There’s always someone making one of those ridiculous all-inclusive, no exclusions, blanket generalizations (and more alarmingly, sticking to them) about how you can accurately judge someone based on a single, simplistic, subjective rule of measurement.
For ince…
If you want to know what a person is really like, look at their shoes.
Clothes make the man.
You are what you eat.
You can always tell a lady by her habits.
Wot I like is a hoss with a nice honest eye. (From a racehorse trainer with a pronounced Yorkshire accent…)
I actually know someone who suggests if she sees a pair of appalling shoes on a first date, there will be no second such get together.
If I am what I eat, I am pretty much a long, golden, crispy stick figure, fried in oil and peppered with salt. (Though I can see how attractive this could be…)
As for a lady’s habits, a clever lady changes them based on everything from her physical circumstances, to the company she is currently keeping. (Which is another way to judge a person – based on their goofy friends and completely weird families… and totally unfair in my particular case, considering my friends and family…)
If clothes entirely make the man, I never would have dated and adored a guy I first met when he was helping a friend paint his living room. If I’m not mistaken, those were actual pajamas he was wearing, with the seat practically ripped out, and with a cartoon character decorating his pajama top. (And his shoes were pretty crap to boot.)
I do agree however, that when buying a horse, “a nice honest eye” is a definite plus. Those wicked, rolling, showing-the-whites or narrowed ones often tell a story that ends with a pretty nasty nip or kick. And it’s my experience that this standard can safely be applied to humans as well.
But perhaps there IS a way to really objectively tell what sort of person a person is – perhaps if you reached conclusions based on the sorts of issues and elements a person attracted to themselves – by the thousands even – perhaps then you could construct an accurate picture, a judgment of their character virtually impossible to refute.
Perhaps if you got a peek at their SPAM.
When did it begin? When did I do the deed? And for what (or what’s) did I initially do it?
When and I why did I remove my spam filter? (And how and when can I get it re-installed?)
I’m pretty cavalier with the old computer – for old is what it is and sloppy is what it’s become. If my computer were a closet, nothing would be on the hangers – everything would be strewn across the floor, hanging on a door handle, decorating the bedposts, or balled up and tossed into a laundry hamper.
It’s like a messy desk – I can find everything I need (I know pretty much exactly where everything is) but I spend an inordinate amount of time shifting around piles of other stuff, as I work to unearth whatever it is need at that particular moment.
My MS Word files are hopeless. I make an effort every time I get a new client to create a new series of files that all begin with a certain word – the client’s name perhaps… sounds simple doesn’t it? – then it all breaks down when I begin to invoice and have to decide whether to begin with the word “Invoice” or “Client’s name”, making a mental note to remember which way I went, or if I’d actually swapped the client’s name with a name for the specific assignment I was actually working on at that particular time, or if it was one of those files where I left spaces between words, or ran the whole lot together, or named it beginning “AAAAA…” and so on, so I could find it easily somewhere near the front of the document index.
(I may know where everything is on my desk, but the filing cabinet that is my mind is like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.)
But I digress. (The essential problem of the tangentialist: “… so where was I?”)
Right. My non-existent spam filter.
So no, I don’t know what specific, exact action or web site or pop up it was I wanted to see (I want to see EVERYTHING) or if it somehow involved lowering a firewall, or discarding some cookies (I still don’t get the cookie metaphor) or changing some security settings, or whatever. I just know I did it, and nothing has been the same since.
Now every day I awake (depending upon what time I went to bed the night before) at least 60-plus announcements, advertisements, come-ons or downright threatening email messages. And then they just keep coming in, regular as clockwork (regular as spam) until I lay down my weary head at night.
And they don’t come out of nowhere you know. Some ingenious “spy” or “bot” or worm or germ has infected my central computery nervous system and is sending me (on a daily basis) somewhere in the neighbourhood of all told, 200 unwanted, unneeded and for the most part, thoroughly unwholesome email messages.
But they all come from somewhere – and for a reason too. They’re ingenious these spam-artists, somehow infiltrating whatever I’ve got masquerading as a security system and plucking things seemingly out of the depths of my soul.
There are emails that come from people with names that look like names of friends – and I don’t mean friends with names like Nancy or Tom. Weird names… foreign names… obscure names… names I’ve perhaps not even used in emails, but rather in my own personal word files.
And clearly (and obviously) every single web site I visit, every google search I make, every secret private thought I have (and some I’m sure I’ve only imagined in my most fevered dreams) is daily being reflected in my email.
There’s a school of thought that no matter how odd or perverse or reprehensible or unthinkable a thought is, if you thought it, somehow, somewhere, you truly do own it on some level.
