Loving Mr. Moon

A toxic sunset was the only allure. Neon pinks swarmed into platinum yellows, and ended in metallic purple just above the crest of the lumpy hill they faced. It wasn’t natural. Fields of factories not far from this hill chugged and churned, spewing colorful vomit into the sky throughout the day. It was barely noon.

Once this area had been a sanctuary to the natural. Speckled birch trees and massive maples swayed in the sweet breeze that splashed up from the stream. Bushy hills and grass-covered valleys rose and fell, creasing and curving the forest into a wrinkled beauty. It lived, wildly untamed, save a few cabins barely noticed through the various shades of green. Now, the forest was gone. The cabins were shacks – worthless plots passed down through inheritance – standing feebly on barren land, waiting to be bulldozed in the name of progress that had enveloped adjacent areas.

Tom Moon struggled to the foot of the lumpy hill, leaning hard on a wooden cane. He sighed, glancing around at the depressing panorama that was his family’s plot of land – it was a place that meant nothing to him in his middle age, but in his youth, it was his playground. Now, as an old man, he could only sigh. Aimlessly, he thrust his cane into the ground and it clanked against something hard. Using it as a brush, he cleared away the debris on top of a small, rectangular stone. A penknife-etching read: He Loved Her.

“Who was he?” came the curious chirp of his granddaughter Delilah’s voice.
“He was your grandfather,” he whispered, hanging on each word.
“Who was she?”

Gently, Tom’s eyes closed and his mind wandered to younger days, to sprawling lakes and endless hallways of birch and maple – a time before suits and shaving cream and conference calls, before being called Mr. and Dad and Old Man. He thought of the wilderness and he thought of her. He drifted back years and brought Delilah along with him, painting with words a time when the landscape they now glimpsed was pure, untouched, and alive.

“She,” he said with a slight grin. “She…she was his muse.”

* * *

Someone had moved the painting. When she came in from the porch it was right in front of her, a large framed canvas leaning against the sofa. It had hung above the cabin’s stone fireplace for years. Other paintings, stretched canvases without frames, never made it to a wall. They went into wooden crates and waited for big-shouldered men to carry them away for Michael, who owned a gallery in the city. She was fond of Michael. He had visited the cabin many times and always spoke gently. And, he had paid her the highest compliment: “You should paint her, Moon.”

Michael and Mr. Moon had often stood in front of the fireplace, studying the painting above it. “I could sell it for you this afternoon.” But the painting stayed on the wall. It had been hard for her to see it up there. Now she felt as if she could step right through the gilded frame into the scene.

Birch leaves tumbled along the road in a bright ribbon of yellows swirling through the painting. Their bare white-papered trees that stood slim and straight as choirboys clustered along the roadside. Above them, brilliant red swatches still clung to the spreading maples. Higher still, the farthest branches of the oaks and elms mingled in a brown and orange fretwork that spilled drops of sun and shadow down onto the cobblestones half buried in the road.

The scene was so alive to her, perhaps, because she had been with Mr. Moon when he painted it. For many afternoons they had walked out together from the cabin to that dip in the woods where the stone fence, the cobbled road and the stream fell in alongside each other for a companionable stretch before they veered apart with the rise of the ground. She watched Mr. Moon set up his easel, planting it in the soft earth up to its spindly ankles. Then, he unscrewed tiny caps from fat metal tubes and squeezed pure color onto his palette. He would say the names of the colors as he chose them: “Naples yellow, gamboge, French ultramarine, sap green, Prussian blue, rose d’orée, burnt sienna, Chinese white.” He would smile at her. “My little incantation. I hope it works.” Then, with a thin wedge of a knife, he stroked and swirled the colors, mixing them thoroughly in some spots and barely introducing them in others. He spent almost as much time preparing the palette as he did painting.

“I don’t want to think too much when I paint. If I have exactly the right colors mixed here and I know exactly where they are on the palette, I can just paint. From the eye to the hand, with very little brain in between. Do you understand?” He talked to her while he painted. She listened and she heard the bark of geese high in the sky, the rustle of squirrel and sparrow in the leaves, the splash of trout striking at the evening hatch. His voice was full of love when he talked about painting and she loved to listen to it. She didn’t really understand what he meant. But then, she was no painter.

Now, as she looked intently at the canvas, she remembered, too, the smells of those long afternoons. She could almost see them hanging in the air around her – the molder of damp earth and moss pierced by the sharp scent of pine needles crushed under the feet of Mr. Moon and his easel. The clean cold smell rising off the stream pushed against the drifts of woodsmoke in the trees. From the cabin, wafted a faint, delicious aroma of roasting meat; from the deepest woods, floated an acrid note of skunk.

Mr. Moon and his easel were another world of scent. Pipe tobacco, turpentine, sweat, linseed oil, apples and whiskey mingled in its atmosphere. Something very pungent that Mr. Moon called rabbit skin glue occasionally fouled the air. From its smell, she thought perhaps it really was made from rabbit. Sometimes a ham sandwich with mustard announced itself from his pocket. In another pocket, a ham sandwich without mustard waited for her.

