Things I've Found After Spring Cleaning for the First Time in Over a Decade: a Mysterious Past

I’m not quite sure what the most confusing part of this find is? First of all, I don’t understand this patch for the “magical stages of puppetry”. Maybe I’m reading this one wrong, but if you make a statement that some stages of puppetry are magical then it would seem to me you’re implying that there exist other stages of puppetry that aren’t magical. Obviously that’s bullshit since everyone knows that ALL the stages of puppetry are magical. So this patch makes no sense to me. And what the hell is an “OMSI Almost Overnight”? It just sounds a little ominous. Do a bunch of Girl Scouts have a slumber party where they get all comfy and doze off in their flannel pajamas only to have one of the parents burst in at 4 in the morning with a water hose? “SCRAM!!”

It was so close to being an overnight…

Or is the really confusing part of this spring cleaning find just why on Earth I might possibly have a couple dozen pins and patches from the Columbia River Girl Scout Council, Portland OR. 1987? I don’t recall doing things with girl scouts or ever being in Portland for that matter. I can only think of 3 really logical explanations for why such things might be in my possession:

1) It might not be actual real Girl Scout merchandise. They could instead be sardonic patches commemorating black op missions that I took part in but that were just so vile that I have simply blocked them out.

Or 2) Maybe I have the opposite of a Mr. Hyde-like alter ego. Maybe I black out and instead of becoming a Mr. Hyde I become a kind of Miss Heidi, someone who likes to hang out with other girls between the ages of 5 and 17 in an accepting and nurturing environment where they can learn to appreciate their own potential and self worth as well as develop skills for success in the real world.

Or 3) Maybe I just found a bunch of the things in another bag that no one wanted to claim after moving out of an old apartment. And maybe I just don’t throw things out no matter how utterly irrelevant to my life they might be. Maybe I’ve got problems. Maybe.

Things I've Found After Spring Cleaning for the First Time in Over a Decade: an Old Body Part

There are a great many things that I have always assumed I wouldn't be good at: knitting, painting with watercolors, extreme interrogation of political prisoners, etc. And there are a great many things that I know from experience that I'm not good at: blogging frequently, cooking swiftly, writing a blog regularly, etc. However there are a few things that I know I am more than just "not good at." There are a few things that I am extremely, really, exceptionally not good at.

Throwing stuff out is one of these things. I don't know how to do it well. I don't like doing it. I am really very much not good at throwing stuff away. Spring cleaning, which by definition ought to be a yearly activity, doesn't happen a lot at my apartment. I would say that I haven't done spring cleaning in the almost nine years I've been at my latest NY apartment but that wouldn't be the whole truth.

One of the other things I'm monumentally not good at happens to be moving. On my last move I just stuffed a lot of things into vaguely labeled boxes and stored them in closets unopened. So if we drop those boxes into the mix we're pushing over ten years since I did a comprehensive, throwing-unnecessary-crap-out spring cleaning of the apartment that I have only been living in for nine years.

That has changed.

I am proud to say that my NY apartment has been officially sprung cleant. I’ve considered writing a long rambling and boring post about the existential ramifications of this spring cleaning and the reasons behind it. But for now you will be spared that post. Instead, I thought I would offer a pleasantly short picture post, the first of a possible series that I like to call: Things I've Found After Spring Cleaning for the First Time in Over a Decade.

I'm starting the series off with one of the happier discoveries; something that I thought was lost long ago, my tooth!

I've only had one cavity my adult life. It was in a wisdom tooth and on my dentist's advice I had it yanked rather than putting a filling in (hence the red circle on the side). I had always wanted to make this detatched body part into some sort of intimidating shark's tooth necklace but I hadn't seen it since moving. So you can imagine my joy at finding it. It happened to be hiding in a Ziploc bag packed away in a box marked "books and Misc" which I suppose makes sense since I imagine a disembodied tooth figures to be one of the more "Misc" things I might pack away.

The only interesting part of this discovery is just how ecstatic I was to find this tiny chunk of worn enamel. If I was in a Vegas pawn shop desperate for a stake in the $1-3 no ante, no bring in, stud game and all I had to hock was that gnarled tooth, I'd be in a lot of trouble. So on one hand it's utterly worthless.

But looking at it a little differently, you could say that in the entire entire world only 4 of these suckers exist, only 4. And the other 3 wisdom teeth are not only still attached to my jaw but they're also quite slobbery and gross. So, as a one of a kind piece, unattached and dry, it's hard to put a price on it. It's unique, literally irreplaceable, and from that standpoint utterly priceless.

It successfully straddles the line between totally worthless and completely priceless at the same time. I hadn't seen it in so long that I thought it had disappeared forever. And while finding it didn’t change my life in any actual way, for some reason it did make me extremely happy. I guess it's just comforting to know that this part of me will always be a part of me. As it turns out I am not big on throwing away priceless artifacts.

