Bellies. A Romanian chicken, dog, and penis. Politics. Smoke Alarm. Scare Tactics. Football. Movies. Etc.

--Have little pot bellies on women come into fashion? At my gym a gang of cheerleaders works out, and over half of them sport tiny round puffs. The everlowness of their gym shorts and the everhighness of their sports shirts suggest that they are proud of these protrusions. I assume they are too young and of the wrong mindset to have seen Pulp Fiction, but one certainly longs to hear them quote Fabienne.

--I like to run. Usually, I run along the road over to the University, twice around the center green, and then back, the last of it up a hill to Greenhouse Apts. I give a kick for the hill. If I’ve run properly, there’s no real kick in me so that it has to be created right then and there. Some trick I play on myself to pretend I can and I play it so well that I run up the hill at a faster clip than I’d been running all along. It hurts the lungs and the throat and when I fall through the door and lay beneath the ceiling fan I see faded out colored spots, the kind of which I used to imagine where angels coming in and out of my head when I was a child.

The fan spins. The body aches.

All of this so that I can clarify the lines on my body. Thinking: you do this for some woman.

I lie there watching those spots that are not angels, wondering, vaguely, if whoever she is, she is doing it for me.

Knowing too, as the spots bleed into each other and then elongate themselves and split again, that it is not the outside that needs perfecting. Not if it’s love I seek.

Telling myself: well, it’s not love.
Telling myself: yes it is, in the end it is.
Telling myself: you need to learn more about giving and receiving love.

Thinking: it’s therapy you need, not exercise.

--Congratulations to Romanian Constantin Mocanu who gives us a little glimpse into instant karma. Angry at a noisy chicken, he raced with a knife into his yard in the middle of the night, snatched up the chicken…and accidentally cut of his penis, which his dog then ate.

Think he’s seen Caligula?

He told reporters he mistook his penis for the chicken head and neck.

I asked my friend, AL, who first told me about the story, whether she thought the man must have had a large or a small penis to make such a mistake. She declared her ignorance on such matters.

After a pause, she added, “It was a Romanian chicken. I don’t know if that makes any difference.”

--Insomnia. I have had it on and off since I was a child, as young as five. I remember lying in my bed at night and wishing for a button that I could push and instantly fall asleep. Now there is a kind of button like that. It’s a little blue pill and not instant but fairly effective just the same.

After three, maybe four nearly sleepless nights I took two of these pills last week. This was about two in the morning. It kicked in by three. Goodbye Jack Tripper and Sam Malone and all my late night friends.

Then: BEEP.

It is five. I am sitting up. I think I heard something, but what? Then: BEEP. I get up, stumble into the hallway. There is a smoke detector on the ceiling. I pull it down. Open its battery hatch. Take out the battery. Drop the battery on the floor. Click the smoke detector back into place on the ceiling.

Just as I reach the bed: BEEP.

I go back out, thinking that for reasons of safety the alarm must store juice inside and could keep going for some long time. I am nauseous with fatigue. I take it down again. I see two wires kind of sticking out. I get a screwdriver and I put it in a loop in those wires and then I twist until they snap. I leave it all on the floor. Get back in bed.
BEEP.

Mother f’er. I get up. I tear the back off the smoke detector. There’s a little mother board in there, one of those light brown things run through with gray and bubbling over with little electrodes or whatever they are. I see something that looks like a speaker amongst these guts. A BEEP echoes through the hallway. Using the screwdriver, I tear the speaker out. Then I set it down.

Go back to bed, practically praying that the pills will kick back in and I’ll sleep. BEEP.

I get up. I dress. I take the speaker and go to my truck and throw it inside. I lock the door. I come back in. I undress. BEEP.

I stumble into the hall. I look at the guts of the things. I pry them out, cutting my hand. Then I put the shell back together again and I re-hang it. Empty. The guts sit on the floor. BEEP. I push them into the kitchen with my foot. Then I pick up the screwdriver and begin to stab at them. I stab the motherboard into several pieces. I mark up the linoleum I am stabbing so viciously. It all feels good.

I go back to bed. I lay down. BEEP. I run out. I break the pieces into smaller pieces. I tear off every little gray and green knob I can. I scatter them apart from each other as if I’m killing a vampire that might put itself back together again if I’m not smart. I cut and recut my hand.

Scattered on the floor are little pieces of electronics and smeared on the floor is blood; it looks like the scene of the final post-apocalyptic battle between the humans and the robots: a tie.

BEEP.

I look up. On the wall, right below the now empty smoke detector, is a carbon monoxide detector. I open the hatch. I take out a battery. Silence. I go back to bed. I am happy to feel sleep come down on my swiftly. I think, before it takes me completely under, that it is odd that my carbon monoxide detector was going off. I wonder as I fade how deep this sleep will be.

In the morning, I wake.

--If my students are right, I am be a liberal. They think all their professors are liberals.

It is clear that Kerry beat Bush and less clear but pretty certain that Edwards beat Cheney. Bush/Cheney keep hitting the same drum concerning inconsistency in their opponents and the idea that Kerry will leave the country open to all kinds of mayhem. Supersize our fear. It was a one prong straightforward march attack while they felt to be hit from every side. Confused generals blustering toward the front of the line.

And yet Edwards appeared too slick, overly prepared, a product of finishing schools and public speaking workshops, a well trained man.

I know who I’d vote for, but only because I’ve got vote for somebody.

--Reminds me that I recently watched The Contender, a political fairy tale that calls itself a political thriller. It’s one of those pandering pieces I’ve grown to hate.

--Speaking of pandering, I am amused by the lyrics of popular songs on the radio that reference political documentaries and bumpersticker politics. It’s good I suppose that mainstream music is developing some kind of critical consciousness about American culture, or rather that it is recapturing that consciousness that died out before disco was born. Still, twenty year olds yelping about our “culture of fear” without any real understanding of it feel just a little more legitimate than Von Trier’s anti-American films—ones that he proudly proclaims he has made without ever having visited America—developed on the basis of rumor and stereotype without a single legitimate critique of a country sorely in need of criticism.

--But yes, Bjork, a good vegan woman, can really act.

--After watching the much in some circles hyped King of the Ants it occurs to me that the only reason this film has been made and has been watched by anybody is because it’s creator had the perverse imagination almost thirty years ago to create a scene in a film in which a mad scientist detaches his own head mutilated and bleeding head and then holds it in his hands while it performs cunnilingus on a strapped down torture victim, leaving bits of viscera where it licks her thighs.

He’ll never match that again. And people will keep giving him money to see if he can.

--What’s that Paul Simon song?

--I wonder if it is coincidence, or if Varsity Blues with its opening soft southwestern voiceover about America and Texas is purposefully referencing Blood Simple’s opening. In any case, this movie has some better football scenes than it’s given credit for and it reminds you that James Vanderbeek—what happened to him?—has got some genuine screen charm. It’s flawed but does have something to say.

--Autumn. Football. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Dead leaves. Dry branches. Football. The Best of Times. The Longest Yard. Any Given Sunday. And so on. Not the Vonnegut cares about football. Not that he doesn’t.

--Funniest show on tv, ever: Scare Tactics on the Sci-Fi channel; it is pure, mean as hell reality tv.

--What’s wrong with running backs? I respected Williams when he left the NFL. But now? And I remember riding on a plane with Portis after the Broncos were beaten badly out of the playoffs by the Colts last year. He was smiling and having a good time with his mini-posse. I know there is something wrong with a player when he takes his team losses better than I do.