Posted on February 8th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I always enjoy how marketing expands our consciousness towards new and stupider horizons. Last week I saw a motion-activated soap dispenser commercial that tried to frighten the simple people of America with the news that soap pumps have “hundreds” of germs on them, which would make them cleaner than your skin by several billion organisms. But leaving that aside, my first thought was, “This is indeed troubling information. It is so fortunate, then, that the very next thing you touch after touching a dirty soap pump is soap.” Later, I was reading a review of the history of the condom which was supposed to impress with the rigorous safety testing procedures condoms undergo, such as being attached to balloon pumps and inflated as large as they can be before bursting. Thing is though, unless somebody’s dick has a tumor of superhuman proportions attached to it, I really don’t see what good that does, or what it proves. They should be tested to see if they can stand up to being rubbed like someone’s trying to start a fire. I think it’s much more pertinent to what people are doing with them to know if high amounts of friction would cause them to rip or, well, catch fire. It would be fascinating if, upon further review of testing results, condom packages started coming out with warning labels like: “Only safe to be used from the front. Anal presents fire hazard. Use at own risk.”

Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I now know that there’s at least one gun store in Boulder. I have laid eyes upon it. It’s not even that far from the Naropa Institute. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, even in a place like Boulder, since society generally tolerates two kinds of people: those it wants to tolerate, and those that are armed. In any case, it’s good to know that there’s at least one good rally point in case of zombie attack, especially since if we hid out there liberal yuppie Boulder zombies probably wouldn’t even know where to look for us, whereas if we went to the tea house or the pottery store they’d find us in five minutes. There are lots of taxidermic deer and elk heads in the gun store, I assume because that’s what most people that buy guns around here are shooting at, unless they’re target shooting, and clay pigeons or plastic bottles don’t make very triumphant-looking trophies. But I wonder what they would have hanging in, say, a Russian gun shop–journalists?

I learned a lot about Boulder social mores the day I went to the gun store with friends to buy ammo. Leaving town afterward to head into the mountains, I discovered that it’s not considered littering to throw orange peels out your car window, since they’re biodegradable. I need to ask to see if that also applies to babies. When we finally got to our mountaintop shooting range, it was full of people blasting away. I wasn’t annoyed at all: I think it’s important for as many people as possible to be trained to shoot a gun. After all, there are a lot of shoplifters out there. And in that connection, I think it’s unfair that when shooting a plastic bottle you get less points for accuracy for a low shot that makes it wobble around and then fall over. I think you should get more.

Other popular targets at the range that day included an Obama/Biden campaign sign and a picture of Osama bin Laden. When the wind knocked the bin Laden sign over and the owners couldn’t find it for a couple of minutes, I think I came to see how bin Laden disappears so quickly into the rocks and hills. Later, coming down the mountain we got stuck behind an SUV with a Obama/Biden sticker moving about 15 mph. I wished that was the Obama sign that was bullet-ridden. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that a car being driven so timidly should encase an Obama supporter, but even health care reform wasn’t that slow. I didn’t let it irritate me overly though, consoled by the thought that guns and mountaintops don’t necessarily have an exclusive relationship.

Posted on January 29th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Who says math can’t be entertaining? Even the simplest equations can, like cat + shower. Of course, only one of my cats can actually clamber up the stairs to the shower and poke her face into the deluge. The other one has too much joint pain to even lick herself clean. Consequently her fur is all matted, which I used to find gross, but now I can sort of appreciate. It’s like having a pet mountain range. I would wager she spends a lot of her time lying awake, having to go to the bathroom but not wanting to get up until she can’t stand not to. She follows the course of the sun around the room she sleeps in all day, starting by the east wall in the morning, moving to a chair on the north side in the afternoon and finally to the couch by the fireplace in the southwest corner in the evening. And like the sun, she never reverses direction. All of her limbs are more or less vestigial at this point. It’s a bit sad, but on the other hand, now that she’s outsourced both the transporting of herself to her food bowl every day her insulin production to humankind, I think she has thrown her hat in all the way with civilization, and she acts like it.

Posted on January 28th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I find it interesting that half the country seems to be under the impression that Harvard, like all the other famous universities in the country, is run by a bunch of communists, since it’s definitely the most capitalistic organization I’ve ever been a part of. And since they had an endowment of something like $33 billion when I entered, I naturally assumed that they were good at making money. But in the last year they’ve lost around $10 billion, and in response started making cutbacks.

They’ve always made a specialty of moves like collecting bills at the beginning of the month but not issuing salaries until the end. But now they’re adopting even more popular measures like cutting free coffee in the break rooms and lowering the thermostats in buildings four degrees during the winter. Within days of their first announcement of losses after the investment banks started collapsing last year I noticed that the motion-sensing lights in the graduate dorm laundry rooms were changed to turn off within 10 seconds without motion. The light would turn off during the time that it took for me to load my clothes into the machine. And then I’d have to walk to the other end of the room, stand under the sensor and wave my arms for a good five seconds before they would turn back on. Never have I found it so hard to convince man or machine that I exist.