Better Science Through Cookies

This year we decided to do something different. The Christmas cookie medium has often been about a look back on the year that was. Unfortunately though, 2008 was kind of a rough year. I wasn’t sure if Christi’s nephews really needed a Christmas cookie depicting Ayn Rand raging through Wall Street, with foam and scraps of credit default swaps frothing from her mouth, as she rips chunks of flesh from the necks of hapless bankers? I imagine that that’s the image you could drop in the time capsule if you really wanted to sum up 2008, but as a Christmas cookie?

Also, it should be noted that Christi and I spend our Christmases with her family in Texas, one of the few remaining places where people still hem and haw a little before begrudgingly acknowledging that, yeah, I guess George Bush did break the world. Since the Bushes would be moving to Dallas after their occupation of the White House was over I saw no need to be making fun of the neighbors with some political jab at the outgoing administration. So I thought it best this year to, for the most part, look forward instead of back, to focus on the positive and shy away from the political this year. And that’s how this holiday became the year of the Stem Cell Christmas Cookies.

Coming out of one of the more historic elections this country has seen, the end of 2008 was rife with optimism. Times were starting to get rough but there was hope that fresh ideas at the country’s helm might bring about positive change. Among the many changes possible was a hope that the next few years would see science treated a little differently.

I don’t want to go all buck wild politico in this blog but I do have to go on record as being pretty disappointed in our country’s stem cell stance over the last 8 years. For what it’s worth I originally wrote a couple hundred words outlining my views on the subject. But looking back I decided to chop it out of this post. Spending 400 words to say “science is actually a good thing” seemed like a questionable use of your reading time. Instead I will simply assume we are all in agreement on this one. If anyone can explain to me how the ban on embryonic stem cell research was anything other than a case of the firewall between church and state not being properly maintained, then please help yourself to my comments section. If I am missing something here I would be happy to understand the issue better.

In the meantime I will just say that I am grateful to find out that our Christmas cookie optimism was not misguided. The current administration this week overturned the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Beyond just unshackling this vital field of research, I feel the president’s action goes a long way towards making us all look a little less retarded as a nation. For that I thank the President and wish I had actually saved him a cookie.

Coincidentally this week also marks the release of the DVD for Rachel Getting Married which almost got it's own cookie. I had very much wanted the obscure-media-slot in this year’s Christmas cookies to be filled by one of the scenes from that movie. While I’m not a real connoisseur of the torture porn genre, I’m hard pressed to imagine anything disemboweled from one of the Saw movies that could be as excruciating as the wedding toast that Anne Hathaway gives in Rachel Getting Married. Unfortunately I didn’t quite know how to nail the essence of a scene like that in almond sugar icing. So instead, the obscure-media-slot this year is filled by page nine hundred twelve, the last page of Roberto Bolano’s brilliant behemoth 2666, one of the many pages I never saw in 2008.

2666 got such unanimous praise that I actually considered wrestling with its over 900 pages. In the end though it just seemed like a damn lot of words. I’m more than man enough to admit that I was not man enough to conquer 2666 in 2009. And this might have been for the best after all, considering that an unpublished 6th section of 2666 was recently rumored to have been found. Bolano the author may have died in 2003 but he's quickly becoming the Tupac of Latin American lit. If I could put up blog entries half as many times as this dead guy puts out new books, this blog might be worth bookmarking. Anyway, even before 2666 became the new never ending story I felt it wouldn't hurt to give his masterpiece some cookie props

Sitting to the left of page 912 in the picture above is this year’s 3^rd cookie, the memorial cookie. As I get older it seems like more and more important people die every year. I suppose that when I was 9 there simply weren’t so many people that I personally labeled as “important”. Just as many famous people must have been dropping like flies every day but I never noticed. In my late 30’s though, the names of those that have died are slowly becoming more recognizable. The obituaries are becoming home to people I’m bummed I will never get a chance to meet. One of those people is Gary Gygax. 2008 was the year that Mr. Gygax, as my good friend Dario so eloquently put it, “apparently couldn’t make his saving throw against abdominal aortic aneurysm.”

There were definitely people more famous than Gary Gygax who died in 2008 (Paul Neuman). There were also people who were funnier (George Carlin), more stylish (Yves Saint Laurent ), more conservative (William F. Buckley), more bigoted (Jesse Helms), more naughty (Betty Page), more literaryish (David Foster Wallace), and more Dolemitey (Rudy Ray Moore). But a case could be pretty well made for the fact that there was no one dorkier.

