unbillable hours

It Was a Private Conversation

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1515 hrs

From: “Peterson”
To: “TPB, Esq.”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

I see Peterson has made the front page.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1517 hrs

From: “TPB, Esq.”
To: “Peterson”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

I couldn’t hold him back. The character’s irrepressible.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1521 hrs

From: “Peterson”
To: “TPB, Esq.”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

So I’ve heard.

Even overbearing at times…but all around a decent sort of chap.

Just make it clear that Peterson’s hung like a wet tube sock…I need to live vicariously through myself…yes, that’s how bad it’s gotten. Give Peterson all sorts of exploits in Tibet and Monaco and Peru.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1538 hrs

From: “TPB, Esq.”
To: “Peterson”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

I wouldn’t say overbearing. Just not capable of playing it molto pianissimo.

Hung like a wet tube sock. I’ll keep that in mind for when Unbillable Hours goes “blue.”

T.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1542 hrs

From: “Peterson”
To: “TPB, Esq.”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

Yes, hung like a wet tube sock was made up on the spot there…I’m just sick of the usual: donkey, tiger, horse, et al.

FILM NERD TRIVIA: the term “blue movie” was coined by censors who used blue pencils to strike out the objectionable content.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1601 hrs

From: “TPB, Esq.”
To: “Peterson”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

You made that up on the spot. Terribly shocking.

Seek help.

As for blue pencils, that seems akin to how the DOD actually used red tape to seal files.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1608 hrs

From: “Peterson”
To: “TPB, Esq.”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

We’re sooo smrat.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1611 hrs

From: “TPB, Esq.”
To: “Peterson”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

Yeah. That’s why we get all the chicks.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1618 hrs

From: “Peterson”
To: “TPB, Esq.”
Subject: Re: Best… Tron Costume… Ever.

NO! That’s ‘cause we’re overweight, obnoxious AND smart. Not to mention our serial killer shark eyes.

Tue., 27 Apr. 2004, 1622 hrs

From: “TPB, Esq.”
To: “Peterson”
Subject: Re: Hey, American Psycho. Chill the fuck out.

Shouldn’t you be registering with a sheriff’s office or something?

Skot on A Hero Prepares for Duty

I prided myself on waiting until 8:00 AM to start drinking. "A new record!" I mused, "I deserve a drink."

I was halfway through the bottle when a knock came at my door. "G'way!" I snarled, "'m drinkin'!" A familiar voice said, "What?" Nuts. It was R., a Bossman of some stature. "Sorry!" I said, "Hold on!" I hurled the Jaeger bottle out the window, and dimly heard it impact onto I-5 below with accompanying sounds of tires wailing and metal crumpling. Fuck those freeway chumps--why weren't they already in their offices drinking? No time for pity. I opened the door, and R. came in.

Izzle! Izzle pfaff!, A Hero Prepares For Duty

Screaming Bean On The Deceased

How do you respond to this? How many students do you know bring the cremains of dead relatives to school? As time passed I felt proud of having her there. When I was done I took her to my car and we went home. She is now sitting in my living room. My grandfather would like her back. My mother will take her up there at the end of this week.

Screaming Bean, untitled. (Apr. 27, 2004).

Sometimes I think about the things I would have liked my grandfather to see. He died in 1993, before I graduated high school. It was the drink, and time, that took him. Would I have carried him along, though, to see me graduate high school? To see me running wild in his home town of Boston? Would he have been there, hunched yet strong, when I put on the puffy velvet hat and blue robes and received my JD? Afterwards would we have ended up in the poker pits of Atlantic City? Would he have chuckled at my shaky hand as I was sworn in by Justice Griffiths?

Last night I hunched over the oak rail at the Dublin House watching the Playoffs as I sipped my gin, listening to my friend Peterson talk about his favorite film monologues. I thought about one of the final scenes in Blade Runner, when Rutger Hauer - Roy Batty, a short-lived replicant - tells Harrison Ford, the bounty hunter sent to kill him, of the things he had seen in his life. He pauses, and then says simply, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain... Time to die."

Peterson thought about it for a second. "Eh. I prefer the one line movie quotes, you know, the ones where it's all right there. One line."

I nodded and took a swig of gin. "You're a movie person, though, deep down. I'm a book person. We need these differences."

And, after all, it was raining that night.

