Well, I’ve done a bit more dabbling with GarageBand 2.0, trying to figure out if the interface is intuitive and what all is possible. I’m very rusty at making music—it’s been over three years since I last sent oxygen to that part of my brain—so this attempt is a little pedantic, but I thought I’d share. You’re supportive, after all, aren’t you? You won’t criticize too loudly as I take these first tentative steps into very cold, dark water? Perhaps this song will carry you to the dreaming world, and you’ll be too sedated to raise any protests about how boring it is. It’s based around a loop I recorded several years ago, a loop just lying around waiting to be looped in among other loops, in a field of loops, or at a little loop party, where all the loops are invited. They stand around, some near the punch bowl, other near the Fritos and sour cream, talking about loops they’ve known. This one (his name is Prophecies Make The World Go ’Round) is standing in a corner by himself and staring at a bug on the wall. Make him feel at home, won’t you?

I was so busy quoting long-dead writers in the last post that I never did get around to elucidating what exactly it is that inspires me about immature age-old humor.

It’s the cyclical thing. C. and I talked about it one morning last week when I took advantage of my employer’s flextime arrangement. I decided to go in to work around ten a.m., which meant that we were free to eat a leisurely breakfast outside on our uncomfortable hand-me-down patio furniture.

(This is the same furniture, incidentally, upon which rest my laptop and I as yet one more gloriously perfect spring day in a string of perfect days falls into night. It’s already wasp season, but the mosquitos have yet to find us, and the birds are extraordinarily and noisily randy overhead. I worked from home today (another option available to me as part of my employer’s flextime arrangement), since the last morning commuter bus arrived and departed from my stop five minutes ahead of schedule—as it does with frustrating regularity—at which point I had two choices: (a) stand at the bus stop for half an hour, sit on the bus for fifteen minutes, and then walk fifteen minutes to work, wasting an hour of my morning, or (b) walk home, change into shorts and a ratty old tee-shirt, and commence with a miscellaneous day of the kind of short-and-sandals professionalism I grew to love in Santa Fe. I chose the latter. Even after taking the time to change and open all the windows in the house, I was still on the clock within 15 minutes, with a hot cup of coffee and some pumpkin bread to fuel the daily can of whoop-ass I open on the data.)

So, as I was saying, C. and I were talking about the cyclical thing, which means realizing that almost every moment of your life has been played out before a hundred billion times, and will be played out again a hundred billion times, by generations of people you’ll never meet, in all the places you’ll never go. The details change over time, and now many of the interactions happen by email or Blackberry, but the universals never change.

The kid will continue to tell his parents what they want to hear and then proceed to do whatever he wants anyway. He will continue to be too busy playing to come home to dinner on time. The parents will yell from the front porch. He will pretend he didn’t hear.

She will continue to wish that he would be a little less brutish, a little more thoughtful. She will talk with her friends at length about how to broach the subject. He will continue to make resolutions to be better, to remember to bring flowers occasionally, to drink less at cocktail parties, but he will always forget. She will keep quietly hoping he’ll change, but he won’t.

He will try to come to terms with his mother’s death, or his grandmother’s. He will avoid people at first, then realize that he needs their support, but he will not know how to ask for help. He will not understand the strange series of emotions that drive him to all kinds of extremes, from anger to hopelessness, from resentment to forgiveness to forgetfulness. He will yell at people who are trying to help him.

But it’s not just the Raymond Carver moments that repeat. Every moment, no matter how mundane or epiphanic, is a rerun. From this vantage point, as the hour grows later here in the back yard, through the illuminated windows of all the houses around I imagine parents are beginning to remind their children to get ready for bed. Children are complaining that it’s not bedtime yet. Lights in some rooms go out. TVs cast eerie blue flickering shadows on the walls. Wives read newspapers. Husbands clip toenails.

This is not to say that life is mundane, or that we’re all boring. Sure, there’s some melancholy in knowing that nothing I do is original, that every brilliant thought ever to percolate through my skull has been thunk thousands of times before, that every ecstatic moment of love, adventure, and victory I’ve ever had has been had before by more nameless faceless young men than can be counted. But there’s something immensely comforting in it too. Nothing so terrible will happen that hasn’t been endured before. No immeasurable all-consuming grief will topple me that hasn’t been outjoyed by ten thousand former young men who have been dust for centuries—and knowing that they did, even if the particular circumstances and storylines are lost, is a rallying call for everyone.

