Geez, thank god christmas is over...

I had the most low key x-mas ever. I did not really go out. It was just me and my immediate fam for christmas lunch and the gifts were so perfectly honed that they constitute pure awesomeness. I enjoyed them all. I got a few sweet kitchen knives, some money (which bought me a backup harddrive and a digital camera), two bottles of Hendricks's gin, one pint of Jameson, one pint of Chivas Regal, a back scruber for the shower, a chia herb garden, a 1943 edition of the Joy of Cooking, some gift cards and the coup de' gras: Two original 1986 Watchmen lithographs signed by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It was tres cool. I also bought myself Ryan Adam's new book Infinity Blues (which because I preordered came signed by the author).
But how do you come back from this? Simplicity. Quiet. Presents. No work. How do you get back into the grove of normalcy which plagues my very existence!? Who knows...
I have also been doing some thinking and that never gets me anywhere but in trouble.

A Quick Ode...

Oh Budweiser American Ale... How I love thee. How I drink enough of you so that I need to pee. How I love your price... so cheap ($5.50 a sixer) and so so nice! God bless you and how little god has to do with it like a gorilla's tit... I give up on rhyming...

Love is Hell on the hi-fi...

So I am having a cooking night. I am currently working on two projects: braised ox tail in a crockpot and braised duck part deux in the oven. The duck was a failed a project from the other night. I braised it stove-top (which isnt braising) and made stock with the bits. The duck got tasty but not tender and so I have put the other half of it in a deep cast iron skillet with a lid with the remainder of the stock. The original braising business was made with almost a whole jar of grey poupon country style stone ground mustard, malbec, mushroom, roasted carrots/parsnips/celery, and some spices. Thus, adding the extra stock and cooking it in the oven will hopefully a) loosen the connective tissue and achieve and actual braise and mix the stock juices and up the awesome factor. The ox tail was browned in the put in a crock pot. I used the juices in the browning pan to cook rudely chopped onion, garlic, shallot, and portabello mushrooms. Once this was sauted to my satifaction it was added to crockpot. The remainder of that pan was deglaced with sherry. This was then added to the crock pot. The pan then had some water boiled in it to loosen up whatever was left. This was added to the crock pot.
Now we wait.
I am prone to dedicated my cooking and this is no exception. This was a hard thing to decide. I decided to dedicate the duck to C because of the nature of the process. The ox goes out to K (and I am not even sure if he reads this blog but that is beside the point, I send the thought into the void regardless).
I am tired these days. My jobs drags me down something terrible. I got no bonus because I am the new guy and there was no way in hell I could get friday off (which it turns out is a work day) nor could I get the day before and after new years off because I am the new guy. This brings me back to a point from a previous post: "the fetishization of the mental health" by philosophers. I admit that psychological jargon does lend itself well to some fascinating philosophy but at the end of the day the use of a lot pyschological terms really does rob the actuality of the situation of some of its reality. It domesticatees it. It glosses it over. Theory has always done well at this and excellent for the creation of catchphrases. I dare not mention specifics because this thought is more of an impulse than a blanket statement against everyone and everything I have ever read. I also know that making this a blanket statement will raise the ire of some folks very near and dear to my heart.
I picked up a copy of the DSM-IV today from work. I did not due this because I find it fascinating but merely so I can grope my way through the dark anals of actualy psychological description. I have reports and treament plans that use DSM jargon and usually when I am forced to look up a term I am not faced with some fascinating new similie to use in my thesis but horror. I am one who believes that a great deal of philosophy (good and bad) is an interesting study in the uses, abuses, malappropriations, and misunderstanding of metaphors. It is a puzzle of language. We look to push language, create shortcuts through it or tie it up neatly but sometimes this denies the reality of what language attempts to describe. Enuresis is one I am confronted with a lot these days. It is not fun. I also think the philosophical fascination with psychology is similar to slowing down to look at wreck. The paramedics find little to be exctied about but we love it and we love the chill of the spine that comes with it. I think that is why psychology attempts to frame itself in terms of a science (though every psychologist I have ever spoken believes their is something scientific about it that it is decidely NOT a science). Attempting the scientific view point is an attempt at distance. And why some might view this distance as a cold thing I am forced to more and more believe that it is a defense mechanism against the misery that the human being can perpetrate against itself. But what the hell do I know. I am going back to my cooking and my beer.

"Man, why can't we look the other way?"

It is becoming painfully clear to me...

That people who are not willing to concede the existence of anything (Nor dignify people's desire to believe in) things of any kind of metaphysical quality have a hard time getting on in this world. Most people commit themselves to some kind of (quasi)-(para)-(psuedo)-metaphyical-(esque)-(ish) things and/or qualities and/or categories in the world they see. I do no such thing. It is odd because the way many people see the world they are beset on all sides by godless heathens seeking destroy their faith. I guess what truly is a battle of people with different conceptions of degree:

"My metaphysical commitments are (more/less) satisfactory to explain the world (and/or) the way things and as such your views are (more/less) fervent than my own and as such not as satisfactory to satisfy my odd sense of epsitimic efficacy. All hail (Buddha, Allah, Yaweh, Elvis, The Mind, spirit, the One, L. Ron Hubbard, the Ego, Id, Geist, Spinozistic notions of the concommitant aspects of mental/physical, Sein (Being), epsitme, the happy land of forms, etc, etc, etc. )."