And that’s not to say we didn’t lose a lot of nerds in 2008. Robert Asprin, Majel Barrett, Arthur C. Clark, Bobby Fischer, Dave Stevens, Michael Turner, and Stan Winston are just a few of the new celebrity guests at that big convention in the sky. But still, I don’t know of anyone more identifiable as an icon of a certain type of Nerddom, than Gary Gygax the man most associated with the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons gaming system. So I felt quite justified in taking a yummy memorial moment to give remembrance to someone who added a decent amount of joy to my formative years.

And finally there was also a TV death that I felt deserved to be memorialized last year. It might seem insensitive to diminish the death of an actual person by placing it on a plate next to the death of a mere TV show. But I hope it is forgivable in this case.

Every so often a work of art is produced that transcends its medium. Like a person, it grows and matures and becomes something more than just an amusement that entertains us for some short break. It becomes a teacher of sorts. It helps us to see something in the world that we could never have experienced alone. In a way it becomes a friend that we are sad to see go.

2007 saw the end of The Sopranos and 2008 saw the end of a show just as powerful, just as complex, just as worthy. After 6 dense years of life, The Wire finally completed its arc on HBO. It didn’t seem right to have done a Sopranos cookie in 2007 and then this year ignore what very well could have been the single greatest show to ever make it onto TV. So that’s why I knew I had to come up with a Wire cookie this year. There was only one problem, and that problem was this, at no time in my entire life have I ever seen so much as a single episode of The Wire.

Naturally, I've always been aware of the fact I was supposed to be watching The Wire. I even made Christi get me the box set of season 1 for my birthday. But truth be told, like proper dental care, it was something I have stubbornly ignored to my own detriment. Sorry. Until now this hadn’t hurt me too much. At Christmas though, I saw that having never watched so much as a single episode of the Wire would definitely complicate the act of turning it into a cookie.

However, I soon figured that I could wing it if I just played it safe and stuck to the obvious things. Based solely on the one or two publicity stills that I must have seen accompanying the rave reviews I have been ignoring all these years, I decided to go with the two things that would absolutely have to be in the final episode of The Wire.

1) I figured that there had to be a gun somewhere in the episode, possibly fired, possibly only referenced in flashback. I don’t know how you do a show like the wire and not have some sort of gun somewhere in the final episode.

And 2) I knew that at some point during the episode Yaphet Kotto had to have cried. It didn’t have to be a full force Keitel Cry, maybe just one solitary tear marching solemnly down his cheek, but at some point Yaphet Kotto would have to acknowledge what he had witnessed, and it would break him.

Of course I have no idea if Yaphet Kotto actual is, or ever was, in The Wire but that’s pretty much irrelevant as far I’m concerned. A final episode of The Wire in which Yaphet Kotto doesn’t cry makes no sense to me whatsoever. And if for some reason it turns out that Yaphet Kotto doesn’t end up crying in the final episode of The Wire, or has never actually acted in The Wire, then I do not even want to know about it. Clearly a mistake has been made. I will just hope that by the time I finally get around to catching up on The Wire it will all have been fixed with some sort of CGI special edition.

So that was 2008. While I have no idea what cookies 2009 will bring, I have to imagine that by the time this year's done with us there might be a lot that needs icing.

(And for what it’s worth I fully understand that Yaphet Kotto doesn’t have blue eyes. I simply felt the welled up sorrow Mr. Kotto was releasing in such a powerful scene was best represented by sky blue icing. Poetic license. )

20 Random Things You Didn’t Need to Know About 2008

2008 was a big year in Mike May blogs for obvious reasons.  Still for those among you who somehow didn’t get enough from this blog last year I thought I would put up a few of the less essential facts that I've kept track of during 2008.

 

1)  Number of times in 2008 that I was able to bust out the phrase "Pardon me ma’am, but by any chance have you ever worked as a lion tamer before?" to a woman at a poker table and have her reply “Why yes I have”:

1 (at the Venetian in Las Vegas)

2)  The 5^th most popular search keyword used to find this website:

"Vagina cookies" (It was actually the number 1 most common search keyword that did not contain some form of “Mike May” in it.  I understand that the “vagina cookie” readership is probably a niche audience but I’ll take whatever I can get at this point.  Other interesting ways to search for this blog in 2008 included search phrase #28 sexy odors, #56 “Steve Martin” legionnaires disease, #60 “What happened to Paco”, #165 Republican blonde fembots, and #202  young ripe melons – Brooklyn)

3) Amount of money I lost last year holding a starting hand that included the 4 and 7 of hearts in any poker game:

$195 ($5 in limit Stud hi/lo, $15 in limit Omaha hi/lo, $80 in pot limit Omaha, and $95 in no limit Hold’em.)

 

4) The picture from 2008 that most should have made it onto this blog:

The Genoa Club.  All good things...

