1. New study shows men who do more housework get more sex.
   Independent study at metamorphosism headquarters has verified this.

2. Scientists surmise evolutionary reasons for finicky eating among young children.
   I read about this in the Japan Times recently. The idea is, babies eat anything, but little kids – old enough to walk around and eat stuff on their own – are finicky; an evolutionary benefit of this would be to protect them from eating dangerous things, such as poisonous plants or spoiled meat, which is why the finicky ones usually avoid green vegetables or meats. Apparently cheese products were toxic back in caveman days, even individually-wrapped processed cheese slices, as well as all spicy food.

   This makes sense. Apparently, it was always safe for cavemen to eat spaghetti or toast with Nutella, especially when carved into teddy-bear or star shapes, which is why young children are more apt to eat such food without protest even today.

   Quick breakfast tip: keep a pair of clean toast scissors in your kitchen drawer. Toast can be cut into interesting shapes faster with medium-sized scissors than with a knife. Be sure to cut up the toast before you spread the Nutella. Breakfast goes a lot faster, with less arguing.

When I was young and single there would be no attractive women until I started dating someone, at which point they would all swarm out of their nests and abound all of a sudden, which tended to lead to the complications a sensible person would expect but which always took me by surprise.

It’s like that now with ideas for novels. I had ideas for five novels, some which I’ve been putting off for a long time, some new. They kept coming. I would try to write a short story, and it would insist on being a novel. Could be I subconsciously realize the ideas suck, because while I tend to finish short stories, the novels, eh, you know. To circumvent this tendency to procrastinate, I did the one thing again and even devised the Metamorphosism Challenge to kill two with one stone.

Yesterday it happened again. I tried to write a short story but it says a few thousand words are not enough. The longer I think about it, the wickeder it seems. It seems, this morning, like a wicked, wicked, wicked idea for a novel. I’ve misled myself on this before of course. I wonder if this is some pretentious self-delusional thing I have going here, you know, brilliant sufficient yet unwritten novels.

What do you think? Here’s a short excerpt of yesterday’s story.

Continue reading →

Reflected in the rear window of a dirty hatchback in front of me: bright overcast sky, and a tangled web of tram wires, telephone lines, cables holding up the lights stretched over the streets. Lasted just a second.

“It all happened so suddenly.”
“He was such a quiet neighbor.”
“One day he’s as normal as you and me, next they’re driving him off in a straitjacket.”
“Suddenly he’s senile.”
“Suddenly he couldn’t hear anything I said.”

Just now, google gave me 148,000 results for suddenly he and 80,100 for suddenly she.

Usually, suddenly just means that we weren’t paying attention. We ignored warning signs of hearing loss, psychosis, senility; anything we’d rather ignore happens suddenly. A google search just now gives me zero results for “suddenly he was slim.”

Because we don’t pay attention closely, people can pass. For them to pass as what we’d rather see them as, for what they’d rather be seen as. You can pass as white. If you’re a guy you can pass as a woman. It works the other way around too. You can pass as a lot of things. We won’t mention passing gas, this is a serious post. You can write books about passing. You can write lots of books about it.

Someone I know who has suffered a heart attack recently got me thinking about this. He seemed a little loopy last time I talked to him, but was doing a good job at faking normality. That’s why senility seems to happen so suddenly. People can lose large chunks of their memory and still pass for normal by faking it. By employing conversational tricks to cover up the fact that they can’t remember your child’s name, or even who the hell you are.

This sick relative, who is by the way making a miraculous recovery, appears more confused than before. This is due in part to the fact that he is in a genuinely confusing situation, but also because oxygen deprivation just might have claimed a few more brain cells. When he is under stress, he seems more senile and confused. I think it’s because it’s harder for him to work around those holes in his head at those times.

I have also seen this with my own father, who is losing his hearing. He has been losing it for a long time. Watching him talk to other people, I have seen him fake the ability to understand everything they say. Now and then he’ll give himself away with some small thing, an inappropriate response. Most conversations you can get through by just letting the other person talk and acting interested. The worse his hearing gets, the more often I notice his little tricks, since I’m looking for them, especially when he talks to me. With a lot of people, he can still pass for normal hearing; this is usually of no importance, although when he does it with his doctors, say, it’s a problem.

I catch myself doing it too. As my hearing gets worse, I fake my way through more and more conversations. People just think I’m a good listener, when I do it right. I pass for a lot of things. When I keep my mouth shut, I can pass for an Austrian. Sometimes even if I speak, depends on how my accent is doing that day. Rarely do they guess I’m American. Sometimes I wonder what else I’m passing for. Am I a good father, or just passing for one? Loving husband?

Does it matter?

