IF THIS WAS A POEM

You would say,

Oh, what an interesting poem.
I especially like how he
rhymed crispies del cocoa
with risotto.

But it's not a poem.
So it sucks.

IN A PERFECT WORLD, we'd still be boring and intolerable, because we'd all be running around obnoxiously content and at peace with everything, rubbing it in each other's faces, as if there was absolutely nothing wrong in the world, which would be true, which would make it all that more annoying. On the bright side, the world isn't perfect, and even better, whenever we foolishly begin to think things can't get worse, George Saunders is there to remind us, "Why not?". Exhibit A, an excerpt from his story, "CommComm":

Dad worked thirty years at Gallup Chain, with his dad. Then they discontinued Automotive. Only Bike remained. A week after his layoff, Grandpa died. Day of the wake, Dad got laid off too. Month later, we found out Jean was sick. Jean was my sister, who died at eight. Her last wish was Disneyland. But money was tight. Toward the end, Dad borrowed money from Leo, the brother he hated. But Jean was too sick to travel. So Dad had an Army friend from Barstow film all of Disney on a Super-8. The guy walked the whole place. Jean watched it and watched it. Dad was one of these auto-optimists. To hear him tell it, we’d won an incredible last-minute victory. Hadn’t we? Wasn’t it something, that we could give Jeanie such a wonderful opportunity?

But Jean had been distilled down to like pure honesty.

“I do wish I could have gone, though,” she said.

“Well, we practically did,” Dad said, looking panicked.

“No, but I wish we really did,” she said.

After Jean died, we kept her room intact, did a birthday thing for her every year, started constantly expecting the worst.

Believe it or not, there's a happy ending. But even better, maybe there's such a thing as redemption in real life, too.

PITCHED A NUTTY? In the end, I think I like Piniella. Crazy can be good for baseball if it's the right kind of crazy, I say.

IT'S SUMMER, AND THE SKY SMELLS LIKE TRASH. One of the few downsides of living in New York City is the ubiquity of trash in everyday life. Walking out of work on this warm, moist summer night, the sky smelled like trash. The gentle breeze reeked of refuse. The hot gust from the subway entrance, like urine. The sticky subway car, like an armpit. In February, it's a winter wonderland of garbage bags and beer bottle snow cones. In October, newspapers and used napkins mingle with the drifting brown and yellow leaves. Ah, the changing of the seasons! Still, it's better than the empty, unrelenting prettiness of partly cloudy, bone chilling San Francisco — an experience that a coworker accurately described as, "Like the worst day of Spring every day of the year." I'll take the stink and grime over that, that's for sure.

FROM NOW ON, I shall evaluate the loyalty of my friends based on whether they would back me up in a knife fight. This includes the girls. This is how it works. If this friend and I were, say, stuck on a prison planet and one of the other inmates started picking on me to the point where shivs were drawn and ready, would this so-called friend stand with me and make sure I didn't get jumped from behind? (Friend.) Or would he/she skulk in the shadows and pretend not to know me? (Not friend.) It's just something that occurred to me. And, I think, it's the only way to be sure.

INAUGARATION DAY and here we go again. The one bright spot – JibJab and their Monty Python-esque little balls of Flash fun. Sure, I laugh because it's wacky and goofy, but I also think it might be one of the most impressive uses of Flash animation yet. Not because of its technical sophistication, but because it's able to create its own aesthetic – instead of just passing as a poor man's cell animation or a slightly more ambitious Sunday funny. (Likewise, this Radiohead video is also very good.)

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a pig. Lots of pigs. Or maybe locusts. Unbelievable.

JON STEWART BROKE MY TV. It's easy to forget you live in a big machine . . . until someone lays the smack-down on a couple of the cogs. For more in-depth analysis, some guy at Salon.

I SHOULD HAVE BEEN A PATS FAN. I wonder, did Sisyphus also have legions of fans back in Greece cheering him on with insanity-laced futile devotion? This is it, Sisyphus! This is the year! You've really got that rock beat this time!

OUR FEARLESS LEADER. It would be much funnier if it wasn't so damn scary. Other surreal points of interest: YouForgotPoland.com, OffroadDieselEngineEmissions.com.

IF CAPES WERE FASHIONABLE. . . . Jean jackets, bell bottoms, Polo shirts with the collars flipped up, mandals – they all successfully crossed over to this side of acceptable. So why not capes? Think of all the colors, fabrics and styles that could stock the racks of Barney's, The French Connection, J.Crew and Urban Outfitters. With nearly limitless design potential, they're unisex to boot. The fashionistas, the metrosexuals, the bling crowd and just about everyone in-between could get in on the action. And I could wear one, too — joining the caped ranks of the stylish, the hip and the cool — all the while secretly pretending to be Superman.

REPUBLICANS IN THE WORKPLACE. It's not that I'm opposed. I'm just surprised. After all, when people spend many long days together doing about the same things as each other, it's easy to assume that you might also share many of the same views and attitudes toward the world at large. And then one day, one of you realizes the other is an alien species. Well, I guess it's not illegal. So what are you going to do? [20MB, ctrl-click or right-click link and save to disk.]

MONKS AND MONKEYS maybe show us the way forward. I dunno, just a little crack of light in the otherwise dark and dreary. First, the monk. Then the monkeys. Er, baboons.

SPRING HOPES ETERNAL. So after a long winter spent licking our wounds and shaking our heads, we begin again.

DESPAIR. Heartache. Misery.

NEXT, IT WILL BE LOCUSTS. The Red Sox have now humiliated the Yankees for two games in a row. They've gone from seven and a half games back to one and a half games back in the space of two weeks. Obviously, there's something off in the world – in a good way.

Of course, this is probably just the tantalizing lead up to the crushing disappointment. Here are two quotes describing the self-flagellation that is the condition of being a Sox fan. In the Globe, David Halberstam recounts the experience of a fan who inherited his love for the Sox down through the generations:

First they killed my father. Now they're coming after me.

And another, off the tee-vee:

Being a Sox fan is like watching the Wizard of Oz and Dorothy and Toto die at the end.

Anyway, here's to October. Or did I speak too soon?

JIGGLY. JIGGLY? GIGGLY. GIGGLY? This little internal dialogue goes through my head at least twice a day -- on the way to work and on the way back. The source of the confusion is the subway poster for a new movie, starring J. Lo and Ben Affleck, called Gigli. Jiggly? Giggly? The title, however, is only one of the many unsettling aspects of the poster. Altogether, it inspires bewilderment and a vague feeling of unsavoriness all over. Both on the way to work, when I am tired, and also on the way home, when I am tired. I wish it would go away and flop already.

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE FAT AND THROW LIKE GIRLS. Although I've been keeping one for months now, I'm still not quite sure what a blog is for. According to this New York Times article, I should be revealing the intimate details, embarassments, and intrigues of my friends' lives if I want any sort of readership. I'm thinking about it. You've been warned. (Actually, you haven't been, because no one's reading this right now.) I need advertising: I should buy banner ads. Or maybe a blimp.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE AD/PIECE OF COMMUNICATION? The question was being posed, via email, by an ad agency where I am counted among the pool of "steady" freelancers. My answer will be included in my bio:

The "You are here" graphic on any map at any mall, museum, theme park, tourist attraction, or information kiosk. It tells you everything you need to know in an eloquently minimalist triumvirate of monosyllables, dispelling confusion in an instant and bestowing reassuring order to unfamiliar surroundings. It also acts as the perfect Zen-like refrain as we grapple with the really big questions in life and try to get our bearings in a world filled to the piping hot brim with chaos and uncertainty: Where am I? You. Are. Here. Between the Baby Gap and the Food Court. Your place in the cosmos summed up in three simple words. Way better than "Just do it" — after all, what good is that supposedly beneficent mantra of marketing during an emergency bathroom crisis? You are here, and that's pretty much all you need to know to get to where you want to go next. Not coincidentally, it's also usually all you need to know to keep from peeing your pants. And that's no small thing indeed – making it plenty worthy of commendation in my book.

SCIENCE IS NOT OUR FRIEND. Or if it is, it's the sobering, semi-snooty one nobody really wants to pay attention to even though he's saying yards of interesting and useful things — it's just that you don't want to encourage the arrogant, little know-it-all. I recently crossed over to the pages of Discover Magazine from Wired via the writings of Steven Johnson. Instead of the thinly veiled hype that science and technology will either doom or save us all in the next five years, which seems to be Wired's editorial bag, Discover is full of examinations into how humans are basically muppets, with thousands of years of evolution and biology pulling the strings — but, hey, the Universe is so big and so full of impossible stuff we'll never comprehend there's no reason to dwell on the fact that we're just educated slime mold to begin with and — ooh! look at that crazy chemical reaction! — neato.

Anyway, this month I learned that nice and fuzzy are basically invented PR terms if ever applied to the natural world. Big, male chimps will kill little, baby chimps if they're not quite sure who's their daddy – which is just another observation in the long string of observations regarding the complexities and conflicts of parenting ("The Hardy Sarah Blaffer Hrdy"). Dogs only like us because they've been pre-disposed by evolution to cast their lot with ours, so their affections seem nearly as mechanical as AIBO, Sony's robotic version of my favorite kind of cuddly canine quadraped ("AIBO as Research Tool"). And, here's a good one, the deer population is exploding to the point where the ravenous, inconsiderate Bambi-monsters are ravaging the ecosystems of forests across the country – and have to be hunted and killed in big, big numbers. This is a plan conservationists are for, and, oddly enough, both the Disney-fied public and hunters are joined very much against ("Oh, Deer").

Undoubtedly, the conclusions I've drawn here are not perfectly in line with the original intentions of the article's authors, but this is what I learned into my excursion into science – and which actually happens to be a reoccurring theme after any amount of targeted study into any specific area of human understanding: Nobody knows anything. Or to put it another way, we're only guessing here. We think chimps are cruel and barbaric, and then we read that some other poor human mother has left her newborn in the garbage. Dogs (our "best friends" for pete's sake) only like us because we know how to operate the can opener, and before that, because we knew how to spear a wooly mammoth. Save the deer, kill the deer — Bambi is the enemy. I'm sure next month will tell me more about how life is basically hard, cold, and cruel and the only real difference between us and the rest of the universe (so far) is that we agonize a little more over it.

But now I forgot to mention the bit in the magazine about the Aztecs and their obsession with violent deaths and human sacrifice ("Empire of Blood"). Apparently, one way in which this played out in their culture was that high priests would basically make jump suits out of people – wearing the dangling, bobbled flesh as part of a spring ritual celebrating renewal. Why don't they ever get into this stuff in school?

P.S. - Oh yeah, the war started. Forgot to mention, but I'm sure you noticed. So disregard the previous post. Bush is a crazy mofo, no doubt.