The Unswung Bat

 
You Lazy Bastards!

As they say in Chicago: Aiya! Did anyone even read this post? Ah, hell, I can't stay mad at you, standing there and being all collective like that. I've been busy too, and it was a long post. So here's the deal:

1. I want to create an evil twin, so we can fight.


2. Being that I am made mostly of animal products, it will be made of starchy vegetables (Dave figured that part out). As I am a non-robot, my evil twin will naturally be robotic.


3. But my evil twin, Not-André, needs a kernel of pure opposition to me blazing at the heart of its AI. Evil twin plant robots don't program themselves, that's where you come in.


4. Go to Not-André's Not Nohari window (though I am as vain as I am fabulous, I don't wanna touch Johari with a pointy stick, and this Nohari gizmo is the devil's work—so it's perfect, just not for me, dammit). From the window of horrible character flaws that appears, choose the 5 or 6 that least describe me. By definition, these will best describe my evil twin.


5. Dance like drunken giraffes, I guess, for soon there will be Twin-kombat!

Make sense? Go, do it now.

Also, why the hell don't y'all sign the guestbook more damn often damn? I know you're reading this without ever having signed anything—is there a thrill to it, you blog pirates? You're messing up the whole system. Is the guestbook link at the top of the page too small? Would it help if I put an armadillo up there? I think I will.
- posted by Andre @ 9:17 PM Permanent link

 
That's What She Said

Seems the health newsletter I edit and proofread is doing a Sex Ed special for the last issue of the year, and, since the head editor and all writers are women, it has a mostly girly perspective. There's only one article that deals entirely with female sexual concerns, and here's the picture someone—a genius—chose for it.

Heh. So there's your sneak peak at the upcoming issue. Oh God.

Anyway, why have only four people pitched in the much-needed advice for my evil twin? You, read, help. Yeah it's long, but every effort has been taken to write it with such whimsmabulosity that reading it feels like your eyeballs are being . . . pleasured by massage gnomes. Yes, that one. Anyway, thanks Andra, Prax, Weija, and the Malacious Sterling von Warhol for your evil contributions.
- posted by Andre @ 10:56 AM Permanent link

 
Of Steak and Lesbians

Oh good Christ, listen to this. A party last night, that I didn't really have much time to go to but it was Rachelle's Awesometh birthday, plus it's the only social thing I've done all week. Right at the end, while I'm putting on my shoes, folk are disparaging the oddly popular idea that lesbians are automatically vegetarian, by some sort of dietary cause and effect.

So my clever joke, my attempted ironic stab at saying "hold on, you mean a woman can be one but not the other?" was to suggest that I'd always had the impression lesbianism was a purely nutritional phenomenon, much like a B12 imbalance or an iron deficiency. Get it? Like anemia! Ha-ha! How funny. There's a place for but-I-thought-the-earth-was flat jokes in most conversations, right? And this one didn't strike me as especially dumb.

What I actually said, though, was something like "but I thought that was why they were lesbians, you know, like from a lack of meat in the diet." I was two steps out the door before what I had said clicked in my head, and by "clicked," I mean shouted Wait! No!! FUCK!! With five exclamation points and bold caps lock and everything, as I realized that failing to indicate what exactly was meant by "lack of meat in the diet" left the statement open to the interpretation that I am in fact a jackass, à la "yeah, I'll fix your sink . . . " Honestly, the ability to screen words for such obvious disasters is just one more reason writing—or simply being quiet—is often far superior to talking.

Could I have done worse if the joke had been:


Probably not. In my defence over not being able to keep my words straight, I've got way too much work to do, I'm perpetually tired, and darn you all to heck.
- posted by Andre @ 9:28 AM Permanent link

 
What Don't You Think?