If that is the case, based on my spam (and on the emphasis in numbers of messages) this is who I am:
I am clearly extremely fat, as offers for miracle weight loss medications, equipment and training programs arrive at the rate of at least ten not-so-subtle suggestions a day. Also bald if the propensity for receiving (miracle) Propecia treatments are any indication. (Considerately deliverable in plain brown wrapping to save the postman knowing my secret shame.)
I am desperate for a loan (which several institutions would be thrilled to give me) ready for some pretty spectacular investment opportunities (if the strangers who are offering me stock tips are as smart as they tell me – and if only they could spell) on the verge of meeting some extremely slutty Russian girls (of impeccable character) ready to date a virtual United Nations of soulmates (particularly black singles in my area) looking for a new wristwatch (and uncaring as to the accurate spelling of Rollexx) and have been warned (I don’t know how many hundreds of times) that this is the second attempt that a gift card worth hundreds of dollars from Oil of Olay, Febreeze, Target, Toys ‘R Us or J C Penney is lying around, simply waiting confirmation from me.
I could so easily improve my credit score, get a free loan worth thousands with absolutely no credit check, get in on a hot real estate deal and I’d be a fool not to invest safely (and wisely) with those people who cannot spell. I am, like, riddled with financial potential!
Do I personally have any shoes with which to be judged by? Apparently not – but for the past two weeks, at least ten or twenty times a day, an offer for “Uggs in every colour” eggs me on to get shod ASAP.
“Replica” handbags and purses are mine RIGHT NOW, at tremendous savings if only I order (securely) from people who breached my security system in order to tell me so.
I have a lot of money – the problem is, it’s stashed in a series of American banks across the US, left to me by some distant, unnamed relative and all I have to do to claim the dough is send on the particulars of my chequing account here in Toronto.
Oh – and the folks from PayPal and Ebay are also constantly writing to me (again, mysteriously not making use of the spellcheck feature) to tell me that they suspect someone is trying to infiltrate my accounts, so if I would just (again) send them all my financial particulars, they’ll take care of those crooks immediately. They just need my AMEX number to make all those problems (or something) go away.
And then there’s my penis.
I hear about my penis A LOT.
The simple fact that I don’t have one is of no interest to my spammers. According to them, it is soft. It doesn’t work. I can’t have sex all night long – and the girls don’t love me anymore.
But – and it’s a big ‘BUT’, for up to 80% off, I can buy Viagra (Vihaggra, Vighara, Viaghra) or Cialis (Cailus, Cilaius, Calisius) safely, securely, and even in soft tabs if I’m having trouble getting the hard ones down. They’ll rush it to me overnight. They offer friendly support, and as an added benefit, they remind me I’ll never have to go to the drugstore ever again. (As if going to the drug store is akin to showing up for a root canal or an embalming...)
Clearly, if you judge me based on my spam, I’m a bit of a fat, bald, broke, soft, unloved mess.
But I have a nice honest eye, I’m on the verge of getting a very big loan – and slutty teenage Russian girls are nearly expiring from excitement at the prospect of meeting me.
So I've got that going for me.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Saturday, October 07, 2006
A Prayer for Paris Hilton
I’m a re-reader as much as a reader. I don’t know if I could do the math without a slide rule and a calculator (not to mention a better memory) but for every five or so books I read, I suspect at least one of them is a re-read.
Every other year for instance, I re-read all of Jane Austen. Almost every year I re-read The Grapes of Wrath. Amongst many others I know I’ve enjoyed the novels of Jon Wyndham more than a time or two, ditto for Susan Howatch, Monica Dickens and great grandfather Charles Dickens (particularly Great Expectations) and I have an almost unnatural fascination with Barbara Tuchman’s masterpiece A Distant Mirror; Life in the Calamitous 14th Century. There are many, many more – some I remember almost line for line, some, no matter how many times I read them, remain a nail-biting mystery until the end.
But right now I’m re-reading one my most re-read reads, A Prayer for Owen Meany, for the I-don’t-know-whatth time.
Each time I’m drawn to different aspects of the John Irving novel that seems to top so many lists of reader favourites, though I’m always cozily happy to luxuriate in the sense of living so close to the centre of the action, as Irving’s fictional storyteller Johnny Wheelwright lives just a few blocks north of where I reside, in the absolutely genuine enclave of Forest Hill.
(I’ve written before of my fantasy Toronto-based novel, with characters all named after various neighbourhoods: Rose Dale, Don Valley – sometimes ‘Dawn’ Valley, depending, – Lea Side, Forest Hill naturally, and plucky heroine from the wrong side of the tracks – and real intersection in the worst part of town – Jane Wilson. Must get around to it some day…)
But this re-read-through has me more spellbound than usual at the parallels between that time and this. In fact, both of the times in which the novel is set – the narrator’s current perch in 1982, and his childhood memories of the late 1950’s through the 60’s – bear painfully apt comparison to the times in which we currently struggle.
