Someone pooped in our yard

There, I said it. It happened, and I acknowledged it.

I think it was an act of desperation, not of revenge. I don't think there was someone saying, "I really hate those guys. I mean really. How can I best say, 'I hate you'? An anonymous letter just seems so...non-disgusting. Hmmm, that burrito I just ate is really acting up....I've got it!"

No, I think someone got really desperate and found themselves stuck in a neighborhood and faced a terrible choice. This is the price we as a society pay for not having enough public toilets.

How do I know it wasn't a really large dog? Well, in my experience, a) dogs don't open gates, and b) dogs don't use napkins as toilet paper.

I disposed of the evidence with one of those long-handled grabber things you use to pick up trash. Some trash that was.

Do I have any suspects? Yes. I think it was Mexico.

I was supposed to go to Cancun on vacation this past weekend and had to cancel due to swine flu aka H1N1.

In retaliation, Mexico pooped in my yard.

Mighty uncalled-for response to a pandemic, Mexico. Próxima vez que escriba una carta anónima!

Hello, Johns Hopkins. I have established a website.

So let's say you went to college, and your college has an Alumni Notes section in its fancy magazine that gets mailed to all alumni four times a year. Your former classmates send in announcements like "I now run the largest trauma center in the Milky Way," or "I just published my fourth Pulitzer-winning book," or perhaps "My wife and I just had triplets, which was hard to fit in to our busy schedules as justices on the Supreme Court."

Now let's say you are me. You vaguely remember receiving a card from school mentioning a reunion or homecoming or something. It had a place for you to write an update about how you just saved Asia from a meteor with your amazing physicist powers or whatever. It also had places to update basic contact info like your address and phone number.

So you scribbled in your eponymous website address, assuming that it would go into an alumni contact database or a list or something somewhere.

But you just got your fancy alumni magazine in the mail, and some helpful soul assumed that your scribbled website address was intended to be an important announcement about your life, one that you'd love to share with your fellow alumni. And this helpful soul, who maybe is a little bit evil, constructed a sentence around your url: "Courtney Lamb has established a website," and printed this sentence in the Alumni Notes.

Yes, Hopkins community. I have established a website.

It was a mighty task, but it's the kind that the rigorous Johns Hopkins University curriculum prepared me for. I am so proud. I only wish I had even more photos of me looking utterly goofy on said website.

I needed to share www.courtneylamb.com with those of you announcing job changes, marriages, birthings, and elections to the Senate. Each of us has done something life-changing.

I Have Established a Website. BEHOLD.

If you send me your phone number, I can call you every time I do something this important. You need to know.

I promise to keep my fellow JHU alumni updated on future important info, such as my favorite color (leaning towards eggshell white these days) and the hilarious antics of my cats. JHU: I have already filled out alumni notes cards with this important info; stand watch for the mailman.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander

I have this rule that I only want to write about things I loved, so I have to write this in the dark in order to get away with it. I did not love Foreskin's Lament.

On the other hand, this: "Hello, McFly! You realize that your blog is just a way to hear yourself talk, right?" So much for rules I made up.

I listened to this book, actually, as narrated by the author in a mostly flat, deadpan-to-the-point-of-maybe-actually-dead drone. It took me what felt like a long time to get through all 63 tracks; walking around the neighborhood, ironing, vacuuming. You name a domestic chore and Mr. Auslander and I have done it together.

I wanted to love this book, and I'm frustrated because I think I could have. It's essentially about Mr. A's Orthodox Jewish upbringing and how its strict rules and mercilessly punitive conception of God screwed him up. In his confusion and anger, he fought back with pornography and hotdogs and finally broke with his family after the birth of his son.

This is a story built on a lot of pain and emotion, and the unfortunate thing for me as a reader is that Auslander chose to bury the pain and emotion under Catskills-level jokes and a sneering disregard for everyone else (except his wife, whom he describes as being very cool and witty, and his baby, who I mean seriously, like he's going to be shitty about his newborn).

His main joke to hide behind is that he gives God the finger, quite literally, whenever he breaks one of the many laws of his religion. The extension of the joke is that God is out to get people, but particularly Mr. Auslander. There is a long section near the end of the book about the convoluted attempts of Mr. A and his wife to both honor the Sabbath and watch the Rangers vie for the Stanley Cup. The lengths that they go to are quite funny, an actual caper, even, but make no sense in the midst of Mr. A's insistence that he doesn't honor the Sabbath (so his mother is hurtful to him for reminding him of it) and that God will punish him personally by making the Rangers lose. When the Rangers win, it is still God punishing him. The tortured logic Mr. A employs to make himself God's victim regardless could've been amusing if done self-deprecatingly or with some kind of self-awareness (after all, Richard Lewis has made a career off of this idea), but it isn't, so it isn't.

