Some Things I'd Like to Accomplish - Another Ongoing Concern

God willing, I'd like to accomplish the following during the rest of the time I have on Earth.  My dear readers, you'll note that I do not refer to this as a "Bucket List."  I do not know that dreadful term's etymology, yet I detest it, as it seems that it originates from the realm of Hallmark inspired schmaltz.  I suspect that the Painter of Light guy had a bucket list.

Not necessarily in importance of order:

Improve upon the things I'm already good at, and, perhaps, master a couple of them.  Music and writing are at the top of that list

Be a better husband

Have a child.  Son or daughter, it doesn't matter.
Read the following books:

• Finnegan's Wake (in progress, albeit in fits and starts
• The Bible
• Don Quixote
• War and Peace
• Gravity's Rainbow

There are plenty of others to add to number 2.  I'll never read all of them.  That's okay.  Only Nabokov and Joyce have done that, and they never field dressed a wild boar (cf #7.)

 Meet new people.

 Make my own soda (in progress!

Learn to use tools and make my own furniture

Hunt and prepare a wild boar for a dinner party.  Granted, this is really low on the list, but wild boar is delicious.

Travel.

Start a garden.

Start a business from home.  If it's a product, I'd like to name it Edward's, in tribute to a friend.

Learn the value of money, and achieve financial security and independence.  That achieved, I'd like to throw that money wildly at charities that I feel good supporting, and keep my mouth shut when I do it.  The following looks to serve as a good guide:  http://www.openbible.info/topics/tithes_and_offering

Be someone's mentor; better put, serve as a good example.
Host a favorite band at our place.

Own a home, where my family and friends can gather. The only extravagances will be a wood-burning stove in the backyard and maybe a pool because swimming is among my favorite forms of exercise.

Count my blessings. An ongoing concern.

Learn several musical instruments, and master two. I'm thinking guitar and, I don't know, keyboards? Drums would be cool, too.

Perform more charity work, and keep my mouth shut about it.  I'm no do-gooder.  They're no good.

Stay sober, but make allowances for the odd drink here and there. For today, coffee is fine.

Perform stand-up comedy (in progress.)

Spend more time with my parents and aunts and uncles. I want to hear their stories sothat I may learn from them and then pass them down.

Be an equal in a peer group of artists.

Play tennis with John McEnroe. Ideally, I'll win one set.

Learn to meditate.

Renumber this list.

Control less.

Patronize and support the arts, especially the artistic endeavors of friends.

Do not suffer fools gladly, yet attempt to lead them toward wisdom.

Always have hope; never have expectations.

Learn to fix things around the house.

Learn essential car repair, at least.

Own a muscle car and a fuel efficient car.

Act proactively, use the term as little as I can get away with. The term is in the same class as "Bucket List."

Rest. Know when to call it a day.

Champion the underdog, always.


An ongoing concern.

Don's Oblique Strategies

Dedications to:

My beautiful wife, to whom I dedicate all good things.
Our dear friend and neighbor, who helped inspire this list.  Thank you, dear friend.

Don's Oblique Strategies are called such in order to distinguish them from the Eno/Schmidt originals, not as a self-referential pat on the back.  These strategies are culled in large part from ordinary experience, and may serve as an aid when faced with creative dilemmas.  A creative dilemma, as I define it, may arise during the so-called "ordinary course of life."  Such dilemmas are not limited to artists:  since every positive action is, again, by my definition, a creative one, these may prove useful to you.  For example, "What to clean first?" may help to break a creative block.   

As you'll note, the strategies are aphoristic in nature; however, they are not aphorisms. Alas, I am not willing to place myself in league with aphorists.  

The list of strategies is ongoing and plastic.  Readers, I welcome your observations as well:  feel free to contribute.  


