Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Tuesday, October 23, 2007)

“Ahab And The White Crab”
A One-Act Play by Herman Melville
Starring Ishmael, Captain Ahab and Queequeg

Scene: Captain Ahab is sitting on the deck of the Pequod at night, watching the sea. Ishmael approaches him.

Ahab
Say, moon calf, why lingerest there? Come hither.

Ishmael

Begging your forgiveness. I did not see you at supper, Captain, and I brought you slapjack and sea bread. Prithee tell me, why do you tarry here?

Ahab
I’m watching the sea for a peaceful respite.

Ishmael
Aye, but sadness is stamped in the troubles of thy brow, Captain.

Ahab
‘Tis true. I’ve kept to myself until now. But I’ve been laid low by a most cursed affliction of the spirit.

Ishmael
Is it this endless sallying and fruitless endeavor to find the white whale?

Ahab

Nay, it is the ticklish white crab that inflicts he who rolls in Venus’ arms.

Ishmael
You say not!

Ahab
Aye, the dreaded one itself.

Ahab scratches his crotch.

Ishmael
What have ye done for it?

Ahab
Not much is that I can do. With a clinched oath and dread in my soul, I have been to see the apothecary and rubbed on the prescribed creams and unguents. But these ablutions brought me no closer to the end of the infernal itching devil’s fury.

Ishmael
I’ve never been so afflicted with such a malady meself. Prithee tell me, how go they?

Ahab
Ah, they are as white as the great sperm whale, and almost as big. The whiteness of the crab mocks, as like a sinister evil to cover up its dark doings.

Ishmael
How?

Ahab
They lay their nits in me and feed on my blood until they grow white and fat on the warmth and larder of my body like nymphs when they become wives.

Ishmael
Sad, truly. You saw some fair dollymop in Boston, perhaps, and it was she gave you the white crab?

Ahab
Or it was I laid too long with the cannibal in my bunk, be it what it would. Yet it is worse now, for now it toys with my mood as well as my flesh. For even when the itching abates, I think of how man’s days are like endless yarn spun from an endless loom until the final day he is hoary, gray and fit for the morgue. And in the meantime of his days: all this wretched, fetid itching. We’re all in a tight scratch with life’s quotidian irritations, which are like the substance of madness.

Ishmael
Did ye try alcohol?

Ahab
How so?

Ishmael
To pour it on directly. Maybe to wrench the tiny white beast from thy close company with rum or whisky.

Ahab (wailing)
Arg, of course I did! I’d nail a doubloon to the mainmast for the man who could help me rid myself of the white crabs.

Ishmael
Avast! Here’s Queequeg. And he’s got a shiv and a bottle of rum, if I see by the way he stumbles.

Queequeg the cannibal comes in with a harpoon.

Queequeg
Some body say there bee a white crab?

Ahab
I did, Queequeg. What of it?

Queequeg
Ah! Queequeg no kill-e big whale tonight. Queequeg kill-ee small white nits.

He approaches Ahab with the harpoon aimed at his genitals.

Ishmael
No! Queequeg, not that way!

Queequeg jumps down on Ahab, pulls down his pants, holds him down and shaves him.

Ishmael
Belay that, savage! Stop! What are ye doing? Are you all right, captain?

Ahab
Wait! He truly knows what it is he does.

Queequeg finishes and gets up.

Queequeg
Is better, no?

Ahab
Yea! I am. Thank-ee Queequeg. You truly are a noble savage.

Ishmael looks down at Ahab’s fallen trou.

Ishmael
The devil, Ahab! Now I’d liken thee by thy dearth of hair to a 10-year-old boy.

Ahab looks down too.

Ahab
So I am. But not to worry. I feel as if it gives me newfound powers and fettle, as if I were like a youthful star-gazer again.

He dances around.

Ahab
That’s a sight better. From now on Queequeg, I am so thankful that I’ll let all generations know what ye have done. I shall call it “The Brazilian Wax.”