God never does get the credit for the good things that happen to Mr. A -- his lovely wife, his son, his friends, who are mentioned in a tantalizing but brief bit at the very end of the book as being "foreskins" like himself. The people he admires and loves do merit mention, I suppose due to Mr. A's thesis that God will punish him and take away the things he loves.

This then is a failure on his part and a mark of the fact that he wasn't ready to tell his story. No amount of bitter attacks on his family or on practitioners of his (former?) religion will signal that he is fighting back against the damage instilled by his upbringing. It simply indicates that he's still fearful and still running away.

I think his editors did Auslander a disservice by not pushing him to tell the more meaningful story. It's as if they settled for the cheap jokes, betting that people wanted to hear a guy ridicule convoluted Orthodox Jewish traditions (though why this means he also has to ridicule and stereotype the inhabitants of his chosen home in Woodstock and the other places he's lived in Israel and New York is beyond me).

I think Mr. Auslander and his editors fell into the David Sedaris trap, whereby they think that it's easy to be as funny as Sedaris -- all you have to do is write about your crazy family. Give it the detachment of Running With Scissors, and you've got a winner on the bookshelves.

But note that Running With Scissors was followed by Dry -- there was a price to pay for that first book's insistence that you can triumph over a bizarre and neglectful upbringing without a scratch. And note that Sedaris is a write of extraordinary gifts and care for the people he writes about. He doesn't ridicule, though he does tease. He doesn't hide from pain; he puts it in context.

And context is lacking from Foreskin's Lament -- Auslander rattles off the prayers required over various types of food and the many and layered activities that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but he doesn't bother to wonder or explain why they exist and why some people are okay with them and why he's not. He's content to nudge us and say, "Isn't that ridiculous? Isn't it stupid?", so we'll say, "Yeah, it is stupid. High five!" That's fine talk for a barbecue, but you need to expose yourself more in your writing. You need to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

I'm guessing that Mr. Auslander felt all too vulnerable in going as far as he did here: in talking about his drug use and trafe indulgences and his encounters with porn and with a prostitute. And especially about his family, and about how his father used to beat his brother with his mother's passive consent.

But he stops just when the writing would've become meaningful. He resorts to arguments with his personal guardian God and the resultant tired anti-Auslander's-God jokes rather than putting his feelings and his anger and sorrow into context. He never wonders how others view God, how others deal with the same thing he's going through, how his mother and father may have seen things. He's so tied up in his own head that he can't see anything else, which ultimately makes his writing tiresome and thin.

I wish he had been pushed to tell the whole story. I wish he'd written openly about his anger and his fear instead of wrapping them up in deflective humor. He didn't admit that he's still struggling with terrible fears, all the more terrible because he knows they aren't logical. He didn't admit that he lost something by breaking with his parents, and that they must've lost something, too. He didn't talk about how therapy helped (or hurt) him; he falls back on (of course) a repated deadpan joke about how much the therapy cost.

He didn't go on a quest to address his problem, he just folded up more into himself. And that's a shame not only for him, but for his readers.

List of the Worst of Human Society (General)

I brainstormed a list of the worst of society, the lowest of the low, the degenerates, the people you would send to populate Australia. This was my list:

Mercenaries
Criminals
Murderers/Assassins
Child Abusers
Wife Beaters
Slave Traders
Sex Slavers
Terrorists
Pirates
Torturers/Inquisitors
Animal Abusers
Rapists

As we can see, the first Worst that came to mind was "mercenaries", because I in my mind apparently live in 1600s Europe. I think I was also thinking of Haliburton and other defense contractors and weapons makers, as they are the modern mercenary, available to any combatant with money. Plus it just sounds like a villainous word.

"Criminals" is too all-encompassing, as everyone on the list would fall under the criminal banner, but it was brainstorming after all.

The next thing of note is that I thought of "pirates" before "rapists". PIRATES. It seems that I am marginally more afraid of PIRATES than I am of RAPISTS or TORTURERS. Pirates arguably are rapists/torturers, but the opposite is not true, so I am still more afraid of everything that pirates embody than I am of being a victim of a sequel to the Spanish Inquisition. (At least pirates are not "animal abusers", as everyone knows they love their parrots.)

Where did I acquire my ever-loving fear of pirates? Maybe blame Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe blame Daphne DuMaurier, whose novel Jamaica Inn I read recently -- the whole danged village feared the innkeeper for being a...well, I don't want to spoil it for you.

First fear the Terrorists, then fear the Pirates. They will swashbuckle you all over the ding dong plank.

