I’m 174 pages into Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers.” It’s been a breezy slog so far, and I have 50 pages left. At one minute and thirty-nine seconds per page (I timed myself on the el this morning), that is one hour, twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds to go.
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Is it worth it? My wife just got me a great book on how to make pizza and I need to bone up on the science of crusts. Plus there is writing like this here blog post that I want to do more of; it’s in my blood, man. Then there’s being a good father and husband and well-informed citizen and all the prayer and study that goes with semi-pro Catholicism. Plus there’s fitness and over-all self-improvement beyond just reading. All that takes time. Do I really have 1:22:30 to spend on this book that I am not exactly enjoying?

Last night I smoked six wings and four legs. The unnamed animal in that sentence was a chicken. If I had a photo I could have posted it beside this paragraph and you would have known it was a chicken (or, rather, chickens) that filled my belly and my wife’s and my friend Marty’s bellys. You also would have admired the uncommonly red skin and finely mottled dry rub. You may have said, “Where’d you get it?” as if I must have had to purchase what is clearly the work of an expert. I would have been able to respond, “I made it MYSELF, dog,” as a sort of culinary muscle-flex to the cheering crowd.

“Food porn” is too coarse a term for the photo that does not exist. It would have been food erotica. Humanists would have held up pictures of the wings and legs while making life-vows during their DIY marriage ceremonies. “This is what you are to me,” they would say over the Unity Bush. Grandmothers would cry tears out of their mouths. That’s called salivating, ma’am, and wait till you see the spread at the reception.

On Sunday, February 24, 2013, my friend Sonari and I sat in a bar outside Dallas, Texas, each staring at a phone and barely speaking to the other. The specificity sounds portentous but it was just a random Sunday, easy to look up because it was that year's Oscars night. A decent crowd had shown up to watch the ceremony. We neither paid attention to the TVs nor, as I said, to each other. We'd just driven 450 miles from Memphis with a long mid-day stop in Little Rock. Google Maps says the drive takes about six and a half hours, but I recall it taking three times that.  It was a fine time, not complaining, but it was 10:00 at night and we had not had dinner yet. I recall feeling completely exhausted. 

The line between cliché and colloquial expression is fine. Consider, for example, the idea that there is “a line” between two categories and that the thickness of it is“fine.” Cliché to thee, adage to me.

Or what if I say, “Friendo, this here toilet’s flushing mechanism just hit a home run.” Have I uttered a tired cliché or used an expression that, like my accent, tells the listener that I am an American? I choose the latter interpretation. It’s not that I am fond of stock phrases. I am just a generous soul who would prefer to think that the speakers and writers I encounter are displaying hallmarks of their culture, not foreign objects clogging their mental pipes. Lack of eloquence is not crime, and stock phrases “are there for the taking” so people who don’t know how to say something clever “can get through the day.” 

So the merely inelegant does not invite the sting of my mace, nor the heat of my blade. Nay, my wrath is reserved for the lazy cliché, the phrase too graceless to be colloquial, too devious to be polite, and too faddish to mean anything but that the person has not thought about what he is saying. Or worse, what he is writing.

I have compiled a brief list of internet-era clichés that we need to put onto a raft in the middle of the ocean, along with the collected works of Aerosmith and Starbuck’s Coffee’s roasting methods. After a small ceremony we will give the raft a shove, and then never look upon their like again:

A few years ago I met a guy in a bar--a friend of a friend--who was loud and confident and obnoxious and, at the moment, hanging out with his father-in-law. Within a few minutes of our meeting he made a joke about how his wife liked to give oral sex.* Everyone laughed, including his father-in-law, because MAN! That guy will say anything.

I politely forced a smile since I had not yet mastered an expression of patrician disapproval. Plus I wanted to be nice. I mean, I had just met him. Maybe his next sentence was gonna be about how he met his beloved on a Doctor's Without Borders mission and that the physical act of love was a small bit of solace in this broken world. It wasn't, though. Just more off-color jokes and swears and non-insult insults because we're all friends here, right assholes? He wasn't my type.

I'm not a prude. I have probably said grosser things than you have ever thought, and I have said them onstage before Republican strangers in rural areas. Back when I was an improviser, I often had to point this out to other performers when we debated the subtle art of when to go blue onstage. My belief is embedded in that sentence--that it is a subtle art. Not thinking that every moment was right for a sperm joke usually earned me the rep of "team prude." 

One of my teammates once told me that swearing and sex jokes were integral to his style. "I bring thunder," he said, and italicized thunder with his voice and fist. He sort of gathered his fingers into one as he uttered the syllables. I thought he played to the childish in the audience, and did not so much surprise people with his language as shock them. Unfunny people, then, confuse this moment of shock with the surprise that is so central to comedy. His shock winds up derailing the show with inorganic choices. The rest of us must then mop up, shall we say, all that spilled sperm. (I remember this conversation because it was a particularly bitter argument amongst the whole team, and I was really only in a support role on the less-is-more side.)

The ironic thing about shock is that after a very short while it fades. It winds up appealing only to bullies and loudmouths, neither of whom are funny and neither of whom could possibly be surprised or shocked after much of it. They just like it because it's a taboo being said out loud. But for the rest of an audience, it's not a great choice. Dice Clay, the bawdy nursery rhyme man who now seems as remote as a character in one, became like piano-key tie patterns and couches made out of the back-seats of cars--something that makes us think of the 1980s, but that did not make it out. You can do blue material well, of course. But there has to be a strong emotional element to it and a logic that fits the rest of the piece, like with my fantastic joke about mopping up sperm in the paragraph above. 

I thought of this since that friend-of-a-friend is in the paper today. Figuratively speaking-- his business is featured in an article on a website, and I thought, "Hey, that's the guy who told his father-in-law about his daughter's sexual preferences." I wondered what he is up to. My guess is that he is still a total nut, saying all the things the rest of us Sallies wouldn't dare to. I bet he tells people about his wife's boning habits and swears around kids and jabs at his friends. Shock is about that predictable.



*It's all in the language, of course. If he had said it exactly like that, "My wife likes to give oral sex," then it would have been funny.

The night after my daughter was born, I had an urge to call my brother with a warning. An order, really.

Find a baby, I’d hiss into the phone. Change its diaper. Do it again and again and again. Do it until you are good at it.

And then, I would hang up. If my brother was smart, he’d walk to the nearest maternity ward and get started.

Before that day, I’d never changed a diaper. I had no experience as a baby sitter. Even when merely holding a baby, I was incompetent. I’d sort of hug them at chest level like I might hold a greased duffel bag full of sand. My wife, Angela, with seventeen nieces and nephews, was an old pro. I figured I’d watch her for a few years and by the time I got the knack, my daughter would be driving herself to the store for diapers.

A C-section nixed that plan. Angela now had orders to stay in bed, and you know, take it easy. “Just take these here pills and groove,” the doctor said. “Let your husband do all the diaper changing for the first few days.

It’s all in the transitions. That’s where you feel it. The fast tempo is even faster after a slow one. The triumphant anthem is more powerful when paired with a lamentation--and it’s also more fleeting. “Watch Me Jumpstart” by Guided by Voices is a good song, but it’s a great one when you play the song before it on Alien Lanes. It’s “Evil Speakers,” one of Robert Pollard’s toss-offs, lots of nonsense lyrics with a cliche tossed in. (“Without wings, I’ve begun to fly.”) It’s not terrible. It's OK, I guess. But as a jangly set-up for the driving, guttural guitar that kicks in the moment it ends and “Watch Me Jumpstart” begins? Man, it’s essential. It’s the pedestal for the bust of Beethoven glaring at you. You don’t notice it but you need it. Without the pedestal, poor old pissed-off Beethoven is sideways on the floor, glaring at lint.

The kids, man, The goddam kids. Listening to singles. Wouldn’t know a good transition if it split their Dres in half. Probably just listening to Vines, anyway, all six seconds if that, the visual more important than the aural. Fuckin’ kids. Only know Beck as the guy who got dissed by Kanye, not as the guy who faded from “Loser” to “Pay No Mind.” That latter track starts with the statement that this was song two on the album and the order, sped-up or heliumed-up in high-pitch, to: “Burn the album!.” Not as in “copy,” but as in “set on fire.” Or better yet, they don’t know Beck as the guy who faded from the manic, eclectic, raw creativity of the Mellow Gold album to the actually-mellow One Foot in the Grave acoustic album, a mini-masterpiece that showed whoever cared to listen that hell yeah, this guy knows his roots. But it’s not just the kids. No one knows that album.

The good people at The Morning News are running an essay of mine titled, "My Top One Lists." It's about my inability to keep up with pop-culture. I recommend reading it aloud at work, to your family, and on the train or bus.

In honor of today's blizzard, here is some audio from the archives. Remember, Chicagoans: don't be a hero. Stay home and youtube a netflix, 'cause it's just crazy out there.

Today Patton Osawlt tweeted, "Where do people find the social wattage to build & maintain an entourage? I thought success meant you earned quiet & solitude." It made me think of this portrait of Sinatra's entourage and his role in it, from Gay Talese's masterpiece "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." If anything can answer that, it's this: