'member those years?

by: gsmoss

Sat Jun 25, 2011 at 19:31:03 PM MST

An Email I Received Not Meant For Me

by: gsmoss

Thu Mar 24, 2011 at 10:22:25 AM MST

Let me tell you about my grandchildren

by: gsmoss

Fri Dec 10, 2010 at 08:06:13 AM MST

Upon meeting a person, of any kind, and having had a short period of time in which to absorb the basic gestalt of their face - I don't need to touch them or shake hands, or anything like that - I can thereafter picture the person, in perfect, accurate detail, crying. Anyone I meet I can picture them, from the shoulders up, weeping, his or her face contorted with the effort and emotion, the little twitching muscles at the corners of the mouths.

If I were a painter, I'd do a series of imaginary weeping strangers. Barring that, there must be some practical (profitable?) way I can employ this peculiarity to my advantage.

two unwilled thoughts from the middle of the night

by: gsmoss

Mon Dec 06, 2010 at 09:12:50 AM MST

2. If this were the '70's, Will Oldham would already be on "Hollywood Squares".

* this is probably unfair to Paul Lynde, and actually I was thinking of a different '70s's star - short dude in a white suit with a bowl cut and always wearing tinted glasses...who was that guy..

Precambrian netting/Dinosaur skies

by: gsmoss

Fri Sep 03, 2010 at 08:20:24 AM MST

Nearby is this pizza place, it's regular greasy Friday night hang-out spot ambience eliminated cause people in this particular city don't congregate publically so much anymore. They had Battlezone when no one else did. Battlezone was better to me than Donkey Kong or Pac Man because a) you looked through a one person viewfinder so the whole thing felt intimate, special and private; and b) cause Battlezone had mountains ahead and a moon above. There was a legend, or else I made it up, that if you drove your tank out far enough, into the right part of the screen, into those mountains, that there were whole other places inside the game. A city maybe, or a different kind of landscape, but that the world inside the game extended, perhaps of its own accord, ad infinitum.

Early video games were the closest a young person could get to going west or going to sea. There was the hope there would be adventure at the border. You could later join a band and maybe that would scratch the itch. As with all colonial endeavors, the unknown fell quickly, the adventure got used up (the internet being the strip-mined remains of that place-beyond-the-mountains in Battlezone). Takes 200 hundred years to devour the unknown. Takes 50 years to re-create it again in sculpted plastic. Frontier to Frontierland.

Also there's supposed to be a hurricane coming ashore today.  

Speaking of vision...

by: gsmoss

Tue May 11, 2010 at 20:56:38 PM MST

my entire response to the "Write an Essay on one of your senses" assignment

by: gsmoss

Tue Apr 20, 2010 at 16:01:48 PM MST

to the fleeting (ominous) glimpse
of a cellmate's bush,

we can all agree that sight has been pretty much

a mixed bag.

Like Derek Paravicini

by: gsmoss

Mon Mar 22, 2010 at 15:07:59 PM MST

Like Derek Paravicini, a masterful musician who is blind, with disabilities so severe he can't tell his right hand from his left or hold anything but the simplest of conversations.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

"60 Minutes" and correspondent Lesley Stahl started following Derek because of his gift at the piano, but it's what he has taught us about relationships, communication and what music is really all about that has kept us coming back.

When Derek is playing the piano, it's hard to believe there is anything he can't do, and yet when you meet him away from the keyboard, as we first did in London six years ago, the contrast is shocking.

Derek is a musical savant, blessed with an island of extreme talent in a sea of profound disability.

"Do you know how long you've been playing the piano?" Stahl asked.

"Was it about a year, wasn't it?" Derek asked. "No it wasn't."

Asked if he knows how old he is now, Derek said, "I don't know how old I am, no."

Today Derek is 30. He grew up in an upper class British family, the nephew of Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. But none of that matters much to Derek.

"You gonna have pizza tonight?" Stahl asked.

"Yes, pepperoni!" Derek excitedly replied. "In New York, what do they have? If I come next year, what do they have there?"

Derek was excited to show us the skills that make him so exceptional, the ability to instantly call up any piece of music he's ever heard. Like the Village People's "YMCA" or the show tune "My Favorite Things."

But it isn't just that Derek remembers them: he can transform them effortlessly and seamlessly into the styles of different musicians, like jazz greats.

Asked to change to the style of Oscar Peterson, Derek changed style mid-song, playing "My Favorite Things" Oscar Peterson-style.

He also wowed Stahl by playing the tune in the style of Dave Brubeck.

"It's like he's got libraries of pieces and styles in his head," Adam Ockelford, Derek's teacher, told Stahl. "And he can just whip out a piece book and a style book and just bring them together. It just kind of explodes."

How Derek's fingers can do this but can't button a button or zip a zipper remains a mystery. There are lots of theories about savants, but few real answers.  

Now if only I could find a mimeograph machine and ten thousand empty lampposts

by: gsmoss

Fri Mar 05, 2010 at 09:44:40 AM MST

Fact: During the baseball game, I turned to look closely into my sister's morphing, fluid face and said, "You're like a third parent to me. I try to please you; I try and I can't."

Fact: My niece and nephew had filled up an entire notebook full of drawings of sideways horses and ponies, rendered in a balloon-like, bulging style.

