fever dream

Pucker up.

Media announcement: I have a geodesically obsessive piece about architecture, engineering and the FUTURE in the current Oxford American. Your brain will be Fuller for having read it.



Man on Wire
nip/tuck, Season 5
Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet

I was out with the flu yesterday, wimpy and insufferable on the couch with a blanket and my viruses and all, so blessed to have all those that put up with me. Thanks, Jerri! I watched the pretentious and breath-taking Man on Wire, about the French tightrope walker that walked a line between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and it made me think of 1) my friend Terry who was one of those rare obstinate individuals who kept his landing gear on the same tarmac on which the rest of us cling as little as possible, and 2) the fact that if we really want to honor those who died in the 9/11 attacks, we should build two office towers on the site and make then one floor higher than the original, and put offices in there. NYC is a place of business; they need those buildings because there is work that needs to be done for the rest of the world.

After all that high-mindedness, I watched season 5 of nip/tuck on Netflix. Did you know you can watch Netflix movies on your iPhone now? Update your app, yo, the future is here. Anyway, I watched it through Netflix on the Wii and it is a gloriously terrible show and my wife got a Filet O'Fish and an orange drink for me for lunch, the same lunch I would have when I was sick at my grandma's house when I was little. The only McDonald's was on the Iowa side where she lived, across a rickety toll bridge, so dragging ass to McD's from our house on the Illinois side was reserved for special occasions, like when my parent's announced they were getting a divorce. We went to Rand Park on a bluff overlooking the river, by the statue of Chief Keokuk who never really lived there either, where I ran on the weird barrel thing they had, wolfed down a Filet O'Fish and minutes later responded to my parents big news with a bit of forced 70's-television-sponsored awareness about how divorce works, if they'd signed the papers already. I knew something was up because they both went.

We moved that night to Carthage, IL, to an apartment my mom picked out, impossibly far from a McDonald's. We still spent some time in Keokuk when my grandma wasn't in the hospital, but she didn't drive, so the arches were more distant to me. Anyway, all this flooded back in a  fever dream of TV and greasy fish patties and orange drink is manna to a soar throat and on the paused TV was still-fine-ass Lauren Hutton frozen in the face of a mid-smooch grandma.

I still sound like shit but I had to go record something for the radio and turns out the flu makes me media-resonant. I had a bunch to say about Public Enemy too but I'm beat. It will come back to me.