. My Mind is Going! I Can Feel it, Dave! . Alrig…

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My Mind is Going!
I Can Feel it, Dave!
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Alright—keep it together, Vanx. You’ve managed for this long to keep from getting all emotionally involved with the election. Four or five more hours. Just hold on.

Oh, it’s useless!

GO BLUE!
Vanx

. Frankenstein Goes to the Rhythm Section . …

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Frankenstein Goes
to the Rhythm Section
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“What glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish Russ Kunkel from the drum riser, and render the audience impervious to anything like a decent groove!” ~ James Taylor

No! Over here!
Vanx

. Ken Leonard Circa 1959 to 2006 Ken Leonard was …

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Ken Leonard
Circa 1959 to 2006

Ken Leonard was the production editor at Chemical Week magazine when I worked there. His job was to take everything that the editorial staff produced and make it work as a physical “magazine.” Ken was the last guy out the door at the end of every chemical week. His was the final eye on our copy, and it was a good one.

Ken moved around a lot. He was fun and very wise. He liked things that I liked, and we got along really well. When he left the magazine, I gave him a small painting of Queequeg. It was kind of an inside joke based on a Moby Dick parody I’d written for the magazine with a character called KPMGqueg. Ken got my jokes. When he left, he told me I was, “one of the good ones.” He didn’t throw that kind of stuff around lightly, and I was glad to hear it.

Ken died last month after a catastrophic asthma attack. Verb-Ops offers the following tribute.

The Band and Muddy Waters Mannish Boy

Wasn’t that a man?
Vanx

Democra-see, Democra-do I will spare you the gloa…

Democra-see, Democra-do

I will spare you the gloating on Wednesday, but I will remind you today of my cogent predictions, already expressed in these screens, of the outcome of tomorrow’s elections in the U.S.

1) Joe Lieberman will go from being a minor pro-war nuisance to being a major pro-war hero, thanks to the short-sightedness of Democrats everywhere.

2) The Republicans will “can-cake the han-gerger”, as they always will, unto the end of our two-party system.

You heard it here, Frist.

Vanx

. A Little Glue Should Get the Coat Through One …

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A Little Glue Should
Get the Coat
Through One More Winter*

I was outed as a blogger at The Show last week. It gave me something to think about.

I imagine that most of my colleagues would have little interest in Verb-Ops in that it is not, strictly speaking, a hardcore science blog. None of them, I assume, would ever join the particular illuminati that actually read Verb-Ops on a regular basis (all thanks and praises). I have shown off Verb-Ops items here and there to colleagues I thought might be interested, believing they would look once and never come back. I’m probably wrong about everything.

Once my coworkers learned about my blog, they asked lots of questions. They’re journalists, for Chrisakes. And, of course, I tried to evade them, not really wanting people from work looking into the smoke that emanates from my midnight oil. Some asked me what Verb-Ops is about. “Cats,” I told them. “All about cats. It’s a vertical.” Others asked me for my URL. “I can’t tell you,” I answered. “That’s not how the Internet works.” Having alienated just about everyone to my satisfaction, I finally got a question that I could not kick into the tall grass.

“Why do you do it?”

“Um,… ‘cause I’m lonely?”

Might that be the answer? My wife started working most nights at about the time I launched Verb-Ops last December. This didn’t exactly give me more time for a hobby, however—my wife and I alternate on solo home enterprise management, which is a time-consuming gig. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly lonely. There is something else that compels me to do this.

On Saturday night, I purposely rented a movie that says a lot about blogging—American Splendor, the film about the cartoonist Harvey Pekar. Somewhere, I’m sure, his comics have been identified as a kind of prototype for blogging. They work on the idea that an ordinary life, with all its “complex stuff,” is interesting, and that stories about a random person—stories that get into thoughts and feelings–can be a compelling read to a wide audience.

But blogging isn’t a public service. The people who do it—and as a percent of the general population, there are still very few of us—have some need to share their lives with strangers. We crave comments on our blogs—they are an indication that someone is reading with interest and has something to say about what we’ve written. The whole blogging trend may come down to society evolving into a kind of oxymoron–collective solipsism. Or it may be a type of addictive behavior similar to Pekar’s record collecting habit.

But these are the easy answers. I distrust them intuitively.

