Loose Cans

First of all, that last post was written in what might be mildly called a lather. I had just come home from work early, fuming. Caitriona and Sadie were up, though, and they eventually calmed me down and talked me into taking it easy today. I just don’t like being incapacitated. I take it personally, I really do.

But today was lovely. The pain has subsided almost entirely. Doing much better; last night I was just pissed the fuck off. I wanted terribly to work tonight, but resigned myself to taking the night off. I spent today reading, mostly. Made it through two of Beckett’s short plays, Not I and Play, and a brilliant Susan Sontag essay called “Against Interpretation,” in which she utterly suckerpunches the presumed supremacy of content and meaning over form and style. She just rips content to wee small bits. Worked on my Postmodernism essay, writing a letter to my only beloved professor, telling her that this one was going to be mildly unconventional, not answering just one of the questions, but two: the role of the “hyper” and the status of “representation:

“I ’ve started collecting fodder for the essay, and in so doing have developed a dilemma: I can’t choose between topics. I want to try and combine two. I feel like--at least to my mind--there’s an indissolubility between the “hyper” and “representation” itself. The hyper seems to be just one of many implements of representation, that big wet blanket. I want to write an essay centering on the unceasing thunderstorm of data that makes our modern consciousness so very damp--which I understand to be the genesis of the idea of the “hyper”--but I don’t feel like I can do it without entwining it with a meditation on representation itself. Or vice versa: couldn’t well write on representation without stepping out into the rain. I want to flesh out the degree to which I feel we’ve surpassed not only “ideas about the thing,” but even “the thing itself.” We’ve moved on to the situation of the thing, its attendant, amplifying, accessory and ancillary things; not things anymore but whole systems, their push and pull, their smash and grab, wax and wane. Separating one thing out from its surroundings, apprehending it as “full, spherelike, single,” I think, is a pipe dream these days. Even the attempt to feel something as isolated on the sensuous plane, “as the moon climbs, not mean but be,” is thwarted by the sound of the refrigerator we know to be humming in the hall of the speaker’s room, and the silent vibration of energy in the wires in the wall and its delivery to the freon tubing in the fridge, do they even use freon anymore, and the spin of the turbines in the power plant, generating that energy, and the lives and anxieties and sex lives of the men and women manning and womaning those turbines, because these are the most crucial considerations. No longer flight, but lift, gravity, drag and thrust.

I’m taking this essay so seriously because I feel like it’s the only productive--or certainly the most productive--one I’ll write this year...It may seem self-indulgent and tedious, and it is, using the essay cardinally to lay out and organize my own small thoughts, but the truth is, honest to God, I can’t afford to fuck this up; I won’t get another chance this year.”

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Of course I wasn’t writing a letter so much as the actual essay. It felt great to be thinking again. It’s a vitally important essay to me, and the best part is, it doesn’t count worth a damn, grade-wise, meaning I can do whatever I want. And then at 6pm I get a little text from my boss, saying I know you’re not in top form, but Gerard called in sick, and one of your arms is better than none.

So I’m in for 10pm. I said yes. Last night’s accident could have happened anywhere. I just fell. I need to be there tonight, taking it easy, yes, but all the same, merely enjoying.

"If it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all."

This is the sort of shit'll give you the blues something fierce. I don't know what it is, but this month has been a fucking nightmare. I think it might have to do with the election. Maybe that was just the overture to God's making it His personal business to kick my ass all over the place. Am I feeling victimized? You bet.

Went to work tonight. Arm was good enough, a little twinge here and there, but on the whole, happy. Amped, ready to rock out. Feeling great. Produced a terrific Horse's Neck (not the drink. It also means turning an entire orange or lemon peel into one big twist. Very complex action). Then, right before we open the club. I see two servers coming at each other around a corner, carrying trays, about to slam into each other and cause a disaster. I lunge to try and get to them, catch something if it falls, but the mat under me slips back, like having a rug pulled out from under you, and instead of moving forward, I go straight down.

I have a choice to make: roll, land on my side and get my shirt crapped up on the filthy floor, or try to break my fall with my hands, as falling people generally do. I, being a big ass hole, go for the latter.

