I go to parties, sometimes until four / It's hard to leave when you can't find the door

Nearly six years later, it still remains true: Even the most fleeting thought of this makes me lose my shit entirely. Oh bless you, internets, for in you I find my life.

A lot of days, I feel like Steve Zahn sitting in the back of the getaway car in Out of Sight, or like Puddy staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him for the entire duration of a transatlantic flight, with no book, magazine, music, nap, etc. and driving Elaine to break up with him once again. Or like Buscemi in Lebowski, including the muddy hearing.

Today in "Unaccountably Overly Pleased With Myself" news:

I cannot stop congratulating myself for finally knowing what two current memes are about. One is, "Bye Felicia," the other is "Damn, Daniel." I mean, context has always been clear enough and I've been borne along on the tides with both of them, but it really is nice to know from whence they came.

OH MY GOD THE BAR IS SO LOW THESE DAYS WITH ME.

Things to never click

You know, tbh, I wonder what the "one weird old tip" is that will "reduce belly fat." This stupid malware-gateway sidebar I've seen for like the last ten years, goddamn.

Timothy Simons is as wonderful as Jonah (aka Jonad) is awful. Please to discuss.

You know how lots of times, you'll read more about a writer or actor or musician whose work you really like, and find out they are a total d-bag or serial cheater or anti-vaxxer or a Libertarian or something, and then you're just like, ugh, I wish I hadn't gone looking and found that out. Right?

Well here is the total opposite of that situation: Timothy Simons, who plays Jonah on Veep.

Jonah, the character, is a loathsome, grasping, legend-in-his-own-mind type who both takes and dishes out the worst insults on the regular. He's strange, he's awful -- and in his own way, a true marvel.

Timothy, the actor, is awesome! He's funny, charming, thoughtful, feminist, organically weird -- ever since I stumbled across this blog post of his, I have been reading every interview he's given and fantasy-casting him in all of my favorite books (I see him as Wyatt in Monday, Monday; as Bunny -- who I know is written blond but who cares -- in The Secret History, etc.).

Refreshing, is what it is, to find out more about a public figure and it's all good. Yay, humans!

ono i drobbed it my gum

yoo guys i cannt stoplauvhing


dissis my favrit

The jerk store called. They're running out of you!

37/40

I might actually die of wanting one of these "Can't Stand Ya" dresses. For real and for serious.

Fun fact: The person who makes them is Erin Pearce, aka the voice of Toodee on Yo Gabba Gabba.

Funner fact: She's 24. So ... like, I guess Old Lady Gleemonex and a youngster of the Millennial stripe could actually get along. All we gotta do is get going on Seinfeld quotes and we're likethis!

There should be more songs about happily day-drinking with strangers on weekdays, eh wot.

27/40

I have a compulsion to read things like what the Hairpin's got going on over there: 20 Songs By Women that Will Turn 20 in 2014. A lot of these are riot grrl things, which I know the names of and the bands by whom they are made but have still never heard them, because back in the day, wanting to be way cooler than I was (photographic evidence TK), I pretended I was at least a little bit riot grrl because I'd read about that whole deal in Sassy and thus learned all the names, but had no access to the actual music so I just bluffed a lot. Which perhaps is a Theme Emergent in these 40/40 posts, ha! Anyway.

They've found me! I don't know how, but they've found me! Run for it, Marty!

13/40

My Compadre, alias Twelve, Is the Greatest Person in the History of Ever: Another Reason Why

Twelve managed to find online the un-googleably-named freshman-year roommate to whom I refer on this here blogge from time to time. And you guys, this shit is GOLD. 

I can't share much -- mostly because I have to maintain my distance from her, and she's the type who probably chases down hits from all unfamiliar URLs just to see what's doing. But oh my heck, y'all. If ever a person were able to remain completely unchanged by life, to only sharpen and strengthen all the elements of their own personality, to charge through the years the same as they were at eighteen but ever more so -- this woman has managed it. 

Here's what I blathered in an email to Twelve: 

OMFG, lookit that husband of hers -- he is EXACTLY EXAAAAACTLY who I thought would marry her (I've even assigned his last name an umlaut for old time's sake). You think he ever gets a single word in? You think she tells everyone she knows, all the details of their extremely personal marital life? DO YOU SEE THAT SHE STILL SAYS SHE'S A [PRACTITIONER OF OBSCURE RICH-PERSON SPORT]???

