Virtual Flaneurism

Work

I wanted to be a rain salesman,
because rain makes the flowers grow,
but because of certain diversions and exhaustions,
certain limitations and refusals and runnings low,
because of chills and pressures, shaky prisms, big blows,
and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs
weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming
the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden ...

I am paid to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive
leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse:
this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none.

The woman who works the cubicle beside me has pretty knees
and smells of wild blossoms, but I am paid to work
my fingers up and down the keys, an almost sexy rhythm,
king of the chimpanzees picking fleas from his beloved.
I wanted to be a rain salesman , but that's a memory
I keep returning to my childhood for minor repairs:
the green sky cracking, then rain, and after,
those flowers growing faster than I can name them,
those flowers that fix me and and make me stare.

I wanted to be a rain salesman,

carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,
but there were no openings in the rain department,
and so they left me dying behind this desk-adding bleeps,
subtracting clunks-and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,
some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.
Above my desk, lounging in a bed of brushstroke flowers,
a woman beckons from my cheap Modigliani print, and I know
by the way she gazes that she sees something beautiful
in me. She has green eyes. I am paid to ignore her.

- John Engman

Stolen from Kristie:

One of my favorite oldies - but who knew that Del Shannon looked like Janosz from Ghostbusters II? *Shudder*

PS. For some reason this video starts to go flat during the instrumental. Not pleasant.

Academy Award Winner Morgan Freeman, ladies and gentlemen...

This may be one of my favorite posts ever.

I don't have a job, but if I stay up all night during the week and sleep until two, that's like having a job, right?

Update from #873

I would like to point out that the gentleman is correct in sitting down.

This is what I've decided to do for a living...again.

I prefer the gentleman in the over-sized white tee.

From Katie, who knows me too well:

There is a bizarre subtlety to this video that requires multiple watches.

In an advertising ploy clearly designed by the same wizards who called the Titanic unsinkable, Jamba Juice has set their sights on a new market: Lovers of Meaty Drinks

I don't know what disgusts me more - the ketchup and mustard swirl on top, or the thought of what they had to do to the hamburger to get it up a straw.

Star Wars Yoga - More Here.

I find it disappointing that there is no Yoda Yoga.

My favorite band. An old one:

I like the sentiment, but "doesent" is almost too much for me to handle.

July has turned into a rather...difficult month for me. A whole lot of things, not the least of which has been my decision to not return to law school, have left me uncertain of what I'll be doing this fall, and relatively apathetic, depressed and bored. Anyway, all things must pass.

This is not so bothersome until you begin to see the image as the four faces made out of his one horrible, Divine-esque visage.

From Kristie:

I read an article about Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" a few years ago that suggested that the song's subject might in fact be Dylan himself. This is certainly not confirmed, though even if it isn't true, I find so much more to relate to if "reading" the song as self-referential. Not that I feel alone, but a personal lament about feeling alone is easier to understand than Dylan's anger at a specific person I do not know. And it's just plain less bitter.

The article further suggested that the song's lyrics could reflect Dylan's transition from folk to electric, where his chosen mode of musical maturation led to his being ostracized from the Village music crowd. I don't necessarily endorse this particular spin; Dylan quite succinctly summarized his frustration regarding his falling out with the Greenwich Village folk scene in "Positively Fourth Street", another song worth an aural gander. Imagining "Like a Rolling Stone" as self-reference undoubtedly gives the lyrics a significantly varied meaning, one that I personally prefer to what would otherwise be a cold attack on an anonymous subject.

I should probably be working on getting a job instead of posting polar bear crap.

If it was unclear, I found internet. Personal crisis averted for now.

I love the Starlight Express meets Sub-Zero outfits they are 'moing it out with in this music video.

I love every man in this video. Every single one.

The modem in my townhouse was mysteriously filled with water this morning, so there will likely be few updates until a new modem arrives. Nothing better than finishing your job and having nothing to do at your house. Yeesh.

Friendly's new marketing ploy: Mac & Cheese Quesadilla.

Unfortunately, it's on the Kid's Menu, meaning I'm going to have to adopt a child and steal his food if I want to get some.

This begs the question: what wouldn't be made better by sticking it between two buttered and crispy tortillas?

I am proud to be part of a mincing.

“I was the only kid in the audience who couldn’t understand why Dorothy would want to go home. It was a mystery to me. To that awful black-and-white farm, with that aunt who was dressed badly, with smelly farm animals around when she could live with winged monkeys and magic shoes and gay lions!”

"I think that when we’re stationary, we have a somewhat thickened sense of the ego or the “I,” and we’re just sort of self-conscious and aware of ourselves. But when we’re in motion, or when we’re in a dream, the “I” entity starts to dissolve. Some people, including myself, and possibly you, are capable of having dreams in which your own personality is really almost dissolved. You know, way, way down in the depths of the ocean there are creatures that are transparent. They’re like jellyfish, a lot of very transparent creatures. And I was thinking it’s almost analogous to the human experience of sleep, where when you’re really, really deep into sleep, your own physical self is often not even there. It’s like you’re transparent. And, it may be a process that we just will never understand, descending somehow deep into the primitive brain - like the brain almost at the brain stem - and away from the consciousness. And, somehow running replicates that, I think. I would think that if you were running very fast, if you were in an instinctive situation where you were terrified - say you were being pursued, and your life was in danger - you would be flooded with adrenaline. I would think probably the “I” or ego was almost gone, that you’re just running like a physical entity, the way a soldier might just start [running], or a boxer, or someone like that. But when you’re writing, there’s … as I say, we have this more thickened or more solid sense of the self, because it’s usually in some stationary situation with social definitions."

- Joyce Carol Oates on running, dreaming, and writing