THE BEST OF WHAT HAS BEEN THOUGHT AND SAID, SAID MATTHEW ARNOLD

Will Rogers said: "Always drink upstream from the herd".

On Saturday The Lotus said: "These potatoes have the skins of reptiles". I didn't tell her that I'd bought a bag of gila monsters. I know, I know. But they were free-range gila monsters. Next on my grocery list: one pound organic Venus Fly Traps, extra bitey.

BRUTAL YOUTH OF MOVIES AND AMERICAN CIGARETTES

The way Carrie Henn¹ says "Mostly" in Aliens has been etched indelibly into my brain. That'll probably be the one thing I take with my into the afterlife. Heavenly auditors will interrogate me and I'll only be able to respond "Mostly". They'll give up and put me in a house for broken and stupid spirits. We will each be given rags and sent out at night to scrub the golden streets until they palely gleam. If we lose our rag it will not be replaced, and we are expected to tear off portions of our robe. Most of us are naked and all of us are mad.

PUBLIC WORKS

Ah yeah. I'm rereading Matt Ruff's "Sewer, Gas and Electric". Ruff adheres to my fundamental principle of writing: make stuff up, unceasingly and with as much smirky insouciance (Smirky Insouciance! He won the game of stickball down on 4th Avenue and won our hearts in the process! All of America loves the antics of little Smirky Insouciance!²) as he can pull off. Occasionally the book gets a little too cute for its own good - the jokey Thomas Pynchon references age pretty quickly - but it's never dull. Howard Hughes piloting a submarine full of kangaroos, a plague that targets people of African descent (except for green-eyed Africans), and a gas computer set on assassinating people in the most ironic manner possible: it's funny. And a scene in Heaven with Abbie Hoffman trying to impart a sense of humour to Ayn Rand. Hot damn.

Somebody from Estonia has been looking at my page (this is even better than the person from somewhere around San Antonio. Hello Texan.). It's yet another in the series of oblique connections I have with Estonia. Schoolmates, cow-orkers and random aquaintances seem to hail from Estonia or have had great life-altering experiences there. Some evening I'm going to dress The Lotus up and make her pretend to be an Estonian university student backpacking her way across Canada. I'll be the maintenance man at the hostel, come to check the, uh, squeaky bedsprings. It'll be great. I'll come in with a toolbox, apply some oil to the springs and even tip my hat on the way out. She'll remember me as that charming Canadian janitor and carry my sunny smile in her heart for years afterward. One day when she's old and grey and living out her days in a cottage in Haapsalu she'll think of me tipping my hat and say, "Holy shit. That was my husband! I'm not Estonian. I'd better call him and explain". I know - pretty hot.

¹Carrie Henn played Newt on the movie Aliens. I googled her and found a couple of photos of her from 1994, eight years after the movie was released. Beware: she looks identical in both of the photos. I do not trust people who pose so exactly for pictures that they look like cutout figures taken from one photo and pasted onto the next.

²The Lotus phoned as I was writing this so I asked her what the gender of Smirky Insouciance should be. She thought it was a good name for a homosexual male orphan, or perhaps a gender-confused orphan. I can see a kind of Lower-East-Side-kid-comes-to-Stonewall story emerging. Both of us thought of Smirky as an orphan immediately, which I guess is why we're married to each other and not to one of you, even though we're so dreamy. We look just like Patrick Swayze.

parode - exode