Fun trip to the vet (for me. Maybe less so for my cat)

I went to the vet today and there was a lady there with a cat and she said the cat's name was Roscoe P. Coleslaw.

"Ross" was a white cat, but he looked gray today because yesterday she found him playing around in the chimney. He was there for a bath. His lady had an injured arm stuck out in an L shape with an ace bandage wrapped all the way from her wrist to her armpit.

There was also a lady there with two cute, yippy little dogs who were very friendly. There were just like the lady, who was a cute little lady wearing tiny shorts who kept her cell phone glued to her ear the whole time. She told the person on the phone that some third person was "an-noy-in-GUH!" and also told that person on the phone, who was apparently a co-worker, that she LOVED her and that she LOVED working with her and NEVER wanted to not work with her.

I like people like that because they are loud and talkative and energetic and think everyone wants to pet them on head, and they are so certain of it that you can't help but do it. I like dogs like that, too.

I myself am more like Roscoe P. Coleslaw, sneaking around the chimney.

Eliot Rex

According to this NY Times article Eliot Spitzer believes himself to be living a Greek tragedy.

Perhaps this means he stands in front of the bathroom mirror with the shaving razor in his hand saying, "Et tu, Joe Bruno?"

Eliot. You were not brought down by wrathful or fickle gods. You were not the victim of the cursed House of Spitzers. You seem to think running Daddy's business is some kind of exile from the kingdom, but you still have both of your eyeballs and all of your family members, and you haven't been hung upside down and flayed in even the most modest of areas, like an elbow or the top of your bald head.

You can argue that you were the victim of hubris, but it's more accurate to say you were the victim of penis. You like to rent young snatch while prosecuting others for doing the same. That's hypocrisy, fool, not poetry.

Though you'd better hope the missus never heard of Clytemnestra.

Why I Love Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy paints with his face. He once plastered his head inside a wall. He made a sculpture of a man with his pants down, humping a tree. He dipped his penis in a paint can and painted with it. He created a sculpture called "Santa Claus with Buttplug", which was displayed in a public park in Belgium.

What's not to love?

His work is corporeal and messy and comes from that impulse that makes you smash your fork into your mashed potatoes and fling it around the room. It's a reminder of the human animal and the fact that all this stuff we have built around us doesn't change our animal nature. While other artists are inside playing Boggle, he's going face-first down the Slip-n-Slide.

It's also fun. I saw his current installation at the Whitney Museum, which has an open staircase leading from one gallery level to the next. His gallery was full of stuff playing with rooms, so for example a life-sized video of the camera view spinning around a room. You stand still but your viewpoint spins.

There was also a small enclosed room with an open doorway and a rolling executive leather office chair bolted in the center. The room turned around like a carousel at various speeds, speeding up and slowing down, and the chair spun with it. The drawings of the project on the wall showed a person in the chair; I wonder if it was ever tried out that way. It was fun to picture that.

But this was the best part -- there was an installation called something like Bang Bang Room or Bang Door or something. A four-walled room, each wall with a door in it. The room starts closed up, closed doors. Then each wall swings out on right-mounted hinges. Then each door opens and closes with a bang. This keeps happening, at various speeds, until the room closes back up and the cycle resets.

Do you know how pleasant the sound of a four banging doors is? In an echoing gallery space, with an open stairwell at one end that carries the sound to the galleries above and below?

The poor museum guards. There's only one way to make that job worse than boring, and this was it.

But wait! There was an elderly white male guard at one end of the bang room. He stood looking at the room. There was another guard on the opposite end, a young black lady. When the door flung open, the old guard could see through to the young guard. Then they'd slam shut, and he couldn't see her.

Every time the doors flung open, he grinned widely, raised his arm, and waved at her. Slam. Fling, grin, wave, slam.

The young guard just looked at him bleakly.

That whole scene made my day. Thanks, Paul McCarthy!

I love that he forced this museum to install such an annoying piece, and that you were reminded of it even if you went upstairs to look at the amazing Buckminster Fuller exhibit because you could still hear it when you stood near the stair side of the room. McCarthy one up on Fuller in this one.

Paints with his face, people. Chew on that.

There's no better way to unwind after ninety minutes of asanas than blowing your wad at OTB. Clearly I need to move to NYC to efficiently integrate the parts of my life.