Mr. Moon was gone now. Last week, more big-shouldered men had loaded him into an ambulance redolent of blood and disinfectant and death. His easel was packed away with the clothes (mothballs), the books (mildew) and the dishes (detergent). His children, Tom and Lila (shaving cream, perfume and cigarettes), did the packing. They didn’t seem to want her help, so she spent most of the day on the porch, resting and remembering.

She had known them for a long time. When they had visited Mr. Moon in the summers, she had spent a great deal of time with them, making sure the stays were fun for them even when their father was busy with a canvas. She had played games with them for hours in the sunshine and walked miles with them through the woods. She had waded in the stream with them and helped capture frogs along the banks. She had sat with them at their early dinners, while Mr. Moon was still out trying to catch the last of the good light. “The best light,” he would say.

If Lila woke in the middle of the night, sobbing softly with a bad dream, she would leave Mr. Moon’s side and slip through the child’s door and into her bed. She would curl close against Lila’s warmth and then there was no more room in the bed for another bad dream. When Tom got tangled up in a broken barbed wire fence – she could still hear him screaming, “I can’t move! I can’t move!” – she stayed with him while Lila ran for her father. She kissed him gently and let Tom lean against her, even though the rusty barbs dug into her skin, too. She and Tom both needed shots that day.

Now, Tom and Lila were tall and lean and dressed as grown-ups. They spoke to her kindly when she came in from the porch, but they were busy with lists and labels. So, she leaned in as close to the painting as she could, trying to catch a whiff of varnish and damp wool and the man she had loved.

“Sadie,” Lila called from the kitchen door. “”Come here, look what I’ve got.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” said Tom. “Keep her in the kitchen. That dog was about to lick the painting.”

* * *

“What are we going to do with her Tom?” Lila muttered. Tom shook his head. Though gnawing on a wishbone left over from last night’s take-out meal, Sadie’s ears heard. She understood. In this moment, something broke behind her patchwork fur and aching paws, inside her itchy skin. She knew that Mr. Moon would not come back and that she was no longer wanted. Swiveling her collared neck, she abandoned the bone and went again to face the painting. Tom and Lila watched her go, her four paws falling silently on the tattered carpet that had yet to be packed away. She leaned back onto her hind legs and settled into a sphinx-like posture. In front of her, the birch trees and cobblestone path rambled forward.

Her eyes, misty and bloodshot, slid shut but the painting stayed. She saw the canopy of maples. She heard the swallows chattering in their branches. She felt the soft creek-side breeze tickle the whiskers on her muzzle and sift through her golden coat. The breeze stirred her. Led by her nose, she lifted from her crouch, body tense, head tilted forty-five degrees in the air, the black half-moon curves of her moist nostrils quivering under the cascading warmth of light flickering through the trees.

Suddenly, she galloped forward, her four legs muscular and powerful. She barked loud and long and tumbled into the dewy grass that grew wild beside the cobblestones. Her fur shimmered as she rolled on her back, legs dangling above her, like a gleefully overturned tortoise or beetle. She flipped back up and snorted, her head rocking back and furry ears flopping sideways. Splashing into the creek, she gobbled fresh water with her swaying red tongue in the shade of the birches.

Her nose twitched as the scent of tobacco momentarily danced above the surface of the water, a few feet in front of her. She leapt up the bank, ears perked. A familiar cascade of smells followed: turpentine, sweat, apples, whiskey, and oil paints. She stepped onto the cobbles and saw Mr. Moon. He was seated at his easel though not focused intently down the road, as he had been the day he’d painted this scene. He was smiling at her, waving a ham sandwich without mustard in his right hand.

She darted, paws smacking cobbles, towards him. Faintly from the kitchen her keen ears caught Tom saying, “the dog isn’t supposed to outlive the master, right?” as she lurched forward into the canvass to meet Mr. Moon’s outstretched hand.

GirlTalk

“You know why she did it this time,” Reese coughed to Claire, raising her eyebrows and rolling her eyes a quarter of the way around as she did.

The pair stood abreast of one another, smug, uncaring eyes caked with mascara wandered down the subway tunnel.

Reese dropped oversized, crimson sunglasses back over her face. Claire shrugged, tapping her left foot, high heeled and booted to the knee in slick leather, against the ground before responding.

“Fucking laundry list of reasons, too much Xanex, too much Lexapro, not enough Ambien…Wait I take that back,” she caught herself suddenly and, index finger held up like a politician or a professor, continued, “not enough Xanex and way too much Valium.”

Claire was taller with stone archways for shoulders, while Reese looked frail, too frail but, as everyone said, those perfect tits made up for it. They stood close enough that a worn sign reading ‘No Smoking’ screwed to the wall behind them was just legible between their heads. Both balanced orange-tipped cigarettes on their lips. Claire tugged at the seam of black leggings on her right thigh while glancing into a cell phone with a convenient mirror feature. Reese spoke, almost in monologue.

“I mean its not as if she doesn’t have a reason to live. Dumb bitch. She always has Dylan there to fuck her.”

She paused. Reese had fucked Dylan too, often. Sage didn’t know and on paper he was Sage’s twisted hybrid of steady fuck-male companion.

“She’s pulls this shit like every other Tuesday. It’s all I’m not happy this and oh why doesn’t he call back that. Get a fucking grip. If she really wants someone’s damn attention at least use a razor. That’s what I did the last time I tried. Everyone rushed to me and I was loved again. Remember?”

