Posted on February 25th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I have a lot of friends who are Russian. Every Russian seems to have seven nicknames but, as one of my friends pointed out, childhood photos from Soviet times all look the same. Those pictures, at least the ones I’ve seen, all seem to be of grumpy-looking children standing in the snow. I can see why: it’s the look of putting up with -20 degree temperatures while eating boiled cabbage every day and having to start learning algebra at age four. Then, when the scene shifts to America, the caterpillar suddenly becomes a butterfly: it’s all just pictures of rollerblading and running into things in the sunshine. All the happiness on display also seems easily explained by the fact that the child now has brightly-colored plastic junk all over the place to play with and won’t even have to learn English until they’re 15.

But while their childhoods might appear undifferentiated, taking away the ability to pursue money seems to have squelched the life drive of Soviet people into all kinds of improbable combinations like that of the father of one of my friends, who was a mathematician and “semi-professional” bodybuilder, though I don’t know what that really means, since everyone in the Soviet Union was semi-professional. I doubt the materials on hand to build your body with were very sophisticated, but on the other hand there were probably lots of abandoned heavy objects that didn’t work lying around that you could lift: broken-down cars, planks of wood, the old women at the internal passport office, derelict Soviet spacecraft. Well, every generation upon this earth through its stupidity performs a great service for its descendants by giving them something to look down on, and in this regard communism has been one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.

Posted on February 23rd, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

When I was little and read Batman comics, a silhouette of black pointy ears meant crime was about to be thwarted. Since I’ve had a cat, it’s come to mean no ankles can swagger around safely any more. A girl once told me the most embarrassing thing that could happen to you if you took Viagra would be to then run into a wall and break your nose. Whatever, I took Viagra and broke my nose and I was proud of it, but I guess that’s because there was no wall around. I would think the porn industry would be the harshest scourge of aging, but I realized it does have a social safety net of sorts: early in their careers porn actresses can do cougar films, and when they get too old for those they will be old enough to star in “barely legal” franchises. I’ve always thought that whatever one happens to say before fighting a duel should be considered an endangered language.

Posted on February 15th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

At a certain age I think most people stop wanting to apotheosize their birthdays and want instead to obliterate all memory of them. Fortunately for me and most of my friends, both impulses find identical expression. Maybe something about that simplicity made me able, while we were staggering around downtown last night on my friend’s birthday, to perceive the inner logic of the systems that surround me constantly.

For instance, I could never see why the Boulder authorities seem to want provoke the most drunkenness in its residents every weekend with the fewest transportation options possible. But I had failed to look at the situation in Leninist terms: covert radicals that they are, the people that run this town must be trying to “heighten the contradictions” until they boil over into open insurrection. But they have forgotten another participant in the dance of intoxicants: in a place with as much pot smoke drifting through the air as Boulder, it’s practically inconceivable that things could ever really come to a head. The most they will probably ever amount to is outraged sentiments expressed in a sleepy voice, like an angry reggae song, which always sound like a speech given by a revolutionary immediately after having his wisdom teeth removed.

I suddenly also realized, for good measure, that the popularity of Mormonism maybe doesn’t demand as much explanation as I used to think, since probably it’s not even supposed to be a belief system with a structure to put any weight on, but rather, much like the plot of a porno, just the minimum number of wheels in motion necessary to connect a man to 15 wives.

Posted on February 11th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Have you ever noticed that in Monet paintings smog seems to be the actor playing all the main roles? Today smog probably would need to disguise itself as the side of a cliff or an ornamental Japanese bridge in order to hide from the banditry of environmentalist brigands. Though actually smog might be coming back into style, now that the alternative to air pollution is getting run over by a horde of out-of-control Priuses. Priuses are now like the pull-out method of the automotive world: they seem like a great idea until it’s time to actually come to a halt.