Frankfurts of the Mind is done, 26 pages long, and totally different from the little bit I worked on here (it was a very organic process: now it's about an angst-ridden half-feline teenage fallen angel chasing his past and coming to terms with his his future, in an amalgm of the Star Wars and Akira universes, set in Tokyo during the Yuuzhan Vong crisis/Seven years after the events of the original manga). *Ahem.* Yeah! I totally wrote that story. Oh, and the title character happens to share my exact name. That's me all the way. Anyway, enough of that, I need you to take part in my Masterplan. Read!

My friends, I desire your help in constructing my evil twin so that we can fight. I have all the cybertronic devices, lazors, and starch-rich vegetables I need to create the body of my doppleganger foe, but designing the seed of purest anti-me that must burn at the heart of its artificial intelligence unit, beneath the padding of browned kohlrabi and potato shavings, requires your assistance.

I wasn't always into building evil-me's to challenge. As a kid I loved playing Password and Mastermind, both games where the deduction you performed had some visual representation. Mastermind in particular was fantastic: you would make guesses at a secret arrangment of colored pins, getting feedback that told you the number of correct colors and positions in your guess, but not which ones were right and which were wrong. That had to be determined by clever deduction. It also sharpened my Masterplanning skills.

I have always liked word games too, so Password, with its gimmicky red screen that made red writing disappear, revealing the blue-text "password" beneath, 3d-glasses style, was close to my heart. Plus it had snappy blue Leatherette sleeves for holding the password cards. This was when I had at my disposal, for at least a couple hours most days, both a Nintendo and an AT&T computer with 3-D Tetris which definitely gave board games a run for their money.

What would've blown the Box and the PC out of the water is if the word-association of Password were somehow compatible with the stark, elegantly layered logic of Mastermind. But I never knew how the hell that would work.

So when I read the description of the silly-named Johari Window, the part where it says "by describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up," struck up a spark of peculiar joy in me. Words, grids, overlap, not stupid-sounding . . . hells yeah.

Still, although I am as vain as I am fabulous, I can't ever recall asking anyone "what they like about me" and I don't think I will. On the other hand, the converse Nohari Window, a grid of overlapping digs at one's character, shows all the signs of the devil's handiwork. As I was thinking about this, it hit me—a way to harness the power of this shifty gizmometer to help complete my evil twin!

I don't want to hear the good things you think about me, I especially don't want to hear the bad things you think about me. Frankly, I don't even want to hear the good things you don't think about me. That too asks for troubles. But I do want to construct a Plant Robot who represents all the most wicked and unwholesome things that I do not stand for. So I thought I'd try doing this _ohari thing backwards. Hence, a Masterplan was born, and one that shant be stopped by those meddling heroes this time. What? Just because I'm the good twin doesn't mean there can't be heroes out to get me. Fuckin' heroes.

Unstoppable Masterplan

Phase One: Go to Not André's Not-Nohari Window and choose the 5 or 6 words that least describe me. By definition, these are the best descriptors of my evil counterpart.

Phase Two: If feasible, buy me a few more lazors, as they are invaluable.

Phase Three: Kombat!

Sound excellent? Good, off you go.
- posted by Andre @ 2:51 PM Permanent link

 
Frankfurts of the Mind

The Invisible Month

December thirteenth, 2000 (zweitausend). Life is ruled by ghostly forces here. A kind of hostile magnetism keeps anyone in the crowd from bumping into any other of the striding thousands crossing the sullen flagstone, quiet because they needn't talk. Every one, and the odd cluster of two or three bound tight as one, moves without bustle, particles in ideal isolation. Even in the chilled air, no one wastes time shivering or huddling. Each person moves with some task at hand, each one's purpose translated fluently into motion, while the Brownian jitter that should shuffle the crowd is pulled inside, stilled and stilted into a third language, one separated from intent and action, that agitates like the yellow green and blue lights buzzing in the stiff night air. This other tongue may well be German.

My failure to learn the languague (sprache) dogs me up Hauptwache. Like the others around me, I am putting some task into motion, but I have an obviously foreign stammer in my step. The blinking light atop the Commerzbank tower pokes yellow holes in the balance sheet hanging on the horizon that I'm trying to sum up. If I could concentrate, I'd try to find out what holes the missing days had fallen into. I'd paid for them, but had no clue when I might've received them.

