Susan Starcevic: My Mother.
     In 1984 she orchestrated the purchase of our family’s first home computer, the Colecovision Adam. A computer so atrociously designed and marketed that it single handedly bancrupted the venerable Connecticut Leather Company (Coleco. Even the Cabbage Patch craze couldn’t save it!)
     I thought nothing of it other than the video games it could play.
     On evening a day or so after setting it up my mom stayed up late and programmed a simple mad-lib program onto it from a SmartBasic tutorial book. She then carefully wrote a note and left it on the desk before going to bed.
     Very early the next morning I descended into the basement, eager to feed my burgeoning video game addiction before anyone else woke up.
     The note was a step-by-step instruction on how to boot up SmartBasic, load the program she wrote, and run it. I was so fascinated by the process that it launched me into a lifetime fascination with computer technology that ensured that I remained a virgin until I was 21, and which now provides me with my comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
     I am convinced that, if she had been exposed to technology at an early age like myself, she would have been a queen geek. But because she was in her late thirties when she first sat at a microcomputer keyboard, I think she was culturally disadvantaged and ill equipped to fully realize her potential in this regard. While she remains unafraid of technology, and an enthusiastic user to boot (pardon the freakin’ pun), she never became a programmer or an IT kinda woman. An ace with a spreadsheet, Quicken, or Turbotax, though…
     Anyway, my computer skills surpass hers in most every way except one:
     She is a persistent and savvy internet researcher. Lately she has begun a new hobby: finding out the truth about stuff she sees for sale on eBay.
     Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to visit my Mom’s new blog:
http://allwrongebay.blogspot.com/ in which she will tell of things she found out about things people didn’t know about when they tried to sell them to other people on eBay.
Let me know what you think about it!

     It is so very difficult to think when you and all your family are made entirely out of bottle-caps and string. So it isn’t all that often that a bottle cap person gets to thinking deep thoughts. But a body can get to feeling so hopeless when you’re trying to raise a family in a house the size of a toaster-oven. So hopeless that you simply must search for meaning outside the squalor of your own wretched existence.

     

And why not seek meaning and purpose?!?

     When I look at these, my stumpy arms, all corrugated tin and miscellaneous cola residue, I am struck by the beauty of it all. When I look at my yellow-faced, boat-footed child, I am nearly moved to tears by the miraculous nature of life and the love it has brought me.
     Sure, our home is tiny, and except for the front porch it doesn’t actually have what you’d call a room, per se. No, it’s a solid block of wood, surrounded by pop-tops. But we’re glad of it. Thankful for it, even! So when I survey all these things, I know–KNOW–that God exists.
     Could a random, unlikely event billions of years ago have caused the first Coke bottle to bob to the surface of the primordial ooze and divest itself of its cap, my ancient ancestor?
     Could Darwin’s dark and pitiless art have eventually resulted in the evolution of me and mine?
     I don’t like such a cold and random view of the universe as that. I prefer to think that there was a mind that set itself the task of creating me and my family of “Life in Hell” look alikes.

I know that my Pepsi bottler lives! What comfort that sweet sentance gives!

• These objects stand from three to five feet tall, and are made entirely from bottle caps.
• They are in the lobby of a prominant lawyer in the Detroit metropolitan area, where I was working yesterday.

     Car arguments are repetitive, they go no place, and seem to always involve the same things; perhaps its because no one can walk away from them without getting killed, raising the stakes to an unacceptable level.
     A typical weekend drive: my wife and I in the front seat, Sam sitting in the back seat, babbling away about whatever and trying to entice a rubber alligator to eat the foot of a barbie, an endeavor I wholeheartedly endorse.
     It usually starts the same way, with the radio playing a song we (that is, me and Heather), both enjoy. First I begin tapping the rhythm on the plastic of the dashboard; playing the louvers of the dashboard vents like a washboard. Soon, I’m singing along, making up lyrics when the words escape me. Suddenly, Heather reaches out and angrily changes the radio station. Unfazed, I continue tapping the rhythm and vocally move toward finishing the interrupted verse…and… I’m only three words from the end when she yells,

     “STOP IT!”

