deeplyshallow // the horn, and what’s around it

the horn, and what’s around it

I have been subscribed by some mystery person to Sports Illustrated. Mystery person, I do not read Sports Illustrated. Well, now I do, but only the baseball stories, which amount to about six pages per issue if I’m lucky, and two pages on average. This is not enough to encourage me to subscribe to the magazine on my own, so why have you taken it upon yourself to subscribe me? Please give me your address — you may even keep your name secret — so that I can sign you up for TigerDirect’s exhilirating monthly catalog.

Last weekend Felicia and I joined a stampede of people in actively eroding the stretch of beach between Morro Bay and Cayucos. It was all for a good cause, this destruction of the planet; because of our selflessness, children now get something they didn’t have so that they can combat some other things. And at the end of it we got hamburgers.

Tonight we’ll be hitting the road with friends. Our destination is the Troubadour. We’re going to see Kathleen Edwards. B., who is coming along, swears he once dated a Kathleen Edwards lookalike who was coincidentally also named Kathleen Edwards. If he told me that she was also Canadian, then I think believing him would be a stretch.

The Troubadour is where Elton John performed his first American show, where Guns ‘N Roses played their first show, and where Cheech and Chong were discovered. It’s also where John Lennon heckled the Smothers Brothers, and was thrown out on his narrow ass. That’s your history lesson for the day.

While watching Iron Man, I never made this connection. There are still film geeks who are both filmier and geekier than me.

The new guy at work uses an Apple screen saver that grosses me out. I think it’s supposed to resemble the gentle flow of sea currents through sea foliage. I can’t explain why it makes me gag a little bit.

Looks like I won’t be getting the stimulus check along with the rest of you mofos. IRS loves me because I owe them so much money, so they’re keeping it. Felicia, on the other hand, got hers a few weeks back. She had been pining for an Xbox 360 (mine’s totaled) so that she could play Guitar Hero. We’re standing in front of the games at Best Buy and she’s indecisive. “Should I? Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe we shouldn’t get it.” She asks what I think. She asks if I would use it. I say that I miss my Xbox. I say lately all my time is wrapped up in work or tasks. I say I don’t have time to just play anymore. “We’re getting it,” she says, without thinking a second longer.

She’s pretty damn cool like that.

I am still mostly thumbs when it comes to Halo 3. I’m obviously coming late to the party, evidenced by all of the tweens who squeak YOU GOT RAPED GAY HOMO BOY when they kill me easily. But I’m learning. If you want to kick my ass and call me names, I will be wasting my entire Sunday on the couch, and my gamertag is ‘arroway’.

As if you couldn’t have guessed that.

I have decided to read more novels by Vonnegut. I’d never read him until late last year, when I picked up Slaughterhouse Five. You know how it is when a book is overhyped for your entire lifetime. I was born, and the doctor was like hey nurse I been reading that Vonny-guts book, it’s pretty good. A couple weeks ago I finished Player Piano, which wasn’t as good as Five but which was still pretty good. And now I’m reading Timequake, which appears to be less of a novel and more an old man’s curmudgeonly lament. (I like it very much for that reason.) It is also the last novel he wrote, though not the last book. It also doesn’t really make much sense yet.

Tomorrow we’re going to another roller derby. This one, I think, is a bout made up purely of rookie skaters, so I expect much blood and hilarity. Felicia has purchased skates in anticipation of becoming a rookie derby girl. So far she has skated successfully across our kitchen floor. Next stop, the Morro Bay skate park.

I have a camera full of photographs of sketches to be uploaded to the sketch gallery. I’ll get around to it; it’s fairly time-consuming, which I hadn’t really anticipated. The sketches, since I’ve never really explained this, represent how I spend my time in meetings at work. I go to an awful lot of meetings. I have a project manager who keeps me flush with Microns and Prismacolors, and in return I give her any relevant sketches that I create in meetings that she’s orchestrated.

I have another Eleanor sketch clanking around in my head right now. I just have to figure out the right angle to approach it from. I am eagerly anticipating the day when Felicia and I find a new place to live, with a room that I can slip away into when I need to write.

I have been rewatching Studio 60 here of late. It does not capture me in the same way that either of Sorkin’s previous shows did. But it amazes me when I realize that, on his third major television project, he is still recycling ideas, and doing so in a continually interesting way. It’s actually a neat little easter egg experience to realize that dialogue between two Studio characters is nearly identical to dialogue between a couple of West Wing characters. There is a tendency for most people to think of this as lazy writing, but instead I find myself thinking of it as a good writer refusing to let great lines die. There’s always room for a great line. But maybe he could write a few new ones for whatever he’s doing next, all the same.