As self-aggrandizing and needlessly abrupt as always, she's got Glamour Shots, she's allegedly the CEO of something (her own thing, not like General Mills, a legitimate business), she's married with three young kids ... on the one hand, huzzah to her -- to anyone, really -- who looks to have gotten exactly what he or she hoped to get out of life. She does look genuinely happy, her kids are cute, I don't begrudge her any of that -- it's just, she is still so HER that it is fascinating/dreadful/astonishing. If you had asked me to make up out of whole cloth the story of what she is now, based on the college freshman I once knew, I might have come up with precisely this, whereas with nearly everyone else I've known in my whole life, there've been some unexpected detours, some discoveries, some chances taken, some wins, some misses, a few edges sharpened and a few more blunted or softened ... but not with this gal. She is indomitably, indubitably she. Amazing. 

Y'all hear some kid's MOM pulled a shotgun on my ass?

As I told my friend the Drink Nazi, who tipped me to this 20th-anniversary screening & cast reunion:

I MIGHT ACTUALLY DIE OF WANTING TO GO TO THERE

By this time we were both half-crazy from too much whiskey, sun fatigue, culture shock, lack of sleep and general dissolution.

Wowie wowie wow, if you wanna see a post that totally nails it, go to here -- inspired by the upcoming release of Before Midnight, Joanna looks up some of her favorite screen couples to find out what they're up to now. It is awesome. I want more. (Hat tip to Sarah Brown for finding it!)

a few months after moving in together in houston, lelaina was hired by bunim/murray. she moved out to LA, and troy came with her.

And if you want to read the piece that was the very genesis of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo streak, not to mention his first collaboration with the great Ralph Steadman, go to here -- there are some great footnotes that you won't want to miss. Hat tip to Mr. Gleemonex, because he sent it to me, and this man knows what I like, y'all.

"I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody," Thompson said in a 1974 interview with Playboy. "Then when it came out, there were massive numbers of letters, phone calls, congratulations, people calling it a 'great breakthrough in journalism.' And I thought, 'Holy shit, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times?' It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids."

"I hated the Wakefield twins like I hated my Barbies: blonde, perfect, zero relatability."

Once again, the inimitable Sarah Brown said something that made me think (that's her in the post title). Her tumblr links to a (rad!) piece by a Sweet Valley High ghostwriter, and Sarah says she never really liked these books, although women around her (our) age are supposed to bond over the love of them. Which is true, except -- for me, it's never been about loving them, just about having read them.

Any nostalgia, or any fondness, I feel for SVH (about which I have written a few times here on this blog) is just the generalized nostalgic/fond way you remember pretty much anything you used to do all of a damn hot summer afternoon when you were eleven.

Mostly what I remember was that it was important to read them; everyone else was, so you had to, to be in the know. We'd trade them back and forth -- me, the Sociopath, Lab Partner, Berwie, half a dozen others. We'd rank the male characters by boyfriendworthiness (Sociopath always liked Bruce Patman and the Wakefield dad the best; she was, of course, the only one to think of including somebody's f'ing dad), the cars by which one we wanted most when we turned 16 (surprisingly, my eventual ride -- the 1980 Buick Skylark -- was not on the list), we'd take personality quizzes to find out which female character we were, we'd con somebody into taking us to the Golden Triangle Mall to buy the new ones at B. Dalton as soon as they came out.

So I participated, you know, and not unwillingly; that shit was pretty fun as a shared experience. But the feelings the actual books produced in me were almost entirely negative. I knew that I would never look like the Wakefield twins, but I learned that theirs was the only desirable kind of beauty. I knew they came from money, and learned that not having money was shameful and a thing to hide from your peers. I knew what boys were like and what boys liked, and learned that the first was "alien" and the second amounted to "not me." I learned that there was always supposed to be drama and scheming going on amongst one's friends and that your sister would always be your rival.

These things are mental handicaps, and part of the baggage that I've been busting open and sorting through all the years of this blog -- talk about power! Whoa. And to me, that's the bond most of my generation of women shares -- we were all a little warped by SVH, or at least it's impossible to have avoided them completely, so love/hate/meh/puke/whatever, you have some kind of opinion about them one way or another.

Lucy, while we argued, was lying on the patio, doing a charcoal sketch of Barbra Streisand. From memory this time. It was a full-faced rendering, with teeth like baseballs and eyes like jellied fire.

Wow. Wowie wowie wow, was that Oscars awful. I am STUNNED by how awful it was, and that's even with the bar of expectation low enough for a seven-month-old infant to crawl over it. I fucking hate the alleged entertainment product of Seth MacFarlane, have hated it for my entire awareness of its existence, but I had no idea how truly terrible he could really be. The whole goddamned thing was painful, and stupid, and brutal (and of course SUPER misogynist and racist, just for extra kicks).