For Johnny Wheelwright (the grown up) living an American’s ex-pat life in Toronto, trying to avoid the headlines detailing Reagan’s presidency in the era of Iran Contra and Star Wars (the political-missile type, not the movie-type) is a daily agony (and an actual impossibility – he’s irresistibly drawn to the papers) comparable perhaps only to the headlines he would have been reading about the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson and the horrors of the Vietnam war, back in his hometown of Gravesend Maine in the 60’s.
The Johnny Wheelwright of the 80’s observes horrified the pronouncements of the Great Communicator, noting: “… the American people will never hold him accountable for what he says ; it is history that holds you accountable, and I’ve already expressed my opinion that Americans are not big on history. How many of them even remember their own recent history?”
And the answer even now as America fights yet another war that cannot actually be won, has to be – not many.
But for all of Wheelwright’s observations about life perched in Toronto watching history unfold south of the border, it is the titular character who is at the centre of the story; Owen Meany who is the real ‘observer’, the insightful and mystically other-directed ‘pronouncer’, and never have his words seemed more prescient than in a passage where he reacts to the Kennedy/Monroe scandal and the loss of his own personal innocence in all it literally meant and all it figuratively represented.
He says about Marilyn Monroe (all in caps – the diminutive Meany had a horribly “wrecked voice” – but a powerful one) “… SHE WAS LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY – NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING – I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE – JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM. LOOK AT HOW DESIREABLE SHE WAS! SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY – AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY.”
He goes on… “MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN – MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY. MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED OVER AND OVER AGAIN – SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, AND SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOUR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY’RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,” said Owen Meany. “WE’RE GOING TO BE USED.” Doesn’t that just give you a shiver? Doesn’t that just give you the all-day shudders in horrifying recognition? And not just the part about Americans being overweight…!
We’re living in the time of the ‘Decider’. The time of a war entered into on base lies, with no real understanding of the enemy, the culture invaded, the needs of the civilian population, or the real issues of re-construction. And as for an exit strategy – well, one just has to wonder how long the current conditions will continue in ignominy before the U.S. retreats, leaving that part of the world, and as a result the entire world, in a worse condition than they found it. Even now, the reports are in: the world is a more dangerous place than ever before. Far from defeating terrorism, the current Administration has stirred it up like a giant hornet’s nest, doubling, tripling – multiplying the anger, hatred and desire for revenge in terrorist outposts from Hell to Kandahar.
But maybe worse than all of the above is that whatever comparisons can be drawn between these times and those Administrations, the citizens of the U.S. (and by extension, Canada) are no Marilyn Monroes: silly, sweet, idealistic and looking for someone to look up to, to trust and to lead. We’re still overweight, but our new ‘signifier’ isn’t. We have a new representative of our times, our values and our countries and the worst possible news is that it’s Paris Hilton.
Don’t believe me? Ask Paris herself.
“I think every decade has an iconic blonde,” she told Britain’s Sunday Times correspondent Giles Hattersley earlier this summer. “Like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana – and right now, I’m that icon.”
Apparently Giles sees the resemblance too, remarking on how Hilton “… signifies the base desires of the age: money, sex and low body fat.”
Or more simply put – insulated narcissism.
And Owen Meany has an explanation for that too.
“THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM. IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE’RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD.”
Maybe the best possible thing the American people could do would be to demand the draft be reinstated.
It would be nice if they could reincarnate Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe read and traveled and hobnobbed with intellectuals; she took acting classes and married Arthur Miller and had a crush on Albert Einstein. She was political and involved and went to a psychiatrist and had an inferiority complex and tried to be good. As far as I can remember, Marilyn Monroe endorsed nothing other than Chanel No. 5 and Dazzledent Toothpaste.
Paris Hilton likes to be read to. She likes pink. She likes purses. She likes other girls’ boyfriends. She will sell anything (including her own porno movie) if you will give her enough money.
This is the icon of the decade.
Some icon.
Some decade.
Draft Paris.
Every other year for instance, I re-read all of Jane Austen. Almost every year I re-read The Grapes of Wrath. Amongst many others I know I’ve enjoyed the novels of Jon Wyndham more than a time or two, ditto for Susan Howatch, Monica Dickens and great grandfather Charles Dickens (particularly Great Expectations) and I have an almost unnatural fascination with Barbara Tuchman’s masterpiece A Distant Mirror; Life in the Calamitous 14th Century. There are many, many more – some I remember almost line for line, some, no matter how many times I read them, remain a nail-biting mystery until the end.
But right now I’m re-reading one my most re-read reads, A Prayer for Owen Meany, for the I-don’t-know-whatth time.
