about 5-10% of their original fortitude) since going off the Fluconazole, I’m trying this diet. I’m supposed to give up certain foods for six weeks, and then, starting in week seven, choose one to reintroduce and see if I feel any worse, then another, etc. I have nothing to lose except six weeks of eating in the hedonistic, gourmandic, instant-gratification-centric way that I have always enjoyed, and could stand to gain actual recuperation of my complete health.

And so: based on my original bodily complaints, and my doctor’s knowledge of my usual diet, and the results of my totally not-rigorous, pseudoscientific, but affordable and quick food-intolerance test (which involves acupuncture points and bioelectric current impedance [and I must detour for a moment here to note that in spite of how utterly dodgy this test was, the results feel—in a purely intuitive way—completely spot-on]), here is the list of foods which must not pass ‘tween my lips for six weeks, in descending order of difficulty, starting no later than Monday although I’m already trying to be good:

WHEAT BRAN AND FLOUR (remember my days of suspected Celiac disease? I might have a problem with wheat after all, it appears, but not only with wheat, which is why a diet excluding only wheat did me little good)
REFINED SUGAR (here’s Exhibit A for the yeast-logic-argument)
DAIRY
ALCOHOL (here’s Exhibit B)
TOMATOES
SEA SALT (WTF?)
COFFEE
CHOCOLATE (not terribly surprising since it generally contains dairy & sugar; I tested fine with pure cocoa)
TUNA
SHRIMP
WHITE BEANS
PEANUTS, CASHEWS, WALNUTS, MACADAMIAS
GREEN PEAS
APRICOTS, PEACHES, PAPAYAS, PEARS, STARFRUIT

The test also claimed I might be allergic to cats, down, certain plastics, sundry grasses although not marijuana, acetaminophen, chlorine, acetone, petroleum, latex paint, sheep’s wool, and the majestic Ponderosa pine. I’m NOT giving up my down comforter, not in Portland in September and T-minus whatever till snow, I’m NOT going to install a shower-head filter to catch the chlorine in my escape-pod-sized shower where the 3-inch head already in place nearly touches my scalp, and I’ve always preferred ibuprofen as it is, so… whatever. It’s the food part that I’m focusing on. If for six weeks my diet has to consist completely of potatoes, rice, corn, Earth Balance, delicious roasts (thank the One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple Jesus Eater that I’m not forbidden Kosher salt and spices), oatmeal, salmon, honey, chicken tacos, ludicrously overpriced maple sugar, vegetables sauteed in olive oil and garlic, metric tons of raw fruit, and nothing to drink but water and tea, I can live with that. Just don’t invite me out to any restaurants.

Interestingly, I didn’t test as intolerant of tobacco smoke. But it would be kind of silly to embark on this detox quest, which I’m already buttressing with a renewed interest in regular exercise, and be banging down Winston Lights the whole time.

I will sidestep the tiresome cliché of opening the first post in a long time with an apologia enumerating my reasons for not having posted in a long time. Suffice it to say: I did, and do, intend to funnel my blogo-energies into layout customization and such pretty soon, and also I’m really lazy.

There is much too much stuff to talk about. I’d be remiss if I used this space here and now either to gloss over the world’s various catastrophes and reduce my nuanced and no doubt laceratingly brilliant insights on each topic to crude punchlines, OR to go into soporific detail on any one of them. So instead, I’ll give you a quick bullet-pointed list of what’s going on in my personal life.

• I’m at a point where teaching drum lessons full time is profitable enough that I no longer need to supplement my income with the emasculating nightmare-generator that is a minimum-wage job. Yahoo.
• Things being as they gloriously are, I’m quitting Movie Madness in two weeks.
• I will be celebrating this emancipation with a trip to LA, to commence virtually the moment I clock out of my last shift. I’ll be there from August 31 to September 12.
• I’m writing a lot of songs. At Dusk is on a brief vacation, what with Cary in MontefreakingNegro and all, and I’m meanwhile getting a good stack of acoustic tunes together on my own, and also rekindling the 2delicious fires with my friend and engineer extraordinaire Chris Anderson. 2delicious, for those of you not in the know, is a hip-hop/dance fusion project on which Chris and I broke ground about a year ago, and then had to abandon entirely in order to focus our energies on You Can Know Danger, and Chris’s other major time-abyss of 2005/06/04, the Strength album (which, for my money, is the best album of 2006 so far, and by dint of greatness has retroactively nullified all of the grief that I gave those guys about their perfectionism during the Hundred Years Recording Process that it seemed to require). I like making music, on a computer, that is purpose-engineered to move butts, at the very least because it’s such a far cry from how I normally operate in terms of priorities.
• A little off-topic, but: Chris and I refer to 2delicious as 2del, just for private shorthand, and… well, check out what www.2del.com currently is. I guess we won’t be able to register that domain after all.
• I’ve seen many movies recently. I’m back up to an average that approaches the voluminous input I was enjoying back in the Video West days. I think I might follow Jem’s lead and do a capsule review post soon, but I’m comfortable revealing now that the best of them was, uh… either The Wicker Man (which was totally captivating though I only really watched it in the first place because I’m going to need to substantiate all the animadversion I’ll be directing at the remake even though I probably won’t see it), or The Wages of Fear.
• I am still reading a very, very long book.

I am tired and I’m going to bed. Stay tuned, now, officially, for more posts soon.

Technorati Tags: music, movies, self-employment, atdusk, 2delicious