So here's some things I wrote down as I drank champagne and lost, utterly and in slow motion, to Mr. Gleemonex, on our Oscar-winner ballots:

1) When did we decide that the Oscars are supposed to be funny? I mean, this here is obviously a colossal fail, but I mean the concept that this the show is supposed to be hilare-town? As Linda Holmes wrote on NPR,

It seems like it's very difficult for awards show organizers to learn the lesson that an awards show is not a roast. It's not there to pull the rug out from under Hollywood and zing the heck out of everybody and show 'em a thing or two. 

2) If I ever meet Barbra Streisand, I'm gonna ask her if she's read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

3) WTF was with Nicholson? He reminded me of Hader's ancient field reporter on SNL.

4) I declare an immediate, total, permanent moratorium on calling out people who are in the audience.

5) I wish Salma Hayek had stabbed MacFarlane in his stupid fucking punchable face. She might've if she'd been any closer to him.

6) Clooney is a good sport, because he has to be, but I think he wanted to burn the building down with everybody in it. Including himself.

7) And then this thing, from the Onion. I can't even. This is what rape culture looks like, Internets. Somebody thinks it's satire, and "funny," to call a nine-year-old girl a cunt. This beautiful, sweet, talented, self-possessed young lady, nominated by her (adult) peers for her excellent work, and it's all turned to ashes by one word from a fucking warthog-shitstain of a person who thinks he's funny and is going to get away with it because his fellow warthog-shitstains will think it's funny and defend him on grounds of if you didn't think it's funny then you're uptight and don't get humor and are probably a castrating lesbo cunt yourself.

So yeah. Puke City.

Imagine if the landlord from Lebowski was a 13-year-old girl

Oh goddammit Internets. I can barely type this through the tears of wheezy, cackling laughter, but you -- especially you and you -- will thank me for it. It's like the video in Infinite Jest -- "the Entertainment" -- which is so perfect that, when viewed, causes the viewer to do nothing else basically until they die. I think I'll let Alec Baldwin tell you about it:

Alec Baldwin: My guilty pleasure like that was when I was in my 20’s and I’d go to my friend’s house. And we just had this weird habit, where like at 4:00 in the afternoon we would like make a drink and we’d roll the biggest joint and we’d smoke pot and watch a show called "Stairway to Stardom" that was on public access TV. And "Stairway to Stardom" was this older man. He kind of looked like Rod Steiger – he was a burly-looking, tough-looking older man – and his wife. And she kind of looked like Tammy Faye Baker. She was like a big, big honeycombed, shellacked hairdo. She was like this big, bosomy older woman.

And the guy would come out, and he had the funniest voice. He’d be like, ‘Welcome, everyone, to "Stairway to Stardom."’ And they’d sing a song, an opening song, and then they would bring out acts that would perform, that were all like local Queens, Brooklyn talent; people singing and parakeets. It was like – it was bizarre.

Lena Dunham: That sounds like the best thing in the world.

Alec Baldwin: It was the best show in the world, especially if you’d smoked an enormous –

Lena Dunham: Amount of marijuana.

Alec Baldwin: An enormous joint. 

I don't even partake of herbal jazz cigarettes anymore, and this is the greatest thing in the WORLD. 

Hat tip: Mr. Gleemonex, who got it from Alec Baldwin's podcast. Reader, I married him! 

You KNOW bin Laden had to've enjoyed gettin orange slices after soccer practice!

Abe Kanan and Rodney Mullen Are Awesome For Entirely Different Reasons

1. Abe Kanan: I have the Stern channels on Sirius in my new pimpmobile, so I am finally getting to hear not only Stern but also my new discovery, the Abe Kanan show. It is f'ing HYSTERICAL. They just talk about stuff (sharks, Rottweilers, Abe Lincoln), and when you try to tell your fellow Stern/Kanan fanboy of a husband what they were talking about, it kind of dies in the translation, but OMFG I thought I might have a stroke in the Whole Foods parking lot the other day when they were talking about dictators' and other maniacs' adolescences -- "Was Hitler, like, always a dick? Or did he get book-checked a lot in the hallways at school and that's what MADE him a dick?" "Bin Laden musta been a little bit cool, he was 6'7" and played soccer -- when he was a kid you KNOW he had to've enjoyed gettin orange slices after soccer practice!" See? You're not dying of laughter -- but if you heard these guys say it, you would be.

