Saturday, October 20, 2007

Fugue Of Sorts

And so it's come to pass here on Singletails that what I try to do here is write literary essays. (Uneditited and straight-outta-my-head literary essays, but it is a weblog after all.) Although I started off with short little chunks, my aspiration has come to be descriptive passages about my Real Life experiences and whatever small insights might arise therefrom.

Well, we need to take a break from that, because I'm working too damn much. Being full time at Ho(t)me(n) Depot means that all day long there's this barrage of smokin hot men I'm presented with, truly taxing my erotic imagination. (It occurred to me today that me working at Ho(t)me(n) Depot is akin to a pedophile getting a job as a playground monitor. It's like, "Wait. Lemme get this straight. Not only are you not gonna chase me off the property, but you're gonna pay me for being here???"

But, over the past week or so, there's been plenty of thoughts passing through my head that actually had little or nothing to do with the autobody guy with ice-blue eyes and a chest like a dark brown angora sweater showing between the buttons on his blue Dickies shirt with hopes of success at being a house flipper to whom I was explaining how he could put together a great looking kitchen for about $5000 (Pause. Breathe.) but rather, I thought, would merit mention here in a posting.

So, here's a miscellany of some of those thoughts. Not in the form of a literary essay.

In the World Series, I'm liking the Rockies, those gutsy unknowns who are showing Major League Baseball that just because they were born while Ronald Reagan was President doesn't mean they can't play great baseball. Although, the Red Sox still have some of the hottest men in the major leagues--Varitek! Youklis! Drew! I am talking to you!--so whatever happens, it's gonna be worth watching . . . Philadelphia was just voted the City With The Ugliest People In America by Travel & Leisure magazine. On the local news, when they were getting man-in-the-street responses, one guy said, "Uhhh... Yeah. I guess that's true." . . . Run, don't walk, to see the movie Into The Wild. Amazing. Beautiful. And inspiring. Inspiring me to think about buying a Honda Element and spending a year driving around the country (mostly the West) with Faithful Companion along for the ride. And re-reading Jack Kerouac and Jack London. . . . So after a long hiatus, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy is back on the air. And is totally Weak. Luckily, Heroes and Mad Men are rocking my world. Could this mean that I'm becoming disenchanted with cheesy reality tv shoes? Time will tell. Season Four of Project Runway is in the works. . . . Okay. So a guy on my softball team told me that he's kicking out his problematic roommate, and he'd be happy to rent me his second bedroom in his NYC apartment for $500 a month and this great job that I'm totally qualified for has just become available up in NYC. So I could hook my father up with a eldercare agency to fix him dinner and keep him company and just be back here in the Howling Wilderness of Pennsylvania on weekends and spend Monday through Friday in New York City. The implications of this are so staggering that I've failed to grasp them. At all. In the immortal words of Rhoda Morgenstern, "New York, this is your last chance!" . . . My Hard Labor Ready gig this week was working for a husband and wife team who clean things. I was helping them clean this mammoth furniture store that's getting ready to open, even though the construction on the place is still going on. I spent 5.5 hours dusting and wiping down this awful furniture. It was all oversize and over-designed and really really really poorly made. We're talkin' crap. The finishing was so bad that I had to stop using the shammy cloth because it would grip the fibers and leave fuzz on the doors and drawerfronts. The reveals were all out of whack, and the cheap-o hinges weren't adjustable so the owners would have to live with it. As I worked, I kept asking myself, "Who is going to pay money for this crappy furniture?" And then it dawned on me: what better to fill your over-priced, poorly constructed, ostentatious McMansion than with over-priced, poorly built, ostentatious awful furniture? . . . My over-used quip of late: "Well, it's not a perfect world. And how do we know this? Because I can't get a Rueben at Quizno's, which would make a great Rueben if they wanted to. But that's all the proof you need that it's not a perfect world.

1 comment:

Jennifer said...

Do you have WG Grinders? Cause they make a decent rueben -- not a super deli rueben -- but very good for a sandwich shop.

I just read "Into the Wild" and wondered about how effectively it would translate to the screen. I will take your suggestion, though reading it made me want to never be more than 10 minutes from an outerbelt!

I love your blog, whether it's essays or small bits. You're amazingly REAL in this virtual world.

Go Indians!