Predictably, most of my weight slams down on my left hand. The shock travels up to the arm, which is not, as the idiot doctor at the hospital told me, plenty healed. Not healed at all. The pain is extreme and crippling, but the anger and disappointment are considerably more so. I know it's shot, completely fucked, from the moment I hit it. I ice it, and Igor, the Polish masseur/bar back rubs some snake-venom-derived, snake-oil joint pain relief potion on it and tapes it up again, but it's not working. I can move it, I've no loss of mobility, only certain types of mobility hurt like crazy. It's very evident that I'm not going to be of any use tonight. I do a couple of orders one-handed, no mean feat when you're pouring a pint of Guinness. But Dan sees quickly that I have to go home; I'm holding my arm tightly to my belly, and grimacing because it fucking hurts. I fill out an accident report form, I am glad to report that my injury was non-fatal, and, so far as I know, had nothing to do with radiation poisoning. But it's just not fair. Unless everything heals perfectly by tomorrow, I probably won't work tomorrow night, which is just depressing. Hopefully, it's just in spasm again, and it's nothing too serious. I just want to work. I've had fuckall worth of hours the past two weeks, and that's just fucking sad. It's not fair: I'm sick as shit and I'm a cripple. Where were you when I created the heavens and the earth? Look, I was just chilling, okay, doing my thing, getting by, keeping it real, and what the fuck, you know? What the fuck? Why? Why is all of this shit being dropped on me all at once? I better get this back in spades.

for beloved, bitterly-missed, brilliant ensembles telephoning from Columbia dorms in the groggy morning, lovely way to wake up, making me gleefully late for class. For those I talked to and those I didn't. For Papas popping over on whims, repairing my life, so recently fallen into disrepair--at least physically, with colds and breaks and bruises abounding--and lighting up the house and town and country. For work, for a chance to spend hours every night in motion, mixing, pouring, merely enjoying and finally being paid for it, for the marvelous people I work with, for the proximity. For massive, twenty-two pound turkeys waiting for me at F.X. Buckley Butcher & Sons, for massive, twenty-two person crowds to entertain tonight. For solvency, for independence, for dependence, for a new, remunerative vocation, for flirtatious, brazen customers, for the cable I plug into the DJ booth at work and play my iPod through, no more Robbie Williams, ever, for Postmodernism, for a great roommate, close friends and the horde descending on my home tonight, who ever thought I'd like so many people, or, more improbably, that they might like me, for Man-Size tissues with plaid design on the box, for Sudafed, Aleve and Ace bandages, for Marks & Spencer, for the Asian Grocery with no Asians, for coming home soon, for UCG within slippered walking distance, for the guy at Bolton Video recommending Barbarella, for Barbarella, for David and Amy Sedaris, for the Euro's strength against the Dollar, for duty-free, for Kung Fu, for blog, for Sam's blog, for tireless commenting, for knowing that no matter how alone I am here, all I need to do to find the people I love is blog on.

Roger Angell can write. God damn, can he write:

Baseball is the only game that’s played every day, which is why its season often seems endless, right up to the inning and the out—the little toss over to first base—when, wow, it ends. Politics should be so lucky. Perhaps there was a time when a close and angry election like this one could be expected to produce some easy joy and a rough, semi-polite unanimity when it was over, and a little space when the candidates and the pollsters and focus groups and the voters went home and thought about what it was that first hooked them on such passion, but it does not come quickly to mind. Now the imminent world, with its round-the-clock, round-the-hour schedule of crises and casualties and unfolding disasters, does not permit even a two-minute timeout. What we all could use right now is fifteen weeks till pitchers and catchers.

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From the November 8 Talk of the Town.

“Pitchers and catchers.” We know what it means, this foreshortened, verbless phrase: "pitchers and catchers report.” It’s what's implied, not what these words, the loveliest words in journalism, say. Meaning disjunct from language, and it slays me every time.

He has this effect, pleasantness, making things be pleasing, whether to the eye or the taste buds or the heart. It's easier to catch than a cold. Quietly, inveterately inspiring, not to unreachable soaring heights, but to the more important ones close at hand, only forgotten, ignored, wrapped in Dejection's winding sheet. Things, streets, homes, music, cities, whole countries that had lost their luster are given glow again, new-blazoned in new eyes. And Neil Young I am reminded is rubbish. Dublin, I think, might not be. Not so much as before. Went to the Botanical Gardens yesterday. Stepped out of everything for a few hours and walked into the wildest, most cultivated place on earth. Maybe it was the fat cheeky squirrels and ducks galloping up in hopes of feeding, maybe it was the step where Wittgenstein sat one winter in the great soaring empty cast-iron and glass greenhouse, but more than likely it was the sharper, bespectacled eyes guiding mine, showing me how to look, where to turn my gaze, what was what. At home repairs and improvements and dinners are made with a sense of investment, the need to make it work right, how different from the chronic air of transience that most often breathed in these rooms. A new shelf where we never thought to put one. The bright lamp not needed in the living room is transferred to the kitchen, hitherto full of dirty light, and the whole room feels different. It's all in the lighting. Architects are good things to know. Everyone loves an architect. I do.