Ishmael
You look a stone fool, Ahab. Stay away from me.

Ahab wiggles his newly shaved pubes at Ishmael and chases him offstage, leaving Queequeg alone to ponder.

Queequeg
Queequeg not from Brazil.

THE END

(Originally posted Monday, October 22, 2007)

Ways To Invest In These Volatile Markets

The recent volatility in stocks has made some people worry about whether we are on the verge of another bear market and stalling economic growth. Where else will Americans be investing their money to take up more defensive positions?

* In CDs that barely keep up with inflation owned by a bank that won’t have the same name in 10 years.

* In old and collectible Spider-Man comics.

* In commodity 10-year futures contracts for sweet, sweet Spanish ham.

* In an Atlantic City Keno machine.

* Into the education of Rico, the son of your Mexican whore Esmeralda.

* Into a new education at DeVry.

* Into the church, because God is the one in whom you place all your material and spiritual trust.

* Into the equity of China, which is going to be the next superpower anyway.

* Into a diamond ring that has absolutely, positively no resale value and depreciates like a car the moment you sweep her back down the aisle.

* Into a plasma TV as big as a giraffe, because that’s the way you roll.

(Originally posted Oct. 21, 2007)

Just to let you know, “Electra in Birkenstocks” is back up at ER Salo Deguierre’s page. If you like the song. And the wife is keeping the blog updated at The Retributioners page.

And if you are reading these pages or keeping up with this blog here on any regular basis, I am hypnotizing you now to go up and hit the subscribe button: Subscribe. … subscribe … subscribe… Be a friend to all our pages, and subscribe to anything we ask. Do it! Do it!

I know it’s tempting to hit the Bo Bice link instead. But Bo is not your friend. I am, dammit!

(Originally posted Sunday, October 21, 2007)

According to new studies, scientists are coming closer to the belief that Neanderthal man, the closest extinct relative of the homo sapiens, might have possessed the same quality of language and spoken with the same level of sophistication as we do. Here are some of the things these cave-dwellers are thought to have said.

* “These berries taste like shit.”

* “I was thinking of going south to the savanna, but it’s just too damn hot down there, and everybody’s a damn foreigner, and why in the hell would I want to be eaten by a tiger? And after all, my brain casing is built for a colder climate. So it looks like it’s back to the steppes for me.”

* “I’m worried about my collection of bones and antlers, because I don’t think the tribal leaders are really telling us the truth about long-term interest rates.”

* “I don’t know if I’m a good mother.”

* “How can I have children when there might be another ice age? It’s just irresponsible.”

* “I’ve got a head for business and a bod for sin. So tell me, what’s wrong with that?”

* “Out out brief candle … Life is a tale told by an idiot. All sound and fury signifying … oh, I don’t know where I’m going with this.”

* “I don’t believe in tipping.”

* “If I want to go hang out with the guys on Friday night, I don’t see why it’s any of your goddamn business.”

* “Life sucks.”

(Originally posted Saturday, October 20, 2007)

Top 10: How Did We End It?

* With an e-mail.

* With a fax.

* With a message taped to the dog we had taught to do tricks, such as delivering break-up messages

* Sky-writing

* … in cursive

* With an eight-page letter that somehow included the entire text of “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

* Signed in goat’s blood

* With a note pinned at the end of a knife stuck into your heart

* With a singing telegram delivered by a circus clown*

* We had our lawyers do it for us.

*This post originally used a word for little people that’s now widely considered to be offensive.

(Originally posted Wednesday, October 17, 2007)

In a heartfelt scene, Ellen DeGeneres broke down in tears on her talk show yesterday after an animal rescue group removed an adopted dog from her hairdresser’s home, claiming Ellen had improperly given the dog to the family.

Here is a list of things this is not as important as:

10. Reports of continued, unauthorized retrieval of the private phone records of U.S. citizens by the Bush Administration from Verizon without warrants, which would set a legal precedent for such spying in the future, making it easier to do and harder to prosecute.