Don's Oblique Strategies:  An Ongoing Concern:


1, Edit 3:  Steal with abandon, and pile up the loot with care. Upon discovery of your thievery, you will be lauded and derided, assuredly not in equal measure. 
OR
Steal with abandon, and pile up the loot with care. Upon discovery of your thievery, you will be lauded and derided, assuredly not in equal measure. 
The preceding is an Oblique Strategy, edit 3.
Provide a "steal" option
FB#:  1

2.  Put off one thing until later.
FB#:  2

3.  Pick a good idea at random, and then abandon it. If you choose a good night's sleep, pick again. It's the only instance in which you are allowed to do so (Abandoned Idea)
FB#:  3

4.  Create, steal, organize, combine.  Lists work well.
FB#:  4

5.  Create, steal, organize, combine. Lists work well. The addition of a short list culled from Eno/Schmidt's original Oblique Strategies list further enhances your lists.
Don's Oblique Strategies, #4, Addendum (FB#:)

6.  Everything we do is music. Please observe your cues to be silent. In that way, you, at once, participate in creation and behold its awe. 
Don's Oblique Strategies, #5, Co-Authored by John Cage (FB#:)

7.  Expression, Not Self-Correction
Don's Oblique Strategies, #6 (FB#:)

8.  Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.  Then attempt to restore it to its original form.  
Don's Oblique Strategies, #7, with kind assistance from Jasper Johns
  
9.  Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. Then attempt to restore the object to its original form. 
Don's Oblique Strategies, #8, with kind assistance from Jasper Johns (Application 1)

10.  Take your ringer off the hook. Proceed.
Don's Oblique Strategies, Number Unknown.

11.  Fill a void:  Dig a hole.

12.  What to clean first?

13.  Unplug your phone.  Proceed.  
Cf:  DOS 10.

14.  Go to your room!

It's Pick Your Own Steak Night, Don!

Dear readers, I don't wish to put you all through the sort of Hell I experience, so I'll just say that I managed to secure a doctor's appointment, and boy, is my frontal lobe tired!  It's so tired that can't recall the last time I was this excited about securing a doctor's appointment.  It's right up there with "It's 'Pick Your Own Steak Night,' Don," only with more fat.

The phone scold said, "You'll be waiting awhile."  To gauge how long, I asked, "What size book should I bring?"  She kinda laughed and said something along the lines of "Looong."  

I don't know to whom or what to credit the following, but literary and journalistic turnaround times are truly impressive.  Twenty-three car pile-up on the Katy Freeway one minute, Dominique Sachse on the scene the next, and flawlessly dolled-up to boot.  

In short, my dear friends, my literary selection for my doctor's visit will be an unauthorized account of my attempts to secure a doctor's visit.  And no, I'm not the author.  I'm not that narcissistic, and I'm afraid I just don't possess the verbal fecundity nor the urgency that such a weighty tome requires.  Also, I cannot in good conscience authorize this doorstep because in it, the author claims I'm a vegetarian.  Why I ought to sue the hack until he's subsisting off government cheese.  Vindictiveness, my friends, is not in my nature.

Look for "Goofus the Vegetarian Has His Tonsils Removed" at your local literary outlet of choice.

Post Script:  With all due respect, the phone scold moved mountains to ensure I get in. I appreciate her throwing her weight around.  However, she also said she doesn't mind that patients may have a long wait time, punctuating her statement with an insouciant chuckle.  To be charitable, I reminded her that she should care because mental illness is a disease that ranks alongside cancer in terms of severity.  The surcease of her self-satisfied smirk occurred, I assure you, abruptly, as though Steve Martin's "The Jerk" was interrupted by a Click 2 News Special Report.

Dominique?   

And Now, a Shiftless Chef Minute...

Good evening, friends.

I think I heard the phrase "slow your roll" tonight.  If I heard correctly, it's one too many times.  Without trying to sound too much like a scold yet cognizant that I probably do, I'm tired of "the roll," which I interpret to mean one's "m. o.," and its variants, as well as most other hip-hop inspired lingo of recent vintage.  It's tired.  In fact, forget tired: hip-hop, with maybe slightly more than a handful of exceptions, is dead.  Even the good stuff is largely hidebound.  And once Walmart becomes a vendor of one's cultural artifact, that artifact has entered another realm, one that I try to avoid.  

I will not try to pretend that I'm a "thought and language" scholar.  I know that one influences the other, and I'm still swamped in self-debate.  I know that the two exist in symbiosis, so I'll start from there.

One thing quickly:  I'm among the bigger jazz nuts you're likely to find.  In the main, contemporary jazz sucks too, but the genre taken as a whole was viable for closing in on one-hundred years.  Hip-hop imploded in less than twenty-five.  To make my point brief:  if you accuse me of racism, well, sir or ma'am, you've got three fingers pointing back at you, and I'm holding back.  Would you really like to know what's on my mind?  Again, I'm willing to entertain differing points of view.