Posted on February 8th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I always enjoy how marketing expands our consciousness towards new and stupider horizons. Last week I saw a motion-activated soap dispenser commercial that tried to frighten the simple people of America with the news that soap pumps have “hundreds” of germs on them, which would make them cleaner than your skin by several billion organisms. But leaving that aside, my first thought was, “This is indeed troubling information. It is so fortunate, then, that the very next thing you touch after touching a dirty soap pump is soap.” Later, I was reading a review of the history of the condom which was supposed to impress with the rigorous safety testing procedures condoms undergo, such as being attached to balloon pumps and inflated as large as they can be before bursting. Thing is though, unless somebody’s dick has a tumor of superhuman proportions attached to it, I really don’t see what good that does, or what it proves. They should be tested to see if they can stand up to being rubbed like someone’s trying to start a fire. I think it’s much more pertinent to what people are doing with them to know if high amounts of friction would cause them to rip or, well, catch fire. It would be fascinating if, upon further review of testing results, condom packages started coming out with warning labels like: “Only safe to be used from the front. Anal presents fire hazard. Use at own risk.”

Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I now know that there’s at least one gun store in Boulder. I have laid eyes upon it. It’s not even that far from the Naropa Institute. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, even in a place like Boulder, since society generally tolerates two kinds of people: those it wants to tolerate, and those that are armed. In any case, it’s good to know that there’s at least one good rally point in case of zombie attack, especially since if we hid out there liberal yuppie Boulder zombies probably wouldn’t even know where to look for us, whereas if we went to the tea house or the pottery store they’d find us in five minutes. There are lots of taxidermic deer and elk heads in the gun store, I assume because that’s what most people that buy guns around here are shooting at, unless they’re target shooting, and clay pigeons or plastic bottles don’t make very triumphant-looking trophies. But I wonder what they would have hanging in, say, a Russian gun shop–journalists?

I learned a lot about Boulder social mores the day I went to the gun store with friends to buy ammo. Leaving town afterward to head into the mountains, I discovered that it’s not considered littering to throw orange peels out your car window, since they’re biodegradable. I need to ask to see if that also applies to babies. When we finally got to our mountaintop shooting range, it was full of people blasting away. I wasn’t annoyed at all: I think it’s important for as many people as possible to be trained to shoot a gun. After all, there are a lot of shoplifters out there. And in that connection, I think it’s unfair that when shooting a plastic bottle you get less points for accuracy for a low shot that makes it wobble around and then fall over. I think you should get more.

Other popular targets at the range that day included an Obama/Biden campaign sign and a picture of Osama bin Laden. When the wind knocked the bin Laden sign over and the owners couldn’t find it for a couple of minutes, I think I came to see how bin Laden disappears so quickly into the rocks and hills. Later, coming down the mountain we got stuck behind an SUV with a Obama/Biden sticker moving about 15 mph. I wished that was the Obama sign that was bullet-ridden. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that a car being driven so timidly should encase an Obama supporter, but even health care reform wasn’t that slow. I didn’t let it irritate me overly though, consoled by the thought that guns and mountaintops don’t necessarily have an exclusive relationship.

Posted on January 29th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Who says math can’t be entertaining? Even the simplest equations can, like cat + shower. Of course, only one of my cats can actually clamber up the stairs to the shower and poke her face into the deluge. The other one has too much joint pain to even lick herself clean. Consequently her fur is all matted, which I used to find gross, but now I can sort of appreciate. It’s like having a pet mountain range. I would wager she spends a lot of her time lying awake, having to go to the bathroom but not wanting to get up until she can’t stand not to. She follows the course of the sun around the room she sleeps in all day, starting by the east wall in the morning, moving to a chair on the north side in the afternoon and finally to the couch by the fireplace in the southwest corner in the evening. And like the sun, she never reverses direction. All of her limbs are more or less vestigial at this point. It’s a bit sad, but on the other hand, now that she’s outsourced both the transporting of herself to her food bowl every day her insulin production to humankind, I think she has thrown her hat in all the way with civilization, and she acts like it.

Posted on January 28th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I find it interesting that half the country seems to be under the impression that Harvard, like all the other famous universities in the country, is run by a bunch of communists, since it’s definitely the most capitalistic organization I’ve ever been a part of. And since they had an endowment of something like $33 billion when I entered, I naturally assumed that they were good at making money. But in the last year they’ve lost around $10 billion, and in response started making cutbacks.