The Universe Told Me To Tell You To Shut Your Darn Yap

So the Universe was like, "Look, I'm being real here, I have dwarf stars and the Pluto planet controversy to deal with, I do not have time for all this I wanna iPhone, I want that hottie, this hottie, that job, money from the sky...I mean, is it me? It isn't me, is it? Dang right it isn't me! I'm not telling anybody anything because frankly, I don't give a sh...oh, girl, you know the Universe doesn't swear!"

And I'm all, "Umm hmmm."

And the Universe is all, "I am tired."

And I'm like, "I hear you."

And the Universe stood up all indignant, saying, "I need an unlisted number, I'm telling you. Like I care about anyone's career or love life that I'm gonna be telling them what to do! Do I look like Ann Landers' twin sister? I don't have time for advice! I've got cosmic concerns -- LITERALLY!"

And then I stopped listening, because, seriously, the Universe can go on.

Do not write these things down

Why would you tell me this is what you've written and expect me to read it?

1. Musings -- Best exemplified by the inexplicable Larry King and his bizarro, ellipsis-happy, stream of nonsensical consciousness newspaper column, full of Angie Dickinson shout-outs and endorsements of things like "rain" and "holidays". Musings are what kill first dates. Your musings are as fascinating to other people as your dreams are, which is to say, tell it to the mirror.

2. Random Thoughts -- Can't be bothered with a specific thought, I see. Let me help you. From now on, you can only write about death.

3. Rants -- Have you ever known a schizophrenic, or an elderly person who has slipped into dementia, or a weird boyfriend who lied about being employed? These are people who rant. Their rants are loud and make no sense and are best listened to from the other side of a locked door. Same goes for Dennis Miller, the unfunny, pseudo-intellectual, former joke-teller who's about as funny as Tiny Tim at the Council of Trent -- next up, my good friend and fellow cutup, George W Bush! When you feel the urge to rant, push your face into your pillow and rant away. Pull your head away from the pillow before you suffocate (I know how ranters lose track of time when they're really steamed about lady drivers who can't see over the steering wheel, or brussel sprouts).

4. Ruminations -- Musings that have been to college.

I hope we've all looked deep inside ourselves and realized that we should put the keyboard away before we embarrass ourselves.

And that reminds me -- brussel sprouts are disgusting! They smell like a wet towel that's been crumpled in the corner for three days, and they taste kind of like nothing, and it's like watching Lance Armstrong pedal a cotton gin for Scarlett O'Hara as Tara burns...Bats fly, but they don't have feathers. I wonder what would happen if we measured time in stones?

I hate people, don't you?

Don't you? Them and their faces, and the noises they're always making. They even make noise when they walk, fabric on fabric or skin on skin, like they're applauding themselves with every step, and they don't have that much to be proud of if you ask me.

They leave their appendages flapping around all over the place; they don't even look where they're going, and that's how we end up with accidents and disease, all over the world.

No matter where you look, there they are. Even when you close your eyes and dream, they're bound to show up sooner or later, with a hand growing out of their fused heads or giving you a math test when you're naked. That's just how they operate. They confuse and humiliate you. Don't you find that to be true? I do.

And they never shut up! Complain and die, that's all they do, complain and die. If they're aren't doing one, they do the other.

And now they want to run away to space, leaving a big mess behind just to create another mess, or so I think. I do think that, because they've proven they can't be trusted. In space they'll be more meaningless matter twirling aimlessly around, just like on the highway on the way to work.

There couldn't possibly be an afterlife. People are too stupid to put together something like that, don't you think? It sounds complicated, what with the dimensional shift and the rearrangement of matter. Lots of paperwork.

But if there is an afterlife, I bet you dollars to donuts it'll be just like here, but forever. And in reverse -- die and complain, that's all they'll do, forever and ever.

I want no part of it, no, sir. My plan is to never end.

"Touching the Void", book by Joe Simpson, movie dir by Kevin Macdonald

You can't make a movie out of this story, it's a ridiculous idea; watching one guy struggle to drag a broken leg down a Peruvian mountain? THAT'S entertainment. Why not have him give soliloquies along the way? Be sure to fill it with plenty of death-themed musical numbers, like maybe just cut in that last stairway dance number from "Sid and Nancy". (I still hear Chloe Webb shouting "SID!" in my nightmares, by the way.)

Joe Simpson's telling of the Rope Cut Heard 'Round the World is enough to make you vomit with fear and wonder and your own goddamned cowardice. It's like reading about infinite space and your complete insignificance in the massive void, and yet being reminded that your only acceptable response to this circumstances is to not die for as long as you can manage. Your reward at the end of all that struggle? Death.