Market Night for June 3, 2013

You Can't Print That!

I regard Redbox as little more than an automat that dispenses nothing by shitty sandwiches.  I will hand it to its creators, though:  they understand the dictum "location, location, location."  You can't walk past a Redbox without stubbing your toe.  Until we can have movies parachuted down to yus, we all risk the loss of our feet.  Such is its ubiquity, I'm certain there's one at the entrance to the White House.  Plus, it's red, redder than a snapper.  If you can't find a Redbox in ten minutes, you're too old and you're from out of town.

Yes my dear friends, Redbox is the cigarette machine of the Information Age.  I'd argue that the contents of the cigarette machines of yore are more wholesome, but I don't like picking fights on social network sites.  You know that!  In brief, the Redbox is a great concept executed very poorly for a guy like me.  And no, that guy isn't waiting for  "Emmanuelle in Space," Volumes 1-7 to return.  Sheesh, what an audience!

Like I said, notwithstanding your entertainment proclivities and demands, you can't avoid Redbox.  Every time you go to Walmart, you bump your head on it.  I'm surprised it's not equipped with a sensor that trips a chip that contains phrases such as, "Ooh, I'll bet that smarts!" or a thousand other variants, the same chip used in one of those mouthy new Hallmark cards that go over well in Peoria.  But a couple of weeks ago, after rubbing my noggin and kicking the machine and stubbing my toe, I struck paydirt.

My wife and I love Jim Gaffigan, the comedian who rose to fame dissecting Hot Pockets and their manifold iterations of vile.  The love is such that I don't feel like discussing it at length here; indeed, Mr. Gaffigan deserves a dedicated post.  My wife and I were, at once, stunned and delighted when we spotted his new release, Mr. Universe, in the display, sandwiched between all manner of crap.  A truffle, if you like.  We needed the laughs something bad that night, so we began to search for it.  Naturally, Mr. Universe was not available; in fact, after exhausting every possible search scenario (and we're both librarians, mind you), we discovered that it wasn't even in the damn box.  Such was my paranoia that I began to think that this particular box was bent on destroying me, in the manner that Hot Pockets destroy their consumers from the inside out.  And after I bumped my head this time, Redbox laughed and dispensed an actual shit sandwich.  

Usually, the first thing I do upon entering the store is get a drink of water.  The Redbox in question is located near the bathrooms and water fountains at the grocery store where we shop most often.  I need not state that the machine's placement betrays evil on the part of everyone associated with it.  

The tortures inflicted upon and the indignities visited upon me as I used Redbox are legion; I've enumerated merely a few above.  In time, I've come to learn that this particular machine does not possess an intuition of its own.  No machine does.  Machines can't do anything without human input, and that includes what looks to be accidentally dispensing a shit sandwich - machines don't know I hate shit sandwiches because they can't know I hate shit sandwiches!  So, there is a simple, sane explanation for the machine's "behavior."

Billy Barty is inside the HEB Redbox waiting for me.  

It makes perfect sense:  

1.  Wonderful, that it is, I hate Redbox.
2.  The creators of Redbox know that I hate Redbox (oh please, I know you're not that thick - bugs!)
3.  Redbox hired a dwarf whose sole job is to wait until I come into the store.   
4.  That dwarf is Billy Barty.
5.  Therefore, Billy Barty is still alive, and he's still active in the entertainment industry.  

My dear readers, you don't need a Venn diagram to understand all this.  To create one would be an insult to you.  You've all known the entire time:  Billy Barty is still alive and, at the age of 89, very much active in the entertainment industry.

This past evening, my wife and I decided to go shopping so that we'd have a leg up on tomorrow's dinner.  The preparations necessary for this dinner will be quite involved, so much so that it would be sage of me to start well before my wife returns from work.  Against my better judgement, I decided to check on the Gaffigan DVD.  Low and behold, I found it within two searches, and it was available!  I decided I'd play it cool.  My plan was simple:

1.  I wanted to surprise my wife, so I'd whisper the news of my discovery to her during check out.  We'd have to check out at the register farthest from the entrance, an inconvenience (all told, a minor one) that was necessary in order to maintain the facade.  
2.  I'd keep a poker face while in proximity to Redbox.  After all, Billy Barty does not take breaks, not even to sleep.  I kinda feel bad that he has to subsist on shit sandwiches, but the little creep knew the score when he took the gig, so fuck him.   