I–and I’m not sure how I’ll feel about this in the future–have spent the last year telling my life story on the Internet. Sometimes I wake up, startled, in the middle of the night thinking, “What the hell are you doing? Stop it! Kill it!” I tried to stop twice, and failed. The first time I started hardcopying all the worthwhile stuff with the intention of killing Verb-Ops. I stopped myself, but who’s to say that I won’t eventually hit the delete blog button?

I love what Harvey Pekar does. He portrays himself honestly—the misanthropic humanist. The Everyman. I have something to learn from him, and he is seeking something in the telling. Who knows where he and I will end up in the process. Maybe a little more human?

Only if we keep it brutally honest. I try. I did, recently, tell the world about getting flimflammed. Didn’t I? I had just finished telling a guy who witnessed the incident to keep it under his hat. Then I published it on the Worldwide Web. I’m not particularly proud of getting beat out of $19 like that—but you’ll notice, if comments are a gauge, which they are, that people are very interested in what happened to me. The mystery still: What’s in it for me to tell them?

Coming up on a year of blogging, I’m done telling the “big stories” of my past. Verb-Ops will have to be a little more real-time in the future. I seriously doubt I will produce the volume of copy I did this year in any subsequent year. Best not to promise one way or the other on that.

So, expect stories, poems, paintings, and pranks to continue for now. Be sure to feed the venture by commenting, and I will try not to assume that swaths of the Web-surfing public that I might not be comfortable with reading my blog are necessarily uninterested in it. That’s not how the Internet works.

Yours,
Vanx

*Harvey Pekar
Illustration: News meeting doodle by Vanx

. Meanwhile… Back at the 2006 Hagerstown Hallow…

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Meanwhile…
Back at the 2006 Hagerstown
Halloween Mummers Parade
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A new film short by Ersatzart.
Which implies there are old ones.
___
Photo by Todd Groesbeck

. Meanwhile… Back at The Show .. . Meanwhile…..

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Meanwhile…
Back at The Show
..

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Meanwhile…
Back at the Northeast News Bureau…
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Feed from Metropark Bureaucam, via Vanx

. Jackson Heist I had an out-of-body experience a…

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Jackson Heist

I had an out-of-body experience at the Dead President Hotel in Washington, DC, tonight. Here it is in real time:

I am checking into the hotel and a man comes up behind me. We are in a fairly posh lobby. He says, “Can you do me a favor? I need a twenty for two fives and a ten. I’m a cab driver.” [Watching this from outside my body, I distinctly remember thinking, why would anybody need that? Isn’t it usually the fives and ten you want for the twenty? Huh?] Of course, the guy is super-chatty and congenial, drawing the man in front of me on line into the conversation. He throws down his money on my suitcase. And I’m all, “Yeah, sure, I got twenty.”

At this point, bills are exchanged, and others of various denomination are moving up and down the man’s sleeve amidst embarrassing confusion to a counterpoint of friendly questions about where I’m in from.

He has flimflammed me, of course. I realize just what happened and exactly how he did it about two seconds after the fact. He’s very gone, leaving me down $19. I did not get a receipt.

The hardboiled part of me wishes he’d just knocked me in the head and stole my wallet. Apparently the hardboiled part has shrunken considerably since I’ve been out of the daily NYC routine.

I’m telling you, I am completely off my game. This encounter may, however, have rounded-off the attitudinal edge that I bring to this annual DC home office meeting. It may pay off in terms of continued employment and flow of twennies.

Humbly,
Vanx

Accounting: I let security in on this tale of woe, of course. They checked the video and sent up a big chardonnay.

. Work in Progress (Detail) , With…

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Work in Progress (Detail)
,
















With seasonal hook.

Happy Halloween,
Vanx

. Off to "The Show" . This is that week in late O…

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Off to “The Show”
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This is that week in late October/early November when the Northeast News Bureau (1) travels to the home office in Washington, DC (2). I will spend the next few days in that quiet space in my head.

Disclaimer: To be honest, I don’t feel I have truly broken hiatus, other than for “Ask Vanx,” in that most of what I am tossing up here lately is a toss-up. I am still on psychological spacewalk. And I still have the greatest confidence in the mission. So, sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

Daisy, Daisy, etc.
Vanx

1) Business writers in New Jersey.
2) Dedicated science writers who, unlike a certain mercenary element of the Northeast New Bureau, would not write about shoes if it paid more.