She paused once more, a grin creasing her tan cheeks, proud.

“I mean, what’s a couple of scars anyways? Just wear a sweater.”

Reese broke off and glanced at Claire, she was twiddling the stringy auburn curls that bounced on her head, still captivated by her mirror-phone.

“Hmm?”

Reese resumed her oratory.

“Even met a George Clooney look-alike on my last day in. God, he was a fuckin’ moose. Huge.” She arched her back at this and wriggled her hips slightly, letting a soft groan quiver from her lips or maybe from between her legs. “He pulled my hair and slapped my ass for at least an hour. He left with a tuft of my black locks,” she cooed. “But I didn’t care. He stuffed me all night.”

“George Clooney?!” chirped Claire, oblivious to anything Reese had said before this name. “Oh I’d kill for Clooney, the guy I just fucked didn’t do anything except leave the condom inside me.”

“I bet that’s because you have a fat vagina sweetie.”

“Hey! You’ve never seen my vagina,” Claire shot back, curling her lips and cocking her head forty-five degrees. Silently, she wished that Reese actually had seen it.

“I’m just saying daaaling.” Reese stretched her last word and touched Claire’s shoulder like a mother would. She stepped in front of Claire and onto the newly arrived train. Claire shuffled in behind her, slipping a curious thumb under the hem of her pleated skirt.

Reese and Claire babbled at each other all the way downtown, on their way to pick up their third, Sage, who, lost in a throbbing dementia of straight whisky, key bumps of pure MDMA, and an already crippled self-image, had gulped eighteen various prescriptions at 3 a.m. that Wednesday morning and tried to kill herself.

* * *

In the four years since the three had met, in the depths of the SubMercer lounge over drug-rattled chatter, they had never worked a day or an hour or minute. Never worried about a resume of a cover letter. The letters CV would be mistaken as a new prescription pill to try. Posh apartments came from parents who couldn’t stand them or understand them or just didn’t want to know them. Life ran on platinum, black and other exclusively colored Amex and Visa plastic. They barely knew where each other came from and they didn’t care, it didn’t matter, nothing mattered.

Reese and Claire slouched into two metal-backed seats at Café Natural, the hospital cafeteria.

“I hate the fucking bullshit chairs in this place,” shouted Reese. A wide-eyed, grey lady with an IV in her arm muttered something from two tables away.

“My bony hips always get so fucking sore…this fucking body, it’s like I came out of the womb a corpse, a fucking skeleton. Fuck.”

“Oh fuck off,” Claire puffed.

The two stared at each other from behind their sunglasses. The silence was broken by the presence of an orderly and a small, curvy Italian girl with a stale complexion. Her long, black hair was gaunt and stringy as if she’d run for hours in a blistering wind and hadn’t washed it for weeks. But she was gorgeous.

“Sit down you crazy fuck,” Claire said. “We saved you you’re favorite seat.”

The seat didn’t matter but the place did. Café Natural. A favorite haunt of these three. Every few days they ended up here, eating a meager breakfast or lunch or dinner depending on the drug or drink or suicidal inclination or mix of all three. Reese usually arrived by ambulance in the afternoons, frequenting the daytime coke bars she’d come to love, by 2 p.m. feeling sorry enough for herself to slit her wrists or at least overdose. Claire nourished herself on Bloody Marys and Codeine, known to hail a cab and check herself into the hospital when she was nearing coma. And Sage often watched the sunrise, eyes bloodshot and head pounding, with a bowl of uppers and downs beside her. So early morning meetings at Café Natural were usually her fault.

In an instant, Sage’s color was back. She smiled. But this smile meant nothing. Not a reassurance to the others or a comfort for herself – just a crude mask, covering the grotesque vacuum in which they existed.

“We should have frequent flier cards at this point,” Sage purred, her voice raspy, sensual.

The orderly turned and strode silently away, shaking his head. Around their table, patients, doctors, and family members filed through the ‘grab-and-go’ cue, picking their nutritious meals – whole grain pastas, tofu burgers, fruit smoothies. The girls noticed no one.

“Ha, we should, maybe get a discount…” Reese murmured. It was the third time in two weeks Sage had ended up here and her friends weren’t happy. They were wasting their day.

“That’d be wonderful,” Claire bumbled in a trippy tone, she talked like this often, constantly dazed. But her voice cracked as she spoke. Blushing scarlet, she feigned a cough and murmured, “funny idea.”

“Really? If it’s so funny than why don’t you fucking laugh?” Reese barked.

Sage snorted a laugh and Reese giggled at her own joke. Breasts, loose in a blouse that hung off her shoulder, wobbled as her chest heaved. The two liked ganging up on Claire. She was the oddball, never quite up with their dry, drab humor. And she was clearly the least good-looking. An easy target.

Claire hung her head and Sage grabbed across the table for Reese’s silvery fish-scale purse. The brass zipper scraped her left wrist as she shoved her hand in.

“Ouch. Fuck. ” She ripped her hand, now clutching a packet of Camel Blues, away from the bag. She stood. Faded jeans hugged firm calves as she sauntered, a drunk, sexy sway in her hips and ass, towards a wooden bench in the open air outside the café.

