No Diggity

It's late. I've consumed my monthly recreation budget in beer during happy hour with the co-workers. At a coffee house downtown, open until 11pm, I fight the inner battle between listening to Ingrid Michaelson via Pandora and a local artist mutilating the song "Sundown" upstairs. Sipping apple juice ($1.89+my change as a tip) I try to finally unwind from my third week of being a middle school teacher.

Tearing Down The Walls

If I didn't love Abba, poetry, the Lilith Fair, and sucking at sports so much I'd probably be one of those people you see who are in the midst of a race crisis. Baggy pants, rap jargon, trucker cap cocked to the side, and either a left-and-back repetitive head twitch or the periodic urge to interject "know what I'm sayin'" and thumb my nose in daily conversation. Sadly, as demonstrated by my middle name and the fact that I'm blogging and drinking apple juice, I'm pathetically white. Do I envy the racially-gifted such as my former roommate Mr. Mikail Gonzales Hamilton? Yes.

While I admit that I have very little to offer, I would hope that if we ever get to the point where we're picking teams again, I'll get picked up by a race with a bit better sense of rhythm. And while we're talking about it, I have to admit that no song has ever made me forget my white-itude like Blackstreet's "No Diggity."

The heavy blues piano, the ever-flowing verse-alternating rap, the persistent chain gang "hum," and the gospel-worthy chorus make this one of my favorite songs of all time.

On a less racially awkward note my car is on its way to be repaired at last. After taking Gretchen, philogygenous little auto that she is, into the shop yesterday I found out that she may be totaled, which would make my day. I hate that car. If I could get a settlement which could pay off what I owe on her I would jump for joy.

Either way she goes in Monday and I get an insurance-provided rental car for a week. Good times.

Today's question: If you could choose one song to represent "Fall" what would it be? I'm trying to put together an ultimate mix, which will provide titles and themes for posts in the month of October. Let me know.

P.S. You can have my ghetto handshake and "brutha hug" when you pry it from my cold, clammy, white hands.

At least Kermit can identify with my skin color woes:

Shot In The Dark

Ah, blogging from the laundromat. Strange how the scent of dryer sheets can make it okay that they never clean the floors. The company is odd: a man asking me for the 70 cents he needs to take the bus to Old Colorado Springs, whom I oblige in true Franciscan fashion, but know that he could have walked there in the time it took to wait for that 70 cents of charity; in and out go a wide array of twenty-somethings either living in dorms or stuck in the same sort of low-rent apartment where I hang my hat; every once in awhile the out-of-place harried looking middle-class mom who suffered a washer breakdown and has three kids to dress for school tomorrow. There's no wireless so I fire-up AbiWord on craptop and word-process away.

If I were a wealthy entrepreneur I think I would own a laundromat just as a self-supporting way of feeding my latent magazine addiction, though I would replace Newsweek, O, and Fashion Monthly with poetry and archeology journals. I imagine that if I actually paid someone to keep the place clean and only held twenty or so subscriptions, I could break even.

'Twas Brillig and the Slithy Toves...

With so many authors to cover in our introductory unit on fables, so many books to give out, and so many diagnostic tests to give, my kids have been taking way too many notes and doing way too little classroom discussion. So, to spice things up a bit, I decided that our first poetry unit would be on Lewis Carroll. Everyone knows Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking-glass, but it's always nice to come back to childhood classics and really see the beauty in them. In the case of Lewis Carroll, a method emerges from his madness after reading his poetry in large doses, especially when you realize that he was a mathematician and a professor of Logic and Mathematics at Cambridge for over half his life.

But, if there's one thing I love more than poetry, it's The Muppets, and as usual YouTube was one step ahead of me:

While Carroll appreciates nonsense, he resorts to nonsense because of a belief that on the other side of an experience, in the world of Alice, one is better able to see truth. I like that. It's why his artistic vision is valuable and enduring. His is just one more way to "tell all the Truth / but tell it slant," as Emily Dickinson put it.

Out of a complimentary Newsweek, as my tee's and dress socks enter their final cycle, I'm reading an interview with Woody Allen that actually reminded me a lot of Lewis Carroll. Woody Allen, it seems, despite a successful film career, a decade-long marriage, two beautiful adopted children, and all the artistic and professional freedom a man could dream of, isn't happy.

During the interview, Allen calls life "a meaningless little flicker," says that he "lies awake at night, terrified of the void," and that he "can't really come up with a good argument to choose life over death."

Despite using his films as something "to be focused on... ...so I don't see the big picture," he claims that in the end pleasures, however many and however good in themselves, are ultimately empty forms of distraction. In the words of the interviewer "the moments don't add up to redemption," and in the words of Allen "it doesn't accrue to anything."

So, how does someone who admits that he has made no progress on alleviating this nihilistic vision that he claims to have held from age five continue to entertain us after decades of movie-making? I have no clue. Before reading this article I was pretty convinced that at some time I would have to make it a point to take in a wide sampling of Woody Allen's films, but now I wonder if it would be worthwhile to do so.

Can a great artist really hold that nothing is eternal? That there are no truths and no constants? That human nature is ever-changing? That we're all that we see and seem is just a dream within a dream? Or, is Woody Allen just another form of distraction: a romance novel, a soap opera, a Harry Potter knock-off, and another sequel to High School Musical?

See you next month you great quarter-stealing monstrosity. Tu illegitime magne!!

And, because you were all waiting with bated breath, my favorite shows of all time in no particular order are: The Muppet Show, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Scrubs, The Red Green Show, and Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place.