But it’s not the just Hallmark moments that repeat. That you’re here reading this now means that your parents met, at some point, when they were your age, if not older or younger, and were attracted to each other. They talked and discovered that the conversation was fulfilling. They became friends. They found each other’s arrangements of bone and muscle and skin mutually attractive and, after feeling various urges and surges of emotion, including but not limited to feelings of completeness and satisfaction, they waited some amount of time (or didn’t wait at all) to engage in official ceremonies with the state (or didn’t). Whatever the circumstances, you are the evidence that, one night (or day), they both took off their clothes and did it like monkeys at the zoo.

When you’re standing at the bus stop, or waiting in line at the grocery store, look for this: A beautiful young woman walks past. It’s spring now, so she’s wearing one of those summery dresses that floats on the wind. She’s having a good day, so she’s got an accidental shadow of a smile on her face without knowing it. As she turns around to go back for the carton of milk she forgot, the eyes of ten men in three register lines will in parallel drift upward, come to rest on some part of her body, drift up, drift down, and then back to whatever they were looking at before. This is not a predatory thing, the grotesque behavior of objectifiers of women. It’s the same reason your eyes are drawn and redrawn to the horizon when you’re in wide open spaces. It’s aesthetics. Or is it?

Imagine all the contours in the world, if you can, all the possible curves and intersections of forms. That we find the particular physical features of another human animal irresistably attractive and even sexually persuasive—the particular alignment of the features on the front of his head, the way the medial collateral ligament on the back of his knee tenses when he walks, or the way his pectoralis minor draws his scapula forward when he writes on the chalkboard—suggests that we are hard-wired to do so. Why should arrangements of muscle on bone incite such strong emotions in us? What can be “beautiful” about those lines that form at the outside corners of her eyes when she laughs?

And why should we spend so much time thinking about it? How many trees have died so that young men and women could try to put into words the various urges and surges instilled in them by some other creature? How many

have been inscribed in the sand, bark, and picnic tables of the world? That ‘+’, whether inspired by the physical, the spiritual, the moral, or the unknown and unnameable, has as much of the monkey as of the poet. That’s reassuring too.

I never stoop’d so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey;
   Seldom to them which soar no higher
   Than virtue, or the mind to admire.
For sense and understanding may
   Know what gives fuel to their fire;
My love, though silly, is more brave;
For may I miss, whene’er I crave,
If I know yet what I would have.

If that be simply perfectest,
Which can by no way be express’d
   But negatives, my love is so.
   To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
   What we know not—ourselves—can know,
Let him teach me that nothing. This
As yet my ease and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss.
                             —John Donne

Everyone is half-monkey and half-poet—you, me, and every last author, playwright, director, and singer. Bono celebrates God; John Donne celebrates what is unknowable about love; Chaucer wonders about virtue; we turn to these and others when we need wisdom, or inspiration, or a laugh. But there are times when it is most reassuring of all to know that the smartest of the smart, the most holy of the holy, the most moral of the moral, the people who feed on intellect, poetry, spirituality, and the other high beauties are also half-monkey. It makes my monkey-nature feel less ashamed of itself, less like an unwanted step-child. My spirit takes comfort when John Donne says

Wilt thou love God as he thee ? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting—for he ne’er begun—
Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath’ endless rest.
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

but my monkey-nature giggles with delight to know that the same man also says

. . . Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my newfound land,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
   Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views;
That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array’d.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea, this white linen hence;
There is no penance due to innocence:
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

(Drinking vessel made ca. late sixteenth century)

Among the greatest pleasures of studying the great books is to be engaged in serious academic enquiry with the most venerable and revered of texts—the words and ideas that shaped the world as we know it—and come across dirty jokes from hundreds or thousands of years ago. It serves to reassure us that some of the loftiest minds history has known may have snickered when their friends farted. The connection drawn across unimaginable spans of time by the shared enjoyment of twelve-year-old humor is somehow more tangible than a common appreciation of aesthetics or philosophical principles.

For instance, Chaucer—writing in 1390—examined the nature of faith and divinity with unparalled insight:

The destinee, ministre general,
That executeth in the world overal
The purveiaunce that God hath seyn biforn,
So strong it is, that though the world had sworn
The contrarie of a thyng, by ye or nay,
Yet somtyme it shal fallen on a day
That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yeere.
For certeinly, oure appetites heere,
Be it of werre, or pees, or hate, or love,
Al is this reuled by the sighte above.