Plopping down on the bench, she fumbled with the pack and began tearing at the first thin, white cylinder she could coax out of the cardboard. She ripped the filters off her cigarettes when she smoked, hungry for the toxins lost in the white fuzz between lips and tobacco. But filterless cigarettes left a permanent mark. The skin on the inside of her index and middle fingers was charred, like the core of an apple, beginning to brown in certain spots.

Reese and Claire followed. Reese shoved in next to Sage. Claire, looking to do the same, caught her boot on a crack in the beige pavement and twisted her ankle. Unconcerned, the other two watched her wince and then regain her balance. Reese reached for the pack and Sage blew a curt breath into her face, clouding her head in smoke, fogging her sunglasses.

“Fucking bitch,” Reese spat.

Reese didn’t really like Sage or Claire. It wasn’t clear if any of them liked one another beyond a bond shared over white lines in bathroom stalls, shadowy night clubs, and apartments they’d sleep in once and forget the next day. Superficial was too nice a word for this threesome, speeding vaginas first uptown to downtown and back up again. Night by night by night, bodies and minds consumed with themselves, consuming themselves, self-loving and self-loathing, drifting through days, coming awake at night only to self-destruct. They were nocturnal druids, unable to predict anything beyond their next pleasure, clinging to these hollow others for lack of another identity, doing nothing, absorbed in a lifestyle that made them feel like queens.

Or at least princesses.

“I wish I was a princess,” Claire blurted, unprovoked. “I’d buy Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren and Jean Paul Gaultier. Not the brands but the actual guys. I’d fuck them, even if they were gay, just to say I had and then they’d work for me. Only me.”

“Yeah, Jappy Jap Jap,” was Sage’s response. She exhaled, quick and hard. The smoke obscuring the dour contortion of her face. Her head shifted right, away from the table. Long and soft, she starred at nothing, deep in thought… No, just bored, not just of the conversation, or the girls around her, or the city, bored of bored, of boredom and apathy. Bored. But there’s nothing else there. Nothing clicking behind those ‘fuck me’ hazelnut orbs that flitter now –able to spray sultry passion with a glance – focusing on being unfocused, above the cigarette smoke dancing in wafts around their faces.

“Fuck you Sage, why don’t you go try and kill yourself again?” Claire said with sickening aplomb. Her head teetered as she stared at Reese.

“Why don’t you?”

“Maybe I will!”

“Maybe you should. God damnit you bitches, I just wanna go fuck Dylan.”

“Ladies, ladies,” interrupted Reese, tender and conscious at the mention of Dylan’s name. “I like the fire, the passion, let’s all fuck some time. But right now,” she waited, eyes ablaze, clammy palms resting suggestively on boney hips, “there’s an all-day rave in Brooklyn.”

She dropped her own hand into her bag and returned with a clenched fist. Splaying her fingers with the craft of a magician showing you the card you picked from the deck, Reese instead produced three tiny pink triangles each engraved with an asterisk.

“Cute!” piped Claire, sarcastically. She pressed her index finger against Reese’s palm and popped a triangle in her tongue. The others followed and stepped into the subway, heading further and further down, nothing but obliteration on their minds.

* * *

Claire thumped against a bronze mallard duck protruding above the handle of her apartment building’s front door.

“Too late for the fucking doorman,” she sputtered, between gasps for breath and gulps of bottled water. She hadn’t gone into the rave. No, instead she told Sage and Reese she’d meet them inside, strolled back to the Subway and now meandered through her building’s first floor, eyes wide, waves of blissful warmth washing over her as the pink triangle did its job.

The 6th floor hallway, marble floored and with mirrored walls, opened onto a curved, granite balcony – an ideal perch for late night cigarettes or risqué blowjobs. She wandered down the hall, running clammy hands along the mirrors, smudging the glass and tickling her fingertips.

Her emotions splintered and she stumbled into the balcony’s sliding door. The ecstasy was turning on her. She moved forward onto the balcony and considered the ledge. A flat stone wall, cold under her perspiring grip. Easy to sit on, legs dangling in the air. Easy to slip from, tumbling into a memory, a thought forgotten. A permanent end. No more cries for attention. No more horizontal wrist cutting. Pussies. No more beauty contests, no longer the butt of jokes. Nothing more than the nothing she already had. Darkness.

She teetered back. Her heels tapped against the marble, a misguided horse in a drunken trot, and she reached her door. Fumbling with the keys, she stepped across the threshold.

Inside, he shut the door and breathed relief, excitement, the hollowness after climax.

Reaching above broad shoulders, he peeled off thick auburn curls and tossed them to the floor. False lashes thick with eyeliner fell to his feet, picked from his eyelids. Coughing, he scratched his chest, behind the plastic cones that passed as breasts outside his door.

Tripping into an open space between the kitchen and living room, he snarled at his stainless steel reflection on the fridge. The glimmering metal warped him, drawing an incipient creature, trapped in a fog behind the metal, features a breath and sleeve wipe away from clarity, amorphous and ugly and misunderstood. Except for those eyes. Sooty ovals, grim and piercing, staring out from the steel into his own eyes, blazing fiery in their centers, scanning the physical presence that created them. The steel reflection, a splatter painting of his existence, more real than any of the persons he ever was.

