Posted on June 26th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I like to hear the rumble of thunder in the air, I think it shows that God is still hungry. He has no more need of inquisitors here on earth below: the weightlifters of the world are hard at work like snails salting their own pseudopods. Not only do they pull and poke and yank at themselves with racks, whips and pulleys in dungeons of their own devising, but most of the unpleasant things that come out of their mouths in the throes of a huge squat, for example, seem to almost take the form of thwarted prayers which have turned away from heaven’s direction like ingrown toenails. Why do I torture myself like this too? Maybe I’m haunting my own body. Sometimes I don’t feel quite aligned with it. I’ve started to think that travel is a continuous display of disloyalty to your home, but perhaps under your own skin there isn’t a home either. Progress doesn’t refine existence, it just magnifies it. Supposedly the king at Versailles would hold court while sitting on his commode. Big deal. Today you can sit in chair kind of like that, encased in a metal box, and let the toxic fumes spewing out the back shoot you down the highway at 70 mph. Since for humankind a vibration in the throat seems to be the appropriate response to virtually everything-love, a flower, attack from the air by bat-it’s a pity we can’t have a flaring of the gills as well.

Posted on June 20th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Every prophet describing the rewards that await after death runs the risk of making promises they can’t keep, but they could at least stand to be clear about what they’re offering. When Mohammed offered the potential martyrs to his faith 72 virgins, which supposedly may also be translatable/interpretable as 72 raisins or grapes, he chose a fine time to get all cagey with his devotees. Even if they are real virgins, I’ve always thought applying to a liberal arts college with lots of English majors was a simpler and less destructive way to find more than 72 of them than blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, though I’ve known more than one person who has probably thought about doing the latter after having a college application rejected. And then too I’m not sure you could find that many virgins at my undergraduate institution, but I attribute that at least in part to the decision of the founder, despite being named Philander, to erect the college as a seminary 50 miles from the nearest city in order to discourage the students from drinking or having sex, whereas in reality, with no city and hence no cultural activities to speak of within the next three counties, students now do virtually nothing else. But at least that attempt to impose chastity for religious reasons went less brutally awry. And those that do decide to kill themselves in some excessively dramatic way in order to get their virgins better hope that those virgins aren’t the other 71 guys that had the same idea.

Of course if it is just grapes, well, ordinarily I don’t feel like death is warranted to attain that which can be gotten as $3.99 blue light special at the supermarket. But how is it that any language or culture could get grapes and virgins confused in the first place? When are those two things interchangeable? I grant you they both bleed red when you poke them, but still. At least you can de-virginize the grape juice by making it alcoholic. So maybe the prophet is leaving a subtle clue that God is really just like one of the sleazy owners of what one of my friends calls “lady bars,” and all his promises, like theirs of “Ladies! Ladies! Hot! Hot!”, is really just a ruse to get people to come in and buy overpriced booze, and will eventually trickle away, like so many nights on earth, into excessive drinking and a disappointed wank-off.

Posted on June 19th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Yesterday my parents and I went to an upscale Mexican restaurant, which blessedly broke the chain of indistinguishable enchilada-and-burrito shacks metastasizing throughout Denver. But this restaurant was the exception that proves the rule: as soon as the white tablecloths and red wine come out, the waiters and busboys drawn from the owner’s 25 teenage cousins, who are almost capable of growing a single mustache among the lot of them and who seem so intrinsic to the experience of the Mexican restaurant, immediately disappear. Actually, I kind of missed those guys. I didn’t even get to hear incomprehensible and barbaric Mexicali slang being hurled listlessly back and forth over the heads of the uncomprehending gringos, who naturally sometimes get intentionally or incidentally tarred by it en route. This is why I don’t agree with people that think that Spanish and English are just going to merge together seamlessly into one big homogeneous mass. Like in medieval England, where the all the farm animals had Germanic names, whereas the meat and other food delicacies were in French, even if they do ultimately create a combined polyglot I suspect English and Spanish will remain more neighbors than sexual partners, rubbing against each other but monopolizing different areas and regions of life, with English confining its influence to things like flowers, financial chicanery and the more esoteric sorts of sexual degeneracy, while Spanish dominates the realms of cleaning supplies, weed whackers and domestic abuse.

Posted on June 15th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

In this impudent little suburb, people stare at me all the time like real estate agents or child molesters. I feel picked out of a crowd. Today is my birthday, so I went to have a drink with a couple of friends at a boutique beer bar in Denver last night. We sat on the patio, a charade Coloradans maintain even though it has become an obsolete social custom, since instead of its usual progressivist, rationalist sunniness the climate has entered a Romantic or Modernist phase, with the perpetual gloom and mopey dampness of a uterus. With the little residual headache I have from last night, today I feel like a fetus being aborted.