They stand on the other and very heavily populated side of the ocean from the few of us who seem to live quite contendly by ourselves without our gods, fate, ice-goblins, myths, folklores, minds, Fruedian conceptions of the unconscious, Jesuses, causes, eschatologies, teleologies, etc. I think the world is mostly populated by the the later and not the former (i.e., me). This is actually sometimes lonely and frustrating. Oh well...
Thy drugs are quick... Another beer garson!

Sometimes I like to rock....

And when I do I want to rock hard...

I totally dig this song. I can't explain why. I feel like I should be riding into a demon horde and destroying them while I rock out to this tune. The video is awful but that dude does throw a sword at Jesus. We all have our guilty pleasures: mine is Fear Factory.

Another post where I go on and on about myself...

Because this is what makes me authentic. I have heard that Lionel Trilling has a book called Sincerity and Authenticity. It talks about our ideas of a moral self have moved from one where we strove for sincerity to one where we strove for authenticity. I am not sure (as i have not read it yet) but I would hope that Trilling deems this to be a bad thing. I have put this book in my Christmas reading list. Hopefully Santa will get it for me.
I love Batman. I think he is awesome but another hero is slowly making his way into my hard cold heart. The Daredevil: Many Without Fear. Why would I let this "super"hero (and a marvel one at that!) do this to me? Well I suppose because he is so similar to Batman in many ways: He lives in a fictional NYC (Yes, gotham is the city), he is a bit of a playboy, he was orphaned by bad men out for ill-gain. But he is also different: is self made, he lives on the Upper East Side (but fights crime in Hell's Kitchen but occasionally can be found in nasty bars in Brooklyn getting some good info), and he is blind. This last part is the great part. I mean, a blind superhero? That is great!
Of course he has all of those powers that make his being blind a moot point but damn, dude is blind! He is also a handsome devil. I would recommend the Frank Miller Daredevil (as FM's stuff is always tres awesome!).
So the kids have all gone home for the holidays and I still have to work and I am hungover. Yuck.

Damn...

I mean damn in all senses of the word. Good and bad. Eternal and ephemeral. Things are just crazy these days. I did not have to go to work the other day because of ice. That was great. I am continually drawn to teaching because of the hours. You want to pay me in the summers? I have two paid weeks of vacation in the winter? Holy cow batman! Awesome...
I have used that time and time since to get some reading done. I finished a comicbook by a local gay named Nate Powell. He is great. I completed about another 1/4th of The Deathly Hallows. I also read the thesis proposal which electrified my brain grapes and got me back into a groove of philosophical thought. I have not finished my letters but I did finish the first issue of my my first comic book. I am trying to find someone to pencil it but I am thinking this will take a while. We will see what happens as time goes on. Oh well...
There is something that I find in certain veins of philosophical thought: seeing psychology as a fetish. It is a bit odd to me that I find myself in the middle of the world of mental health and DSM-IV diagnoses. I am going to have to think about this more.

A Winter Weather Advisory is in Effect for the Vicinity of Your Heart...

So here in the durty south even a whisper of winter weather sends us into a tizzy. My office was closed at 3.30 and word went out to those of us in the field to get the hell home. I of course have decided to take my time and run as quickly as possible to the beer store in preparation for the impending icy doom. I have already decided that I will be reading and letter writing this evening. I have already put a few beers down and I am going to run go snag some more blood warming potables and then settle in with a letter that needs responding to, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Nathan Powell's most recent independent comic, someone's thesis proposal which I have yet to give due consideration too and some other stuff. Did I mention that I will be drinking? Cuz I am going to be doing just that. Here is an artist representation of my plans...
The internet is awesome. Tata for now.

So I didn't make it out of town this weekend...