The only way to get from my gray-and-brown suburb into Frankfurt, to school, to Valerie--to anything--was with a train pass, a so-called Month Card (Monatkarte) that in true Deutsch style was valid for exactly 30 days, regardless of when the line between months happened to pass. I'd say it was designed to trip people up and and charge them the 80 DM (Deutschmark, Deutsch Bundesbank) fine for travelling with a bad pass, except the Germans seemed perfectly able to keep track of the time and replace theirs when it expired, with no days of overlapping coverage. My classmates kept me up to date, one of the benefits of attending a regular school (Gymnasium) instead of international school like Valerie. Not that I wouldn't rather be in school with her. Doubt I'd miss much about Hederschule. I don't know if the kids who, like clockwork, remind me to buy a new train pass are friends. We copy each others' homework--my English, their math--though neither they nor I need the help. I pick extraneous commas from their compositions like ticks, and expect the same from them for my logarithms (logarithmus), which I do make mistakes with from time to time. But I've always been pretty good with numbers.

The mystery is that I've paid for twelve train passes in a row, never missing a day, and my last one expires a week before my year is up. I'm trying to work it through in my head. Reaching the widemouthed stairs to the subway (U-Bahn), I head underground. For a moment, I'm in warm obscurity when I pass under the shadow of the overhanging pavement, in between worlds, and I feel like I can shudder honestly in the cold. It tinglingly shakes on my shoulders. Then a new horizon tilts to my plane as the pavement becomes the cieling. A different crowd, different like two streams are called different. They're walking faster, but just seem to be about getting out. A pigeon ( . . . I don't know the word for pigeon. Come to think of it, I don't even know bird, just chicken) is hopping in circles on one foot, the other curled tight and held against its body, fleeing one set of fast-swinging legs and then the next, and so on. I rest my back against the tiled wall and watch him (Er) . . . it? for a few minutes while I think.

Days in a year. 365, twelve months. Four weeks each plus change (münze). Twelve months of four weeks was . . . forty-eight weeks? That wasn't . . . yes, forty-eight. I tried not to mouth the words. Thirty days hath September . . . two other months, and November. All the rest have thirty-one, except February for some reason. February had exactly four weeks, then there were four months with two loose days . . . eight days, then, and . . . seven months with three days extra meant an additional twenty-one--twenty-nine days? I did my math again. The cripple-pigeon hopped in more circles. People passed. Yup, twenty-nine days, and wasn't this a leap year? Well shit, thirty. A whole damn month hiding in front of me.

The problem was that a week pass (Wochenkarte) cost half as much as a whole month, which left me with less than I'd planned on. I've had to work at tracking abstract things. Time, money, dates. Exchange rates. Being 30 DM short was $42 gone.

---

Not In The Beginning

A funeral for Oatey the dog. So many options have never had so little meaning to me, but for some reason I've taken on project heart and soul. The kids named Oatmeal (obviously), they loved him, and he died before they were old enough to shake off the loss like grown-ups. I'm not saying I'm not sad that Oatey is gone, just that I wish he could've waited another decade or so like he was supposed to.

Maybe it's good that he went while the kids were still here and still kids. I don't really want the house to empty all at once in ten years. But now he is Karen and Anthony's First Death. Until now their luck, and their relatives', have been remarkable. The grandmas and grandpas are all healthy, no accidents have befallen any of the cousins, and the one great-uncle on Valerie's side is still (against the odds) alive and smoking. I don't just worry about the house emptying all at once, I worry about the older half of the family dying inside of one or two years. It's actually a bit of a relief, in hindsight, that the kids get to practice their goodbyes on Oatey.

But, though grief-stricken, they're also clamoring with questions about how we're going to bury him. At least they have that much of an clear expectation, though I don't know if it's even legal, let alone a good idea. While the kids are putting the scraps they've learned about mourning into action, all I know is that the dog I fed yesterday is lying stiff in the basement, under eight bags of ice and a blanket we've sacrificed to him in the absence of a freezer, a measure I don't expect to give us much time. I'm wondering whether we should give away the rest of his dog food or save it, and how the kids might accept burying the dog in effigy without asking too much about what happened to the real body. Meanwhile I found Anthony in the basement stretched out beside Oatey's body, with the blanket half-hiding his little six-year-old self, rubbing the dog's cold fur with his hands and breathing on his paws—something I showed him when we went sledding last year—and he pleaded "I wanted to keep him warm."

I was younger than Anthony when my mother's cynicism introduced me to religion with angry gestures aimed at the latest round of Bible-quoting fundamentalists appearing on the news, who spoke against abortion and Iran. Against them, she defended the one on principle and the other having lived there. That she was reacting to the emotional predations of the religious right with sharp reason was beyond my ability to notice: at three or four I didn't have an ear for so much subtlety. When they drew her wrathful criticism, I absorbed mainly the wrath, rejecting the other stuff as too big to chew on.

I heard her rail against the hypocrisy of her opponent, and rattle off examples that placed his religion in a lineage dating to Assyria and Babylon, reducing his rhetoric to motives and his motive to stories and his stories to everyone's stories, which she insisted there were only seven of. The idea I got was that the religion and beliefs of these men were common old things, like rocks in the dirt, not the diamonds they seemed to have lodged down their throats when they spoke on the news. I didn't realize my mother cared and knew more than they did about their faith, only that a fight was unfolding between her and what I took for Christianity, and so my loyalties were strongly set.

I don't remember when we did Chanukah for the first time. It would've been Hannuka then, though: I do remember it was before the two months of Hebrew lessons at age ten (or eight, for my sister), that would be our entire involvement in the Jewish world, except for one course I took in college and dropped within—by coincidence—about two months.

Judaism at the time was something I loved, not as a religion like Christianity (these I took to be synonymous), but as a fascinating secret. How could a child not be thrilled by the mystery of being told by his parents to light these candles—in this order—for no reason, while a tape-player sings in a pretty, other language. I'm not even sure why we did Chanukah, it's not like dad wasn't "invited to leave" temple for being an atheist, or like mom believed in god, either

---

It will grow.

Sometimes my reaction to a photo is surprisingly strong; sometimes visceral; pricklingly cerebral other times; sometimes a dumb glut just fills my head and refuses to allow words and ideas to spring together.

While writing this bit I had to look up some pictures of Frankfurt, which caused physical pain. I hate every one of them. Look at them. They probably seem innane. Something in them brings out bad thoughts in me.

I remember those warm ugly nights, I remember those stupid trees, I remember quiet huge spaces, all clearly and uselessly.

I remember the damned Churrasco Grill with the red sign in that blockhouse across the street.

This is the one that holds the rest of them together. I tried to sit under that tree with the Commerzbank Zentrale looking like a church folded into triangles, and write the story I'm working out here.

Just when I finally thought I'd been exaggerating my aversion to Frankfurt, I dredge this stuff up. Well, I've got no real connection of any sort to the geographical place. The pictures just find locations in my memory bring them forward. And man it's shocking how much I hate them spots.

Word

Merriam-Webster, the One True English Dictionary as far as I care, announced their "top ten words of 2005," meaning the words most looked-up online. Their list, in order: integrity, refugee, contempt, filibuster, insipid, tsunami, pandemic, conclave, levee, and inept. What a lame list! Dictionary fans, you've let me down. I guess you heard those words repeated ad nauseum on CNN this past year, and with most of that network's contents, decided you were better off researching the words yourself. Still, also like so much of CNN's content, just because these words were aired again and again does not make them interesting, informative, or important.

Although, conclave? When did that come up in the news?

Also, go read about my Evil Twin Kombat Masterplan and do your bit. Hop to.
- posted by Andre @ 6:53 PM Permanent link