But his theological insights do not incline me to want to spend a night hanging out with him in a bar. And to a certain extent, if you can’t hang out in a bar with a great mind, is that mind really worth the paper he or she is printed on? Nietzsche would have been a neurotic bore, as would Kant. But Chaucer, on the other hand (along with Virginia Wolff, William Shakespeare, and others we could name) would have been hilariously fun to drink with. How do I know? Let me set the scene.

The Pardoner, a travelling seller of indulgences, is in a group on pilgrimage to Canterbury. He has just finished telling his tale, in which he admits that his only motive in selling indulgences and pardoning sinners is the money. He doesn’t believe in what he sells, but his tale was a highly moral one about four youths seeking to confront and murder Death, when they stumble upon a pot of gold, and they all conspire and in the end murder each other over it. When at the end of his tale he asks the crowd who will pay to see his Holy Relics, the host has this to say to the Pardoner:

‘Nay, nay!’ quod he, ‘thanne have I Cristes curs!
Lat be,’ quod he, ‘it shal nat be, so theech!
Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
Though it were with thy fundament depeint!
But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!’

Which of course translates as:

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘then I will have damnation!
Relax,’ he said, ‘it won’t be so, I beseech you.
You would make me kiss your old underwear,
and swear it was a relic of a saint,
though it was stained by your own anus!
But, by the cross that Saint Elaine found,
I wish I had your balls in my hand.
Have them cut off, and I will you help you carry them.
They shall be enshrined in a hog’s turd!’

When the Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by my house early last Saturday morning, I wish I’d had something as clever to say to them. Instead I just smiled politely and told them that the Kingdom of Heaven sounded very nice, and that I’d like to go there some day. I promised to read their tract called “Why You Can Trust The Holy Bible,” and said I’d call if I had questions. It seemed like the easiest way to get them to leave, but it certainly was’t clever, and it didn’t make me feel like I’d really taken charge of the situation.

But Chaucer is nothing compared to Catullus, a Roman poet who lived between 84 and 54 BC, whose poetry might make Larry Flynt blush. If you blush easily, you should probably stop reading now, if you haven’t already.

Improba Carmina

I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth,
Aurelius, you sodomized ass-licker
And Furius, you perverted cock-sucker
Who read my sensual poems and conclude
I'm too wanton. For everyone knows
It's meet and proper for a poet to be
Pure, pious, and always correct in his behavior.
But we don't expect the same of his poems.
Of mine they'll say sure, they have wit, they have charm,
They're so sexy and lewd they can
Arouse—I won't say boys, but these hairy
Men whose unstiff dicks wilt on the vine.
You who have kissed many thousands of mouths
Upper and nether, man and girl,
How dare you think me less than manly?
I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth.

(translated by Molly Arden)

It has homoeroticism, slander, assaults on others’ virility, insights about literary criticism, and all of it older than Jesus. I used this translation because I could not find the version submitted to the St. John’s student newspaper’s first annual Dirty Poetry Contest, which I co-sponsored, in which the translator rendered “hairy men” as “hirsute studs,” which I prefer.

Fine, you can quote me on it: I prefer hirsute studs. What’s the big deal?

In a sense, there is no such thing as a random number; for example, is 2 a random number?

—Donald Knuth, quoted in Knuth 3:16

Apparently, I’m still fat.

It started sometime in the late seventies, when I was but a wee lad. I didn’t even notice it happening. But in those days, my family was enduring difficult times. My father was in the throes of post-heart-attack existential depression, near bankruptcy and suicide, having lost his health, his stepfather, his job, and his mother in rapid succession. My siblings lost one of their best friends in a motorcycle accident around the same time. Somewhere in there, I’m told, I killed the family dog by opening the front door, whereupon it promptly ran in front of a car.

I was too busy thinking about where to hide boogers and wondering why kids made fun of my Toughskins to notice the heavy cloud hanging over everything, but the stress must have taken a toll on my young figure. Well, the stress, in addition to a heartland diet of meat, meat, cheese, milk, meat, cheese, Chef Boyardee, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I had one advantage over the kids these days: in the days before video games, I still had to play outside most of the time, which usually consisted of one of the following activities:

• Throwing stuff into trees and then climbing the trees to get the stuff back. Then doing it again.
• Throwing a tennis ball against the garage door and then catching it. Then doing it again.
• Running around in circles until I was dizzy.
• Riding my bike to the end of the block and then turning around.
• Rollerskating to the end of the block and then turning around. This was especially enjoyable the summer they repaved the street. You could go like a million miles an hour. Waving your arms like a moron helped a lot.
• Watching ants.

