Go to theoldstandby.com instead. That's where I am now.

the two best things I saw on my bike ride home from work today

1. A woman grimacing—there's no other word for it, it was a for real grimace—as her dog squatted and pooped right into a puddle along a curb. It was in the middle of downtown at the start of rush hour.
2. A man carrying an actual hobo bindle. I mean, it was some real legit stuff. But instead of wrapping his provisions in a hankie, he had a massively-filled bag of empty aluminum cans. And the stick the bag was attached to was hulking too, something he could start an impressive fire with if the weather dipped too low. But I guess it's never wise to burn the implements of your livelihood, is it? That'd be like shitting in your own gutter.
   

how it is (a marriage)

Saturday night was a good for walking, so I left my bike at C—'s house where'd I'd locked it a few hours before and just hoofed it back home.

Sunday, I went in the late afternoon to get the bike. Outside was slush and mess, so I took the car, jammed the bike in the best I could. While mentally kickboxing geometry, I realized I'd have to take the front wheel off.

When I did, I noticed a wrapped condom weaved in the spokes, like how a kid would do with a baseball card.

C—, I thought. C— C— C—.

When I took my bike out of the car to ride to work yesterday, I undid the condom from the spoke. Obviously, I wasn't all that into the idea of lugging a love medallion (errr) in my pocket at the office all day, so I put it in the change tray, locked the car door and biked off.

Later at night, A—, dear sweet wife that she is, ran to the store to pick up some things to lighten the cold that's been weighing down on me. She called me as soon as she got into the car. Why's there a condom in here?

I explained about C—. She knows him, how he is. Said ok.

When she got back, she seemed agitated.

Me: Are things were ok?
Her: Yeah.
Me: So what's wrong.
Her: Nothing
Me: Is it the condom? C— left it there, swear. He thought it'd be funny. Do you think I'm messing around on you or something?
Her: Trust me, C— leaving a condom in your spokes is way more believable than you being able to get laid by someone else.


Guess she just didn't feel much like talking afterall.

Titles of three books I'll never write:

• Occidental Beards
• The Education of a Flunky
• A Wildebeest's Tears

on blizzard

The airport's about a mile away, close enough that there's a constant sound of spaced flights. They have patterns that switch like sluices. You can hear it always, though mostly you end up ignoring it altogether.

Wind's doing things to the the snow, lashing at it, making it gumshoe the corners of the fence. It's unclear whether more snow is falling or if the stuff that's already fallen is getting agitated.

I haven't checked the news, but it's so bad that all air travel in and out of this city has to have been halted.

But still there's that sound like a jet. Whir—there's no other word I can think of for it. I'm imagining flights suspended over us, making a slow decision about whether to drop or leave. Airborne indecision.

The windows of the house rattle, a very real thing. Everything I know seems like it could collapse into white.

It probably won't.

"Aboard the gliding craft, a stewardess crawled down the aisle, over bodies and debris, telling people in each row to remove their shoes, remove sharp objects from their pockets, assume a fetal position. At the other end of the plane, someone was wrestling with a flotation device. Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn’t this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn’t think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now. The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. “Crash landing, crash landing.” They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact. They patted themselves for ballpoint pens, went fetal in their seats." - Don DeLillo, White Noise

old standby

I've started oldstandby.tumblr.com
for sharing photos.
Been putting stuff up slowly. Surely though.
Follow me there.