     I hadn’t consciously been aware that I had been singing until she yells, but I then immediately feel an intense sense of dissatisfaction, like a lack of closure. I only had two words left, and I would have stopped on my own. But NO, she couldn’t let me finish, and now I’m all vocally blue-balled.
     “Why couldn’t you just let me finish?” I complain, “I only had a little bit left.”
     She responds incredulously, “Left of what?!? You didn’t have anything!”
     “The song. I was just..”
     “Why do you have to ruin every song on the radio?”
     Sam pipes in from the back seat, “I like daddy singing!”
    I gesture to the back of the vehicle, “…see? She liked it! It wasn’t so bad.”
     “It was unnecessary. Why don’t you just listen to the song?”
     “Fine, fine. Whatever. I was almost done.”
     “Did you even know you were singing?”
     “Uh….no.”
     “Then how do you know you were almost done?”
     “Because I was almost at the end of the verse.”
     “You would’ve gone on.”
     “….wouldn’t have.”
     “Whatever.” I must admit I pouted a little…
     We drive in silence for awhile.
     Sam is quiet for a bit. … The rubber alligator suddenly sails past me and bounces off the dashboard onto my lap. “I want music!”
     Heather turns the radio on, and flips through the stations. Soon some crappy classic rock comes wafting out of the radio. I don’t like Elton John. I especially hate “Tiny Dancer.”
     I patiently sit, growing annoyed, as the song plays on….and on….and on… I try to forget the music, as I watch the signs pass by the car. I look on the floor. I look at the ceiling. I begin rifling through the contents of the glove compartment. Hmm…onion soup mix?
     Soon, and without thinking, I begin singing along with the hateful song, singing along with Elton. “Hold me closer, tiny dancer! Count the headlights on the highway!” Angry at myself for singing along, I begin singing mockingly, in the voice of the classic lounge singer, “SpongeBob.”
     “Stop IT! Can’t you just sit there and listen to it?”
     “I’m sorry. I hate this song.”
     “Why didn’t you just say that?”
     “Because you were listening to it!”
     “So fucking it up is better than just telling me the truth?”
     From the back seat Sam pipes up, ”you said a bad word!” and Heather begins to blush. I turn to the back seat and advize Samantha to “shush.”
     “Shush,” sez I
     “But mommy said-”
     “Sam,” I interrupt,
     “she did…”
     “You can’t say it just because mommy did.”
     “How come mommy can say fu-”
     “You wanna hear Fraggles?”
     “YEAH!!!”
     I insert the CD, and the fraggles sing. Heather and I exchange glares…..

I left my laptop at work, and therefore cannot complete my ad-hoc recording system as I usually do.
My wife’s laptop isn’t up to the task (its a PII 366MHz), so…no new content!
I hope this doesn’t disappoint anyone, and I’ll do a couple in the week to make up for it. I’m planning another piano haiku (thats what I’m calling them for now) like Idle Hands and perhaps another improvised piece.

     It sits with a “Brighter Smile” shadow box propped hopefully against its vinyl, padded ground zero, sadly wishing that it could, one last time, irradiate someone’s jaw

     I wish my eyes were radioactive and my ass was a limousine. That way I’d at least have a half-life and could carry twelve of my friends in my colon.

     If you turned around, friend-who-would-ride-in-my-large-intestine-if-he-or-she-could, you would see a sad little server on top of a sad little counter in this, the quarters of the retired X-ray. “Applying Computer Settings” is the eternal lament of this fellow, the unfortunate side effect of Microsoft mandated updates from Microsoft’s foul pit of desperate and lonely work visa bearing programmers. Did it make me late? Yes, it did; thankfully not late as in the late Mr. Whited.
     It is better now, and my ears ring so loudly that people look for flying buttresses all around my thighs and seek to offer me confession. Catholic Nazis unite! HEIL MARY! HEIL MARY!

Norma Shearer (1902-1983)
-click to enlarge photo-
     I mentioned a few days ago that Norma Shearer is my favorite pre-code actress. I recieved a couple emails asking for more details, so here we go:
     In 1930 the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (now known as the Motion Picture Association of America or MPAA), responded to public conservative criticism and pressure by writing “The Production Code.”
     This first version of the code was more a token gesture than anything else, being neither overly restrictive nor particularly well enforced. For the next few years Hollywood, which had gotten the hang of many of the film techniques we moderns recognise as standard, produced challenging, racy and sometimes important cinema. (Well, and lot of crap, too)
     This all came to a screeching halt in 1934, when Hollywood, sensing a coming onslaught of legislated censorship and organized boycotts, took action. To maintain their freedom and defuse the conservative bomb, Hollywood reasoned that they needed to perform their own censorship and turned to their heretofor weak Production Code with the devil’s own pen at the ready.
     The Motion Picture Code was then rewritten as a draconian edict which was now strictly enforced and resulted in a white-washed Hollywood for decades afterwards.
     The Production Code of 1934 prohibited any and all reference to homosexuality, interratial relationships, illicit drugs, prostitution, premarital sex, white slavery, and profanity. Further, it made no distinction between endorsement and condemnation of these taboo subjects; they were simply to be avoided. The sugary, light-weight nature of movies you may remember from the late thirties to the fifties was the result, and many people forgot the brief period of the early thirties when Hollywood had substance.
     The only form of steppin’ out Hollywood was allowed to do after that was in the form of violence. Similar to our current prudish conservatives, sexual deviancy was considered far worse than violence by the ignorati of the time, and therefore violence was not prohibited in any meaningful way by The Code, which merely asks that “the use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials,” and that “brutal killings are not to be presented in detail.”

     Hollywood: Now With More Cowboys and Gangsters!