A girl who was there with us asked if dogs are color-blind. That would represent a certain social ideal, but I have my doubts. What about like those racist dogs that have been trained to only bark at Mexicans? She also praised the nudist maniacs who staged some sort of semi-protest bike ride in Boulder the other day in support of their crusade to be allowed to always be on the go with no clothes on or something. With that as their ideal, the residents of a refugee camp are already living in a better world.

On the way home I couldn’t help nodding off in the front seat. My friend who was driving me said I looked like I was watching opera.

Posted on June 4th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Many people assume that the Genesis story must be the work of a misogynist because of the supposedly nasty way it presents Eve, but I suspect the hand of a woman. The original sin comes about because of a woman eating when she’s not supposed to, then she persuades her heterosexual life partner to do likewise and they and their descendants have to spend the rest of eternity exercising it off. What man would have that much of a dietary hang-up? I also don’t understand how any modern day evangelists can read that and conclude that work and labor are as sacred as God’s own pet iguana. Isn’t the whole point that work and labor themselves are the punishment and payback for unredeemed miscreants? Yet they go about praising work like S&M enthusiasts contemplating being whipped and flayed in hell. If the Bible were really written in that spirit God would have been bragging about achieving full global employment after exiling Adam and Eve and having rid the Garden of welfare queens and social parasites.

Whatever, this is far from the only economic concept on which the usual social views are completely contradictory. The media, in particular, love to write stories about how peoples’ lack of confidence in the market and pessimism about the future will cause the collapse of the economy. And they seem incapable of looking both directions on anything. If inflation has stopped, we are in dire danger of deflation. If they were reporting on crossing a street, no one would ever make it to the other side. If no cars were coming from the left, they would announce that all the cars on the street must therefore be coming from the right, casting grave doubts on the possibility of ever making it past the lane divider. My theory, on the other hand, is that anyone will do any job with the right manipulation. For instance, scientists have been trying to cultivate special prokaryotes that can clean up oil spills and radioactive material by ingesting them. Whereas I’m pretty sure if you just added enough sugar and caffeine and carbonated the whole mess teenagers from near and far would come to lap it up.

Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

When not flying around the world incessantly in private jets hectoring people to use less fossil fuels, Al Gore and his ilk may see themselves as trying to preserve the “pristine” places of the world, but even the most audaciously tall mountain or reprehensibly tick-filled forest is fenced in–by expectations, ideology and idées reçues. They are, in short, big clichés. Me, I dream not of saving points in space but moments in time that haven’t yet been cut and plowed and mowed over, but which my imminent employment severly endangers with regimentation. Like the pre-dawn, that dark Scandinavia-like continent where the wind blows and the sun refuses to shine. Or the period before a summer afternoon thunderstorm, when color shines from the plants particularly luridly, as if they were going to explode from within before getting swept away from without. These moments come and go so quickly, whereas the seeing eye unimaginatively remains, that I think perhaps the mind, like most other things that are able to last a long time, is the most insensitive rather than the most sensitive part of its environment, like the skull that endures after the eyes and nose and tongue and brain have vanished. Maybe these little moments of the day can only survive there, in the memory by transforming into a harder, lifeless form, like petrified wood, in which mineral deposits fill up the cell walls, replacing the meat of the tree with stone.

Posted on May 25th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Although recently talk of “accountability” and “change” has engorged the sails of political blather in Washington like a giant erection, the plan to shut down Guantánamo while simply spreading the detainees around to different prisons around the world, as if Guantánamo’s particular genius loci had any intrinsic importance, puts me in mind of those McDonald’s McCafé commercials where coffee makes people feel better about their menial and/or degrading tasks. I have visions of CIA agents electrocuting the nads of some Iraqi car thief to gain information about the movements of the Taliban in western Pakistan–”torture.” Then, the same scene, but now with the agents holding mochas with whipped cream–”torturé!”

The reform impulse isn’t necessarily completely insincere; I doubt even the CIA agents imagined that their training would consist of a kind of bizarro reverse medical school. But the fact that the government apparently doesn’t plan on prosecuting anyone important enough to actually give a real order reminds us that the wheels of justice conform to the same rules that 18-wheelers do at the interstate weigh stations: how much you pay depends on how much weight you have to throw around. Lord knows we’ve seen that monogamy, the amusing idea that the blind wildfire of love should be directed with the precision, stability and exclusivity of property rights, is about the only principle in the name of which they are willing to call the headest of honchos to account. I suspect this is largely because, with the exception perhaps of a few of D.C.’s costliest and most decorated hookers, this kind of scandal only implicates the individual target, rather than the entire political class. The relative infrequency of other kinds of scandal is probably because the warring factions are only once in a while able to unearth shady dealings of their rivals that don’t involve their own side as well.

Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | 4 comments »

Yesterday I went to my brother’s graduation ceremony at UPenn. I recognized the stadium from that movie Unbreakable, and M. Night Shayamalan was a fitting patron saint for those three hours of action-packed rhetoric. Bridges were built, paths were blazed, the walls of Plato’s cave were flickered upon, marathons were planned, then abandoned, and above all, differences were made (or at least promised). Since a professor of classics was presiding over the second half, I was hoping for some application of the principles of Demosthenian oratory, or at least the recycling of a bit of rancorous invective against the Macedonians, but it was not to be.

I guess it doesn’t matter, the auditory element can’t be preserved in picture form, and most parents were there to create a photographic record of the specialness of their children by watching them dress up in identical formless robes and collect in a swarm of 10,000 to sit in rows and be harangued mass rally-style. I admire the principle of making the world’s most highly educated put on silly hats and get-up before they can receive their diplomas, but I find it interesting that girls go out and buy the most luxurious, colorful dresses, just to bury them under a big black burqa. They should just buy the ones whose two inches of hem will look the best peeking out from underneath some billowing pancho- or mumu-like contraption.

I’ve decided graduation ceremonies are a lot like funerals: people dress in black, drink slightly too much and listen to someone behind a pulpit tell lies about the departed or soon-to-be departed. Given the dogmas and clichés nesting them in our culture, every funeral should be happy and every graduation sad, but of course the opposite is generally the case. I guess if the dogmas came naturally to be believed, they wouldn’t need to be constantly repeated.

Posted on May 8th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I see ads all over the city bragging about how McDonald’s uses grade A eggs. Let’s hope they’re not using the Harvard grading scale. Most people admit to not understanding economics, but it would take a psychic not to see the direction things are headed now. Religion and comedy are the tragically separated Siamese twins that could not survive apart, having one eye apiece and sharing all their vital organs. The 10 Commandments must have been thought up by someone who didn’t know gossip. Don’t look too much at faces looking back at you, they give you a distorted image of yourself. Get too big and powerful and you split into factions–even within a single person’s mind. The body is a concentration of destiny. I have the same relation to geometry that a drunk has to the lines of a street. The higher divinities shouldn’t need to actually exist to work their wills.

My name is there not for others to recognize me by but to help me recognize myself. Because as Joseph Brodsky hinted, the mind is totalitarian: whichever of the vying factions wins out in any particular internal debate insists on monopolizing not just the acquiescence but the volition of the entire self, and often manages to dupe the outside world as to the unanimity of the whole through that reverend organ of propaganda, the human voice. Or maybe not; I sometimes think writing aphoristically is like pressing coffee and only keeping the grinds. I’ve lost my taste for waking up in the dusty barrio of a hangover. At best, it flattens out, at the end of the day, into a mopey ocean climate.

Posted on April 24th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | 3 comments »

Since Al Gore spoke at Harvard last fall, the campus has been plied with a new slogan: “Green is the New Crimson.” I guess the university is making a noble gesture of support for color blindness–and, hence, for more traffic accidents. Or maybe they are simply admitting the validity of our suspicions about the Green Parties, with their motley assortment of ruffians, ex-communists and compañeros de viaje. On the other hand green being the new crimson will make it a lot less scary if, as revolutionaries of that ilk usually do, they eventually turn on those they claim to be working to benefit, and vow to make the gutters run green with the sap of the enemy’s chlorophyll.

This may be their hour, since the world is well set on the green-friendly policy of massive impoverishment, having previously adopted the unorthodox but surprisingly uncontroversial economic growth strategy of sucking its own dick, and then being surprised when it didn’t get pregnant. The signs of decay are everywhere. I was watching my hometown team, the Denver Nuggets, play last night, when I realized that although they’re pretty good, they still might be more accurately classified as a horde than a team, and if I saw the lot of them charging down the court at me the proper response might not be to drop back into a zone defense or whatever but to do what the Roman and Chinese Empires did on their northern borders and construct a big wall or fortification of some kind to keep them out. But they’re my hometown team, already inside the gates, so I guess there’s nothing for it but to be cautiously on the side of the sackers and pillagers.