Person 1: The world sure is beautiful. Isn’t the world beautiful? Don’t we live in a beautiful world?
Person 2: Mmm.
P1: I just saw a gravel road running into the woods back there. Even in this cold rain it was beautiful. It reminded me of the woods out at my parents’ house.
P2: Mmm.
P1: Not that I’d actually want to live there. I’d want somewhere with more of a view. I’d feel too isolated stuck in these dark woods all the time.
P2: Not to mention afraid of robbers.
P1: I suppose so. Although your grandparents have several guns.
P2: No fooling?
P1: Your grandpa has a Winchester 30.30 that I know of, real nice saddle gun, and a Colt .38 detective, you know, snubnose revolver. Except once you have robbers in the house it’s usually too late to run and get the guns.
P2: Uhhuh.
P1: The .38, you couldn’t hit a damn thing with that short barrel either. A human close up, maybe. But grandpa and I were shooting at rats once when I was a kid. Loud as hell. We hid in the barn, waited for rats to come out, no further away from us as that red car in front of us, took careful aim and BANG. Jesus. Couldn’t hear a damn thing for fifteen minutes. Of course the rats all disappeared. We waited another half hour and BANG!!. Didn’t hit any rats either time. They didn’t come back again that night, though.
[Insert usual gun-control blah blah here]
P1: That .38, though, decent stopping power if you did manage to hit someone.
P2: Really?
P1: Not as much as a .45 of course. That was originally invented, eh, not sure when* but it was invented by some colonial military, British in Malaysia maybe** because they were fighting these local guys who’d go amok and could manage to run clear up to their soldiers and kill one or two even if they took a few shots on the way. The .38s weren’t stopping them. In your European wars, you know, shoot a guy, he’d go, “oh, I’m shot, better sit down, medic!” whereas these guys, they’d wear armor or tie vines or ropes around themselves as tourniquets and go amok and shit, actually had to knock them off their feet with something big.
P2: Is that so?
P1: Of course, now you’ve got even bigger guns, magnum .357s and .44s and stuff, which are handy I guess if you’re walking down the street and suddenly have to shoot a moose or something.
P2: What’s amok exactly?
P1: Basically go apeshit and try to kill as many people as you can. I saw someone go amok once.
P2: Really? Who?
P1: Um, a maid at work.
P2: Heh.
P1: [Tells story] They finally flew her home. Glad I wasn’t on that flight. Screaming babies would be nothing compared to that.
P2: Anyway.
P1: Anyway. Beautiful world we live in, kid.

*end of the 19th century **US military in the Philippines

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim the week of October 12 through October 18, 2003, as Marriage Protection Week. I call upon the people of the United States to observe this week with appropriate programs, activities, and ceremonies.

[Via Francis.]

Yes, whenever my marriage is on the rocks, nothing helps like a good ceremony. I am personally fond of taking my wife to our favorite cemetery at midnight, where we swing a dead mole above our heads, in a big circle, and chant our secret marriage chant. I suppose a program of placing sleeping divorce lawyers in unventilated garages where Cadillacs are idling could possibly have some benefit. What else would be appropriate for marriage protection week? Your suggestions please.

My old friend Mig asked me to guest-author a post today since he is suffering from stress at the moment due to worrying whether he’ll be able to hack the metamorphosism challenge idea-wise, also his wife just called him all shaky-voiced and told him that she’d just been in a traffic accident but was okay but her car she just forced mechanics to fix yesterday for free is like, whoa, dude, and she won’t be going in to work today after all, that feasibility study will just have to wait, and best of all it wasn’t her fault; his favorite uncle’s heart attack had of course been getting to him as well, frustrating to be so far away and limited to email news and occasional telephone calls; but the old guy phoned Mig himself last night from the hospital bed and sounded good, a little shaky and weak, but you know, he’d just had a fucking heart attack, they’d restarted his heart one dozen times in a single day, you know? Also it was the first time the guy’d been on drugs in eighty years, so given all that he sounded quite impressive. All this worrying – Mig hadn’t thought it was affecting him, but his family noticed and he had to admit it when they pointed it out. Disoriented (more than usual), amnesiac and forgetful to a concerning degree. Of course, Mig is a wussy, people go through far more than this on a daily basis, but he decided to take a day off from blogging.

Personally, I support his decision. It’s important to give yourself a mental health day now and again, even if nothing major seems to be eating at you. It’s the little things that make you snap, after all. The empty gas tanks and the broken shoestrings. The moldy toast bread in the morning when you’re out of everything else, the daily grind of a career that didn’t take off the way you thought it would, you know, like you’re surfing porn in a cubicle instead of writing the great novel you expected, or instead of starring in jungle action films you’re fucking jumping through hoops somewhere, Vegas say, for a couple flashy German twats.

We all have our breaking point.

Go find some moss somewhere and lie down before you start forgetting where you put your glasses. Embrace the sublime for a couple minutes. If anyone asks what the hell you’re up to, send them to me.