Each time I’m drawn to different aspects of the John Irving novel that seems to top so many lists of reader favourites, though I’m always cozily happy to luxuriate in the sense of living so close to the centre of the action, as Irving’s fictional storyteller Johnny Wheelwright lives just a few blocks north of where I reside, in the absolutely genuine enclave of Forest Hill.
(I’ve written before of my fantasy Toronto-based novel, with characters all named after various neighbourhoods: Rose Dale, Don Valley – sometimes ‘Dawn’ Valley, depending, – Lea Side, Forest Hill naturally, and plucky heroine from the wrong side of the tracks – and real intersection in the worst part of town – Jane Wilson. Must get around to it some day…)
But this re-read-through has me more spellbound than usual at the parallels between that time and this. In fact, both of the times in which the novel is set – the narrator’s current perch in 1982, and his childhood memories of the late 1950’s through the 60’s – bear painfully apt comparison to the times in which we currently struggle.
For Johnny Wheelwright (the grown up) living an American’s ex-pat life in Toronto, trying to avoid the headlines detailing Reagan’s presidency in the era of Iran Contra and Star Wars (the political-missile type, not the movie-type) is a daily agony (and an actual impossibility – he’s irresistibly drawn to the papers) comparable perhaps only to the headlines he would have been reading about the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson and the horrors of the Vietnam war, back in his hometown of Gravesend Maine in the 60’s.
The Johnny Wheelwright of the 80’s observes horrified the pronouncements of the Great Communicator, noting: “… the American people will never hold him accountable for what he says ; it is history that holds you accountable, and I’ve already expressed my opinion that Americans are not big on history. How many of them even remember their own recent history?”
And the answer even now as America fights yet another war that cannot actually be won, has to be – not many.
But for all of Wheelwright’s observations about life perched in Toronto watching history unfold south of the border, it is the titular character who is at the centre of the story; Owen Meany who is the real ‘observer’, the insightful and mystically other-directed ‘pronouncer’, and never have his words seemed more prescient than in a passage where he reacts to the Kennedy/Monroe scandal and the loss of his own personal innocence in all it literally meant and all it figuratively represented.
He says about Marilyn Monroe (all in caps – the diminutive Meany had a horribly “wrecked voice” – but a powerful one) “… SHE WAS LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY – NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING – I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE – JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM. LOOK AT HOW DESIREABLE SHE WAS! SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY – AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY.”
He goes on… “MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN – MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY. MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED OVER AND OVER AGAIN – SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, AND SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOUR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY’RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,” said Owen Meany. “WE’RE GOING TO BE USED.” Doesn’t that just give you a shiver? Doesn’t that just give you the all-day shudders in horrifying recognition? And not just the part about Americans being overweight…!
We’re living in the time of the ‘Decider’. The time of a war entered into on base lies, with no real understanding of the enemy, the culture invaded, the needs of the civilian population, or the real issues of re-construction. And as for an exit strategy – well, one just has to wonder how long the current conditions will continue in ignominy before the U.S. retreats, leaving that part of the world, and as a result the entire world, in a worse condition than they found it. Even now, the reports are in: the world is a more dangerous place than ever before. Far from defeating terrorism, the current Administration has stirred it up like a giant hornet’s nest, doubling, tripling – multiplying the anger, hatred and desire for revenge in terrorist outposts from Hell to Kandahar.
But maybe worse than all of the above is that whatever comparisons can be drawn between these times and those Administrations, the citizens of the U.S. (and by extension, Canada) are no Marilyn Monroes: silly, sweet, idealistic and looking for someone to look up to, to trust and to lead. We’re still overweight, but our new ‘signifier’ isn’t. We have a new representative of our times, our values and our countries and the worst possible news is that it’s Paris Hilton.
Don’t believe me? Ask Paris herself.
“I think every decade has an iconic blonde,” she told Britain’s Sunday Times correspondent Giles Hattersley earlier this summer. “Like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana – and right now, I’m that icon.”
Apparently Giles sees the resemblance too, remarking on how Hilton “… signifies the base desires of the age: money, sex and low body fat.”
Or more simply put – insulated narcissism.
And Owen Meany has an explanation for that too.
“THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM. IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE’RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD.”
Maybe the best possible thing the American people could do would be to demand the draft be reinstated.
It would be nice if they could reincarnate Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe read and traveled and hobnobbed with intellectuals; she took acting classes and married Arthur Miller and had a crush on Albert Einstein. She was political and involved and went to a psychiatrist and had an inferiority complex and tried to be good. As far as I can remember, Marilyn Monroe endorsed nothing other than Chanel No. 5 and Dazzledent Toothpaste.
Paris Hilton likes to be read to. She likes pink. She likes purses. She likes other girls’ boyfriends. She will sell anything (including her own porno movie) if you will give her enough money.
This is the icon of the decade.
Some icon.
Some decade.
Draft Paris.
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