“The temperature had fallen with the sun.  Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind roll across the incline and desert floor.  Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores being slowly to open, hopeful of dew.  The American Steeply produced small exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm.  Only one or two remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radials blades of the sun found crevices between the Totolita’s peaks and probed at the roof of the sky. There was the slight and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night, emerging.  The sky was violet.”

As few living humans’ birthdays as I celebrate, I celebrate even fewer dead humans’ birthdays.  Specifically, I celebrate two dead humans’ birthdays: David Foster Wallace and Johnny Carson.  I celebrate Johnny Carson’s birthday because it is coincidentally my birthday, and my birthday is one I’m keen on celebrating regardless, no disrespect meant to The King of Late Night.  I celebrate David Foster Wallace’s birthday because he wrote the words above, and many other words, words that were and are true, beautiful reminders of why certain people should not be allowed to suffer, to die, to miss their own birthday celebrations.

What’s so significant about this excerpt specifically, though?  Let me see.

Sentence 1: The temperature had fallen with the sun.

Significance: This sentence does more, as most Wallace sentences do, than traffic in generalities.  The key here, and everywhere, is movement, liveliness, the complex conveyed simply.  He begins somatic and general (The temperature), modulates and specifies the generality (had fallen (become cold)), and then redefines the established subject by evoking a general visual image of warmth.  In seven words, he navigates from the subcutaneous to the interstellar, and he does so without wasting a breath.

Sentence 2: Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind roll across the incline and desert floor.

Significance: First, Wallace spatially fixes the reader with Marathe, a physical embodiment.  From there, the reader is given what Marathe hears (the cooler evening wind (Rehashing Sentence 1′s prestidigitations), suddenly finds himself located in the sound, then that sound is attributed to the wind, and suddenly the reader finds himself located in the wind, moving across the incline (lateral and descendent movements) to the desert floor, a body disembodied, a stationary man atop a mountain suddenly an element in motion on the desert floor below.

Sentence 3: Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores begin slowly to open.

Significance: This sentence thrusts the reader back to Marathe, conveys his experiential confusion (“sense or feel” (which should, by now, mirror the reader’s) before moving into (Note, too: The alliteration of “many million” to aurally evoke plenty.) a more terrestrial, animate destination that reveals itself gradually, as the reader begins with the abstract multitude, a largeness, but then is presented with floral pores, which denote smallness, an intense, specific image of life, divorced from Marathe, but not as much as the wind moving across the desert floor making those flowers nod in exuberant agreement (Note, too, too: How these metaphors are beginning slowly to open).

Sentence 4: The American Steeply produced small exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm.

Significance: From the flowers on the microscopic level to man on the microscopic level, the scene’s other main character, Steeply, is introduced through evocation of the preceding smallness, but simultaneously are the preceding scenic descriptions employed to characterize the two characters.  Unlike Marathe’s sentences, Steeply’s remain fixed in his person, and the reader can see his self-involvement, and Marathe’s being unlike that.

Sentence 5: Only one or two remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun found crevices between the Totolita’s peaks and probed at the roof of the sky.

Significance: Like sentence one, the reader moves from the passage’s most personally grounded moment to outer space, up the sun’s blades, back down to a specific mountain chain’s peaks, back up to the general sky (Note, too, too, too: How inundated this sentence is with images of sharpness (tips, spikes, blades, peaks) and how those harken cognitively back to the scratch on Steeply’s arm).

Sentence 6: There were slight and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night, emerging.

Significance: Metaphor for every metaphor in the passage, metaphor for human existence as a whole.

Sentence 7: The sky was violet.

Significance: Let things be simple and simply beautiful when you can, when you’ve earned it.

As human beings with birthdays, it is inherent to our nature to distrust those whose thinking is fundamentally different than our own.  Yet, on occasions few and far between, we are to recognize an individual who observes the world so differently, so idiosyncratically, so profoundly the opposite of how we go about letting what’s out there into our eyes that our view cannot help but be changed, tinted if ever so slightly towards that individual’s way of seeing things, words, and, most significantly, ourselves.  We cannot, and should not, help but love this person, to celebrate him, living or dead, on his birthday or not.