A pain stabbed through his temples and he doubled over. A shuddering left hand clenched the chiseled ivory side of a low coffee table and his knees buckled. He tore off the blouse, bra, boots, skirt, leggings, panties. The blissful waves collided with an explosive throb deep in his skull.

His vision blurred and his thoughts swirled. Long arms rubbed against his forehead and then in a swift motion reached down to his sweaty thighs and tore a foot-long piece of ducted tape from between them.

Suddenly, he was numb. His penis slipped down, shriveled and distorted. He stared at it, sweaty and sticky between his legs, unknowing, unfamiliar, an appendage trapped, hidden. Another pang and his eyes watered, unable to see, a caged libido spewed out of him.

Look at me.

His eyes darted from the front door to a coral white sofa and then through a doorway on the left where he slept. Nothing.

He stood. Scrambling towards a mahogany mirror in the breezeway of his apartment, he scratched at his face, make-up smearing, lipstick smudged against a faint hairline on his upper lip.

Touch me, you have to, feel me, know I’m there, I’m here, always.

His head, topped now with a blonde crew cut, tilted down and his eyes shuddered in their sockets. An erect penis stared back at him.

Manic, he grabbed it and squeezed. Pain and pleasure splashing and crashing from his crotch to every extremity. He screamed, howled, ran to the bay window looking out over the city, spread his legs wide and squeezed. His head tossed and his teeth chattered, froth and snot and sweat sprayed across the glass. Deep inside him, behind his bowels and beyond his loins, two shadowy figures collide.

Silence.

He collapsed on plush pink wall-to-wall carpet. A freshly waxed chest heaved long and steady, remnants of mascara trickled watery down his face.

From a tan and gold Gucci handbag, lost in a shredded pile of women’s clothing behind him, a vibration. He rolled over onto his stomach and clawed his way to the noise. Tossing the lacy bra, with fake breasts sown into the cups, aside, he found the bag and cell phone inside.

Text message from Sage.

Dylan will you come find me, I’m rolling hard and I’m all wet for you.

A twisted grin, those eyes pleased and focused.

I’ll be right there.

Toast The man

Dear Dado,

I wanted to tell you that I’m not as good a Santa Claus as you. I never will be. But don’t fault my effort. For the past two years, I’ve crawled into the velvet red pants and black plastic boot covers and tried to be Santa. Everyone in the living room laughs and cheers, but I know it isn’t the same. The suit doesn’t quite fit; the beard is a little too long; but most of all I don’t captivate the familiar audience of Gaga, Cousin Ed, Jim, Nell, Emily, Robin, Sara, Lizzie, Nick, and everyone else who gathers in your living room on Christmas Eve the way you did.

I’ve been told many times of one of my first encounters with your Santa. I believe I was only five when you entered the living room and to everyone’s surprise and horror I kicked you in the leg. I’m not sure what inspired my reaction to the sight of Santa Claus and apologize incessantly for my behavior that night. I’ve also been told though, that you carried on with entertaining the room and did not allow my adolescent shenanigans to spoil the evening. It is something that I’ve always admired about you. Quiet cheer and steadfast confidence that permeate everything you do and always fill everyone around you with a similarly sublime happiness. You make it seem so easy. It doesn’t take a booming voice, a cackling laugh, or an overly eager nature to both command the attention of a room and put everyone in a state of ease. In fact you seem to do it in opposite fashion, with a calming voice, a clever wit, a subtle presence. Whether at Truffles in Hilton Head, on the driving range at Sea Pines Country Club, walking around the inner harbor in Annapolis, or simply visiting in Bellefonte it is as if in the heads of everyone you are with a little voice whispers, “Dado is here, everything is going be fine.” An intangible sense of security infects the people you care about and interact with.

One lazy summer in Bellefonte, you helped Lizzie and Nell build a fantastic tree fort in front of the house and helped me put together a clever, spring-loaded catapult. Your vision in planning these projects and sophisticated dexterity in which you constructed them amazed my eager mind and eyes. Sawdust caked the floor as hammers slammed, saws sawed, and nails penetrated wood. I have an everlasting image in my head of what I believe to be a “classic workshop”: you with tape-measure in hand surrounded by a sea of wrenches and screwdrivers, happily checking the length of a plank of wood that would eventually become my catapult. Looking back in this summer, it is not only your woodshop cunning that impresses me but your undying commitment to making the lives of others joyful. Lizzie and Nell spent hours and hours in that tree fort. Talking about their ideal futures, their friendship, and everything else young girls gossip about. It was the centerpiece of their great bond and it would not have been possible without your hard work and desire to help. My catapult led to many entertained afternoons thanks to your imagination. The list of your selfless acts goes on and on, which brings me back to Christmas Eve.

All those nights, in those precious, exciting pre-Christmas morning hours, you weren’t just bringing the joy of the fictional Claus into the living room for the younger kids to enjoy, you were flooding the room with your brilliant, powerful, compassionate character. Though we all saw Santa Claus, behind the beard and under the red cap we stood in awe of someone even greater: Dado. I promise that will continue the tradition as long as I can. And while each year the red jacket and pants and the snowy white beard will make me an imitation of Santa, all I want to do is try to be like you: to affect people in the dynamic, admirable way you always have. I hope that I can.