2. Rodney Mullen: Holy skinny, wiry Shatner would I have been an annoying skate nerd back in the day if I had any notion that this world existed. I've come to know about Bones Brigade from Mr. Gleemonex, who WAS into this stuff back in the day; this weekend, we watched the 2012 Bones Brigade autobiography Stacy Peralta made -- it was absolutely fascinating. This feels like how I got into the Pixies around age 30, since I missed them almost entirely the first time around (would have been a full 100% cultural miss if not for the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack -- but now I play bass because of Kim Deal and kind of almost might someday get a tattoo of their logo). And while I have written here before about Tony Hawk, whom I continue to love, I gotta tellya, I'm developing quite a Thing for Rodney Mullen (at least the current incarnation of him, all bedraggled and wistful and strange and reflective, beautiful like a musician over a mind like David Foster Wallace or some shit). He is so goddamned interesting, and I can't figure him out, and that's sofa king cool, man.

I love lamp

Oh Internets, I love you and your horses and bayonets sofa king much!

The dust of Winona Ryder's dreams

Ohhhhhhhhh shit y'all, Sarah Brown -- I am in severe respiratory distress since reading this crystal nugget of hilarity -- canNOT stop laughing!

I had this whole thing I was gonna say about how I just can't with handbags, no matter how much I like former Sassy staffers (which I do, forever), but that'll keep for another day.

Curated ... by Mario Batali ... [wheezing, feeling faint]

And yes, I'd feel the same way (only probably even more gleeful) if this were about the Swimmin' Douchebag, Lochte. But he didn't pull bitchface on the medal stand, so.

So even though I think she's a Mean Girl, I at first defended McKayla Maroney on grounds of she's a child, and that must've been awful to know that she has only herself to blame for falling short of the gold (and on a vault she must've done one million times before, flawlessly), and she went cold instead of breaking up and being all blubbery and ending up on a thousand stupid damn websites weeping her eye makeup off all over the Internets and I could understand that ...

But then, she refused even to touch the Russian who won gold -- I mean, she left the girl hangin on the obligatory "good game" hug, y'all -- and even much later, on the medal stand, she couldn't draw on the discipline and focus it's taken her to get this far, pull it together enough to wipe that bitchface off her head for three minutes, uncross her arms, stand up straight, and show a little fucking class?

She deserves this -- also, it's funny as hell. I hope she grows up enough to realize that someday.

SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIT

Holy crap, Internets, I got a basketload of goodies for y'all today.

--STFU Conservatives: Where I spend most of my time online. A Tumblr of wonderfulness that will also enrage in a head-explodey way. Good for keeping fired up in this election season, and I adore Jess & Joe, the proprietors (whom I've never met or even corresponded with, just to clarify; they're just really kewl).

--Fuck Rick Santorum: A Canadian gets in on the game, and hilarity ensues.

--I Hope Rick Santorum: ... encounters a whole bunch of shitty little first-world problems, pretty much every minute of his day every day of his life. AWESOME.

--Dr. Jen Gunter: Wielding the lasso of truth -- it's her tagline and the actuality of the blog. Thoughtful, intelligent, extremely interesting posts on the issues of the day by a doctor and single mom.

--Bracketology: Greatest Wire Characters. You come at the king, you best not miss.

BOBBY FLAY is now my SWORN ENEMY, which means he is also YOURS.

Look, here's the deal. Many moons ago, somebody once linked on their blog to a drawring of two kids sitting on a pile of books, thoroughly absorbed in reading -- done so well, so simple and early-sixties-looking, I loved it on sight -- and the words "There's more to life than books you know, but not much more," which of course KILLED ME DEAD (Handsome Devil, whaaaat), and I bought it in under sixty seconds from this person's etsy shop. It is waiting to be framed and hung in my reading nook -- this sort of dogleg 1/3 of the Master Bedroom (heh. master bedroom) of our new house, for which I already have a wonderful chair (the Luxe chair + ottoman from Cost Plus), and now need only my bookcases, my goddamn books which are still in boxes in the goddamn garage, a good reading lamp, and the Desk I've Been Waiting For All My Life (which I will know when I see it).

Since that time, probably two years ago, that I bought this fabulous piece of art, I have wanted desperately for some more illustrated lyrics/quotations, preferably without attribution, and not the whole goddamn song or whatever -- Beatles, Pixies, more Smiths, all kinds of cool shit -- which I would create myself if I had that kind of graphic artistry talent but I don't, SO. What I need from you is: FIND ME THIS SHIT ON ETSY. I do not know how to navigate that fucking place. I get lost and then cranky and then want to burn the mother down with every twee little crafter in it. Links, people -- direct links to items and shops. PLEASE help me!

By which I mean: FUCK YEAH