     Before all that came to pass, however, Norma Shearer bloomed.
     Her most famous role was as the titular character in The Divorcee, a movie which garnered her an Academy Award as Best Actress in 1930. In this movie, a disloyal husband tries to justify his infidelity on rationalistic grounds, but then divorces his wife when she reciprocates by committing adultry in turn. Afterwards, the desolate husband descends into alcoholism while Norma’s character becomes a powerful career woman. In the end, they get back together, and all is forgiven in a flurry of art-deco globe trotting, Norma Shearer’s amazingly sexy wardrobe, and a final kiss. Throughout this and her other films, Norma was smokin’ hot in an accessible way which seems very modern to me, while never being trashy.
     In her real life she was also quite remarkable and ahead of her time. Norma married MGM’s Chief Of Production, Irving Thalberg, and had two children by him before becoming a widow in 1936. Proving to be a formidable man-hunter, she embarked upon an affair with the then-teenage (and cute as a button) Mickey Rooney before retiring from acting in 1941 and settling down with a star ski athlete named Martín Arrouge who was twenty years younger than herself. They remained happily married until her death in 1983.
     What I wouldn’t have given to be Mickey Rooney gettin’ schooled by this incredible lady!

• Norma Shearer on Wikipedia
• Google Image Search for Norma Shearer
• The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 on Arts Reformation
• The Divorcee on IMDB

     One of my clients is a beautiful, tall blonde in her early fourties. Just in case she googles her name (something I wouldn’t put past her narcissistically pampered and beminiskirted ass) I will call her “Covereducterella” in reference to her one obvious fault.

     She has the covered duct thing going on.

     Many years ago I worked with a girl named “Mara”–and another named Narda, and a third named Cindy. They were all hot; I was still within my 21 years of virginity and their exotic names, especially Cindy’s, added to the unattainable allure my 20-year-old self found in them. Anyway, Mara had the same condition as Covereducterella.
     Look in the mirror and examine the corner of your lovely brown eyes (your actual loveliness and eye-color may vary, but I bet you have beautiful peepers, too) and note the spot of pink in the corner of your eye. This is where eye-goop accumulates during head-colds and allergy attacks, and also from whence tears flow during the many times daily that I cry like a little bitch.
     Covereducterella and my old friend Mara, however, both have rounded eyes that end before exposing that pink wetness. In both cases no one knows what the hell I’m talking about when I mention it, and in both cases I have the inexplicable urge to reach out and pinch the bridge of their nose.
     “Where do your tears come from, eh insert name here? Do you never allow yourself to cry, or does it come from your nose in a thin stream of delicate mucus?”

    This is not socially acceptable; so, like a good boy, I keep my hands to myself and bite my tongue–hard enough that tears come out of my ducts and I once again cry like a little bitch. That makes four times today already. I pause, look in a mirror, and admire my pink wetness.

…yes, I know what I just said.

    After being turned down for the truancy officer job, Heather is now going on to round 2 of interviews for a job as a debt counselor. (an unexpected prospective career change)

     At the same time she received an interview request from the City of Troy for a temporary full-time Probation Officer (her chosen career).

     Life is full of choices! Full time position with a new career or temporary position with the current carreer. She is going through round 2 of the debt counselor thing, and only then will she decide on her response to the temporary position interview request.

I’m trying something new. Its only 21 seconds long, and I’ve tried to boil a feeling or a image to a simple musical phrase. I need to know if this is a good direction or a bad direction. Would you like to hear other little musical sketches like this one, “Idle Hands“?

1. if you could be a famous woman,who would you be and why?(any period)
• Norma Shearer, sometime deep in the thirties. What a glorious bitch, and pre-code movies are the BOMB! The Divorcee is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. I know she died of old age in 1983, but when I see her old movies I get a raging erection.
• Or maybe Amelia Earhart, because of all the cool plane flying stuff. Goggles make me look dashing.
• See, this question is hard for me. My personality is one that automatically assumes that women should be in charge, and I’m always attracted to strong women. But….I’ve never ever really wanted to be one. Make love to them, worship them, obey them, but never be one. So….
2. what has been your all time embarassing moment?
• Everything is embarassing. THIS is embarassing.
• Seriously, I’m embarassed all the time about every little thing I think I’ve done wrong. From the time I got drunk and cried like a baby because my lips were numb (seemed quite tragic at the time), to the moment I was caught desperately (and reciprically) fondling a mean, ugly woman in the stock room of JCPenneys when I was 19 (seemed quite tragic at the time.)
3. if your wife was adamant about moving into a hippy free-love commune,would you go with her?why,why not?
• Sure! Why not? I hear there’s lots of sex in them there communes. Wait…will there be carnival mirrors? I would definitely either avoid or seek out communes because of the presence, or possibly the absence, of carnival mirrors or other warped glassware products.
4. are there aliens?
• What? Where?!?
5. would an african american local to your area participate in an over the top ‘jivin’ hand shake if you were to initiate one with him?(assuming he was a complete stranger to you).
• First I would need to know the ‘jivin’ hand shake. I’ ve seen them performed at exhibitions, and I totally respect the skills involved.
• I could probably go so far as to get a stranger to give me a hug through subterfuge or graft.

The Rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying interview me please.
• wait…I never did that…
2. I will respond by asking you five questions.
• I will make certain you must either lie or humiliate yourself horribly
3. You will update your blog/site with the interview questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions