Scrambling up mount oracle (as in the Greeks, not Larry Ellison's), trying to revitalize my blog. Too much depressing stuff going on to attend to call of egocentricity. The stock market collapsing (yeah, yeah, up month in August, beware September, the meanest month), corporate crooks everywhere, Ann Coulter advocating blowing up the New York Times (some wit said that the NYT is now performing the role Clinton's member used to, the ... er, thrust of all evil), and the Saudis, the SAUDIS, the GODDAMN SAUDIS. I feel like Matt Dillion's character in Drugstore Cowboy after he sees the hat on the bed.
Plus this month harbors my birthday, which is always a rank event that leads to dangerously lugubrious ruminations. When the highlight of the past fortnight was a business trip to Dallas to report on meetings regarding federal government workman's compensation claims --- I therefore lay claim to the informantion bidness crown of Extreme Esoteria -- you know the days I've fallen on have been particularly fell.
So, in keeping with the creative advances I've achieved this month, I'll recycle a few emails here.
You know what that patriot, Ari Fleishcher, said the other day about Prince
Bandar?
"He's a very charming guy. He speaks very good English, better than most
Americans do."
Prick. Here we have, as Matt Welch points out, have the spectacle of the president's press secretary condescending to and rankly INSULTING
Americans in order to genuflect to the people who sponsored the murder of 3,000
of us.
Can you imagine the reaction if Clinton's press secretary had said
something like this? Yet nary a peep from the established media. So much for
Bernie Goldberg's thesis about the "liberal" media. Maybe they are
individually, but they treat this administration like ... well, this
adminstration treats the Saudis.
If the Bush Administration kissed any more Saudi ass, even Hustler wouldn't
publish the pictures.
Welch grits his teeth and gives us the latest rundown of American genuflection before the Soddies.
Like I said, I just got back from Dallas, covering meetings regarding workman's compensation. Pure adrenal excitement. 13 breakout sessions, each one trumping the previous one in dash and flair. A man cain't stand too much of that lest he go BLIND!
Oh, well, I always like going to Texas. I got there a day early and tooled up to Oklahoma. Texans are nice; Okies are mean. Sorry to any Okies reading this, but I'm plain spoken (easy to be that way, 1000 miles from Oklahoma City) But there's this national wildlife refuge outside of Lawton called the Wichita Mountains that rears up off the plains like, as Cormac McCarthy might write, the backbone of some great spined creature of myth. I went hiking up there, up Last Resolution Mountain, or something like that. I also stopped by Archer City, Texas, a little piss of a place where Larry McMurtry was born. McMurtry still keeps a lplace there, and the entire downtown (well, what there is of it, it really is out of the "Last Picture Show") is more or less a used bookstore that he runs. He's a big collector of used books. Anyway, I pull into town about 5 pm Saturday evening, feeling like Hud ("did you have trouble here last night?" "I had HUD in here last night, is what I had" -- Hud the movie was based on McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By) -- and who do I see getting out of his big black Caddie, wearing a bolo tie, and looking like he'd just stepped out of a John Ford western? I walk by him, say "hello, Mr. McMurtry," and he said, "O'Grady, ah yes, even though I've won Pulitzers and National Book Awards and made shitloads of money, my life is incomplete, because I know I'll never be in the running for one of your Nonachievement Awards!" I shook my head sadly and in sympathy, musing all the while on the fickleness of fate and on man's desperate attempts to deny his own.
Driving around Texas reminds me of the P.I. in Blood Simple: "Now in Russia, they got it figured that everyone pulls for everyone else; at least, that's the theory. Well, I don't know about Russia, but this here is Texas, an' in Texas, you're on your own." That got me to thinking of Jeff Skilling and Sullivan and that crowd, and how the tax 'n spenders are just drooling in anticipation in launching an assault on Fort Lassiez-Faire, and how we're no longer going to be on our own. Even though it's been my experience you're usually better off when you're on your own (which, actually, is one of the hidden meanings of the movie, come to think of it).
Dallas reminded me of Don DeLillo's "Libra," a (somewhat) fictionalized account of the JFK assassination. T.J. Mackey. George de Mohrenschilt. Shadowy figures lurking on the fringe, hiding between the neon-lit corridors, brooding over that bastard who sold us out to Castro. Dallas is still like that. It thrusts its glamour and wealth (or what's left of it), but in between the seams, there's this sleaziness of industrial parks and liquor-on-the-go shop and robs and strange bedeviled looking characters who've spent too much time in urban wildernesses living beneath underpasses selling the odd LaRouche newsletter. I was last in Dallas six years ago on my American trauma tour, when I went to Oklahoma City as well as Dallas, and also almost got myself killed wandering around Waco asking where the Branch Davidians complex was.
In Dallas, there's this main arterial road, the Stemmions Freeway, that approaches downtown from the northwest. Lots of budget motels along it back in the mid 90's, I stayed in one. And strip joints to the galore. Industrial section, with lots of long low buildings that could hold massive amounts of contraband and, in the winter, illegal immigrants. But now, in true Dallas fashion, the area's been totally redone as a convention epicenter. Trade marts, skyscraper hotels. The convention was in this swanky place called the Wyndham Anatole. They done put in me up in style, goldurn it, for a govmint type. Complimentary cocktail, bathroom phone, towels the size of comforters, a bed so wide you could scout across it. (Only problem was, the friggin' air conditioning didn't work well, so there I was, trying to sleep in this 300 dollar a night room, sweating.) The lobby could have held a roundup of steers (I learned that a steer is really a castrated bull, which gives a whole 'nother level of meaning to the "steers and queers" Texas jokes.). Cavernous, overwhelmingly capacious. As they say, "Texas-sized." At a restaurant called Pappas Bros., I got me one of them there 28 oz. ribeye steaks one night and chewed it all up right there on the premises. Then I left the gal who served me a PETA brochure on the evils of slaughterhouses, instead of a tip.
Plus this month harbors my birthday, which is always a rank event that leads to dangerously lugubrious ruminations. When the highlight of the past fortnight was a business trip to Dallas to report on meetings regarding federal government workman's compensation claims --- I therefore lay claim to the informantion bidness crown of Extreme Esoteria -- you know the days I've fallen on have been particularly fell.
So, in keeping with the creative advances I've achieved this month, I'll recycle a few emails here.
You know what that patriot, Ari Fleishcher, said the other day about Prince
Bandar?
"He's a very charming guy. He speaks very good English, better than most
Americans do."
Prick. Here we have, as Matt Welch points out, have the spectacle of the president's press secretary condescending to and rankly INSULTING
Americans in order to genuflect to the people who sponsored the murder of 3,000
of us.
Can you imagine the reaction if Clinton's press secretary had said
something like this? Yet nary a peep from the established media. So much for
Bernie Goldberg's thesis about the "liberal" media. Maybe they are
individually, but they treat this administration like ... well, this
adminstration treats the Saudis.
If the Bush Administration kissed any more Saudi ass, even Hustler wouldn't
publish the pictures.
Welch grits his teeth and gives us the latest rundown of American genuflection before the Soddies.
Like I said, I just got back from Dallas, covering meetings regarding workman's compensation. Pure adrenal excitement. 13 breakout sessions, each one trumping the previous one in dash and flair. A man cain't stand too much of that lest he go BLIND!
Oh, well, I always like going to Texas. I got there a day early and tooled up to Oklahoma. Texans are nice; Okies are mean. Sorry to any Okies reading this, but I'm plain spoken (easy to be that way, 1000 miles from Oklahoma City) But there's this national wildlife refuge outside of Lawton called the Wichita Mountains that rears up off the plains like, as Cormac McCarthy might write, the backbone of some great spined creature of myth. I went hiking up there, up Last Resolution Mountain, or something like that. I also stopped by Archer City, Texas, a little piss of a place where Larry McMurtry was born. McMurtry still keeps a lplace there, and the entire downtown (well, what there is of it, it really is out of the "Last Picture Show") is more or less a used bookstore that he runs. He's a big collector of used books. Anyway, I pull into town about 5 pm Saturday evening, feeling like Hud ("did you have trouble here last night?" "I had HUD in here last night, is what I had" -- Hud the movie was based on McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By) -- and who do I see getting out of his big black Caddie, wearing a bolo tie, and looking like he'd just stepped out of a John Ford western? I walk by him, say "hello, Mr. McMurtry," and he said, "O'Grady, ah yes, even though I've won Pulitzers and National Book Awards and made shitloads of money, my life is incomplete, because I know I'll never be in the running for one of your Nonachievement Awards!" I shook my head sadly and in sympathy, musing all the while on the fickleness of fate and on man's desperate attempts to deny his own.
Driving around Texas reminds me of the P.I. in Blood Simple: "Now in Russia, they got it figured that everyone pulls for everyone else; at least, that's the theory. Well, I don't know about Russia, but this here is Texas, an' in Texas, you're on your own." That got me to thinking of Jeff Skilling and Sullivan and that crowd, and how the tax 'n spenders are just drooling in anticipation in launching an assault on Fort Lassiez-Faire, and how we're no longer going to be on our own. Even though it's been my experience you're usually better off when you're on your own (which, actually, is one of the hidden meanings of the movie, come to think of it).
Dallas reminded me of Don DeLillo's "Libra," a (somewhat) fictionalized account of the JFK assassination. T.J. Mackey. George de Mohrenschilt. Shadowy figures lurking on the fringe, hiding between the neon-lit corridors, brooding over that bastard who sold us out to Castro. Dallas is still like that. It thrusts its glamour and wealth (or what's left of it), but in between the seams, there's this sleaziness of industrial parks and liquor-on-the-go shop and robs and strange bedeviled looking characters who've spent too much time in urban wildernesses living beneath underpasses selling the odd LaRouche newsletter. I was last in Dallas six years ago on my American trauma tour, when I went to Oklahoma City as well as Dallas, and also almost got myself killed wandering around Waco asking where the Branch Davidians complex was.
In Dallas, there's this main arterial road, the Stemmions Freeway, that approaches downtown from the northwest. Lots of budget motels along it back in the mid 90's, I stayed in one. And strip joints to the galore. Industrial section, with lots of long low buildings that could hold massive amounts of contraband and, in the winter, illegal immigrants. But now, in true Dallas fashion, the area's been totally redone as a convention epicenter. Trade marts, skyscraper hotels. The convention was in this swanky place called the Wyndham Anatole. They done put in me up in style, goldurn it, for a govmint type. Complimentary cocktail, bathroom phone, towels the size of comforters, a bed so wide you could scout across it. (Only problem was, the friggin' air conditioning didn't work well, so there I was, trying to sleep in this 300 dollar a night room, sweating.) The lobby could have held a roundup of steers (I learned that a steer is really a castrated bull, which gives a whole 'nother level of meaning to the "steers and queers" Texas jokes.). Cavernous, overwhelmingly capacious. As they say, "Texas-sized." At a restaurant called Pappas Bros., I got me one of them there 28 oz. ribeye steaks one night and chewed it all up right there on the premises. Then I left the gal who served me a PETA brochure on the evils of slaughterhouses, instead of a tip.
posted by citizen dilettante at
7:07 PM