Simpson quite rudely turned down the chance to die dozens of times during the course of his appallingly lonely journey down a mountain, through a crevasse, up and over the worst scree possible for a man in his condition (hungry, thirsty, wracked with pain, one-legged). His traveling companions should have left their base camp by the time he got there, they should've been unable to hear his cries for help, and yet. And still his journey wasn't over -- returning from the dead is a disturbing thing to do, after all, a bit of an imposition on even your closest friends. He still had to be bounced back to civilization on the back of a mule, ignored in a Peruvian hospital, and assured by his home doctors that he'd never again walk correctly. Somehow, he survived, did not go crazy, and did walk and climb again.

So he got to tell his own story, again, in the movie. Macdonald solved the dilemma of how to film this movie by hiring actors to recreate the action and having Simpson and Simon Yates narrate their story in intercut interviews. The result is spellbinding and sad and awful and even funny in the "cosmic joke" sense. It reminded me of "King Lear"; the gods "kill us for their sport".

I was astonished by this movie. I read the book afterwards and was shaken up by Simpson's story in ways I still haven't resolved.

And then there's this: watch the making of feature on the DVD. I think artists, especially movie directors, have to have a streak of terrible cruelty in them in order to do great work. Watch as Macdonald drags Simpson and Yates back to the scene of this awful tragedy, which became not a tragedy, sort of, but somehow an even worse one because of the painfully unresolved feelings of guilt and betrayal and blame and fear and, over it all, loneliness of a type we mostly can't admit to ourselves. Watch as he takes Simpson to the places of his worst nightmares, dresses him in facsimilies of his own former climbing clothes, and makes him reenact dragging himself down the mountain to use in long shots in the movie. And then comes the best part -- he makes him do it AGAIN. And AGAIN, despite the fact that Simpson's face registers pure horror. Whatever it takes to make the movie, right, Macdonald? Right. Watch Simpson and Yates' faces as they see this place again and try to talk casually about it. Watch as they confront boogeymen they'd buried under the bed long ago. Do you feel dirty yet?

Watch as Lear cradles the body of Cordelia.

Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

What kind of sicko do I have to be that I've read this book three times? I found it so sad and devastating the first time that I had to run back and repeat the experience, thereby gifting myself with a little thrill of pity and pathos. It must be the German in me.

I've read and reread Fatal Vision and Blind Faith in the same lustful fashion, but at least in those cases the story is coming from Joe McGinniss, and I can hide behind his well-documented fascination and over-identification with the suburban killers and feel like I'm sitting at enough of a distance from the whole thing to not be implicated in the unethical seduction.

I can't hide from the Gilmores, though. Mikal, the baby of the family, tells us the whole horrible story himself, and takes us through his own long, painful process of uncovering the layer after layer of deceit and abuse and waste and tragedy that his family was built on. He was born much later than his brothers and benefited from “second family” syndrome (my made-up term), wherein a horrible parent gets to mess up one family, walk away from it, leave it in disarray, then straighten up and fly right with the second family and get credit for being a swell guy. Except that Gilmore's father stayed with the first family and just worked that aging bad-dad magic on his youngest son.

But the worst of it is that Mikal didn't get that second-family-kid glow about him, that subconscious specialness that comes from being the object of someone's redemption. Instead he got Norman Mailer's intrusion and his brother's insistence on dying and his mother's intractable suffering and the slow dissolution and decay of his entire family. Lucky kid!

Lucky for me, though, sicko that I am, that he became a writer and eventually had the guts to put the whole mess on paper. This isn't one of those memoirs that's really a ploy to get a book contract; it isn't one of those that's really about the writer trying to prove how cool he or she is simply by having gone through something shitty; and it isn't one of those that tries to convince you that the writer's pedestrian life and thoughts are somehow extraordinarily quirky or grievous. It's the real deal: a person struggling with questions of human nature and the wheel of fortune and the sorry truth that some lives have no happy ending, or middle, or start. For this reason, this book has the power of Greek myth to me. Sorry, Marsyas, you seem like a nice guy and all, but we'll be starting the flaying now.

Gilmore approaches the story as a journalist: he researches his family members and their pasts and their religious beliefs in order to present a fuller picture of them and try to understand how they became the people they became and why they treated themselves and others the way they did. That's the value of this book, and what raises it to the level of art. Gilmore writes out of anguish, and his heartbreak is palpable throughout the book, but he has the guts and the grace to search for perspective on his family members and give them to us from their place in the world and not just from their place in his heart.

Read it if you're a sick fuck like me who likes to be reminded that there are no easy answers in life and that your sorry ass better get to dealing with it.