Love,

Tim

Sorry I didn't write my paper, I was facebooking

Neither The Oxford English nor The Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary has a definition for the verb to facebook. Dictionary.com, my reliable on-line source for definition finding, offered “a school yearbook” as a noun definition and then proceeded to define both face and book separately. It was not until I reached into the far corners of Internet word-defining – the website Urbandictionary.com – that I found a sufficient representation of the verb:

Facebook - verb; It can be used in any tense, referring to the action one does when one uses the facebook. Examples:

1) Aaah! I need to facebook!

2) Becky, have you facebooked lately?

3) I’ve been facebooking for the past three hours.

The facebook.com, which seems all but unknown to anyone older than thirty, took over the world of Internet interaction in 2004. That fall, a group of Harvard sophomores, headed by now millionaire Mark Zuckerberg, engineered a website that allowed people from different schools to make personal profiles, send each other messages, and find common interests. Beginning only with Harvard, the website mushroomed during the 2004 academic year to include schools all over the country, from Southern Methodist University in Houston, Texas to Erskine College in Athens, Georgia, and, clearly, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. It was all so innocent: taking advantage of the world’s largest communications medium – the World Wide Web – to keep in-touch with far away friends, find out what’s happening on your own campus, and make new friends, by, gasp, friending another person: requesting their “friendship” with the click of a button. Once friended, people could view each other’s profiles, post on each other’s walls, and clearly enjoy all the social benefits of true friendship. Now its own verb, the facebook and facebooking are quickly making a case for all campus life to be confined to a computer lab.

Recently, I was in a room with three anonymous girls who exemplified the social ramifications that facebook.com has had on the future of America.

“No, I mean, she seems totalllly cool!” says girl 1.

“Really? Yeah I think so too. I mean she’s in my soc. class and everyone who takes soc. is kinda cool you know?” Says girl 2, who had met the girl in sociology class and thought she might be cool.

“Well…let’s facebook her.” Says girl 3. The other two agree and all three squeeze into one desk chair to research this poor girl’s social status on the facebook.

“Uhh, she’s only got 44 wall posts.” The room goes silent. Apparently 44 posts is nowhere near the norm and suddenly all three girls are doubting this new girl’s coolness.

“That’s not possible,” says a shocked girl 2.

“Whaaatever, she’s definitely cute though.” girl 3 has clicked just below the picture in the upper-left corner of this girl’s profile, where the girl herself or any of her friends can post pictures of her, viewable to the public. For the next twenty minutes, all three of the girls busy themselves with a comprehensive scan of 122 photos of this other girl. I can’t help but snicker and shake my head from behind the copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet I’m reading for class.

The original facebook page was fairly basic. A soft blue and white webpage with a photo in the upper left corner and one’s basic information to the right of the picture; this included political views, birthday, relationship status, and sexual preference. Below this section were one’s interests, ranging from favorite quotes to favorite movies. Below this was the message wall, where friends can chat in public. On the left side of the page, below the picture, there was the list of groups one had joined: these included Lion King and Beyond! – a group dedicated to the Disney movie, or Cheese is weird but so good – a group that bonded over an intense love for cheese. Of course dominating the page is the list of the person’s friends: first a total number, then a list of schools where one has the most friends and so on.
As the website’s members and popularity have grown so have the ridiculously extensive elements of the site. Now, you can constantly update your “status” by writing how you feel each day and having it show up on your page. You can give gifts to each other in the form of digital icons. And perhaps most annoying, each person’s News Feed announces everything that one’s friends have done recently, from adding new photos to posting on walls.
The idea is a common ground to exchange information and create relationships; the reality is an addictive site that undermines this very idea. While I admit to frequent use of the website to talk to friends or browse through photos, it keeps me in my room rather than outside meeting or hanging out with the people that I’m looking at on-line. It sounds creepy and in a way it is. However, the unprecedented use of the site by college, and since 2005, high school students –there are currently over 18 million subscribers worldwide – has turned it into a socially accepted and encouraged norm.
Like the three girls I encountered, people measure their social lives by the facebook. It has become a competition to amass friends and when someone is found with a particularly large number, they are awed and revered. In addition, people’s pictures come to represent them entirely. A photo of a drunken guy puking in the road gives someone a first impression who, otherwise, might have had a completely different perception of the guy had they met in person.
This newest product of the WWW generation, of which I am one, is not only making us lazier, but more introverted, and dependant on the web for social interaction. While blogs and instant messages are simply faster and more convenient ways for people to publish writing or talk to each other –along the same lines as cell phones replacing pay phones and even home phones – the facebook is attempting to revamp basic social concepts that need not be changed: supplanting the age-old process of physically meeting someone with an impersonal, electronic handshake.

In a recent interview with Newsweek, CEO Zuckerberg defended his creation against critics that derided it for moving life too quickly to the web.

“We don’t view the site as an online community,” said Zuckerberg. “We bill it as a directory that is reinforcing a physical community.”

My question to Mr. Zuckerberg, whose site is clearly shifting people into on-line existence: Why not live socially in a physical realm instead of recording, defining and, ultimately, degrading life on-line?

Random List

Which actor gets teh hottest co-stars?

