The Yellow Brick

Years ago somebody told me The Yellow Brick Joke ("...and the yellow brick sailed off into the sky...and simply vanished"); it's a joke within a joke within a group dare, for those of you who are unfamiliar. The purpose is to tell the first joke, which is deliberately not at all funny, anticlimactic, and perhaps even a little baffling, to some unsuspecting mark - preferably in the company of several people who themselves once fell for it. You end with this non-punchline and everyone laughs like it's the funniest fucking thing ever...except the one person who isn't in on it. If that guy does laugh, he's a douchebag who laughs even when something isn't funny and you should avoid him.

You wait a pre-determined amount of time until everyone is gathered again (a few days at least), and you explain that you feel awful about the last joke you told him. You tell him it isn't him, it was kind of an inside thing with everyone else and you hadn't even thought about how weird it must have sounded. So to make it up to him, you tell him another joke that has an obvious, almost juvenile punchline that you telegraph the whole time. If the guy calls you on the fact that punchline is obvious or acts like an asshole, he's a douchebag who doesn't give people the benefit of the doubt and you should stop hanging out with him.

If you get to finish the joke you'll basically ask him for the punchline ("...and guess what the parrot had in his mouth?"), and he'll probably respond with the obvious answer you handed him ("the fat man's cigar?").

And then you hit him with it: "No, the yellow brick."

If he doesn't laugh, he's a douchebag who...ah, fuck it. It isn't really so much a joke as it is a douchebag test, but the point is that timing is everything.

Like today, for instance. My landlord told me I could keep the new dog we rescued from the streets a week ago. Fifteen minutes later, I told my wife the good news, and that I would cough the extra money for the permit, shots, new kennel, and other bullshit since we'd given it a week and he was doing well with the other dogs, and since nobody had posted any signs looking for him or answered our own inquiries. Fifteen minutes later, she took him for a walk and stopped to get a coffee.

And at the coffee shop his owner came running up, and fifteen minutes later we were returning our new dog to his previous owner. We did the right thing; I know that, and she knows that. We took care of the dog when he needed it, we did our due dilligence looking for his owner, and just when we'd accepted that this was meant to be it suddenly, very obviously, wasn't going to be. He knew his name when the woman called it, she described the collar he'd had on when we found him, and he was very obviously excited to see her kids, who having accidentally left a gate open one night, were heartbroken that the dog had ran away on their watch. We didn't accept anything in return, and we tried not to get weepy in their living room as we said our goodbyes. None of this, of course, makes it easy to lose the dog right after we decided to keep him, LOL, but it certainly isn't "wrong" for him to return home; the timing just sucks.

So my wife is equal parts inconsolable and pissed, and I keep waiting for the brick to show back up.

Tanka

The autumn wind blows;
I breathe in and I breathe out.
I prefer neither.
Rote becomes a ritual
when a sigh becomes a song.

Working Definitions Revisited

Pragmatism is the noble ability to look at a moral dilemma and see a logistics problem; it allows strong people to make difficult choices and weak people to capitulate without taking responsibility. Characterized by a propensity to willingly accept the hatred of those less capable.

As contrasted with Opportunism, which is the preferred term for the same quality when it is displayed by some other mercenary bastard.

It's Curtains...

Shower curtains that is (as opposed to drapery, or the sort of thing Cagney says when he's not doing a love scene¹).

When decorating a guest bathroom it is important to establish boundaries - something that says "this is my house, you fuckers; you tend to your collective bodily functions and hygiene at my discretion in the same manner a serf is suffered to live at the whim of a tyrant". Some people only stock the cheaper soaps and lotions, the old towels, last month's magazines, and toilet paper that feels as though it had been crocheted out of burlap; others make a point to leave a bar of Cor soap that cost a dollar a gram, their finest linens, a Kindle, and toilet paper that feels as though it had been spun out of virgin wool. Whether through indifference or fawning, the message is clear: your host alone determines your level of comfort. Either way, it's an awful lot of work.

Having no time or patience for picking out endless insults or indulgences for my guests, I am resigned to making a single but rather overt statement with my shower curtain. It is unquestionably noticable, the nature of a shower curtain in a bathroom, even when it isn't the point of the visit. Sheerly by size, and often by the serendipitous placement in front or immediately to one side of the other focal points. Hell, it's even visible when opposite the vanity courtesy of the human frailty from whence it is so named. A message to your guest by way of shower curtain is both unavoidable and unquestionable. It says "respect my domain, for if I would do this to my own dwelling, imagine the disdain I will show your corporeal person should you displease me."