But you were not immune, William Henry Harrison.  Underneath that veneer of moral fortitude and equanimity was a vulnerable man, a prideful man, a man naked to the icy gales of slander, as all men are, deep down.  You took your opponents’ words to your formidable heart.  To prove your mettle, your resiliency, you delivered your inaugural address-the longest in history, coming in at nigh two hours-on an uncharacteristically freezing March Day, sans coat or hat.  You caught pneumonia, and died thirty-two days later, a trailblazer to the end.

A certain brand of men meet death quietly, assuredly.  From this world they fade gracefully, and are remembered, and then forgotten, as good, sure men.  Another brand of men meet death in a callow, self-destructive manner entirely counter to their lives up until that point, and are remembered, and then remembered, as good, sure men just the same.  William Henry Harrison, surely you were, and remain to be, the latter.  I salute you, this day after President’s Day.

The Rallying Cry of The Presidency of William Henry Harrison

Old Tip he wore a homespun coat, he had no ruffled shirt: wirt-wirt,
But Matt he has the golden plate, and he’s a little squirt: wirt-wirt!

Downton Abbey is, through and through, a melodrama, but, like the medium within which it operates, the show’s seeming inanity betokens actual depth.  At a glance, much of what is presented seems hackneyed, the exceptionality stemming only from how the creators managed to corral so many painstakingly pale people.  It is a costume drama that through exploration of the past’s mores and practices seeks to make comment on the present’s.  For the most part, Downton Abbey, accomplishes these tenets of the genre adequately, but what it does expertly is providing the illusion that these things are being done expertly, so much so that the illusion becomes reality, and suddenly Mr. Bates’ cane is a metaphor for your entire life.

Like the cane upon which Mr. Bates must ballast, so too does Downton Abbey rely upon television’s most affecting and manipulative contrivances.  Every technical aspect of the show gongs with intelligence, or, if not intelligence, intense care for what is being conveyed.  But, though the show can operate as exemplar of how television can strike the golden symmetry between entertainment and art, it also demonstrates the extent to which literary strategies have wormed into television in the wake of The Sopranos, The Wire, arguably John From Cincinnati.  Characters characterize and re-characterize themselves, plot lines unfurl over the course of a season, if not multiple seasons.  It has fierce sense of setting, time period, the subjects at hand.  It’s methodology is demonstrably novelistic, and those elements may not be drawn from the best novels, but the show’s execution presents the argument for television’s supplanting of the written word as the predominant outlet of serialized story-telling, if not story-telling in general; that image could conquer the written word if it understands the written word enough.

The evolution of narrative storytelling may, in the end, not allow for multiple varieties.  And who is to say we would be worse off if books and literature fell to the way side?

I would, doy.  I’m not vlogging this post for a reason.  Words do things that images can’t, as images do things words can’t, and back, and forth, and the two mediums should not be mutually exclusive.  They should interact, for the betterment of each respective medium, and for the betterment of the reader, the viewer, the audience.

Not to say television doesn’t scare me.  Not to say what Downton Abbey says about the American television viewer doesn’t scare me.

Because when you’re dealing with television, with that degree of cultural and societal saturation, scares are legion.  Like, could the American infatuation with Downton Abbey be an unconscious acknowledgement of two centuries worth of American denial of the class system, of a collective yearning for an honest confrontation of these strict stratifications, that the refutation of the barrier is but another barrier?  Like, does Downton Abbey‘s captive, modern audience mourn for a time when communication was trivialized by facility, a time that, more than ever, is unable to be returned to? Like-and this goes to a lesser degree with Mad Men-why is the body politic so keen on shows that completely eschew the existence of minorities, that lionize white hegemony over society to a caricatured degree (Devil’s Advocating: Mad Men had Carla.  Downtown Abbey had Mr. Pamuk.  Note the past tenses employed.)?  Like, why waste so much time not only watching television but then thinking about watching television?

Well, because, and this may not have been the case before, now people are thinking about why they watch television, which is worth something.  It’s worth the time.

Downton Abbey Season One is streaming on Netflix (nee Quickster).

BUT NOW IT’S TIME FOR WHAT’S REALLY IMPORTANT

THE FOLLOWING SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS

 LADY MARY AND MATHEW ARE GETTING MARRIED!

IT’S A DESTINATION WEDDING,

AND THE DESTINATION IS AWESOMEVILLE.