Call it Miss Ross Playground

p.s. I took a stroll through the Ramble in Central Park, and I came around a bend of a narrow path beside an algae-covered lake. I was looking around, watching birds bouncing around in the trees, seeing the sights, and oh, yes, here came a guy wearing a black backpack, a white shirt, and white pants with his penis hanging out of the zipper.

Well well.

I stared very hard at the trees on the side of the trail opposite the peek-a-boo and kept on walking. He seemed a bit startled and moved his shoulder to the side and did I don't know what, because I was looking at those fascinating leaves. I think he might've been reacting to the camera in my hand. Maybe his penis is camera-shy, "No pictures!"

I passed by and came around to where I'd started on this circular bit of trail. There were two guys heading toward the guy I'd just passed, and I hung around to see what he'd show them. I saw his head (the one on his shoulders, sicko!) peek around the trail, look at the two guys, and then turn around and disappear. I don't know what happened after that because I decided I was showing too much interest in the guy with the zipper problem.

In fairness to Central Park and New York City the thousands of other men I saw on my visit there managed to keep it in their pants.

p.p.s. To purge ourselves of that story, here's another: I sat next to a couple of little girls sitting with their nanny in a coffee shop. The littlest girl asked the older one if she wanted to hear a joke and got the go-ahead. "Why couldn't the mummy come to the telephone when it rang?" the little one said. The older one said, "I know this one. He was all wrapped up." The younger one said, "That's right. She was tied up. She was chained to the floor and couldn't come to the phone when it rang." The older one slurped her drink without looking up.

I love that that little girl pictured someone's mom chained to the floor, staring helplessly at a ringing telephone, and thought that made for a fine joke.

You, the Consumer, Drawn

I just got a sewing machine (for sewing! Home Ec redux!), and the best thing about it is this picture in the instruction manuel. Presumably this is the footwear that the good people at Brother envision their typical customer wearing as she sits at her crafts table in the refinished rec room. "Criminey -- I forgot to make the deviled eggs for the fair!"

It's like they're saying, "Enjoy your machine, housefrau. You can make a lot of muu-muus with this baby!"

They could've at least drawn Crocs -- stylish slopwear for those too classy for flip flops and too sane for slippers outdoors.

My Goals Have Changed

When I was a kid, I got my idea of the world from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Phillies and Braves games on TV (the Braves thanks to Ted Turner and his cable station), and a basic study of American history. I believed that American Senators were present-day Jeffersons and Adamses dedicated to the ideals of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, that baseball was the noble sport of American kings (which is to say, all of us, in our no-caste-system/no-monarchy/ Common Sense society), and that we were all essentially rabble-rousing, freedom fighting pamphleteers at heart.

I may have been wrong about some of these things.

Then I read an article about Happy Chandler and I thought I'd discovered the road to a perfect life. I seized on the following goals for myself:

1. Attend Princeton.
2. Become a U.S. Senator.
3. Become Governor of a state.
4. Retire from politics, become Commissioner of Baseball.

I don't know why I fixated on Princeton; I didn't know anyone who'd driven through Princeton, NJ, much less gone to the school. For some reason known only to a sheltered kid who read too many books, attending Princeton seemed like the epitome of good breeding and fine learning in natty suits. It is possible I had seen a picture of F Scott Fitzgerald and took all the wrong lessons from it.

I wanted to be a governor, but I don't remember picking a state. I knew it wouldn't be Southern, because I'm not Southern, but it was pretty open after that. I liked the idea of being responsible for a state that was all my own.

I wanted to be the next Kenesaw Mountain Landis and rid baseball of any sneaking suspicion of foul play and keep it the fine, upstanding game it was meant to be, played by fine, upstanding lads with pure hearts.

Then I grew up. I forgot about Princeton. I watched the Iran-Contra hearings and the Anita Hill hearings. I followed the presidency of former California governor Ronald Reagan. I watched chicken-eater Wade Boggs disparage his road girlfriend when she took their arrangement public. My heart broke. My dreams died a horrible death at the hands of trickle-down economics and good old boy sexism.

Now I have new goals in life. I am older and wiser, savvier, even. I know what's really important in life. Now I want only the following two things:

1. To be in a Levitra commercial. I want to see what it's like to be so happy to be with a silver-haired chemical stud.
2. To play a mascot/Fruit of the Loom character/monster/vitamin/what have you. In a commercial. Wearing a goofy costume looks like fun.

Sorry, Congress! You'll have to make due without me.