Now I think I’m starting to see how they lost all that money. They have no idea where it came from or went to. They lose $10 billion through bad real estate investment and over-exposure in the stock market and they’re looking for it in the coffee carafes. Don’t be deceived by the physical resemblance of the faces on the money that you give to coked-up investment bankers and the money you give to the energy company. They’re really not related. Harvard is like an old woman who leaves her purse in a restaurant and, when she notices, starts poking the first teenager she sees with her umbrella, convinced he stole it.

Posted on January 25th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | 3 comments »

After mounting a campaign that thrust deep into enemy territory, the back and forth along the horizon between earth and sky in Shanghai has become a stand-off again. Have to keep giving people a reason to look up though, distract them from looking down and remembering how many fetuses of baby girls are buried in the ground. The world economy may be grinding slowly, but after having come all the way out of Africa, I don’t think humanity is going to go back in. Although…I don’t quite understand all the tension at the nexus between race and sex, since we’re all black in the dark. But if building upwards doesn’t start again, it will remain what I see from my window, buildings neither tall nor short, beautiful nor ugly. It’s the suburbs, and I know it doesn’t stop from here until the ocean. America is a suburb. It’s the only world power that has to commute just to participate in history. In my hometown I feel like I’m constantly living in the recent past. A couple of weeks ago a girl asked me if choking was a big new sexual trend. God only knows why, maybe she read a story in Cosmo about it. I told her she probably doesn’t need to sort out her feelings about it in advance, since if some guy is sitting there eagerly wanting to choke her and asks her if he can, whatever she answers will probably produce the same result.

Posted on January 13th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I went to an open-mic comedy night at someplace called the Squire Lounge last night with two friends, the name being important only insofar as I dare say it found itself elbowed into more slanderous tirades directed against various people’s bodily orifices than any other title of chivalric rank has before. Inside the bar was the kind of motley grouping which didn’t lend itself to any shared social classification, no matter how broad, except maybe “evacuees sheltering from a natural disaster.” It was a vaguely endearing place nonetheless, with some sort of yarn creation wrapped around a pillar like a knitting project that had regrettably failed to turn into a pair of socks, as well as, up in the rafters, a disembodied, seemingly female mannequin head with what one of my friends and I decided must have been a moustache shading its upper lip, only because I don’t imagine a mannequin would be designed with a harelip. The men’s bathroom had, besides a urinal, a sitter whose lips practically touched the walls on both sides, probably because the owners were tired of people taking dumps on the floor on either side and determined to provide no room for error.

We sat in a semi-circular booth with a two-step rise near the stage. I thought that that kind of set-up by itself practically seemed like an implied invitation for a lap dance. One of my friends claimed that that wouldn’t work because the booth was too high off the ground. I liked that the only problem she saw with the idea was the elevation of the furniture, not the fact that the only people in our near vicinity were bums sheltering from the cold and a couple of people guessing the gender of whom, we decided, could replace bar trivia contests on the nights where there was no act. Finally the performers came on one at a time. Much wonderment at ethnic differences was expressed. A general lack of interest in babies without exciting mental illnesses or poignant disappearances into garbage dumps or the hands of pedophiles was implied. I learned that a much bigger groundswell of dissatisfaction with the state and nomenclature of the vagina exists than I would have suspected.

Outside the bar a bouncer was trying to shoo the smokers on the sidewalk off to more than 15 feet from the building. Most of the art-school types walked further down the street. The hobo wearing the hard hat, on the other hand, had, I take it, armed himself to pursue the opposite strategy. On our way home, a sudden unexpected need to go to the bathroom on the part of the girl provoked a discussion as to how long-haul truckers manage to drive all day without having to stop for that purpose, my guy friend holding that they take anti-diuretics to suppress the urge. Whereas I had assumed that the usual trucker strategy was to accumulate enough veneral diseases that it would hurt too much pee. So that, like in most primitive societies, fear would fill the role of science.

Posted on January 4th, 2010 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I hate buzzwords and stupid terminology. It partly drove me out of my job teaching English at a business college in Shanghai: it seemed particularly hypocritical to claim to be teaching English to Chinese people while massacring it behind closed doors with barbarous business neologisms. We were as bad as a bunch of womanizing monks. For instance, our teaching trainers would tell us: “We don’t give feedback, we prefer to give ‘feed-forward.’” Whereas I think that as long as we’re making shit up, a word like ‘feed-forward’ would more accurately describe a bird ingesting some seeds or berries and then vomiting them up again into the mouths of its babies. Although I suppose that’s more or less what we were doing too. Of course it’s worse in politics, since the power is greater and the ends are generally worse, and where euphemisms represent the most frustrating concealment of reality other than the bikini. For instance, this horrible new phrase ‘the public option.’ Were I to guess, I would have imagined that ‘the public option’ referred to when a guy can’t find a girlfriend but is still wants to have sex, so he chooses the ‘public option.’ And naturally I imagine that in today’s liberal America when a mission goes wrong in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever the soldiers will no longer abort it, they will “exercise a woman’s reproductive rights” on it.