Certainly such a statement is both safer than occasionally risking your own discomfort with the burlap toilet paper and cheaper than stocking designer soap made with goddamned silver.

(¹ "A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live." - B. Hope)

The New Ecology / Four Legs Good, Two Rails Better

As periods of adaptation go, my sudden dietary shift is fairly straightforward; no crawling about in the muck for years trying to breathe, no flapping my fins uselessly, and very little slithering has been required - just a lot of avoiding carbs in general and beverages composed largely of high-fructose corn syrup in particular. Perhaps I'll grow a tail; the endocrinologist doesn't think so, but I'm hopeful.

But I am one of the lucky few, ostensibly at the apex of evolution on this quaint little tilted, eccentric dirtball. I have only genetic diseases and maybe the prospect of a new sensory ability to anticipate. If anything, I am losing what little remnants of a tail my ancestors left me, along with my appendix and other vestiges of the trial and error of human physiology. It is the much less personal evolution of the rest of the planet that intrigues me now, particularly the speculation of how I and my fellow apex apes may be inadvertently influencing the evolution of of other species.

Certainly we do a number of things to influence the evolution of other species deliberately, ranging from the mildly absurd to the positively brilliant (with the occasional foray into dangerously stupid), but that discussion doesn't need my sponsorship. Engineered medicine and food, biofuels, and organic industrial compounds may be miraculous or catastrophic when the score is tallied, but even if they are the product of hubris they were considered.

I'm far more concerned with lawn care and generations of dwarfed pets, two examples of the ecological and evolutionary impact that is derived from human aesthetic appreciation. We enjoy the look of well tended Agrostis Palustris, and as we cover golf courses and lawns with it we acknowledge that it is a pain in the ass compared to the less attractive grass that it replaced. It requires maintenance, significant watering, and the manual removal of other species that threaten to usurp it from within. We enjoy small, cute little yipping hypertense dogs, so we have bred them to fit into purses and laps over centuries of careful, controlled eugenics. We have created countless hybrids over millenia of agricultural experimentation, both primitive and modern.

And I propose that we are inadvertently teaching the species of the world to please us, slowly but surely. The concepts of camouflage and mimicry already exist in nature, so it isn't much of a leap to consider that as human beings become more and more the controlling force in the survivial and prosperity of a species, and as that decision is based more and more on our own aesthetic considerations, that a species will simply begin to evolve without interference to be more attractive to this capricuous control mechanism of the new ecology called 'man'. Our ability to influence the genetic makeup of pretty much everything around us has essentially made our collective opinion a concrete force in the development of the ecology, as significant as physics and as pervasive as climate.

And even the byproduct of our inhabitance, the machines and cities we construct in order to adapt our environment to our own ends, will no doubt become an evolutionary spark at some point, driving species incapable of that tool-making ape's trick to themselves adapt to our new jungles. If stray dogs begin to compete with us for a spot on the commuter line, such as the case in Moscow, I fear it won't be long until the little bastards stop honest begging and stealing and actually enter the work force, learning to tie a leash in a poor simulacrum of a single windsor, feign interest at social gatherings, and steal sidelong glances at bitches and studs while on the clock. Fifty years ago the job market would have judged them harshly for being illiterate quadrupeds, but in this economy being able to parlay their natural gifts of loyalty, intelligence, and the modicum of restraint all domesticated animals show intuitively even prior to training puts them at least one or two steps ahead of a newly graduated ivy leaguer douchebag with a BusAd degree. I suppose the dogs will be behind the curve in the easily entertained, ass-sniffing, and boot licking departments in comparison, but something tells me they'll catch on.

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

If I had to literalize the metaphor of "opening a new chapter" in my life, my first pick would be something along the lines of "No shit, there I was, surrounded by horny amazons insisting I complete their 'religious' ceremony before collecting my winnings from the high-stakes poker game that followed my successfull United Nations speaking engagement." It absofuckinglutely would not begin with "I remember the day I was diagnosed with diabetes." As chapter openings go, that one just blows.