Wake Up Time

You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams
You follow the leader into the trees
And what's in there waiting, neither one of us knows
You gotta keep one eye open the further you go
You never dreamed you'd go down on one knee, but now
Who could have seen, you'd be so hard to please somehow
You feel like a poor boy, a long way from home
You're just a poor boy, a long way from home

And it's wake up time
Time to open your eyes
And rise and shine

Tom Petty, Wake Up Time, on Wildflowers (1994) (link).

Inspired by Sua Sponte's Emerson quote.

Cory Doctorow on London: The (Magnificent) Biography

Boing Boing: London: The (Magnificent) Biography

The thing I liked best about Ackroyd's vision is the idea of continuity, which speaks directly to an idea I've been having lately: that books are a practice, not a product. Here's what I mean: the Bible was a book even before it was bound between covers; the fact that it was scroll-shaped didn't make it any less bookish. By the same token, one of my novels, represented as a text-file, is also a book -- even if it doesn't look anything like a bound volume -- even if it doesn't look like anything, period. A scroll, a bound volume, a CD of audio, a text-file: they're all "books" even if they're all different.

What a book is, is a collection of literary, manufacturing, commercial, and technological practices. And what all these different kinds of books have in common with one another is that their practices are continuous with one another. A Torah in scroll is related to a bound edition because the latter couldn't exist without the former: the latter rises up from the former, perhaps inevitably. The "book" is the continuous practice of writing, reading, marketing, distributing and publishing that dates back thousands of years.

We're continuous, too. The "me" who wrote my most recent novel -- which I'm very happy with, indeed! -- is not the "me" who wrote the one before that. The new one is informed with the lessons from the last one, and the intervening living. The me who wrote the last book could not have written the next one -- but the me I became could. And those two mes are continuous with one another: one gave rise to the next.

our carnival life forever

As an experiment in gratuitous wasting of time that I do not have, I went out recently with my global positioning system (“GPS”) and took a stab at the sport of Geocaching.

Geocaching is a sport wherein someone creates an objective, usually a cache of trinkets or the answering of a question posted on the Geocaching website, and then a “seeker” goes out with a GPS unit and attempts to discover the objective. It involves hiking and nerd toys. It seemed like the perfect sport for me.

John Lustig on Modern Marriage

World Famous Comics >> Last Kiss - John Lustig

Quite delayed, but via Pops' 2hr Lunch, which quotes my favorite Talking Heads song, (Nothing but) Flowers.

Witness

The Abandoned Merry-go-round, Asbury Park, NJ.

Dale Keiger On The Neurosis of Writing

scribble, scribble, scribble....: Why Write? Because I'd Make A Lousy Farmer.

Writing for me has been a means to satisfying two compulsions. One is the compulsion to draw attention to myself; I am a contradiction, a loner who nevertheless wants to be noticed. Which, I suppose, means that I want to be noticed, but only on my terms. The other is the compulsion to figure out how the world works, and then belabor strangers with stories that express what I’ve figured out. That I’ve been preceded in this by men and women both smarter and more talented than me is no deterrent: like so many writers, I always think that my take on the truth is at least a micron or two more accurate than anyone else’s. And I hold dear the central notion that truth must be testified. There is the pragmatic consideration that writing is the one means of making a living for which I seem suited. Finally, there is the charge I get, after 30 years in the trade, of creating a well-formed sentence. I am besotted with words, and have never tired of playing with them.

"I am besotted with words, and have never tired of playing with them." I like that. I don't think my compulsion to write was a desire to testify the truth. If anything, writing this website was a way for me to escape the frustrating, often ugly world of the truth. I write because of the neurosis that says that, while this is the way of the world, I cannot help but dream of so many interesting, better, and more beautiful worlds.

The Post In Which I Comment On BloggerCon in a Fashion Clearly Stolen from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency And For Which David Eggers Would Have Every Right To Sue Me For Infringement*

* But for which Neal Pollack would be told to go pound salt.

On Friday, April 16, 2004, I traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend the BloggerCon lectures at Harvard Law School. I was in attendance because of my interest in Jay Rosen’s piece on weblogs and journalism, and also because of my interest in seeing some sort of social commentary develop regarding weblogs. Normally, after attending a program like BloggerCon, I would have based an essay of this sort on the notes I took during the seminars. Unfortunately, the only note I made at BloggerCon was the hastily-scribbled “That is the weirdest receding hairline I have ever seen.”