Saturday, March 21, 2009

Larry King

This Onion video is a hoot.

I have my own spin on a Larry King interview.

Larry King with Jesus as a guest.

"So Jesus. Welcome to the show."

"Thank you Larry. It's good to be here."

"So. I hear you used to be a carpenter. What was that like? Do you miss it?"


NASA Simulator Prepares Astronauts For Rigors Of An Interview With Larry King

Sunday, March 15, 2009

3/24/What to do? This friend Miss A has everything and ...What to do? This friend Miss A has everything and more than I have ever sought. Unlike tk, unlike cv--the truith seems to carry weight. She is stunning beauty: clear, tanned skin, deep, intelligent round eyes, powers of observation only other men's wives have--never mine; she has a healthy, naturally toned body. Great ankles. And bosoms the size of tennis balls. Though she's been in my life now five or six weeks, last week was the first time we held each other. T

onight I breathed in her fragrance and tasted her.

But what I feel from her, in this timeless moment of perdition is a familiar avariciousness. I

am easily convinced that if she were to straddle me tonight, she could blom a rose in the bottom of my heart. The other night. in my dream, she lay on her stomach while I felt her wetness through her legs, tasted the moisture and breathed in her heard sighs.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Erring on the Side of Caution

About five years ago, when I first started this blog, my intention was to bang out about five hundred pages of quasi-me stuff/ and quasi fiction. I was seriosuly giving thought to writing my second novel.

My first was a graduate school project, and I did sell one short story from it--but that was a long time ago. Actualy the short story came first and inspired me to add on another 200 pages. I never submitted it. I probably tossed it long ago.

Anyway, I was going to try to give it a go again. A novel.

I had read once in a Granta magazine interview that when asked about his process of writing a novel, Philip Roth said that he banged out about five hundred pages without stopping to edit, revise, look back or give much thought to where he was going with plot, setting, characters, all that jazz.

Then after getting his five hundred or so pages, he'd retreat to some quiet place with a yellow highlighter and scrutinize what he'd written for sentences that he thought had a breath of life in them.

He told the interviewer, that if he was lucky to find maybe twenty or thirty pages worth of sentences that would point him in the direction of his next novel.

That was the original inspiration for blogging. Bang out a lot of pages--don't look back.

I now have well over 500 single spaced pages, about 350,000 words, and about 2 million characters with spaces.


Time to grab the yellow highlighter and find a quiet place.

Why now?

Precedent.

About five years ago, give or take, I went to Kuwait to accept a position that had opened up mid-semester because someone had resigned. It was an emergency fill-in position at a place called "The Gulf University of Science and Technology", or "GUST", with the promise that "If you help us out and fly over here to take the job, we'll offer you a ticket, housing and at the end of the term, a two-year contract."

I flew there. While waiting to meet with some people in personnel, I found a free computer in their library, and toodled around with a poem called "Gust". Hammered it out in about fifteen minutes, then posted it. I may still have it somewhere in this blog where I've now batched downloaded every past post and saved them in Word.

I remember a line in the poem about "on a gust of decision and indecision. . ."

A few weeks later, someone at work found the blog, probably someone Googling for dirt, found the poem, and forwarded to management. Management thought I was slamming them and their fine tertiary institute if higher learning. They especially zeroed in on the "decision and indecision" part.

I tried to convince them it was a poem, more about me, about other ex-pat ESL teachers, thisESL teaching business and travelling, all that, but they weren't buying it.


I was not offered a two-year contract based on that poem and and found myself stranded in Kuwait working for the next year or so in a business English institute waiting for a more permanent position elsewhere. That was a rough year.

It has recently come to my attention that co-workers have found the blog, and though the comments about the writing have been complimetary, I ain't taken any chances.

So, this is my first post of a revised Past Imperfect.

Today, I took my car to the service station and had it washed.
Yesterday, I homed four cats.
I'm going to eat an apple now.
Tonight I will have green tea at sunset

I have borrowed from a friend the complete first season of the Simpsons and plan to watch it with commentary.

To celebrate the rebirth of this blog--I'm going with Arial font for a fresher look. I may even redesign the lay-out. The coffee stains are stale.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Neighbors

There was a young family who lived above us. The husband wasn't very smart, he was overweight and he loved his wife's soft face. Below them lived a couple who spent their weekends either fucking or fighting with equal severity.
On a daily basis, I explored new ways to provoke in her some cheer. I characterized my efforts not as labors of love but as the things I had to do for marriage, the rudimentary things I'd always overlooked in relationships with women beginning with an impassioned elimination of me.

Some women simply leave the men they no longer love. In my case, they contact sisterhood underground, gain new identities and go into something akin to a former lover's witness protection program. Those first few days, sunning by a five-star pool with a bottle of chardonnay, her pleasant face, had begun to show symptoms of my patchy success.

Her skin was no longer flushed with apprehension. Her big round eyes no longer appeared off balance, always puffy from crying. I had never been able to promise anyone anything close to devotion, but for her I'd pledged to myself to always try to keep her spirits from lapsing. Those first few days were all we had to go on later, when we used to call a truce, not much later, when things got out of hand.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Abuse and Doomed cats





William Burroughs as a junkie priest (Drug Store Cowboy) on the subject of demerol:"Demerol is for pussies."
"It's not about the sleep. It's about nodding off." (anonymous)
"I can't go through treatment with those people. I'm middle class." (anonymous)

"The Full Elvis: xanax, viagra, crack, scotch, weed, speed, a tattooed, red headed crack whore and a room at the Roadway Inn." (anonymous)

Bin cats in the Khaleej.
Most of them can't be approached. Still, you will find the occasional ueber cat, the rare one who works out the math and deduces that it is in its best interest to suck up to a bi-ped or, as they say in Felinese "the openers of cans". Most of the stray cats in the gulf are doomed.
I collected my first cat family in Kuwait, these cats later accompanied me to the US for a year then when my Saudi opportunity presented itself, and I could find no foster homes for the arrogant hair balls, I hauled them to Saudi with me.
T. would eventually take in my first cat family. Two of those cats are still living together with my nieces. They are brother and sister all white cats--Latif and Leela. Leela is a morbidly obese white cat with one blue eye and one gray eye.
T. and I collected my second cat family from the Gulf. Of those two, our favorite has since died. Her name was Blanche. A couple of years ago, when we had Blanche neutered, an inexperienced Camel vet from India almost gutted her. Blanche had to be revived. When we brought her home from the vet's, we fed her through an eye dropper.
T. held Blanche on her chest throughout the night. Blanche's eyes had rolled back in her head and her tongue dangled. I'd never seen a cat look like that in the night and by morning still be breathing. I knew she'd be there in the morning with us.