Constant, Schmonstant.
For a Physics final back in high school, we had the option of writing a paper or putting together some sort of group "artistic option" illustrating 12 physics principles. Thus: the filming of the VHS classic, "Physics Project of Doom," in which two friends and I featured relevant snippets from Casablanca, Barbie surfing in the bathtub to the music of The Breeders and of course, 12 illustrations of basic physics principles, all completely riddled with flaws and incorrect calculations.

I think our poor, beleaguered teacher—a really, really young guy whom we caught one Saturday that year working a second job as a salesclerk at Sears—gave us a B. That B was a gift: our movie was lovingly crafted juvenile shlock, but it was crap in terms of an illustration of what we were actually supposed to have learned that year.

The latest on Found Magazine's beautiful website is in the same spirit, I think. Anonymous elephant illustrator, I salute you.

The Fact Men post their very funny Year in Review.
(Coincidentally, Wikipedia lists no such entry as "Very Little Known Facts".)

Loving Miranda July (even) More
Write a press release about an ordinary event! Take a flash photo under your bed! Draw Raymond Carver's Cathedral!
This is the best idea I've seen in a long time. If you've got any lazy days coming up this winter break--and even if you don't but just want to feel all warm and squishy inside for some slightly inexplicable reason having something to do with the allaying of the fear that all this goofy internet technology is alienating us from one another--I encourage you to check this project out.

The office is cold in the morning. This morning, the cat who is usually the coldest in temperament insists on my lap. Heat, soft weight, there. Feels like a gift and a threat, all at once. Also, I find this beautiful thing by artist David Silverstein at the website of the wonderful literary journal, Pank.

The Dance of Destiny, the Loafing of Laze.
There’s a reading tonight on campus, but I’m feeling extremely hermitlike in here, inside what my roommate calls “Your Cave.” She always comes home, all the house lights turned off: the kitchen, the hallway, my bedroom, back, back, back until, there’s my office, all warm and dim and cozy. I specifically don’t want to interact with a bevy of people or sit up straight in a chilly auditorium wearing real clothes tonight. I just want to curl up inside by the blazing radiator in an afghan on the amazing antique rocker I found a few weeks ago. Chamomile tea, even, and nobody in sight for miles. Just this book. Hell, if I were outside on a park bench with this book and a handy streetlight, I'd take it.

So, I’m here.
Carmelita and I had this really yummy brand of frozen pizza for dinner, which is worlds better than the delivery alternative. I’ve never seen this, but Carmelita says that whenever we order from Papa John’s, we get the creepiest delivery boy ever. Last time he came, he warned Carmelita to be careful of jumping over the giant corners in our house, his stare hard and evil and empty.
“And he drove up, his car blaring with that song! That 'Whoa-whoa-whoaaaa' dance song?”

Logically, I thought: I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about, Carmelita. But then I heard myself singing back to her, “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more…” We both laughed over the fact that we keep that song stored away inside ourselves without even knowing it. She says this: Something about that song, coupled with that delivery boy, equals creepy.
What is love?

I always just sort of linked that song in my mind with Rick Astley, who, a number of years earlier, sang that “Never Gonna Give You Up, Never Gonna Let You Down” dance song, which is basically, like, the same song. It also being true that Rick Astley and the “What is Love?” man possess basically the same voice. And what if they are blood kin, we wondered? What if all dance singer men are chosen from one family of men, like boy sopranos of English days of yore? Chosen for how their grumbly-weird voices sound, projected over a very specific beat.



Ecce Romani
I need to go running. No; better than that. I need to do community service; need to take a year of my life and devote it to relief in Somalia. I’m saying this not because I had pizza for supper tonight, five pounds of hors d'oeuvres at a party last night and haven’t gone running in a week. This isn’t about being skinny or fit; it’s about real virtue, or total lack thereof. It’s because of the other thing I ate last night, which a friend brought to said-party: a gourmet dark chocolate bar with bacon in it.
He told me about it and I said, “No. Gross. Gah.” But then I went and tried it and yes: It is the best, most evil thing I have ever put in my mouth. The incomprehensible, looming, loamy sweetness of the darkest chocolate and then, the crunchy, salty Perfect Foodness of bacon, all there in one really, really decadent bite. I would have felt less wrong, less tainted with Romulus Augustus-styled hedonism, had he fed me some damn foie gras on a Chicken McNugget. Just hand me a toga and a feather. Surely, we are the Romans.

Read it.

The Used World, by Haven Kimmel. The Used World, by Haven Kimmel. The Used World, by Haven Kimmel.

Goodness gracious, sakes alive.

Night Sounds
Our house is filled with knocking at night. In the apartment above my bedroom and office, they start stacking heavy piles of wooden pallets, it seems, beginning around eleven and ending a half-hour later. Also, walking around in heavy-soled shoes and I know exactly which is their squeakiest floorboard. Take me up there; I’ll walk you to it.

They begin loading their clothes washer (this I know is true), also their dryer, and hitting “Start” on both. In my bed, I hear and feel the rumble, hear the water make its gurgling exit between Rinse and Tumble Dry. The dryer too, as it growls and shakes. Usually, those things don’t disturb me from sleep any more than the trains that pass through here every couple hours on some weeknights.
Their whistle: Long, long, short, long.

I went through a bad spell last year. During that time, the train whistle, which I heard at two a.m. at my old apartment, felt like a part of my own personal disquiet; a dramatic underscore to my own insomnia. Train whistles can mean anything. When I was little, sleeping in the trundle bed at my grandma’s, they meant that shiver of risk: Train train coming from the wild unknown and disappearing to the same—but meanwhile it was now right here, mere yards from my bed, the safest place in the world. Sometimes I still catch a spark of that feeling. Mostly though, my brain has tuned it out. I fold clothes and put them away, or read, or sleep—right through it.

Too Much
It’s too: warm, sunny, humid for the start of December. I remember it was the same at this time last year. We stuck our toes in the ocean surf the night of December first: “Can you believe it’s almost Christmas? Almost Christmas.”

I still feel like a stranger who just happens to be living in this town, but I feel sure, walking through campus at class-change, that everyone is waiting for the ten-degree temperature drop predicted for later this afternoon. Everyone waits for the air to become hospitable, breathable again. And who wants this year to be last.

The Homeland celebrates its birthday.

Terrible photo on CNN, so I've provided one that's more fitting.
"Imagine what you can do here!"
Yes! Eat stale smiley cookies at Eat 'n Park! Stare at the overcast sky! Visit that one French and Indian War fort!

Actually, long-time readers will know, that like many emigrants from Pittsburgh, I am a freakily fierce defender of my hometown. This means I can make fun of it, like you can make fun of your dad, but you wouldn't catch me mocking your pa's propensity for multiple gold chains and stinky cologne, at least not in front of you, right? Well, that gold-chained papa, with his closet full of Stillers sweatshirts, he is the Dad of Pittsburgh. And don't mock him, or you're in for a hurting, a Jerome Bettis-style bus-accident, my friend.

Sigh. Can't wait till Christmas.