Laughing, Crying, Window Treatments, and Puzzles

I'll just kind of run my mouth at you for a minute.  About a year ago I spilled a little beer on the lower left corner of this hideous-but-recognizable-from-a-great-distance-as-hip white keyboard. On that:  What do I hate today?  Two things: 1. Straight people who move into a gay neighborhood and can't stop casually mentioning it because it means they are aw-suuuum! 2. People who walk around with blinding white headphones, one in the ear and one hanging down oh-so-casually, unused.  "Oh, I can pay attention to you, sure, but I'll only sacrifice half my hipness to do it."  Back to the keyboard - no, to hell with the keyboard.  The beer be-sodden keys get very sticky whenever the humidity climbs.  Makes typing anything a stentorian task, until they get loosened a bit by my hammering.

I am just trying to have fun.  Don't know if you have picked up on that or not. Sometimes it is hard to tell.  Life, for some reason, seems to be a long run of moments in the neutral to somber range, with intermittent splashes of "hey, that was a blast!"  I don't mean that strictly in relation to me, but that it's kind of a human communion - we coexist most frequently as emotional window treatments. Functional, and mostly noticeable for being mostly unnoticeable.  I suppose that's as it needs to be - if everything were either amazing or miserable, we would be exhausted right away, and dead from it by the age of nine.  It must be why my daughter does puzzles.  She seems to have only three states of being:  Laughing, crying, and puzzles.

I finished reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  Is that right?  What's the rule for books?  Italicize?  Underline?  Quotation marks?  I used to know these things.  I should go back to school.  The book:  Written by David Mitchell, I believe right here in 2010, and centered on Dutch trading on a Japanese island at the turn of the 19th century.  I need more books like this.  No cheap tricks, no shiny trinkets.  Just smooth writing, solid characters, and easily discernible storylines.  If I were to give it a one line description for to be plastered atop a cardboard display in a bookstore (Do they have those any more?  Bookstores?) it would be this:  "Enjoy this very singular accomplishment: a novel written in the 21st century with not one mention of the Knights Templar."

I am using a lot of colons today.

My new Kindling is something called "White Noise" by Don DeLillo. Went for the trifecta there, you may have noticed.  I nabbed it from a book list at Art of Manliness.  The Essential Man's Library.  I have read many of them.  Essential is hardly the word I would have chosen.  Only one description really approaches what the compiler of that list was really compiling, and that is for Ulysses, the Joyce version:

"We suspect that even those who have written their doctoral thesis on the book only pretend to have read every word, but a good friend of mine said not to question an academic on things of this nature, so if you encounter someone who has built a career around Joyce, don’t ask if they actually read it."


One for the "looks good on the bookshelf" collection.  But I take that as a challenge, and I know that I will be reading it eventually.  


Back to White Noise.  Perpetually, I suppose.  But, the book.  Written in 1985, no Knights Templar so far.  People saturated by modernity, with their own mismatched and cynical children.  One of them says, in passing and on the phone:  "Neutrinos go right through the Earth."  That could be the crux of the whole story, really, that we are as indefensible to all this supercilious contemporary window dressing as the Earth is to the incessant barrage of those insidious neutrinos.  Should we get whipped up into a frenzy about it and try to stop something that we can't, or will that just lead from stacked up cookie cutter housing to stacked up cookie cutter bomb shelters?   No wonder our cars keep getting bigger - we're vulnerable out there, man!  Enough.  


It is extra gray here today.  The rain last night was spectacular, the best kind of window treatment.  So I threw them open, and even put on fresh sheets so that the bed would be a heavenly little nest while the rain played its opus out there:  Now the fat splatting on the concrete, now the muffled thrumming on the grass. You, shed roof section, now with more vigor! And then when I finally got my neurotic little ship adrift towards slumber, the whole thing just faded to a particular white noise of its own.  


Good morning.