#LESCOUSINSDANGEREUX

Her response: “Why would you want a cat?  They’re mean.  They’re anti-social.  All they do is lurk in the corner and send you threatening looks.  You can’t trust them.  You never know how they actually feel about you.  One second they’ll be creepily nuzzling your leg, and the next they’ll be hiding in your bread basket, waiting to claw out your eyeballs.”

My response: “You just described me.  I’m getting a cat.”

Before any of that can happen though, I have to come up with a name for my pussy.  I’ve assembled a short list, discounting human names (If you’re going to name your dog Steve, might as well name your son Sir Barkington, your daughter Spot.(Reflecting, if anyone actually did this it would be entirely justified.(Do this.))).

Potential Names For My Pussy

1. Chest of Drawers

Justification: I find chest of drawers to be one of the most evocative combinations of words in the English language, on par with “cellar door” and “The Sausage King of Chicago.”  If there’s a greater metaphor for human interconnectivity than our chests being a series of drawers in various stages of openness, some locked, some left glaringly open, then I will name my cat that.

Used in a sentence: “This is my cat, Chest of Drawers.”

2. The French Revolution

Justification: It is a little known fact that when a dissenter was put to death during The French Revolution, so too was his cat, by way of a to-scale cat guillotine.  This would be cat name as political state.  May we never forget.

Used in a sentence: “This is my cat, The French Revolution.”

3. Skrillex Lyrics

Justification: Click This

Used in a sentence: “This is my cat, Skrillex Lyrics.”

4. Sex Scene from Watchmen

Justification: One of my favorite scenes in the history of cinema is the sex scene between Malin Ackerman and Patrick Wilson in the film Watchmen.  I cannot link the scene, because the kids, but highly recommend your watching it every day to remind yourself that true beauty lies hidden in every stitch of our world.

Used in a sentence: “This is my cat, Sex Scene from Watchmen.”

5. Mittens

Justification: Sometimes cats feel like mittens.

Fact time: The world shapes its image of us, as we shape our image of ourselves.  Rarely are these two constructs in agreement.  The wicked are hailed as righteous.  To the coward’s chest the medal is pinned.  A passable female singer becomes the most divisive entity in the history of digital music.

Inasmuch as Lana Del Rey has been qualitatively divisive, it should too be said that she has been unifying as a point of interest.  Say whatever about the quality of her songs, but the amount of discourse she has inspired signifies that she represents something about how we have come to talk about popular music, the state of music criticism.  Or, maybe, it represents something more, that the fervency with which people analyze Lana Del Rey is indicative of a fundamental shift in the essence of what it is to be human today.

But, now, what is that something?

The something is this: Reality did not suffice.  It was flawed, befuddling, harsh, and man sought to create a new reality, where his fantasies would not be sullied by actuality.  Image would be self.  The self could be created, recreated, erased at will.  It would be a simpler, better world, a world based entirely in images, in projections, in what we choose to see, not what we are forced to.  This was the fantasy.

Lana Del Rey is the fantasy destroyed.  She is the triumph of harsh reality.

When the appropriately titled “Video Games” broke, the internet music collective rejoiced in the fantasy, this unheralded testament to the artistic heights made possible by their age, by the medium within which they worked.  It was indubitably a pop song, but wasn’t it also something different, an internalization of everything that had worked in pop, but a piece of music intangibly different in execution, proliferation, approach, a piece of art informed by a view of the world as it manifests itself now?  Didn’t its platitudes seem aware of their own existence as platitudes, didn’t the music delve so far into being hackneyed that it became novel?  It seemed to.  It was a wonderful song produced independent of the music industry by a created persona upon which the hopes for the future of pop music could justly be pinned.  Lana Del Rey became an expectations balloon of infinite elasticity, a construct completely divorced from its origin, an unimaginably beautiful sound in a vacuum, a perfect image in the darkest of rooms, the ultimate fantasy.

Then she became a person, and the fantasy was undone, and who else could be blamed?

In the end, Lana Del Rey could not escape reality.  She was relegated, as her critics are, as every person is, by her existence’s dependency on her being a physical entity, occupying real space.  Sound can only persist for so long until its origin is found out, and when the sound is that mellifluous, and the origin so frustrating, so disconcerting, the listener cannot help but be bereft.

