Choire Sicha

Friday, August 29

From the "Poverty Is Wicked Ennobling" Department:

While I'm on vacation until next week, why don't we play a little game? Uh, no. Not the game where you pants me.

The pictures below are of the dog dish of coins that I suddenly remembered during this week's financial emergency that I was saving for... a financial emergency. How felicitous! Anyway, the person emailing me with a guess closest to the amount of money contained therein --without going over -- will win all of the exciting useless dirty Canadian money I had to remove from the change sorter! Good luck!

Update: Our big winner is mystery man Mr. Kevin Z.! Yay Kevin! He will receive $7.25 Canadian, which is I think just about a dollar American. In second and third, Rob shot just past the high end, and tricky pup was just a little low. Many thanks to all who entered, and, for the record, my dog dish contained $381.50. ⊕

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Monday, August 25

On vacation. As we watch the summer shudder horribly to a halt here in the Rotten Apple, I'm going to take a week or so of vacation from this website so I can work some stuff out in private. We all know there aren't any victims, only volunteers, and several recent bouts of volunteer work on my part suggest that I need to go find some new priorities. I assure you I'll be back soon with some ridiculous stories and a few fun surprises. Thanks, and enjoy yourselves. ⊕

It occurs to me now that, in his 20s, a man can be made happy by, say, a good lively dinner party and perhaps a not-terrible blowjob once a week. In his 30s, however, late at night, as yet another dinner party draws to a close, some sort of horror will manifest itself in the skin forming on the ambitious soup that remains unappreciated in the tureen. An over-fed feeling of life wasted sags him down after midnight. In his 20s, a man's most creative time is often the lonely hungry intoxication of the late-night, ending exhausted with the happy shame of dawn. Now, beyond 30, as this not-young man meditates not quite so late at night on whatever fantastic, ludicrous, and ultimately very tardy project at which he too-often labors -- a vast kinetic sculpture perhaps, a raggedy cut-out of a novel, a perfect Alpine dessert --, he may retrospectively view all the joys of his 20s as a financial and energic waste. All the sex was ludicrous, the conversation foolish. The flowers sent were wilted wasted gestures. The television programs watched were certainly the most grievous life-hating hair-rending mistake of all.

Perhaps one should skip straight to 40, although recent reports by men in their 40s suggest a rough decade of psychic landmines, and besides; so very few at that age have anything to be grateful for from what remains of the nude dreams of their 20s. 40 for most is the acceptance of failure. At 40, nearly every man realizes he will never captain his own pirate ship -- except for those very lucky hard-working swashbuckling souls who do. Perhaps life then begins at 50. And so the sensible man as early as possible quits the deadly vice of smoking in the hopes to experience greener, less shit-heeled decades -- and perhaps, just perhaps, to experience the splendor imagined in the tiny dream of looting and pillaging, on the high seas of whatever floats his boat; commerce, true love, recognition, adoration, or even self-regard. ⊕