It's about time this weblog lived up to its name and featured some more moods. Here are some things that didn't go the way I would've liked today.
Woke up today on the first weekday morning in my new home and discovered that the traffic on my new street is very very very loud on weekday mornings. Didn't seem to have slept very well. Ran around looking for my shaving supplies, realized they must be packed away in one of the dozens of boxes stacked around the apt. Decided it was more important to get to work on time, so I left unshaven. At the train station, realized I had no wallet. Went back home, found the wallet, also found the razor—oh well. Halfway to work, I realized I had a doctor's appointment at 9 AM. Stopped there just in time, feeling pleased with myself till I realized I didn't have my new insurance card—which is also Packed In a Box Somewhere. Called the HMO, got a computer that said they had no record of me; the computer did not offer the option of speaking to a person. Sat listening to muzak for 10 minutes, then was given a new appointment for 3 weeks later. Got to work at 10 AM. My boss is out for 2 days so I'm filling in as assistant to the VP... and my boss hadn't bothered to inform the VP that I had a doctor's appointment that morning. So there were a bunch of messages telling me about urgent things to be done by 10 AM. But before I could get these messages (and the 125 spam messages that I got in the last 12 hours), I had to get into my office and now I discovered that my work keys were also P.I.B.S. Everyone else in the department was out. I called Security to let me in. A half-hour later I called them again. "Oh, the guy came up there already." No he didn't. "You said Stanford Building, right?" No, I said the Sacramento Street building. "Where's that?" Finally got into my office at 10:45, found urgent requests from the VP to locate a document in my absent boss's office and fax it to the VP; absent boss did not leave information on that, or on anything else (did leave me a paycheck, but it wasn't mine—had to track down the person who got mine). Couldn't find the document—called absent boss at home—she has no idea what I'm talking about. VP returned to the office at 11, immediately found the document, gave me a bunch more urgent requests. Everyone in the world called me to schedule meetings with the VP, who is never, ever available. Some very unpleasant person called me to complain at great and confusing length about a scheduling mistake by someone who has nothing to do with me. Finally, someone at work, trying to be helpful, told me that all of the above was because "Mercury is probably in retrograde." Oh yeah? So why are you having a good day?
Also, Schwarzenegger still hasn't gone away. And yes, I do know about other things going on in the world. I'm just having trouble finding any response to them other than putting my head on the desk.
Speaking of moods... when I posted those Daniel Berrigan quotes before, one of the responses I got was this (paraphrasing): Berrigan thought the ability of people to carry on "normal" life during the [Vietnam] war was a terrible thing, but shouldn't we always give life our all, including simple pleasures? That's a fair question. Of course that whole book is sort of a cry of pain (written in response not only to the war, but to Berrigan's experience of being kicked out of his country by his Church because he insisted on talking about the war), and it would be an eloquent expression of a common form of despair even if that's all it was. But anyway, later on in the book he clarifies that he doesn't think people can or should live in a state of permanent outrage:
Moral recoiling from every form of violence, if it is to be responsible, must avoid the paralysis that results from too intemperate a sense of horror. Our emotional life must be useful—to ourselves and others. Granted the real world is vicious and terrifying in many ways. But it is always bearable. A moral sense must submit to formation by the real; to the admission that nothing is too big, too real, too unreal to be lived with. Man is made for the world, even for our world. .... What light can you shed? Woe to the high-minded, over-fastidious man who merely pours darkness upon darkness.
I didn't write anything here in the last 2 weeks because I got suddenly very distracted with the question of where I was going to live after the end of August. Having moved to SF, after a couple of temporary situations I had ended up in an apartment share with two very nice people; unfortunately the one who had the lease ended up moving to San Diego and a new plan was necessary. I wasn't really relishing the idea of trying to find 2 or 3 or 4 more strangers to let me use an itsy bitsy corner of their space again.
So after I'd been looking at a bunch of ads and getting ready to take the next thing that came along, my pal Susan got fed up with living in a tiny studio and suddenly it seemed like a real good idea to go looking for a place together. Since we keep mentioning each other on the Internet I should probably explain that Susan is not my girlfriend, but someone I've known longer than just about anyone outside my family, and she is the bee's knees. Also she cooks and has a great music collection, so I'd have to be crazy not to do this.