But alas, in these sort of endeavors it is improbable that I am the sole author of this particular body of work; at the very least the editorial staff has final approval (bitches). Whether I like it or not, Type II Diabetes is the opening to this new chapter and I'm going to have to deal with that, along with all of the carb counting and glucose management horseshit that a reasonably healthy person would have been doing anyway if he had any sense. Stress management, blood pressure, cholesterol - all of that shit that was peripherally important is now dire, because diabetics get twice as fucked three times as fast from those maladies. It is very strange to have those concepts reprioritized overnight, but that's basically what happened. All of those things you've casually done for most of your life, you immediately and permanently stop doing, and that's just how it goes.

And I can't help but feel like an asshole for that; why the fuck couldn't I have stopped all of those bad habits before, motivated by sheer sanity and the hope of a healthier life? Eating sweets and carbs doesn't cause diabetes; it's a pancreatic problem. If you aren't diabetic you can eat pounds of goddamned sugar, and your pancreas will make as much insulin as it needs to make in order to get rid of the excess. Type I diabetics don't make the insulin, and Type II diabetics don't process it correctly, but it isn't like Coca-Cola caused this. More likely a lack of excercise in the last several years, combined with a high carb diet, combined with stress, combined with who-knows-what-else kicked on that genetically predisposed circuit and the old pancreas eventually said "Ah...I see; you're not listening. Try this on for size, dumbass." The Coca-Cola isn't to blame; the idiot who drank two litres of it a day and stopped taking care of himself is to blame. Him, and his traitorous goddamned pancreas.

Although the modern Western term is Greek, Hippocrates didn't write about it. That's the scariest fucking thing I know about diabetes. Hippocrates wrote about tons of things, both obscure and phenomenally mortal...but not about diabetes. He doesn't mention it, not because it didn't happen in the ancient world, but because it was always quickly fatal. He didn't write about it, because there was no point discussing medical treatment for something that was (at the time) medically unreatable. Diabetes was a death sentence in the time of Hippocrates, and that's a sobering thought even if it isn't the same case today. Even a few hundred years later when Aretaeus named the condition diabetes after the way a guy stands to take a piss (seriously, 'one who straddles'), his prognosis for those afflicted was a life "short, disgusting, and painful". Charming.

But modern medicine is not so pessimistic. Excercise, light medication, and an almost monastic devotion to never eating or drinking anything truly tasty again will triumph. I took a hedonistic route in my late teens that lasted until I met my wife, just prior to turning thirty; beyond the other (ahem) "indulgences" along that journey of self-discovery, I managed to eat a variety of truly sinful, delectable dishes from around the world, some of which would make a nutritionist blush like a nun at a strip club. Of sweets, and carbs, and Coca-Colas, and rich French dishes I have had my fair share, and now my appetites have shifted. I want to stick around, and if that means regarding food as a measured, rational pursuit rather than a pleasure of the flesh I can do that. My new hunger is to remain healthy, and to be a very old diabetic someday.

And as far as the title of this chapter of my life is concerned, even my nom de plume, Amamankhet, is a bastard-Egyptian term that should have foreshadowed this - one that I chose at the beginning of that last chapter of being young and somewhat reckless, I might add.

It means "Eater of Life".

Retail

I remember the first time I learned that savvy businesses were using sexual imagry and allusion to subconsciously sell me products. Although I am sure the intention was for me to be incensed at this revelation, to a pubescent male the notion that retailers are creating and distributing sexually suggestive materials in order to entice purchase doesn't seem like a soulless manipulation of the unsophisticated masses by a callous institutionalized capitalism -- it seems like a charitable pursuit. Even if you don't buy anything, they keep showing you.

And now, a couple of decades later, it is somehow disconcerting that my customer relationships have progressed logically to the "next step" I once dreaded; I can no longer just get a juvenile thrill from my vendors, careless of their feelings. They send me catalogs when I haven't ordered from them in a while that actually say that they miss me. They give me ultimatums about taking me out of their mailing list (the commercial entity's version of deleting my number from their cell phone, I guess). They beg, they wheedle and cajole, and they offer to do those dirty things they used to when our relationship began, like free shipping and handling.

I even discovered that two of the catalogs I'd been with recently were subsidiaries of the same company; even their websites were identical, if you know what I mean. In my youth the prospect of two retailers at once (twins!) would have been exciting, but now all I could think about was that I would never be able to order from both of them for long without going bankrupt or crazy, but I didn't want to let one of them down gently and risk fucking things up with the other one. And you know they talk to each other all the time; they're related, and I didn't opt out initially.