The Best Thing On TV

Is the website, Television Without Pity

The funniest thing I've read this week. Seriously. I cried. Hell, I nearly died. Read it and weep...

http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?show=126&story=6392&limit=&sort=

Letters!

Please note: I love hearing from those of you who read this blog (and/or my books) and I will write you back.

If you've written and haven't heard from me it's because my message was bounced back (something to do with your computer settings rendering me persona non grata) or because your message was a bit scary and I'm afraid to reply... Nothing personal, of course. Luckily, scary messages are few and far between and most of the time they don't even seem personal:

"Dear website operator,

I am inmate #1254678 at San Bernadino Regional Correction Facility, but you can call me Dan. I am looking for pen pals who are willing to travel..."

Sometimes it might take me a while to get back to you because I've got quite an active schedule, what with speculating about why Shandi didn't win America's Next Top Model and why some of the people on American Idol are popular in spite of having no discernable singing talent (at least compared to the most phenomenal Idol contestant ever: Fantasia Barrino). But I will write back... Oops! I have to go. Flick that D#*! is at it again...

Why I Live In This Town

Because in the last 7 days I have seen:

- 3 intensely focused pileated woodpeckers

- 4 garrulous blue jays

- 14 meandering sealions

- a herring run involving millions of fish

- hundreds of robins, each looking lustily overfed

- thousands of seagulls in a single flock, all apparently getting along for a change

- 3 slender and strangely elegant garter snakes

And none of these things was located more than 15 minutes from our house.

Now Let Us All Praise Cintra Wilson

I have read her in Salon.com and admired her writing, but it wasn’t until I read A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Culture Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease that I fully appreciated the glory that is Cintra Wilson's mind. She has the beautiful person's intolerance of vanity and the brilliant person’s intolerance of stupidity, but there is also a profound streak of empathy running through her work.

Here she is getting warmed up on the subject of young gymnasts:

"Those poor young women must be set free. Who are the idiots that told them that winning a gold medal at the Olympics would be worth sacrificing their height, their self-image, their entire childhood, and their bodily comfort forever. Sure, they can jump and twist and handspring like superballs, but Christ, forty-five seconds off the mat they look as shrunken and needy eyed as suicidal orphans in indentured servitude to the Peking Opera. …”

Here is Cintra Wilson functioning at the height of her powers on the subject of young gymnasts:

"The heartwrenching biographical montages set to overwrought piano music were another travesty: 'Little Natalia was ripped from her mother’s womb with a set of ice tongs by Communists and given to Dmitry, the man who would be her trainer for life. Natalia developed her upper-body strength dragging corpses up the harsh terrain of the steppes to the local incinerator, near the ice cave she called home. Dmitri would tell Natalia hourly that if she stopped moving she’d be clubbed by wood trolls. Sleeping covered only with a used aluminum foil near a tray of radioactive beef as a means of warmth, Natalia dreamed of the day she would be able to fly. And fly she does. Winning is all she knows, this tot-faced little angel, and if she doesn’t bring home gold for her country, her little body may be sold and converted to shark chum.'”

--From A Massive Swelling, 2000.

Cintra Wilson's new book, Colors Insulting the Nature: A Novel, will be out in August.

It's a Bit Much

To the sixtyish man wearing a trucker hat and no nonsense expression sitting on a stoop that I passed this morning, the one with a cigarette stuck on his lip, smoke curling into his eye, the one with a clear plastic bag of poo in one hand and a leash attached to a tiny apricot poodle in the other. I hear you, man. Sometimes dogs are really a bit much.

And to the woman with the long bleached blonde hair and abrupt bangs struggling to get a toilet into her compact car, I sympathize. Not every day is as glamorous as we might like.

Grown Up

I've decided the very best thing about being a grown up is flower bulbs.

The concept is wonderful. You bury yourself dozens of little presents in the ground each fall and you are so damn grown up you're actually able to wait until the following spring to get them!

When I was nine or ten I never would have been able to wait for my bulbs to come up. I'd have taken them out of the ground every day or two to see if anything was happening. Then I'd have forgotten to put them back. A passing racoon would have eaten them. When nothing happened, bulb-wise, in the spring, I'd have blamed my brothers.

But You Promised!

Informed the hummingbirds would be arriving to our part of the world on March 1, I rushed out and bought a feeder. I hung it on the 29th, just to be on the safe side. And now I wait. And wait.

Where are the hummingbirds? Did they stop off at a friend’s? Were they blown off course and are just now arriving at a place where they are not expected?

Or are hummingbirds the new WMD: just an idle threat to get me to buy something?