UNREMITTING FAILURE

Well, We're Moving Out of the Woodner

We thought, a year ago, that we'd be starting some dreadful new phase of our life there.  It was dreadful, all right, but we're ending up right back where we started, at Mrs. UF's place on 1811 18th Street in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. But we're returning as a friend, not a husband, and the sadness we feel over this will not abate.  It's a temporary arrangement, done out of an understanding that we like living together but not as husband and wife.  Everybody says we're crazy.  We know we're crazy, or we wouldn't even contemplate such a measure.  That said, we'll be glad to be seeing the last of the Woodner, which was just too isolated for our tastes.  It was a good two miles from Dupont Circle, and we never felt at home there.  The halls were too wide and too empty, and our apartment, despite it's large windows, felt a bit too much like Hitler's Bunker.  In short we were lonely there, and it wasn't homey.  It was the kind of place that would have felt empty no matter how much furniture we crammed into it, and as it was we never tried.  That said, it had a great view of Rock Creek Park, which would have been nice if we cared about such things.  As it so happens, we prefer the view of Flat Rat Alley we get from the balcony of the apartment on 18th Street. 

Anyway, the Woodner will soon become a talismatic landmark in our history, the place where everything went to pieces and nothing cohered.  Soon it will become a magical place, one of those places, like 16 N. Washington Street in Shippensburg, where we were afforded the life-altering opportunity to live at the very limits of our nerve endings.  We tend to end up romanticizing places like that.  There's something to knowing that there we were at the very end of our wits, and there was no escape.  We'll want to go back, we'll dream about it, it will become yet another legendary space where our nightmares forced us to confront the fact that there is no way out, that we were fucked from the very beginning--that we were born with our nerve endings on the outside of our body, and there wasn't a goddamn human thing we could do about it. 

Eyes

The woman working behind the cash register at the little store down in the lobby is wearing a low-cut blouse that reveals she has an eye tattooed on each breast.  One of the eyes is open; the other is closed. We suppose this is supposed to give the impression of winking, but to us it looks like she's blind in one breast. 

Diary of Roadkill

I stepped out onto the road.  It occurred to me that what I was doing was none too smart.  I'd beenwarned.  But I'd never been to the other side of the road.  Whatever was over there, it had to be different from what was over here, and I'd seen everything over here.  I was jaded.  I took a tentative step or two onto the tar road.  It seemed safe enough.  I saw nothing but two lights, like stars, growing larger.   I slowly lumbered toward the center of the road.  Glory be, I was doing it.  Then I heard an engine singing, and the lights blinded me, and now I lie with my legs in the air, staring at nothing much in particular. 

Too Busy to Write Today

We would ask that everyone write their congressman to complain about the stifling of a GREAT TALENT.  Why should we be slaving away at the government's work when we could be blathering on at great length about absolutely nothing?  This is not a rhetorical question.  This is the plaint of a fettered spirit, whose futile wings have been clipped by the uncaring colossus of big government intrusion into his personal work-time affairs! We have unimportant things to say and by God, we need the paid business hours to say them!  Why, we had a whole spiel worked up about the time we got assigned to paint every single pipe, air vent, handrail and geegaw on the roof of the foundry building in Littlestown Pennsylvania with Andy Warhol silver paint but now it will never be written because "THE MAN" decided he had "MORE IMPORTANT" things for us to do.  Namely the Work of the People! To which we respond, Let the People do their own damn work! We have more pressing matters to attend to!

a funny link, thanks to Mrs. UF

BAD LYRICS THAT INSPIRE US

Yesterday Mrs. UF defended liking Elton John's lyrics by saying they were so stupid (check out Rocket Man if you don't believe her) they're brilliant.  We agreed completely.  It's one of the reasons we so love Elton John.  Then we went too far.  We (crotchety old coot that we are) said nobody writes lyrics that stupid anymore and it's a damn shame.  At which she recited the opening lines of London Suede's Savoir Faire, i.e., "She lives in a house/She's stupid as a mouse."  We were awestruck.  It is really something, to find yourself in the presence of lyrics so stupid they make Bernie Taupin look like Cole Porter.  (Let's not forget that he, Taupin that is, not Porter, helped write We Saved This City (With Rock'n'Roll).)  We should have more faith in the coming generations, and their ability to generate song lyrics of breathtaking dimwittedness.  People, stupid lyrics aren't dead! There are earnest young songwriters out there putting inarticulate pen to horrified paper at this very moment, to come up with a lyric that challenges Noel Gallagher's "Rolling slowly down the hall, faster than a cannonball" for sheer idiotic supremacy. 

Work Has Become... Work

Due to the evil machinations of the powers that be, our job has been redefined to give us numerous additional responsibilities with no commensurate increase in pay.  As a result, we've been unhappily busy trying, and failing, to master these new additions to our formerly sleepy workload.  We're half afraid they'll get around to firing us, that's how incompetently we're managing, even though getting fired from a government job is extremely difficult, even for a retarded cocker spaniel.  We know because we work beside one, and frankly he's doing a better job than we are.  Several times in the past week or so people have more or less asked us, to our face, "Don't you know what you're doing?"  "No," we reply, hanging our head in shame.  Frankly, we haven't had as hard a time as this since our first job, where every day our status as a working shlump hung in the balance.  Every day we come in to face a new disaster stemming from our incompetence, and every day we hear that damned cocker spaniel snicker as he competently creates a final PDF and performs (no kidding) a Preflight check.  We're not even sure what a Preflight check is.  We do know he doesn't fly an airplane.  We realize now, listening to the chatter around us in our cube form, that we have no idea what most people are talking about.  It's like they're speaking a foreign language, and not one of the ones we flunked in high school.  It's like they're going "Glick klump farb me rift."  It could be a joke at our expense.  Or it could be the death knell of our career as a government bureaucrat, which is chastening in the extreme.  Usually you have to be caught red-handed looking at child porn or convicted of attacking your superior with a three-hole punch.  To be fired for gross incompetence? Unprecedented...

Huxstable on Fire

Last night we dreamed we ran into Bill Cosby.  He cried, "Help me, my sweater is on fire!"  We replied, "You know, we thought it was even more colorful than usual."

Cuz tonight's going to be a good night, yeah

If we hear that song one more time, just one more time, we are going to take hostages. 

Why He Attempted Suicide, Only Reason

He couldn't live with the fact that he enjoyed listening to Eagles' songs.

Moments in humility

The other day, while running back down the hill from the Vice-President's rez on Connecticut Ave, we were passed (and he really blew by us) by a guy with one leg.  It was sproing! sproing! sproing! and he was past us.  We were already feeling bad because Mrs. UF had an easy 300 yard lead on us, and she didn't even look like she was trying.  The one-legged man didn't look like he was working especially hard either.  It really caused us to develop an instant prejudice against one-legged runners.  "Hop along, kangaroo leg!" we shouted at his rapidly disappearing form, when a woman who must have been in her late sixties passed us too.  And she didn't look like a lifelong marathoner, she looked like Bella Abzug.  It's almost enough to  make us believe all those fake warning labels on the sides of cigarette packs.   Except that none of them warn you that you'll potentially be passed by one-legged guys and geriatrics while jogging.  Put that on the side of a cigarette pack, and we might take  heed.