on idleness
I am waking up too late in the mornings. I blame Nik's trampoline. He has a marvelous trampoline in his backyard with a diameter of perhaps fifteen feet, and it always begins with Nik and Eric and I going out around midnight to lie on our backs on the trampoline, which gives under you slightly like a hammock, but soon one of us (often me) will be unable to resist the urge to get up and start jumping, which causes everyone else to bounce perilously.
"Excuse me," says Nik, "I'd like to smoke this cigarette with my mouth, not my eye."
"Right. Sorry."
And then we start talking about, I don't know, the bit in Exodus where God threatens to show Moses his back parts, and then somehow it is three in the morning.
I don't know how well The World Anthem works out in practice, but I'm thinking in visual metaphors: you mix together 193 colors of paint, you get sludge. I suppose everyone's official music must use the Western scale these days, which is too bad—quarter tones don't get the attention they deserve.
Yeah, Americans are said to love big cars, the dumb Yanks. The BBC has to run something like this about three times a week, and it doesn't even know how fucked its grammar is.
He decried America's throw-away society and it's [sic] "bigger is better" ethos, whether it was the cars they [sic] drive or the large McMansions they [sic] build. He pointed to the large sport utility vehicles rounding Washington's Dupont Circle. "The SUV is the status vehicle to have right now," he said. "It just burns gas."