9. The continuing war in Iraq.

8. The continued manipulation of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve mainly to bail out rich people who make bad investments

7. Climate change that has finally given us the Northwest Passage sought by Lewis and Clark, though it will likely come at the expense of the north and south poles, polar bears, fall and spring “seasons,” and the island of Manhattan.

6. The raping and pillaging Janjaweed in the Sudan

5. The genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

4. Increasing cases of staph infection

3. Iranian nuclear weapons

2. American nuclear weapons

1. And now that I think of it, this story is less important than any story out there in which a dog might have actually died. I mean, the dog’s not even fucking dead! What the hell, man? I thought Anne Heche was the crazy one in that relationship.

(Originally posted Tuesday, October 16, 2007)

Dear Leticia,

The fall burns red in its autumn fugue colors, and yet you still haven’t written to me. But I don’t despair; I have several new writing assignments, and a dewy eyed optimism has borne me up in its sylph-like slender arms. I have been told to write a feature at the sump magazine about the dismal state of America’s pipes, especially those in our Lady Gotham. The original rough text given to me for this article by the hucksters and public relations people who call themselves scientists says that these pipes they want to install are the latest, most technologically advanced type of slip-sock boring technology. But I’m too much the poet to reiterate this in such crass, vulgar scientific terms. Instead, I intend to write it in my own supple, filigreed way, and thus have begun it: “Today in New York, great men are laying great, erect pipes into the gentle furrow of this, our sighing wench of a city, and as they sob their fluids into her, let our lady be better for it.” The editors were not happy with that one, I can tell you pointedly, Leticia, but I like to think that you are somewhere right now noshing a tender croissant in your pretty rouged mouth and having a small titter over it.

Yes, you were right in that letter you wrote me ten years ago to detect the note of sardonic sour cream in my observation of the jazz poetry we heard on the wharves of Monaco. Yes, I am of open mind. But I always try to regard such work with a bit of postmodern dismissive-ness, if only because it enhances my enjoyment of the form. If it gives you any perspective, this is the same attitude with which I approach agitprop theater, miniature golf and sex.

The last you heard from me, I was probably going on and on about my long-ago love for Mavis. Yes, as we all know, it turned out to be a grave mistake, yet once upon a time, however foolish it may sound, I did think of her as the great love of my life. I remember how we’d fight over Nietzsche and I would make her cry, and then we’d go back to her house and I would intensely roger her before we’d go hear Camille Paglia speak at the university center. Ah, the feelings of pain and the loss were intense and had their own taste and shape and smell. Good god, I’ve made myself hungry.

How is it that you and I were not ever lovers ourselves, Leticia? Only friends in the great platonic way men and women of the late Romantic period were? Oh yes, people wondered about us, and sometimes even wondered if, given our abstemiousness, I were a flaming homosexual. For convenience’ sake, I let them think so. We laughed over that too, at least I did until I realized later that your beautiful flatmate Yssa was only kissing me ironically. Meanwhile, you would spend weekends with your boyfriend Brutus at his dacha and do God only knows what in his sweaty arms. I would like to think that our long talks about quantum physics and Wittgenstein only made your sex life with another man that much richer.

But for two such as you and me to be romantic…that was beneath us. Because you and I, we negated our physical instincts. Better yet, as Marx would say, we sublated them until they became something more profound, of a more intense truth. For us it was not sex: It was all watching punk music and the speaking of French poorly and buying dime bags from a guy named Jo-Jo on St. Mark’s in the cold. I think of Jo-Jo often whenever I delude myself that I am being an outlaw. Mostly when I throw away parking tickets. That fucking man, Giuliani.

Think of me often, Leticia, and when you are down, try to recall what we used to say to the kids in the soup kitchens: “Every time you vote for a Republican, children, an angel gets syphilis.”

The country will give us no peace,
Salo