They’ve always made a specialty of moves like collecting bills at the beginning of the month but not issuing salaries until the end. But now they’re adopting even more popular measures like cutting free coffee in the break rooms and lowering the thermostats in buildings four degrees during the winter. Within days of their first announcement of losses after the investment banks started collapsing last year I noticed that the motion-sensing lights in the graduate dorm laundry rooms were changed to turn off within 10 seconds without motion. The light would turn off during the time that it took for me to load my clothes into the machine. And then I’d have to walk to the other end of the room, stand under the sensor and wave my arms for a good five seconds before they would turn back on. Never have I found it so hard to convince man or machine that I exist.

Now I think I’m starting to see how they lost all that money. They have no idea where it came from or went to. They lose $10 billion through bad real estate investment and over-exposure in the stock market and they’re looking for it in the coffee carafes. Don’t be deceived by the physical resemblance of the faces on the money that you give to coked-up investment bankers and the money you give to the energy company. They’re really not related. Harvard is like an old woman who leaves her purse in a restaurant and, when she notices, starts poking the first teenager she sees with her umbrella, convinced he stole it.

Posted on January 25th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | 3 comments »

After mounting a campaign that thrust deep into enemy territory, the back and forth along the horizon between earth and sky in Shanghai has become a stand-off again. Have to keep giving people a reason to look up though, distract them from looking down and remembering how many fetuses of baby girls are buried in the ground. The world economy may be grinding slowly, but after having come all the way out of Africa, I don’t think humanity is going to go back in. Although…I don’t quite understand all the tension at the nexus between race and sex, since we’re all black in the dark. But if building upwards doesn’t start again, it will remain what I see from my window, buildings neither tall nor short, beautiful nor ugly. It’s the suburbs, and I know it doesn’t stop from here until the ocean. America is a suburb. It’s the only world power that has to commute just to participate in history. In my hometown I feel like I’m constantly living in the recent past. A couple of weeks ago a girl asked me if choking was a big new sexual trend. God only knows why, maybe she read a story in Cosmo about it. I told her she probably doesn’t need to sort out her feelings about it in advance, since if some guy is sitting there eagerly wanting to choke her and asks her if he can, whatever she answers will probably produce the same result.

Posted on January 13th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I went to an open-mic comedy night at someplace called the Squire Lounge last night with two friends, the name being important only insofar as I dare say it found itself elbowed into more slanderous tirades directed against various people’s bodily orifices than any other title of chivalric rank has before. Inside the bar was the kind of motley grouping which didn’t lend itself to any shared social classification, no matter how broad, except maybe “evacuees sheltering from a natural disaster.” It was a vaguely endearing place nonetheless, with some sort of yarn creation wrapped around a pillar like a knitting project that had regrettably failed to turn into a pair of socks, as well as, up in the rafters, a disembodied, seemingly female mannequin head with what one of my friends and I decided must have been a moustache shading its upper lip, only because I don’t imagine a mannequin would be designed with a harelip. The men’s bathroom had, besides a urinal, a sitter whose lips practically touched the walls on both sides, probably because the owners were tired of people taking dumps on the floor on either side and determined to provide no room for error.

We sat in a semi-circular booth with a two-step rise near the stage. I thought that that kind of set-up by itself practically seemed like an implied invitation for a lap dance. One of my friends claimed that that wouldn’t work because the booth was too high off the ground. I liked that the only problem she saw with the idea was the elevation of the furniture, not the fact that the only people in our near vicinity were bums sheltering from the cold and a couple of people guessing the gender of whom, we decided, could replace bar trivia contests on the nights where there was no act. Finally the performers came on one at a time. Much wonderment at ethnic differences was expressed. A general lack of interest in babies without exciting mental illnesses or poignant disappearances into garbage dumps or the hands of pedophiles was implied. I learned that a much bigger groundswell of dissatisfaction with the state and nomenclature of the vagina exists than I would have suspected.

Outside the bar a bouncer was trying to shoo the smokers on the sidewalk off to more than 15 feet from the building. Most of the art-school types walked further down the street. The hobo wearing the hard hat, on the other hand, had, I take it, armed himself to pursue the opposite strategy. On our way home, a sudden unexpected need to go to the bathroom on the part of the girl provoked a discussion as to how long-haul truckers manage to drive all day without having to stop for that purpose, my guy friend holding that they take anti-diuretics to suppress the urge. Whereas I had assumed that the usual trucker strategy was to accumulate enough veneral diseases that it would hurt too much pee. So that, like in most primitive societies, fear would fill the role of science.