I'm still a Wise Ass

Marriage can't change everything. Or most things really. Evidenced by nuanced replies to the questions I've been getting from my friends and co-workers.

The first time I heard this it was from an Uncle. "So, what's it feel like to be a married man?" I replied,

"Fantastic!"

Friend #1 in quick succession, "How's married life treating ya?"

"Um, good?" Of course the question mark in my reply refers more to 'is this a sufficient answer?' than implying any sort of uncertainty to my marital bliss.

Friend #4 "So, how's it feel to married!" (with an insane amount of emphasis on 'married' as if it was some sort of mythical state that has been achieved by 2, perhaps 4 people throughout the course of human history)

"Pretty great!," said with a smile which at this point was still genuine.

Co-worker #7 "How was the wedding? What's it feel like..." me cutting them off hopefully not too impatiently,

"It was great! I couldn't be happier." said while not looking away from computer screen.

Co-worker #11 "hey Doug, congrats. Say, how does it feel to be..."

"Married? Hmmm. That's tricky. very hard to say. But i will try and explain. Imagine holding your immortal soul in your hand, it's the size of a grapefruit and luminous and ethereal and beautiful. Now grab onto that soul and crack it in half as violently as possible. Now have the person you love the most in the entire world do the same to their soul. Finally, take one half of your soul and sew it to one half of your partner's. make sure to firmly snuff out whatever halves you do not chose to merge. The new frankensoul is yours to share for the rest of your natural lives."

Dread Pirate Hillbilly

And yes, if the Simpsons taught me anything its that they prefer to be called Sons of the Soil. But that is not the word that was used to describe my appearance this past Tuesday now was it?

Keep in mind I was asking for it. The following things all more or less scream 'bumpkin' or at least don't scream 'latte-sipping Prius driving America-hating Elitist':

jeans.
red and blue plaid shirt.
old baseball cap worn forwards.
long hair in back, not too combed.
6 days worth of not shaving.

In short, a colleague of mine, whose first language was not English told me quite bluntly that I looked like a Hillbilly. All i need is a jug of something with XXX written on the side and a shot-gun and I'll complete the stereotype.

West Virginia or bust.
(btw, the above image was one of the first to pop up when I googled 'plaid.' scary!)

The Betterments

Last night I had a terrifyingly realistic dream. And it went on forever, a full-length feature film and then some. It was equal parts Village of the Damned and Pleasantville with a little Cronenbergian body horror mixed in as well. In it I was a teenager in an idyllic small town where a new medical practice moves in. The sign is simple and almost fairy-tale direct: Betterments. The doctor boasts that he can correct what is wrong with everyone and since everyone is unhappy with something about themselves, his business doesn't take long to grow. The doc really exploits people's insecurities and there is a slick small town advertising campaign and everything.

In the dream my father (who isn't my father in real-life, like i said, this dream was like a live-action movie where even I am an actor playing me, if that makes any sense) is one of the first to go in, his big toe is banged up and he has surgery to fix it. The thing is, the guy running Betterments not only fixes the problem but also manages to secure some sort of control function over each patient. At any moment the doc can take over one of his patient's free will. And this is just the beginning.

The dream meanders along with me the happy go lucky center, I'm often hanging out with my sister (again, not my real sister) and we begin to get suspicious, especially of Dad. But since in the beginning there is no real reason for the Doc to use his control, its impossible to prove, but we keep catching glimpses of this puppeteering at work all over, most times in the most benign fashion. Finally our mother goes in to see the Doc about 'night blindness' or something stupid like that and there is this skin-crawling sequence where my sister and I walk into her bedroom in our house which is more a horrible funhouse at this point, with impractical angles and doors everywhere, Dad is a carpenter and this odd housework is part of the whole mind control deal, or perhaps an unintended side-effect, and we walk in and mom is facing away from us. She turns around horribly slowly and stares at us with this creepy sedated smile and both her eyes are strikingly different colors, one a bright light purple the other a greenish brown.

We run screaming out of the house and the latter third of moviedream has us playing the Running Man because now most of the town is under control or eliminated or too stupid to care otherwise, and now all sorts of secondary abilities in the patients start cropping up. Everyone who has been operated on can communicate with each other telepathically and have super strength and other heightened senses depending on what surgery they had. Along the way my sister is horribly murdered by this big bald thug who has obviously had brain surgery or something and is really slow moving but implacable.

Somehow i end up building a case, getting audio and other files against these people and there is one extended moment where I'm running from Dad and half the town and end up hiding under this filthy porch and a bunch of them are sitting above me talking about how they will find me and kill me, that i know too much and that it was my fault that my poor innocent sister was killed and that my mother is worried sick about me and how this doctor's procedure will spread across the country and the world.

In the end I'm captured (of course this would go the 1984 route) and just before they are about to kill me I let them know its no use, that I have already informed the proper people but everything is now ambiguous, i don't quite know if the people i sent things to got them or if they can be trusted. And the moviedream ends with my neck being broken (same thug as my sister) and the camera just slowly zooms in on my wide open eyes, starting from many feet away and my whole body in view, head at an impossible angle and the feet of everyone walking away from me in all directions, the camera zooming in until its just my unblinking eyes.

creeeeeeeepy.

Invisible Syllabus

The teacher in me, that quiet voice that likes to kindle knowledge and mildly reprimand, often passes the time by inventing syllabuses for classes I will never teach. This is not because the classes themselves could never exist. Well, not really because of this. More because I can't really see myself teaching, not at a university level at any rate. And my invisible syllabuses tend toward the college level.

The one I've spent the most time playing around with is an English Lit class based around the "Monstrous Novel." It would be anchored by Moby Dick, which in and of itself would take most of the weeks of class to read in a satisfactory way. But I would then include other 'takes' on Moby Dick, in particular Dan Beachy-Quick's book of poetry called Spell which is a reinterpretation of the novel. I heard Beachy-Quick (awesome last name, perhaps top ten in the history of last names) give a reading of this book when I was still slumming it at the U of C. It was neat to hear, if not a bit of a struggle to read. But rich in the poetry-esque multiple readings type sense. I think students would have fun with it.

I would then make my hypothetical students listen to Mastodon's album Leviathan which is a metal concept album based around, you guessed it, Moby Dick. Or maybe I'd push them one step further and have them listen to Blood Mountain the album Mastodon released two years later which shares many of the same themes. I don't know much about music theory so it'd have to be mostly a discussion on the lyrics, which are engaging enough on their own.

I'd end the course with an old favorite, Danielewski's polarizing House of Leaves. A monstrous novel if their is any, it owes much to Melville but also pushes things even further, on what a novel can and can't be. I think the course would be really fruitful, and in some alternate reality somewhere where I've gone on for a PhD, I'm teaching this to precocious college sophomores.