Posted on December 28th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Although it’s Christmastime, around here some of Jesus’ miracles don’t seem so miraculous. “Jesus walked on water!” Yeah, great, so could I right now, it’s frozen. I need to go somewhere hot, someplace burning, maybe a civil war. I noticed the other day that the jail in my town is next to the airport, which seems kind of mean. The airport is just a small private airfield, so it probably doesn’t have a departure board, which is too bad, because I always thought of them as being the things most symptomatic of optimism in any airport. I used to wonder, though, since flights are always listed according to their destination, if there couldn’t be, hidden between the lines of the departure board, a limitless ghost army of planes taking off with no destination, as invisible bureaucratically speaking as the angels climbing Jacob’s latter even if they are hulking steel cans like any other.

One of my best friends from high school who is also frequently possessed by fits of wanderlust has just come back to Colorado from that depraved den of iniquity London, though he only remains among us for a couple of weeks, probably fearing that to absent himself longer would give the mold growing on his walls time to colonize his floor and perhaps take up arms against him. I think he should leave it be: with little money and jammed into some back-alley, it’s probably the only way he will be able to cultivate the famous British love of gardening. He’s only been away from here for a few years, but he has already become detached enough from the genius loci to deliver himself of such judgments as he did the other day when he said something about how Mexicans make “good food.” I had to remind him that in this country Mexicans don’t just make “good” food, they make all the food. Nonetheless, he has the irrepressible compulsion to make invidious comparisons of a man comfortable only in open relationships. He started going on about how strange it seemed to drive or ride a bike when going out at night, since in London one generally walks or takes public transportation. I implored him to tell me more magical stories of the exotic East. Whatever, his idea of a nice city is St. Petersburg, where you risk being menaced by the depradations of wandering noses and disgruntled statues.

Posted on December 5th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

I came back home last week, and after taking a couple of runs through town everything seems to still be more or less where it was before. Apparently my running like a maniac back and forth in front of the trees and statues all last summer didn’t make any converts. I noticed signs of more gradual slide though; I’m glad that I’m not going to elementary school in these times, since I ran past my old elementary school and saw that the marquee in front said: “An Evening of Sharing.” A night of sharing…what? Venereal diseases? Vicious rumors?

I think I left China just in time though. I suspect imminent economic dissolution as the entire structure collapses into the vortex of its own lies and made-up employment statistics. And of course it still faces the near-annual Christmastime tradition of the recall of millions of Chinese-made toys containing dangerous toxins, unless the manufacturers try to take advantage of the ever-present popularity of exoticism among Western customers and the growing brand nationalism of Chinese buyers by promoting toys containing lead paint as Childhood Fun With Chinese Characteristics.

Also, my body had reached saturation in many different ways. For example, before I went to Shanghai in August I hadn’t even heard that it was hosting the World Expo next year, and actually, after two months of relentless advertising bombardment, I’ve almost returned to a state of being unaware of it, as I think my brain has begun expelling undigested chunks of Expo-related propaganda, just like my intestine has stir-fried food. Many people seem to fear swine flu mutating to create some kind of super-pathogen, but I worry more that the Chinese government will seek a more efficient means to infiltrate its passive subjects’ brains by weaponizing Expo propaganda, combining it with the flu to create what could then quite literally be called Expo fever. I will know to be afraid if I hear people coughing and expressing enthusiasm for magnetic tramways and ecologically responsible sidewalks.

Posted on November 28th, 2009 by Curt in Uncategorized | permalink | no comments »

Communism, the most carefully thought out half-thought-out idea in the history of the world, may have shriveled in China, but for lots of Chinese men it seems to have been replaced as an object of faith and belief, despite a total lack of evidence of it working, by–the comb-over. Maybe the end of communism itself saddened the hair from their heads. Me, I see things falling now relentlessly: after two months of practically every building over 10 years old that I lay eyes getting knocked down and plowed over, I’ve gotten so used to the sight of heaps of ruins rising victorious from their scuffles with structural engineering that I’m starting to suspect that my eyesight has the power of a cosmic five-year-old to wear out and break everything it touches within a few weeks. In any case, all that’s over, because yesterday I flew back home. I’m always particularly worried about crashing from the sky when I fly to or from here; I love my home, and I wouldn’t want it to be said of me “cause of death: Colorado.” Then again, sometimes I wonder if I ever have even passed through the sky: airplanes seem less like humanity taking to the air than training the air in the ways of the ground. You walk into a steel box, it whirls and shakes a bit and then (at least on long flights) you just wait for the sky to ripen.