All was going according to plan after we'd paid, and I was about to pull my sneak attack.  There was another customer in front of me making his selection, so I stood behind him with my cart.  I was afraid I'd hit a snag , but I regained my wits:  I was waiting by the gumball machines next to the Redbox.  Billy Barty would think I'm buying gum.  Boy was I going to get Billy Barty.  I was going to get Billy Barty good.  

Curse that shit-eating pygmy because I got fucked out of our DVD again.  I didn't count on the customer standing at the Redbox for twenty minutes.  Billy Barty must have bribed him, that's the only explanation.  Billy Barty saw the guy and said to him, "Hey kid (everyone's "kid" to that wrinkled old prick.  It's common Hollywood lore that Billy Barty once propositioned Abe Vigoda by saying, "Look kid, me and my old lady are on the outs, and no one else wants anything to do with me, see?  Here's $100.  I'm light.  You can lift me up to your mouth.  See there, kid?  Yeah, yeah, that's it.  That's the stuff..."), you wanna make a hundred bucks?  Looks like you could use a hundred bucks."  Billy Barty flashed the goods through the slot where you collect your movie.  Billy Barty told the guy to stand there and play dumb for twenty minutes.  I figured this out after I'd filled all the available nooks and crannies of our cart with gumballs.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not only a reasonable man.  I am also a fair man.  It is in the interest of fairness that I tell you all that Billy Barty picked a real crackerjack.  The guy played dumb so well that he made Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man look like two dolphins playing chess telepathically.  

The simpleton, and the rest of the story is not a fabrication, I assure you, stood at the Redbox like he was poised to earn another Donkey Kong, watching a peep show, or taking the sort of leak he's fantasized about for years.  He can't be much older than I am, but he looked like his mom dressed him and, furthermore, he looked proud of that.  His mom, obviously a woman put upon, but with a deliciously cruel sense of humor, somehow squeezed him into a faded Coca-Cola t-shirt and matching red shorts with white stripes running down the side, the sort of stripes that ordinarily indicate participation .  Dumpy of comportment, his mouth hung agape the whole time.  By the looks of things, he saw the cover for a movie about hamburgers and thought he could eat.  My cogitations were becoming cruel and confused indeed.

Well before long, I had company in line.  After a couple of minutes, I looked at the woman behind me and shrugged my shoulders, fishing for a response.  She stared back blankly, as though she enjoyed standing in Redbox lines.  I bumped the gumball machine in hopes of getting Dumpy's attention.  It was no use.  He continued to run his hands over the screen as though it was the first time he'd set his hands on a human butt, and the woman behind me stands in lines as sport.  I figured my wife and I would be there again tomorrow anyway; besides, I was sure neither of these champions would rent the Gaffigan DVD.   

It wasn't long after I'd bowed to my fate that Dumpy finished his business at the Redbox.  He was on his way out the door when I said to my wife in what I thought was a furtive manner but hoped not, "Man, I hope that guy got a good one!"  I got what I wanted:  his face, which resembled the face of any other boob's as rendered by a funhouse mirror, betrayed meanness and ignorance.  He quickly faced forward again, presumably for fear that he might tump over and lose his grubby grip on McNugget's Murder Mystery 3:  Dipped in Shit and Left for Dead.  

My wife and I loaded up the car and started home.  Manfred Mann's "Blinded by the Light," aka the "Manned Up Like a Douche Song," started playing.  No, this affair wasn't quite over yet, and it wouldn't be for another couple of truly absurd minutes.  The moment I heard the song, I must have rolled my eyes.  Then I started laughing, just like any of you would do when it all makes sense.  Still laughing, I said to my lovely wife, "Geez, standing in line behind that guy is just like this song, except this song isn't long enough."  Oh what a wonderful world.   

Lover, What Is Gorgonzola?

Lover?

My delightful wife and I declared tonight a wash in terms of dinner preparation. We're both too beat for much besides eating and a good, clean game of gin rummy. Star Pizza - It Never Fails to Deliver (get it? Hyuk!)

David Cross fails to deliver more than I'd like him to. Often, it seems that he doesn't respect the intelligence of his audience and resorts to hackiness (cf, the letter to Larry the Cable Guy.) And even then, he's mostly funny.

Mr. Cross stands on the right side of most issues, so you can't really give him much static for the contents of the routine I've posted.  It's one of my personal desert island routines, and it's a perfect post for Pizza Night.

Happily, my wife and I didn't go through the folderol that Cross captures with Swiss-like timing and precision. I did describe Gorgonzola as a "cross between blue cheese and Velveeta," but I didn't recommend "hours-long Bud Light braised 'coon" as an add on, so I not only got off the farm, but I also thrived since fleeing.  I opted for the swamp?  Alas, my dear friends, another blog post.

Star Pizza insisted that I'd never called from my own number before, so they called me back to ensure that I wasn't placing a prank order of twelve pizzas, like in that one old Saturday Night Live sketch. The one in which Steve Martin plays the Roman Centurion.  You know it already (no video anywhere?  Lorne Michael, eat a dozen double-dick pizzas.)  

So Star Pizza calls back. Here's the exchange:

Me: Star Pizza!
Star Pizza: HA!
Everyday Surrealism, folks.

Star Pizza had the taste to play "Maggie May" as its hold music.

We picked it up.

Taylor Swift Marked For Mirth, Part 1

You'll agree, I hope, that there sure has been a lot of bangers and mash about our subject lately.  It's almost not fair:  she's an easier target than the authors of all our social ills put together with a turkey with a belly full of hot-buttered popcorn and whiskey thrown in, because she's so winsome and projects the down-home goodness of a biscuit smeared with freshly churned butter.  Well go-o-lly, she's purer than driven Southern snow.

Winsome without question, and pure like a tub of Country Crock.  This erstwhile pig-farmer's jeremiads about good lovin' gone bad real quick have proven too popular with the stunted pajama party set, and me and you and the Good Lord too wanna know why.  

Does she sing of the vicissitudes of love and the verities of being burned by it?  In the main, I guess so.  It's the oldest subject in popular music in all its iterations.  What the heck - sure, God heal her broken heart.  If I'm going to be honest with you, my dear friends, I have to tell you that I don't pay much attention to her music.  I have paid enough attention, though, to know that it fits nicely in business and medical office settings and, yes, the nuthouse, too (in due time, in due time.)  It's perfectly negligible, yet it's all around us, like some airborne rash immune to previously reliable forms of treatment.  

I suspect that the girl reads her own press - she seems to revel in creating it, after all.  Therein laughs something laughable:  surely she knew better than to give John Mayer anything more than a fleeting thought.  Hell, they're competing for face space on the cover of every checkout rag and, what's more, they're in negotiations to grace some of our most beloved candy bars, too.  

It seems to me that dating John Mayer excited a change in her.  Hers wasn't about to become another Tina and Ike story.  From the point after John Boy kicked out her of his room before the sun came up and breakfast was served one too many times, she picked up the mantle of liberation from scumbags with greasy hair and greasier motives.  In her mind, she's become liberation's foremost theologian.  

That makes me laugh too because, unless I'm a dummy for believing everything I read, she's a scumbag, too, tossing men out to the curb like Ophelia tossing poppies, but still unable to tell a hat from a stick.  This new take no shit ethos she's adopted, one that will only earn applause from me, begs a different analogue.  Now she's Rosie the Riveter, showing off her muscles and punching paramours where they live upon their respective inabilities to make her every wish come true.  It's the best I can summon right now.  The chef's been cookin' all day and he needs a break.

We've all been burned in love and burned someone else in its name, too.  In the best cases, we mature and either move on or humbly make amends, whatever the case requires.  That, or we act like pigs.  Despite the image she attempts to cultivate as a woman of the world, she's an overgrown kid, capricious, petulant, prone to fits and pretense and proud of it.  In short, her behavior is rotten, which marks her as a brat.  Maybe she'll become a woman soon.  Until then, she's churning up nothing but shit storm after shit storm.  

The Main Ingredient

A Shout It Out Loud: Penultimo, I Hear You Loud and Clear, Good Buddy!

My ally, the sour-dispositioned Mr. Yum, is this installment's featured image.  His is the type of face that belongs on the covers of a thousand magazines.  Sometimes there's just no justice.