Effete Musings

What a spastic.
Who’s Amir? Let this be your guide:
Dis Acronym, Very Important…Daringly Does Exposing!

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2009/05/25/090525po_poem_levine

I was hanging out in Walled Lake the other weekend and came upon this veritable treasure trove of Neil Meridith photos in a dumpster behind the local Kroger’s. All I’m going to say is thank God I was there to prevent these historic shots from being lost to historians forever. Because for all those who know and love Neil, as well as for those for whom he is merely a hero and legend, these photos provide an invaluable window into what made Neil into the latter-day Renaissance man that we all know him as today. So without further ado…

Neil Age Eleven:

Little is known about Neil as a young man, except for the fact that he loved to eat burritos. While scholars debate whether Neil preferred chile con carne, poblano chicken, or simply rice and beans with a slathering of shredded cheese and hot sauce, all agree that burritos were a major formative influence on Neil in these early years.

Neil Age Sixteen:

Firmly established is the fact that Neil was in fact born a hemaphrodite but that his parents chose to raise him as a male. When he began to develop female characteristics, as seen here, Neil suspected that something was wrong and began to question his own identity for the first time — a process which likely was the genesis of his later architetural masterpiece The Cage Museum, better known as the “pair of testacles” building, erected in Munich, Germany in the early 2000s.  Neil later underwent hormone treatment to revert completely into a male, undertaking doses of some two thousand milligrams of testosterone per day in order to retard his emergent femininity.

Neil Age Nineteen:

In college when Neil wasn’t busy pouring over some tome describing the genius of Le Courbusier or Mies van der Rohe, you could be sure to find him with a burrito in hand. Here we find the Master racing to finish his meal so as to get back to hitting the books. Word has it the Nectar was quaffed in a single gulp.

Neil Age Twenty-three:

Despite the many opportunities for communing with the opposite sex offered by post-collegiate life, Neil always chose the burrito.

Neil Age Twenty-six:

For a time in his mid-twenties, Neil was involved in the competitive eating circuit, focusing mainly on the consumption of burritos in a fixed amount of time. Though he never won a competition, he was a frequent contender, finishing second in the Alberquerque Eat Off and fourth at the annual Famous Nathan’s competiton on Coney Island. Here we see Neil (second from right) duelling the legendary “Eater X.”

Neil Age Thirty-one:

It’s true what they say: there is a fine line between genius and madness…

Paula, we missed you! So glad to see you are back in the circuit!

      Writers are forced to live in extreme poverty. It might even be a cliche to mention it at this point. Sometimes writers are so poor that they can’t even afford places to live and are forced to spend all their time on public transportation to keep out of the cold. This is why there are so many people on buses reading Tolstoy and scribbling notes to themselves. These people may often be mistaken for lunatics, but they aren’t lunatics, as long as they are writing. As soon as pen touches paper, they become writers. They might be writers at other times as well because they might be doing research. Lunatics hardly ever write anything and rarely do research. They just walk around talking to themselves and to no real purpose. Whereas if a writer is talking to himself he is usually trying to compose a monologue.

        Writers also tend to eat very little. What money they have, they spend on booze. In wine there is truth or so the saying goes. Many writers have drunk a great deal of wine trying to find the truth at the bottom of the bottle, but instead they have only found the tannins. Let me propose a corollary statement to the other one: In a little wine is a little truth; in much wine is only headaches.

      Of course writers get hungry, but since they spend all their money on booze, they are forced to rely on the charity of their friends. Either that or they eat their boots. The great Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno was once mistaken for a lunatic when he allowed his boots to roast in a fire with his feet inside them. As it turns out he was just cooking his dinner and forgot his feet were still inside it.

      Writers are sickly and chaste. Flannery O’Connor spent all her time being sick and raising peacocks. She never had a boyfriend. Thoreau lived in the woods and kept his mother company. Writers hardly ever show up at dances or social functions. If a writer does happen to find an amorous passion brewing inside, he or she usually feels it so intensely that it turns into sickness. Otherwise writers are too sick to feel very amorous.

         Sickness is a kind of gift for writers. Only a writer would treasure feeling sick, anyone else would feel miserable and bored. Most writers discover a love for illness at an early age and their poverty helps them sustain it into adulthood. I once knew a writer who had a fever for five years. He was the happiest writer that ever lived. But finally his brains turned into mush and he died.

Detroit Ice Drink

A Letter From Brooklyn from Eric Anton Schechter-Oblomov on Vimeo.

This shit is pretty hilarious - apparently it’s based (verbatim) on a quite EFFETE email that made the forwarding rounds. The name is made up. From Nick.