I've heard this question debated before (weird?). Friends and family inevitably pick Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington or some other leading man who is in their own right good looking and has a formidible list of attractive female stars they've acted with. It is time, however, to break away from this mold of simply matching the attractive male with female and assuming you are correct. It is, in fact, Jim Carrey who has had the longest running, and very diverse, list of hot hot women acting with him. Surprised? So was I, but just check out the list below and then get back to me.

6). Tea Leoni - Fun With Dick and Jane

In this most recent of Carrey comedies, Leoni plays Jane Hardy to Carrey's Dick. Rocking the frazzled, trim blonde look she exhibited in Spanglish, Leoni is the super-hot housewife type that is at once formally pretty and sexually-charged in a manic way.

5). Rene Zellweger - Me, Myself, and Irene

Agreed, she's not exactly a bomb shell, but when she puts her mind, or boobs, to it Zellweger can be boner-enducingly banging. (Think Chicago). The scrunched up, contorted face that she sports in other films is almost no-where to be found as she plays a convict/mafia-boss's girlfriend and her controlling character is utterly attractive. Her body looks tight and curvy on the motorcyle she rides most of the film.

4). Kate Winslet - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Her the diversity of Carrey's co-stars shines. The titanic heroine plays the wacky, extroverted Tangerine and every male whose ever seen this movie has left completely drawn to her and wanting to spend a night in her weird, poetic, substance-abusive world. I mean who doesn't like an artsy chick? Not only does Winslet nail this role, but she plays the hippish, NYU undergrad, jaded, spunky young girl perfectly. Shes warmly inticing in a subtle manner that one only realizes is a strange attractivness a few days after viewing the film (atleast thats what I thought).

3). Jennifer Aniston - Bruce Almighty

I don't think Aniston is that hot. At all. Period. There I said it. But I understand why people do, why a lot of my friends check her out on-line, and why most of mainstream america clings to tabloids about her though she isn't a good actress by any means: Shes the sporty, fun, American girl most dudes would like to end up with. Just not me. Anyways, in Bruce Almighty Aniston has the tight body, flowing hair, and glowing eyes that made her a hit in Friends. And in this underrated comedy about a man (Carrey) becoming God for a week or so, Aniston's cute looks and hour-glass figure shine.

Two oints of reference:
1). Sex scene - best orgasm I've heard in a long time, should have been nominated for best score simply because of her pitch
2). Boob Enlarging scene - while they might not be Aniston's boobs, seeing them enlarge on her petite body is a thing of beauty.

2). Courtney Cox - Ace Ventura, Pet Detective

Because of my lack of interest in Aniston, Cox gets the nod over her former friends co-star. Don't think of the post-marriage, post-kids, post-Scream Cox (who has a phenomenally unfortunate Fupa) although her character in Dirt is fucking amazing. Think of Cox during Friends prime. She was really hot, overshadowed by America's love-affair with Aniston, but she was hot, young, and totally fuckable. In Ace Ventura her trim but still curvy body and jet black hair made her Carrey's second hottest co-star. Carrey seemed to have a knack for landing hot actresses right in the peak of their attraction.

Defining Scene: Sex scene. An immortal peice of cinematic beauty. Not simply because Cox screams out and her shaply form is highlighted between the sheets, but the song "In the Jungle" plays as the bed rocks and all of Ace's animals peek from around the room at the humping. Classic.

1). Cameron Diaz - The Mask

Absolutely, drop-dead gorgeous. Before Diaz struck it big as the airhead/goofy/comic-relief role she plays in most of her movies, in The Mask she plays the damsel in the distress and it is (from an attractive stand point... well screw it from any standpoint) her best role ever. Long Blonde hair covers part of her face, striking green-eyes peer from slightly closed lids and give that "come and get me" look. Her body is unbelievable. Protruding breasts, a perfect butt and firm legs that go on forever. In her opening scene in the Club, her red dress, her sultry demeanor, and her amazing figure are stunning. I better slow down before I blow it. I literally haven't scene this movie in about 7 years but I remember that scene like I saw it last night. Fucking great. Diaz should have stuck to these type of roles, if not for her own good then the good of every prepubescent boy growing up ever.

The list should be longer than this. I mean think of Liar Liar. Carrey bones the devilishly sexy lawyer and ends up getting is sweetheart wife back. But how can you doubt it now? Sure Pitt has had Angelina Jolie and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Depp has had Kiera Knightly and Penelope Cruz. But, hell, Billy Bob had Halley Berry (and Jolie in real life...gross). When it comes down to a lasting list of hot girls that have acted with him, Carrey takes the cake and probably will continue to.

What can you say to a player like Daunte Culpepper?