 

5) Number of African American presidential candidates that I did not vote for in 2008:

1 (Allen Keyes)

 

6) Total number of times that I've flossed in 2008:

52 (There is a long list of things I could do to make myself a better person.  At the top of that list would be caring about and/or striving to become the best person I could possibly be.  However I have conceded that that would probably take a buttload of effort.  Much farther down on that betterment list is something I proudly thought myself capable of, flossing at least once a week on average (not actually weekly per se).  So that was my one New Year’s resolution last year.  And all I have to say is, mission accomplished!  Aim high kids.

 

 

7) Number of Limo rides I've gotten because of this blog in 2008:

1 (which along with Jay Greenspan’s book Hunting Fish may be the only two things of actual quantifiable value that I ever have or ever will get from this blog.  Yay writing!)

 

8) The picture from 2008 that most should not have made it onto this blog:

3 women, some real, some not.

  

9) Hand drier I was most excited to see being used in American public restrooms in 2008:

The Dyson Air Blade.  How much does that thing rock?  Copious amounts of rock, that’s how much.

10) Hands down the single coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life (in 2008):

FLCL.   

This anime originally released a couple years ago, is not the coolest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.  But while I was in the act of watching it I was able to think “THERE HAS NEVER EXISTED ANYTHING THIS COOL IN THE UNIVERSE EVER BEFORE, IN THE UNIVERSE EVER!”  I miss being able to watch something and actually believe it to be the stone cold greatest thing that has ever existed.  That’s one of the joys of being young that tends to fade as the world grays.

Ostensibly, FLCL is a coming of age story about a kid with a pan dimensional portal in his head, and there’s this hot older chick who has a bass guitar with an internal combustion engine in it, and when she whacks him with it a robot grows out of his forehead, and after seeing it it will make even less sense. All you really need to know is that Fooley Cooley, as it is known, somehow manages to congeal the frenetically illogical superbadassery of being young and packages it into six 22 minute slices.

(Honorary Mention in hardcore Nerd media from 2008 goes to The Venture Brothers.  I watched a few episodes when the series first came out and wasn’t too impressed.  But then I finally got around to watching some of the 3^rd season episodes that were clogging up my Tivo and I was pleasantly hooked.  Go team Venture!)

 

11) Total number of words I've written since putting up my post, around 180 days ago, jokingly promising to write only 13 words a day on a long form project:

Maybe 78 or so.

 

12) Number of ex-girlfriends that started both blogs and Facebook pages in 2008, which much to my surprise took some of the fun out of stalking them online:

2 (though one of them changed her privacy settings effectively locking me out of her Facebook page.)

 

13) Number of new blogs written by ex-girlfriends that Christi scours vigorously for grammatical or stylistic mistakes that she can point out to me in casual manner, as in "Hmm, now that's a novel way to use a comma."  :

2

 

14) Number of better-than-I-deserve girlfriends who didn’t dump me last year even though they’re not always fairly portrayed in this blog:

1

 

15) Toughest Sophie’s Choice scenario of 2008: 

Trying to decide which is the greater sign of lyrical genius, Ne-Yo’s song lyric I won’t attend your pity party/ I’d rather go have calamari. (from “So You Can Cry”) Or Lil Wayne’s Swagger tighter than a yeast infection / Fly go hard like geese erection (from “Dr. Carter”)  Am I more impressed with the ability to rhyme “party” with “calamari” or am I more awed by an artist unafraid to make poetry out of both yeast infections and geese erections in the very same song.  I suppose I have to declare them both winners.

 

16) Board game genre that I most excelled at in 2008:

Medieval farming simulations.  (I flat out destroyed in Agricola last year.  Suck it, all you subpar, sucker-peasant agrigariasts!)

 

 

17) 2008 movie that had the most misleading ad campaign of 2008:

Wendy and Lucy (the dog movie).  First of all, Jenifer Aniston looks way younger with short dark hair.  Second of all, I don't remember even seeing Owen Wilson in it at all.  Still, the commercials didn’t lie about one area, it was funny.

 

18) Single greatest album that came out in 2008 or any year for that matter:

Diamond Hoo Ha from Supergrass (To be honest with you I haven’t actually heard a single song from the album.  I just so liked the title that I wished that I had started a band instead of becoming a degenerate poker player in the off chance that I would have come up with the idea of naming an album DIAMOND HOO HA.)

 

19) Painter who produced the empirically best oil works of 2008:

Nick Dileo.  If you made a ton of dough in credit default swaps last year or have a wad of TARP money burning a hole in your pocket, drop him a line and pick up something nice for the office.  Some of his older work can be found HERE. 

20) And finally, this video, like most of my memories, looks somewhat washed out and faded but I think it very eloquently puts images to the subjective feelings I have of 2008.  So I close with a little video I like to call "2008: a Fond Farewell to the Way You Made Me Feel".

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