I’m not really put off by all that, though.  Mostly, I’m concerned with distracting my frivolous mind while I’m waiting for the 2 train.  Born to Die is capable of doing that more so than some albums, less so than others.  Did Lana Del Rey deserve the invective she’s inspired? No.  Is the album as perfect as it could have been?  Definitely not.  But nothing is, and while I admire those who believe otherwise, I also pity them and their unwarranted expectations, their dependency on how things could have been rather than how they are.

So I celebrate Lana Del Rey for who she is, not who she was perceived to be.  Can one really complain when a pop musician actually gets the masses to think?  I cannot.

Too much noise drowns out good songs as well as bad ones.  Stare at something long enough and you’ll lose focus.  Quiet rooms and closed eyes exist for a reason.  Music is one of them, and will continue to be, despite anything anyone says.

Listen To:

“Dark Paradise”

“Born to Die”

“Blue Jeans”

“Summertime Sadness”

“Video Games”

“Off The Races”

Don’t Listen To:

“National Anthem”

“Diet Mountain Dew”

“Radio”

“This is What Makes Us Girls”

“Carmen”

In closing, don’t listen to Carmen.

I must understand why.  For the first time in seven Valentine’s Days, I am completely and utterly alone, and there must be a reason.  There is.  In fact, there are ten distinct reasons why I am alone today.  They follow, in order of severity.

Top 10 Reasons I’m Completely and Utterly Alone on Valentine’s Day

10. Call of Duty

Rationale: It is my estimation that most intelligent, self-possessed women have little to no interest in a 24-year-old manchild who plays Call of Duty: Black Ops 4-6 hours every day.

9. Talking to Myself

Rationale: For the same reason both genders are adverse to serial killers, girls tend to shy away from 24-year-old manchildren who have a propensity to discourse at length with washing machines that don’t work, pens that run out of ink, televised sporting events, and Ryan Reynolds movies.

8. My Voice

Rationale: I have the shrill, grating voice of a pre-pubescent boy.  I sometimes employ this voice to talk to myself.

7. Vegetarianism

Rationale: Whenever I tell someone I’m a vegetarian, this look of having just ingested curdled milk alights on the informed’s face.

6. Know Too Many Jimmy Eat World Lyrics

Rationale: It is not uncommon that a Jimmy Eat World song will be shuffled into my iTunes rotation during my commute to school.  It is also not uncommon that this will result in my jubilantly foxtrotting down subway platforms, “feelin’ it” via head-bobbing, and silently mouthing Jimmy Eat World lyrics to horrified strangers.

5. Vampiric Circadian Rhythm

Rationale: Most girls probably want to spend time with their significant other.  Most days I wake up at 2 P.M., go to sleep at 7 A.M., comprising the antithesis of the functional majority of the world’s circadian rhythm.  This limits my pool of potential significant others to grave diggers, nighttime security guards, and female vampires.

4. My Nose

Rationale: Once, the owner of an Italian restaurant I was dining at sent me and my date complimentary flutes of champagne, out of niceness.  My nose prevented my drinking any of it.  I poured the champagne over my head in disgrace.

3. This Blog

Rationale: See this post, specifically the next portion of the post.

2. Off-Putting Man Crush on Ryan Reynolds

1. The Microscopic, Black Abscess Where My Heart Should Be

Rationale: There is a microscopic, black abscess where my heart should be.

Unlike her son, Theresa Petaccio is economical in her wants.  When asked what birthday girl would like for her birthday, she will tell you what birthday girl would like.  I asked her this very question some days ago, being as artless in my reconnaissance as in my gifting.  She did not answer immediately, opted instead to let the pause brighten her end of the line, as if merely being asked was kindness enough.  Could she abide another Yankee Candle?  Another ceramic tchotchke bought out of the frustration borne from a child’s inability to adequately provide thanks in any capacity for what he has received over his life, for his life itself?  Certainly she could not.  I hoped she could not.  My mother did not disappoint.

“You haven’t updated your baby pictures in a while,” she said.  ”I’d like that.”

Like always, she was right.

Like she said, I had not updated my baby pictures in a while, and while I understood her meaning this blog and my recent lax stance toward it, I also understood the phrase’s dualistic nature, how the years that flow from our infancy unto adulthood are nothing if not an updating of our baby pictures, the re-characterization of the self we had once been, the promise squandered, the promise realized.  Because to my mother I persist, at least in part, as the pale, knee-high Juicy-Juice imbiber of yesteryear, the peaceably curious boy whose pastina soup she ice-cubed, the reluctantly grateful elementary schooler who protested half-heartedly to her driving him to the bus stop one driveway down, the young me who fashioned her birthday cards by putting crayon to construction paper and meaning every word.  I did not like the idea of then me out meing the now me.

