John Milton June: The best society, sometimes

For solitude sometimes is best society,
And short retirement urges sweet return.

(John Milton. Paradise Lost. Book VIII, 249-250.)

I have actually not had a great deal of solitude whatsoever lately, but I have been hustling my sweet ass from Hell to Kansas just about every day with this and that, and I do plan to try and take some alone time soon. Maybe just a drive and some photos or something. I’ve enjoyed my flurries of activity, but you can’t drift away from your center, and I find my center in stolen, quiet moments here and there. Got to capture me some of those.

Talk nerdy to me: You and me and everyone we’ve ever fucked is a Tusken Raider

via.

Stumbled over this picture and it really tickled me. “I don’t care what you say, Daddy! I love my Tusken Raider!” [Cue: “He’s A Rebel (And he’ll never, ever be any good)”.] It inspired me to share a little sad personal Funny Business.

I have a lengthy sketch I’ve written about a woman who’s dating a Tusken Raider. She’s not dating him because she’s a sand-person-perv or because she’s particularly desperate, per se. She just is. Everyone with whom she interacts stands in as the audience’s interlocutor, recognizing the bizarre fruitlessness of what she’s doing in various situations involving her dating a Tusken Raider, but to her this is all perfectly normal.

In developing this idea, I had to ask myself some questions along the way, which is the way I prefer to work — I think of something I think is funny and then ask myself questions that will help me expand on the kernel of (usually weird) humor. In this case the one question that truly lit the lamp which shed light over the whole bit was, “Can they talk to each other?” It shed light because of this:

First, I tried to picture them sitting in the Olive Garden and her saying, “This is nice. I’m glad we came, I haven’t been here for awhile.” And him hooting and waving his walking/beatdown staff around (yes, he always has the gaderffii, including at his job as an accounts payable clerk for a cafeteria supplies vendor), his bellows unintelligible.

Would she then nod and say, “Of course, they’ve changed the decor. New sconces! You’re right”? Mm. No. Not funny enough. Not right.

How about he hoots and waves the gaderffii and she pretends to understand him? “Wawawarr! Baahh! Garghh!” “My day? How sweet of you to ask. Pretty good. How about yours?” Deluded and a little funnier, but no. Still not right.

“I can’t believe you let me get two desserts! I have to go to the gym.”

Finally, I made a writing choice: No, they absolutely cannot talk to each other. At all. Their words are totally meaningless to one another’s ears. Everything they do together is a case of tandem solitude, parallel behavior uncouched in any deeper meaning, more like comfortable coincidence than love.

“This is nice. I’m glad we came, I haven’t been to the Olive Garden for awhile.” “Bluloodoomarr! Grah! Waahh!” “Do you want to split an appetizer?” “Barrgh. [stamps gaderffii] Aroo!”

You know why that was just right on my funny meter? Because it demonstrates the frustrating absurdity of attempts at human connection. In the same place at the same time and full of totally different thoughts, dreams, and ideas of what it means? Just noising at each other in context but taking no notice of the content? That’s dating.*

You and me and everyone we’ve ever fucked is a Tusken Raider.

Unpleasant truths: now that’s Funny Business. Barrgh. Aroo.

*Unless you find that special someone, blah blah blah. Not knocking those who’ve made, or think they’ve made, it work. Just observing.

Daily Batman: Sabado, Sabado, Sabado

via laurenmoran on the tumblr.

Sweet ride.

All Apologies, “I Want to Ride My …” edition

In the “keep it real” post, I was really snide about Lindsay Lohan’s looks and lifestyle. I apologize to Ms. Lohan’s good name and to the internet at large for putting negative energy out there so flippantly, especially toward a mark who is a pretty easy target. Low blow.

via “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger”. Ow!

I also apologize to you for not even once featuring Ann-Margret in the just-over-a-year the thought experiment has been kickin’ until this morning — total scandal!

Hope that shot up there begins to make up for it. Love can build a bridge, you know.

Teevee Time and Advice: Not today

via fyeahscrubs on the tumblr.

Keep that chin up and go get ’em!

Goethe Month: Roman Holiday edition

Outtake of Audrey on a Vespa for Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953).

Though you’re a whole world, Rome, still,
without Love,
The world isn’t the world,
and Rome can’t be Rome.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Roman Elegies, 1789.)

Advice and Happy Wednesday!

I don’t have the time today to make it a true Wednesday Wednesday, but here’s a little Miss Addams in your life, both literal and reminiscent, and also some really cool wisdom from great sources about two simple, harmonious, earth-friendly pleasures for which we can thank each other: reading and bicycling.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. — Christopher Morley

It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us. Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they’re out on a bike. Or they like the bicycle’s simplicity and the precision with which it is made. Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep. — Gurdon S. Leete

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. — Aldous Huxley

We read to know we are not alone. — C.S. Lewis

Schoolgirl IV Reading by x-Autopsie on deviantart.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book. — Coolio