I first suspected that something was going wrong when Robert Allmart beat me in a race down his block, past the witch of an old lady’s house who every Halloween gave out nothing but Peeps and those shitty rock-hard peanut butter candies wrapped in orange wax paper. This had never happened before in all of our many races, and my young mind simply couldn’t or didn’t connect my decreasing physical abilities with the upticking digits in the waist size of each fall’s back-to-school Toughskins.

The problem continued through junior high and high school, but I’ll spare you all the painful details about name-calling and self-doubt and such. The point is this: I have carried extra weight pretty much since I can remember. And now, despite months of work and gallons of sweat on my part, the arrogant monkey at the gym, having applied his dreaded calipers to various fleshy bits of my body, has again decreed that I am “out of shape.” In fact, for all my work, I have gained ten pounds in six months.

Even though the recent news is bad, the fact is indisputable: I’m certainly less fat than I was. My girth was on the verge of impressive there for a while. During the year after I graduated and was unable to find a full time job, I worked three to four part-time jobs at a time, averaging 50–60 hours a week (but, sadly, without overtime) to save up for our open-ended journey to the Czech Republic. All my jobs had something to do with sitting at a computer, and none of them had anything to do with getting any exercise whatsoever.

The funny thing about getting fat is how it sneaks up on you. If 40 pounds of slimy goo waited to hear your first tentative snores, crept up under your covers, slid into your earhole, and oozed around inside your body, depositing itself more or less uniformly under your skin, you’d wake up screaming in the morning. But when that 40 pounds comes over many months in the form of delicious food and beer, it’s not quite as noticeable.

I left the midwest years ago. I haven’t necessarily noticed my diet changing, but it obviously has. While growing up, many of my meals involved ground beef, Velveeta, and/or ketchup. Milk, bologna, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, Bisquick, peanut butter, and strawberry jelly were on maximum rotation. Vegetables, if they appeared, came from the freezer and were a mealy little lukewarm lump next to the real food, like your new girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend at a party—there was an obligation to cordiality, but no enjoyment on anyone’s part. My diet has slowly changed for the better, a result of the confluence of at least three factors: (1) further experience with the bags-of-frozen-vegetables food group in its natural state has proved surprisingly enjoyable and varied; (2) a year spent in a country where the choice of available vegetables ranges, for a few straight months in the dead of winter, from cabbage to cabbage has taught me that you don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry; and (3) a girlfriend who (a) was raised vegetarian by parents who brainwashed her into thinking that artichokes and asparagus were treats for good children who mound their manners and (b) enjoys both (i) cooking luxurious vegetable-based meals from scratch and (ii) gardening like a mofo has proved a crowbar to my admittedly sometimes formerly closed-minded ways regarding unmeat.

And so it is that now, when I encounter fellow midwesterners still in the throes of their meat and whitefood addictions (my favorite is pasta in a cream sauce with mashed potatoes [which, for the record, are not a vegetable] and a glass of milk), I want to preach the glory of the vegetable with the zeal of a convert. I share a name with one of the most zealous, after all—and since I am careful to hold my tongue when it comes to reminding smokers about how much healthier I feel with two years behind me of not smoking (after emphatically smoking for twelve)—reminding white-food folk that they could eat better, and by eating better would look and feel better, seems like it would be a helpful thing to do. But it would not be welcome.

Ok folks, help us out. Strange Proportion currently has #11 Google rank for “cubicle decorating guidelines” and we would really like to get a bit higher. And we can’t do it ourself. We need your help. Click the link and (unless you have your results per page turned up) head to page 2. Click on Strange Proportion. Come on! It’s so easy, and it’s for science! And meanwhile, while you’re hard at work on that, we’ll work on a little lesenwerte Schrift.

We offer the following as an additional bonus: If our faithful reader(s) manage (and by all means, use proxies!) to get Strange Proportion to #1, we’ll actually post an entire page devoted to clever ideas for decorating a cubicle. And we mean clever.

Update [04-15-2005]: We’ve brought it out of beta and into production: The Official Strange Proportion Feng Shui Cubicle Design Course has been launched! The Google seach result now links to there, not here.

Update [04-20-2005]: You thought it was all a joke, but it’s not a joke!