I used to love the guy, part of me still does. From the seventh grade on a was a die-hard Minnesota Vikings fan living in Washington D.C. larger due to Culpepper exploits. Assuming the reigns of a franchise at the peak of its talent and capablity in 2000, Daunte led an out-of-this-world offense, rivaled only by the Rams 00s greatest show on turf, to the NFC championship game. Though buttressed by the phenomenal Randy Moss, Cris Carter, forever underrated running back Robert Smith, and offensive line anchor Center Matt Birk, Culpepper put up numbers that came close to Dan Marino's record-setting numbers for a first-year QB: a 98.00 passer rating, 33 touchdowns only 16 interceptions while completing 67% of his passes. In 2002, Culpepper's rating was 96 as he passed for 3,400 yards. In 2004, the QB passed for 4717 yards, 39 tds, and a passer rating of 110 -- the 4th highest in league history. If not for Payton Manning's record-setting season in 2004, Culpepper would have easily been the league MVP that year. Culpepper was the face of the franchise, particularly after the retirement of Carter and Smith and the departure of Moss via trade to Oakland. With pride, I sported my Purple and Gold #11 jersey around the halls of my high school. In fact, during one thanksgiving break when the Vikings faced-off against the Cowboys on Thanksgiving day, I actually slept and showered with the jersey on.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

While other quaterbacks have been more successful than Culpepper (see Tom Brady and Donovan McNabb) and even put up better numbers (see Manning, Michael Vick, and McNabb again), the Quarterback's future seemed set and after consecutive trips to the pro bowl, his place amongst the elite in the NFL seemed similarly concrete. Now at the might-as-well-retire, yesterday's-news, over-the-hill, own-franchise-is-drafting-to-replace-you, shit-out-of-luck age of 30, Culpepper's future could easily be hued as pitch black. In a 2005 regular season game against the Carolina Panthers, Culpepper's knee exploded and 19 months, two surgeries, two teams, and a variety of rehabs, Culpepper is only just been cleared to practice again.

Blame it on the injury or the situation.

After BRAD JOHNSON, the then 36 year-old former Viking stepped in to replace Culpepper and lead the Vikes to an improbable play-offs birth with an 8-8 record, Culpepper was shipped to Miami. Inexplicably, new coach Brad Childress would stick with Johnson (then pushing 38) in 2006 and may as well have stamped void on the entire 2006 season. Yet I digress. Culpepper was heralded as Miami's solution to long standing line of sub-par qbs to follow after the retirement of Marino. He even stared in the summer 2006 Madden commercials, completing passes to Cris Chambers and "getting his role on" in videogaming glory. The roll, however, didn't make it to the field. Culpepper's knee kept on nagging and after four games he sat for the rest of the season. Though he was signed through 2013, Culpepper would not take another live-action snap for the Dolphins.

Blame the agent.

To me it does not make sense for athletes to be their own agents. I understand the worry. Young players, especially those like Culpepper from small towns, don't want to fall to the corruption of money-shark agents ala Bob Sugar and so they elect to rep. themselves. I recently discovered Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards has assumed the role of self-agent. It is dumb. As a professional athlete your daily routine, your monthly, yearly, careerly routine is dedicated to preformance. Off-season work-outs, meetings, and training sessions, mini-camps, summer camps, spring training, in-season games, road trips, morning meetings, all one has time to focus on is the result. Win games and others will do everything else. Yet Culpepper, Arenas and others have elected to take the challenging route of self-management. Adding significantly to their own duties and possibly distracting them from what really earns them the money: their success. A note to athletes considering this idea: DON'T DO IT. There is nothing noble about it, about repping yourself. You are a paid professional there to preform, they are their to get you your money. It works, has worked, let it happen. While pundits might say, "look at the contract Daunte got himself" it is about to be terminated and where is Daunte then? With training camp less then two months away, Culpepper now has to contact teams himself, apply to the NFLPA himself for help, and what else? Oh yeah still find time to work out and show teams he's still worth their time. Having an agent would allow him to focus solely on football in this trying process.
In 2005, after his big-money deal to the Dolphins went through, it may have seemed like a great example of a player representing himself and doing well. Well it is only when things go bad that self-agenting becomes a mistake. When an athlete gets injured or seems ineffective, everyone is quick to bail on him and usually the agent is the last to go. The agent will work for the athlete until there isn't anything to work for. It may be because of money, but that is the way things go. With Culpepper, he is in dire straights and he has no agent in his corner wheeling and dealing for him. It could be possible that Daunte can still navigate the field in the superd way he did only two years ago, but without an agent navigating the business side, he is at a distinct disadvantage and his window is closing very, very fast.

'shower'

The shower calms me. Miniature geysers spray warm currents across my shoulders and down my back. Arching my spine vertebrae by vertebra, I lean backwards into the spherical curtain. The water trickles down the tangled runways of shaggy, blond hair on my forehead. Timid, the aqueous droplets linger on the longest strands that hang at eye level and drop down to my chest – slipping through sparse, scraggly chest hair, past small nipples that are unnaturally low on my body and a slim, flexed stomach that I look at and believe is fit – rolling eventually towards hairy toes. Eagerly, I enjoy the abstracted cascade of liquid warmth that upon contact dulls sleepless hours, months of stress, or simply a bad day. The streams become rivers then floods; toenails and fingertips shoot an excited tingle along the veins and nerves of my arms and legs; water reaches my extremities and a sensation like the opposite of goose bumps runs across my skin; Mouth agape, I inhale steamy mist. Regardless of time or emotion, the constant, thermal blast from dozens of holes in the silver showerhead on the wall kneads my mind into a flowing relaxation: the watery masseuse of the early morning, pre-work hours, of the Saturday afternoon, post-sex moments, of the refreshing thirty-minute break at 3 AM when pulling an all-nighter. Having let the shower coat me in shimmering wetness, I shift slightly back on my heels. I’m immediately drenched. My matted hair plasters to the sides of my head and I stand in the momentary buffer that the careening spray creates between my naked body and the rest of the world.