We briefly had the wrong impression that there were a bunch of really cheap good two-bedroom apartments. Those ads turned out to be creative writing exercises(*)
After 3 years of living alone and then 8 months of tiny random shares, this is a pretty huge adjustment. Even weirder because I have the place to myself for the next 2 weeks so it's really, really ... big. High ceilings, echoey, could get kind of spooky if you're easily spooked ... eating a burrito the first night in total silence (not sure why I didn't put on any music) I felt kind of like Dave having his dinner in the glowing extradimensional hotel at the end of 2001. We'll have to have you all over for dinner some time soon. Might need to get a table first, though.
(So that's the end of at least some of this transitional stuff for a while. And in the same week, I got another kind of long-overdue closure: the Municipal Court of Elizabeth, NJ finally found me guilty of a traffic violation from eight months ago—driving my moving van in the left lane of a bridge, on the way out of New York—and sent me the bill. I don't know if that means I've officially lost my innocence or if it's just Mayor Quimby's leaving-town tax.)
Once again, real life threatens to distract me from the joys of typing a bunch of crap into a weblog. Some of the main distractions this month:
I went to a most excellent Giants game. We got there pretty early but still missed Bonds' homer by literally 5 seconds—climbing up the big stairs with the field almost in view, we heard everyone go totally nuts and saw the big blast of smoke they send up whenever the ball goes into the bay. Then the Padres wouldn't dare let Bonds hit anything for the rest of the game, so we had to be content with making chicken noises at the pitcher. P.S. I don't have a clue about baseball.
A 110-degree day fried the brains of Bay Area cartoonists and their screaming fans at the Sonoma County Book Fair. (Well, I heard some screams anyway and they might have been our fans.) Then we went to a lake and cooked food with fire.
I was exposed to the Folsom Street Fair for the first time. (Stop that—I mean my eyes were exposed.)
A whole bunch of furniture suddenly appeared in my house, so you can come over and sit down. A zillion books that hadn't seen the light of day since I left New York are now gamboling happily around the walls, on a variety of cheapo shelves that will warn us of impending earthquakes by falling down.
OK, back to the world of things that don't happen in front of my face but are announced on various machines everywhere, so you should already know:
It looks amazingly as if someone at the White House may actually get in trouble for one of their clumsier bits of funny business; a dangerous misuse of technology is finally getting some attention although possibly too late; and a really scary censorship effort in good old Pennsylvania has suffered a temporary setback but will be ruled on in November.
Also, dammit: the bus came to take him to the train / looks like we'll be blessed with a little more rain.
Possibly trying to get in on the "fantasy thrillers presupposing a very vague knowledge of literature from before 1950" game that began with Time After Time and fifty zillion Sherlock-Holmes-and-Frankenstein-versus-Poe-and-Bulwer-Lytton pastiches and reached its logical extreme in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Image Comics is now doing something called Heaven's War, in which C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and friends face off against Aleister Crowley in an attempt to seize the celestial gates or something.
This cheesy interview with the writer leads me to believe that the comic (a) will inform a few curious readers of the existence of that weird and wondrous author Charles Williams; (b) in terms of its insight into what the Inklings were talking about, will make Shakespeare in Love look like a doctoral dissertation; (c) will spark a bunch of deeply unilluminating message-board discussions, such as the one that follows that interview, about whether Crowley was evil or cool or both; and (d) will be awful.
It seems like a lame and unnecessary kind of pastiche to attempt, because Lewis and Williams already wrote plenty of good books about mild-mannered scholars getting mixed up in cosmic shenanigans—they just didn't star in those books themselves—and most Image Comics readers probably think of Lewis and Tolkien in terms of children's books rather than Christianity, so they won't get the joke, such as it is. Anyway, I can't imagine that someone whose summary of the Inklings is "They had similarities in their beliefs, but they were also different" is likely to write a story 0.0001% as interesting as, say, Perelandra or All Hallow's Eve. Unfortunately, being a little obsessive about these things, I'll probably have to at least thumb through it in the store.
(Brought to my attention by Slacktivist—who hilariously suggested that Image instead try adapting Williams' indescribable novel Descent Into Hell. Two of the main storylines in that book involve a historian sitting at home going slowly crazy, and a ghost wandering around doing nothing. I think Todd McFarlane should do it; I can just see him looking helplessly for something to draw fangs on.)