Which makes me sad but there is a recession on and there was Christmas shopping that needed doing. And someone threw their shoes at the president. My list of excuses goes on and on and on. That being said: I wish I had weaseled my way out of being a productive member of society but alas. I suppose my main reason for not going was that I could not find someone to go with. I have to say that this provisio is solely for my own personal safety. I do not doubt my own skills as an outdoorsman but I do doubt the nature of nature. And since my intention was to go some place where no one could hear me scream I decided that I would have import someone with me. But other people find themselves more shackled than myself. So I didn't go. This was not intended to be some Therou-esque gallavanting but serious quiet time. Therou was a bitch of a bitch and that business in Walden was, what my grandfather would have called, a "Load of hooey." I admit I see the paradox of needing alone time and someone to around to drive me to the hospital shoudl I be attacked by a rabid squirrel. But oh well...
My roommate just showed me the video of the President being attacked with shoes. I love freedom of the press...
I admit I am growing resentful of the requests people put on my time. I don't get to write letters, do laundry, go camping, update this blog, or write in general, read more than I do mostly because someone always needs something from me. It is not one person (though my parents being old feeble and needing something moved every 15 minutes does no help) who does this but an aggregate of many requests and some poor management. I had to fire my social sercretary due to cut backs in the face of the declining economy. Oh well...
On a bright note though I have borrowed the most office 1980's boombox from a friend of mine so that I can try and make mix tapes. This does not seem to be working but I do want to video tape the system while I play some songs through it. If I can do this you will see why it is some awesome.
Back to work!

My Unhealthy Obsession with Richard Milhouse Nixon.

So I have slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am fascinated with Nixon. And there are several reasons for this. First because it can be said that the presidency (and possibly the country) as we know it today is based on actions of our 37th president. And second because this country elected an ugly, paranoid sociopath to the highest office in the land even in the age of television. I admit that the second fascinates me more...
If you want to look for the seeds of Bush administration look back to Nixon. Smear tactics, secrecy, paranoia, misleading the public, homophobia. All hallmarks of Nixon. Not to say that Nixon invented these things but he, more so than other presidents, built them into the actual bureaucracy of the executive. Sweeping executive powers. Manipulating public perception. And of course Rehnquist on the bench. Wow, its all there. I went to go see Nixon's last White House Counsel (a fancy phrase for the president's lawyer) speak a few months back and he spoke about what men who are absolutely assured of their own rightness (not to mention righteousness) will do when given an unfathomable degree of power. This is the lesson to be learned from Nixon and it is a lesson we have learned too little of too late.
Now, all of that being said, this is not what attracts me to Dick. I am not sure I can truly place my finger upon what it is. I am fascinated by him, Sir Thomas Moore, Ryan Adams, L. Wittgenstein, and William Faulkner. From that list I can discern no pattern unless we count chromosome composition so that is that. As I said up above though: we elected an ugly sociopath. He ran the country. The extent to which he spied and manipulated and investigated is only on par with J. Edgar Hooever himself. And we gave him power. But his ability to manipulate the gears, levers, and buttons of government were beyond reproach. He was also magnificently deft in his foreign policy. The ramifications and consequences of everything can be debated but Nixon was a political animal and a damn good one. This is why I find Nixon to be so much more of a terrifying figure than the current Chief Executive. The combination of political savvy, machismo, and insanity would put Bush II and Cheney to shame. It would be like putting Cheney in office if Cheney could win an election (and he couldn't, not for president). It should be noted that Nixon won his second term by carrying 49 states and 60% of the popular vote. But Nixon could win and he did. His career was rocky to begin with. House, senate, Eisenhower's VP. Kennedy stomped him in 1960. He was beat for governor of California in '62. But who comes back from that? Who? Nixon did. Fueled by whatever it was that flowed through that mans veins. He also got us off the godl standard and was a bitching piano plater. This guy fascinates me. Oh well...
I can't get enough of this guy. I fear for my mind.

For Some Folks

More On This Later...

Netflix: An Addiction.

So I signed up for netflix last week as part of a christmas agreement and I admit that it is far more AWESOME than I ever imagined. Here is my que thus far (I already have the first three):
1.The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson
2.Willow
3.Rick Burn's New York (1st disc)
4.Democracy and Disappointment (That is the Critchley/Badiou DVD)
5.There Will Be Blood
6.Batman: The Animated Series: Vol I, Disc I
7.Dead Man
8-10. Spaced (Simon Pegg's Sci-Fi comedy series on BBC)
11.I'm Not There
12.North By Northwest (Classic Hitchcock)
13.Breathless
14.Croupier
15.A History of Britain (Disc 1)
16.Tokyo Drifter (Not the car movie)
17.The Machinist
18.Come Early Morning
19.Control
20.24 Hour Party People
I like this.

So this is what I gotta do...

I have decided the pace of city life and dealing with other people has become too much for me and I have the holidays coming up so it is time to get out and leave all of that business behind. As such I am going to go solo camping next weekend I think. I have always loved being outside and by myself. A small fire, a bottle of red perhaps and if I am feeling very fancy I can always borrow my dad's windup shortwave radio so I can listen to my local NPR station. I might even take a book. We will see...

Kinda Like This!

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

I am sure you have seen this but I am old and behind the times.

Things I Don't Understand...

So one of the perks of working amongst peoples of different age is that they introduce you to knew things. Today one of my kids taught me about the "Stanky Leg" courtesy of Them G Spot Boyz. As I know all of my loyal readers like to learn knew things I bring this spectacular find to you. Enjoy!


Though it is important that you not confuse the "Stanky Leg" with the "Dirty Booty" by T-Real