These and other facts originate in dreams I had in the year 2010 AD. The truths they reveal will be made manifest in the air among people to come circulating on the internet and in televisions across the globe. Be prepared for the Celestial Change circa 2014 AD not 2012 as the Mayans erroneously predicted. Never trust a Mayan.

excerpt from a Playboy Interview, November 1974 (torn page found in a ditch nothin dirty on it)

by: gsmoss

Mon Dec 07, 2009 at 16:15:58 PM MST

(Laughter)

Q
Well...

A
Well let's put it this way: I am wealthy enough to - late last year I had synthetic dragon heads surgically fixed over the heads of the heads of all of my children.

Q
Wow!

A
Yeah. They were beggin and beggin and - and they're really fantastic, these heads. Like masks, but on there for good!, and the skin - you should feel the skin - the scales feel real!

Q
Wow.

A
Yeah. And. You know the expense, the expense is great but. But you know, it would have killed me, KILLED me not to be able to give those kids their way. They were asking me but -

Q
How many -

A
But my wife of course she heh?

Q
How many kids have you got?

A
Me? I got five. Five beautiful...and the littlest one, Minton? He was sitting next to me at breakfast this morning, and it's so cute cause he's got this, like this speech impediment thing, you know like kids have, it'll go away, not like he's gonna talk this way forever, but for now, for now it's so goddamn cute I could cry every time he - and so we're at breakfast, and I see his little face shining out from between the jaws of that surgically attached synthetic dragon head, in the shadow of the teeth his little round eyes shining in there, and he says to me, he says, "Daddy? Can you pass me the bwuttah?"

(pause)

Can you believe that? The - the - the unprecedented adorability of him and - and you know the dragon heads, when they talk, the kids? a little puff a smoke comes out too. With their words. "Daddy, can you pass the bwuttah?" and smoke in the nostrils. Cause that's how he talks. So yeah. Yeah. No. Not for nothing am I a wealthy man.

Why I Hate Celtic Music

by: gsmoss

Thu Nov 12, 2009 at 22:20:52 PM MST

I was at a disadvantage, in an unknown sector of an unknown town. I usually stick to myself. I was just passing through.

In the light coming through the Venetian blinds she looked eerie, only half-corporeal, like a strong breeze would disperse her.

She is a beautiful woman, I think, watching her sleep in the shadows, in disreputable hotel sheets. She is a beautiful woman, but she is every bit of the forty-five years she will actually cop to. You can see that when the various restraints and fasteners come unhooked, when you are close enough to see the faint bars of silver just cresting the skin of her scalp.

She blinks in the half-light. I stub out my cigarette. Did I wake you I ask No I had this dream she says. What was it? I say. I was a rabbit she says, being chased by a hunter; I was a rabbit in my favorite book. Which one is that I ask. Watership Down she says. I never read Watership Down I say. Come back to bed she says.

And for the third time that night I make love to former governor of Alaska Sarah Louise Palin."

"Didja Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?"

by: gsmoss

Sat Oct 31, 2009 at 23:41:34 PM MST

I wouldn't want to eat it, wouldn't entertain the idea even, except that seeing it sitting there - not a meal, not even a snack - I sense that someone has placed it there, deliberately, a temptation, a question of where your boundaries lie, that someone, somewhere wants me, or wants someone, to eat this nut, to consider eating this nut on the floor of the corner of the bathroom, wants someone to be at least tempted by the question of eating it.

And I was in Philly, in the subway, with my girlfriend Saturday. It was pretty empty, maybe cause it was Saturday, but I got the impression that very few people use the Philly subways - they looked abandoned, Escape From New York'd. This one dude, wasted, street type individual, could've been 30 could've been 60, staggered over to the bench where my girlfriend and me and a fellow passenger, middle-aged African-American woman, sat waiting for a north-bound train. "Look what I'm drinking," he says, and holds out his bottle of mouth wash. "I'm fucked up," he says. "My father beat me. I'm gonna go find him and beat him back." Swings his limbs. No real physical threat, right, too looped, uncoordinated. But still. And we're frozen. Black woman says: "Why don't you go do that, then." He doesn't hear. Says: "My father told me - " racial slur something something - makes a lame fist and jerks it just a little in the direction of the black woman. She doesn't flinch - it's too far, too small - what is the nature of this threat? Is this a threat?

[Read The Rest Below The Fold...]

have I the rabies? (found inside a fortune cookie)

by: gsmoss

Wed May 27, 2009 at 19:51:23 PM MST

two short lists

by: gsmoss

Thu Apr 02, 2009 at 11:48:57 AM MST

2) my best friend from way back now a middle-aged property owner and I'm not entirely without envy

3) the irony of the Golden Corral buffet

4) right to life/death penalty

5) The American Family is an entirely hypothetical proposition

(two college girls covertly sharing ritalin at the table next to me - to help them study better...)
Books I never read:
1) How to Win Friends and Influence People
2) As I lay Dying
3) Mad Magazine anthologies 1990 - present
4) Death of A Saleman
5) Pussy King of the Pirates
BONUS - my mom's diary (at least not all of it) (I didn't even know she kept one!)

pseduo-psych sci-fi christianity

by: gsmoss

Sat Mar 28, 2009 at 21:43:10 PM MST