Incline

If my posts are going to be this far apart, I oughta pick a theme without a date stamp so I can at least maintain the illusion of timeliness.

I seem to be in a perpetual competition with myself (the most dangerous competitor of all!) to see how long I can go without posting before I make some exploratory poke at a decent return.

Poke. Poke.

Usually, when I think I’ve got worries (Noboooody knows the trouble I’ve seen! / Nobooooody knows my soooooroooow), something happens to knock a little perspective into me.

In this case, “something” was a car, parked in Beverly Hills, spouting flames eight or ten feet into the night air for no discernible reason (though in my professional opinion*, somebody had torched the thing on purpose, and just moments before I came upon it).

*My services as a professional freelance conjecturer are available at very reasonable rates. Just ask!

For every official action (for instance, filing an insurance claim when a dipshit whips, beyond cavalier, through an illegal left turn, causing a nasty little crash), there is an officially sanctioned Way To Go About Things. So what does one do when the officials who are responsible for enforcing (on pain of being ignored, talked down to, and delayed) this Way To Go About Things throw their own rules out the window and, like trying to drive the car token in Monopoly diagonally across the board, from Free Parking directly to Go, start playing by new (made up) rules? An example, for the sake of illustration:

Say that insurance claim mentioned above was submitted to the insurance company of the dipshit (and say it was a rental car, on which the dipshit had purchased the optional insurance), and was approved, with no argument at all that the dipshit was entirely at fault. Say then that repairs were started on the car of other, non-culpable party (call him, for sake of argument, “Me,” “Myself,” or “I”). And then say that “I” received a letter from a different insurance agent at the rental car company, asking “me” for $5,000 because they’d decided “I” was at fault (and all of this, remember, while “my” car is in the shop for repairs that have already been approved and accepted as the responsibility of the rental car company). Now say that same insurance company has an average response time of 1-2 weeks per contact.

In that example, what might “I” do, short of selling all worldly possessions, shredding ID documents, and going off the grid to live (unhappily!) on the fat of the land, where cars do not and can not travel, to prevent “my” head from exploding into tiny little shards of bone and hunks of brain?

Any advice, thoughts, or reasons not to become a furious, anti-social hermit that “I” may not have yet considered?

windycitygirl:

Mmm cinnamon roll for dinner. Just because I technically am an adult doesn’t mean I have to act like one.

There are times when I point to things like this and say “My friend, ladies and gentlemen” with a slow shake of the head and times when I say the same thing in a Groucho voice, smile and give a thumbs up. As I was thinking, only moments before seeing this post, about how much I want a cinnamon roll (right this minute! now!), I say: “My friend, ladies and gentlemen.” Thumbs up.

Based on my written output (on-/offline) one might think I’d awoken one morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a perfect grump. It’s beyond my understanding, other than as some sudden-onset writing-induced clinical misanthropy.

I’ve grown so tired of the self-righteous condemnation of anybody who does not express (in every public forum available) loud, strong opinions about the real, significant problems that are currently facing our world. To those who are so quick to demand that everybody else stand in line to be handed a guilt trip on a silver platter, we should say the same thing that I say to the folks who hover outside the grocery store, clipboards in hand, implying that I am some kind of monster for not donating to their cause:

Not giving to you, right here, right now, is no indication of what or where I do give. Now quit yelling. You look like an asshole.

Having driven away from my home for a productive afternoon of reading and writing, I find that I have left both my notebook and my readin’ book behind. I am now faced with the prospect of an utterly unproductive four hours, unless one considers the fine arts of thumb twiddling and shoe gazing to be (somehow! some way!) a valuable use of spare time.

The hole in the ground that, this time last year, had only just been dug has been filled quite suddenly with a twelve story building. Like a delicate flower, it must need loads of direct sunlight to keep growing (thirteen stories? fourteen stories?), for it seems to have stolen all of mine.

Now I make do by turning on all of my lamps and overhead lights in the middle of the day and pretending that I am in Barrow, Alaska, waiting out the long dark winter, rather than in a ground floor Hollywood studio, muttering in the artificial light, spending endless hours on the phone trying to get my car repaired or replaced by the insurance company of the man who totaled it, growing my beard out longer than perhaps I should, feeding the stray cats in the alley behind the building, thinking that these are the conditions under which manifestos are scrawled on stained butcher paper.

I’ve been informed that I am a jackass for doing more writing in my handy little notebook than on the internet lately, and have been ordered by a very grumpy person to quit being such a hopeless recluse.

It’s an attempt I’ve made before, to mixed results.

A bit of Ms./Mrs. confusion has brought to mind something that I am usually able to (blissfully) ignore. That is, despite my age, I don’t know if I will ever be able to react to news of my friends and peers getting married with anything less than childish bewilderment.

It shouldn’t be such a strange thing anymore. Fresh out of high school, when those few friends who just sort of lingered in my hometown started immediately pairing off, now that was strange. But now? I’m at an age where I have to start thinking more about my high school reunion than about high school itself. I’m the best man at my (younger) friends’ upcoming nuptials. So why this with calling a former Ms. a Mrs.? What explanation could there possibly be for my inability to comprehend the word “marriage” the first time anybody says it, as if they’re mumbling some obscure word though a thick, unfamiliar accent?

I should know, by now, that visits home bring with them a certain melancholy, a specific longing for communication and connection that I find inexplicable. They also bring loads of spare time.

So, letters. If I know you, if I don’t, just tell me how to send you something. jb (at) jbmulholland.com.

Update: This is lovely! I’m already getting responses, and I’m thrilled to have letters to write. I’d love to have even more to write, though. Who else shall I add to the list?