I would like to update my baby pictures for the better.  Hence this post, and those to follow in greater frequency.  If the thought indeed makes the gift, then my mother is as adroit in requesting as she is in giving, because if I hold anything in surplus, it’s thoughts, and as of late I have grown accustomed to lending no voice to those thoughts, to leaving them undernourished, orphaned, abandoned before they even have chance to be.  No longer shall I do this, if only because my mother asks it, and it is less than the least I can do, but still an attempt taken earnestly, conscious of everything received and everything left to give to the woman who provides the ginger ale to my life’s every bellyache, who asks nothing of me and complains not a second when she receives just that, the woman who believes I will learn to give as she does, that I will be one day be like who I want to be, like who she is glad I already am.

I am also going to take her to the movies.  We both like that.

One does not venture forth into the public sphere under the assumption that his actions will be exempt from criticism.  When writing (or as I prefer to call it “improvisational thesaurusing”) I expect most readers to respond with at best apathy and at worst silent derision.  People are, by nature, critical creatures.  We cannot understand before we question what we are trying to understand.  Nothing plants fear square in the heart like “that which cannot be understood.”  I understand that I write this blog so Will Zurich will have something to read while occupying the limited physical and spiritual space of his work-time cubicle.    I understand that if I can make Will’s day relatively enjoyable, infinitesimally better for a fleeting moment amongst the preceding and succeeding swaths of boredom, I will have succeeded, I will via Will have had a relatively more enjoyable, infinitesimally better day myself.  For this, I will withstand any criticism, any anonymous libel sent cruelly to my Gmail.  What I will not withstand, what I cannot withstand, is the denial of my freedom to do this, to provide a nexus for delight as well as criticism.

On Saturday, I received an email from wordpress’s legal department requesting that the aforementioned post be taken down due to “claims of impersonation.”  If I did not comply, my blog would be “permanently deleted” and I would face “further ramifications” and “do make us aware when this has been done.”  It was the worst strain of legalese: the strain of straightforward dismissal absent of legal writing’s expected eclectic syntaxes and word choices.  Fearing for the life of my blog, I complied with their demands, and wondered, who could have possibly accused me (Carmen Petaccio) of impersonation?

I thought two long days, gave the public a chance to view the post’s final hours, and narrowed the investigation down to nine potential culprits.  Who could possibly be fell enough to do such a thing to me?  To Will?  To McGowan?  I may deserve the chastisement, but they do not.  My limited readership deserves access to readable materials produced by the writer of readable materials me.  Thus, I am going to spend the remainder of the week chronicling the nine suspects in McGowan-Gate.  Three suspects a day, with a weekend of rumination to follow, and a Monday poll to decide who is behind this most heinous of crimes, once and for all, and to bring that person to justice.

POTENTIAL INTERVIEW SERIES REPLACEMENTS

1. Interview Series Redux

Gist: I do Interview Series again, but I interview different people.

2. 28 Days of Harry Potter Fan Fiction

Gist: I write Harry Potter Fan Fiction for 28 straight days.

3. Super Size CP

Gist: I write 28 angry letters to Morgan Spurlock, detailing his inexorable self-aggrandizement and penchant for providing information as illuminating as pointing out a lamp’s predisposition to stasis.

Gist of Gist: I write insulting letters to the director of Super Size Me for a month.

4. 28 Days of Twilight Fan Fiction

Gist: I write Twilight Fan Fiction for 28 straight days.

5.  Riding in Cars With Lada

Gist: I detail a 28-day cross-country road trip with Chris Lada.

6. 28 Days of Harry Potter vs. Twilight Fan Fiction

Gist: I write Fan Fiction detailing the events leading up to a climactic hockey game between Forks High School and Hogwarts in no way resembling the narrative of D2: Mighty Ducks 2.

7. Feminine February

Gist: I attempt to live as a transvestite named Carmella for 28 days.

8. Fast-Footed February

Gist: I try to go running every day for a month.  Not really blog-related.

9. Nothing

Gist: I continue the utter denial of this blog’s existence/my masquerade as a normal human being.

END OF POTENTIAL INTERVIEW SERIES REPLACEMENTS