On Saturday, no less! Were my computer a car it would have been stranded on I-95 yesterday evening with the hood up and steam blasting out of the radiator. The PC had been on for most of the day and around 6 pm it was oh. so. slow. (I almost resorted to banging my fist on the CPU, and I know better.) Effing viruses, I started swearing, now I'm gonna have to take this thing in. Bitch bitch bitch. Moany moan moan ... Once I realized that the CPU's fan was turning on every few minutes while simultaneously realizing that sweat was pouring down my chest, I figured it out. Even a PC can get overheated. (I don't have air conditioning in my office. Don't want it. And, most days of the year don't need it. So, if Husband No. 1 is reading this please wipe that smirk off your face. Or, as any formidable no-nonsense parochial schoolteacher would say, I'll wipe it off fer ya.)
Well, that's it, I decided. Workday's over. Let me go fix a drink and watch a DVD. I'm currently doing a marathon viewing of Homicide: Life on the Street. I didn't have television when the series ran so I knew little or nothing about it. Having been mesmerized by The Wire, I needed to see David Simon's earlier work. You can track, just as one would with a fiction writer, the metamorphosis of his ideas and themes, not to mention the actors who moved with him to The Wire. No. 1 Niece had other ideas. As any of you who live with children know, you have a Hobbesian Choice: either make them watch what you're watching and explain why that man and that man and that man is lying on the ground with red red blood fanning out beneath them (this is Homicide, after all) or give it up and watch Coraline for the 20th time. Too tired to explain the exigencies of street justice, I let her choose a movie. She chose Dreamworks' Rango.
What a treat! Dreamworks' films are like Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. The writers only pretend that they're writing for kids. My favorite scene among many is when Rango, who's a chameleon, arrives in Dirt and mimics the other animals' walks. It's a sly homage to the American western's a-stranger-comes-to-town setup with its stock characters, Gunsmoke's Chester -- Marshal Dillon! Marshal Dillon! -- and Agnes DeMille's choreography for Copland's ballet, Rodeo.
Apropos of nothing, here's today's poem:
Well, that's it, I decided. Workday's over. Let me go fix a drink and watch a DVD. I'm currently doing a marathon viewing of Homicide: Life on the Street. I didn't have television when the series ran so I knew little or nothing about it. Having been mesmerized by The Wire, I needed to see David Simon's earlier work. You can track, just as one would with a fiction writer, the metamorphosis of his ideas and themes, not to mention the actors who moved with him to The Wire. No. 1 Niece had other ideas. As any of you who live with children know, you have a Hobbesian Choice: either make them watch what you're watching and explain why that man and that man and that man is lying on the ground with red red blood fanning out beneath them (this is Homicide, after all) or give it up and watch Coraline for the 20th time. Too tired to explain the exigencies of street justice, I let her choose a movie. She chose Dreamworks' Rango.
What a treat! Dreamworks' films are like Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. The writers only pretend that they're writing for kids. My favorite scene among many is when Rango, who's a chameleon, arrives in Dirt and mimics the other animals' walks. It's a sly homage to the American western's a-stranger-comes-to-town setup with its stock characters, Gunsmoke's Chester -- Marshal Dillon! Marshal Dillon! -- and Agnes DeMille's choreography for Copland's ballet, Rodeo.
Apropos of nothing, here's today's poem:
I love this easy work for which
I get paid on the fourth Friday
unlike the men.
Every week, they preen with their money
plans already made to spend it on a couple drinks
a carburetor a girlfriend.
On the way back to the G
I think of what I’ll do
when there she is:
So young black fat from babies
leaning on a streetlight at the corner
the heat of the day still scolding us all.
No pool for her, no cooling soda.
She is glued to the light, craning her neck.
Sweat glistening shorts
cutting into varicose thighs
Ooh, it’s hot she says to nobody at all
and pulls off her shirt.
I am attacked by whiteness
a tattered brassiere against her black
skin exposed in the street
like getting undressed for a bath.
I turn ashamed.
Slowing down, a swaybacked station wagon.
Inside a sober man
whose side locks graze an oily steering wheel
While his eyes swivel like a lighthouse beacon.
He honks the summons.
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