To Russia, with love

So, Blogger says that a fair amount of my blog traffic comes from Russia.  If that is the case, greetings, Russian readers! I have no earthly idea why you'd read this blog, but feel free to leave a comment and tell me...

Source: rentauskas.com via Amy on Pinterest

Second City 2: Less Pride, More Pork

So, this is something I did...

This is one of the cartoon voice overs I've done.

http://libtech.marin.org/test/overdue.swf

This is a thing.

America is doomed.

The key to my heart...

I love a lot of food, both haute and not-so-haute cuisine.  But the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most scrumptious thing I have ever had is bone marrow.  The first time I ever had it, I turned to a friend of mine and asked him to kill me because my life would never, ever be as delicious as that very first moment when I tasted bone marrow.

I have mad respect for my vegetarian friends, but I promise you that I will never join their ranks because I cannot and will not ever give up the prospect of hunching over a shank of something and slurping out delicious marrow.

I am paleolithic and unapologetic.

On Poetry

Hey guys, if you're in love with a girl or were in love with a girl and had your heart broken, do me one little favor, will you?  Do NOT, for the love of all that's good in the world, write a fucking poem.  You are not good at it.  It will embarrass you in the long run.  It will be stupid, at best, and an affront to the English language, at worst.

There is maybe, MAYBE one real poet born every generation or so.  Odds are you are not that poet.

Don't write that poem.  Or people like me will make merciless fun of it.

Nothing now can ever come to any good

My best friend passed away yesterday. Here's a blog post I wrote about her in '04:

Friendship is love without its wings?

I stumbled across the above quote while looking for an adequate title for this entry and I am inclined to disagree with it for I happen to be blessed with a friendship whose wings are most certainly present and most certainly capable of lifting me above the melee of my so-called life.

Back in New York, when I first moved there, I was lonely, cold and nearly always broke. At one point, while looking through old letters in a melancholy exercise that I had hoped would lift me out of my perpetual feeling of friendlessness, I found the address of an ex boyfriend and his wife who, last I heard, were living in New York. Now, since this ex was the first person ever to have the gall to have broken up with ME (there has since been one more dreadful heathen of this ilk), he had long dropped off my "most favored nation" list, but I was desperate for human companionship. This desperation drove me out into the streets with my dog in an effort to find them.

I walked up First Avenue, telling myself it wasn't creepy to do a walk-by of their building because it was very near to the dog run at Carl Schurz park. The fact that my dog didn't seem to ever ENJOY the dog run didn't sway me from the belief that she needed to go there, if only to provide me with an excuse for a slight detour to peep at the names on the buzzers at this particular address. Suffice it to say, their names weren't on the building anymore and my dog spent the afternoon huddled against my legs as dogs with healthy senses of self-esteem bounded around us in doglike fervor. I went home, like my dog, defeated by the exuberence of the rest of the world.

Later, I emailed a friend whom I hadn't spoken to in a while, casually inquiring if he had heard where the Least Favored Ex and his wife had taken up residence. I got a reply back with an email address for LFE, promptly emailed and received a phone call in reply. The day before I flew home for Christmas, I got wasted over brunch with LFE and his lovely wife, whom I had always had a sort of bitter hatred for. After all, he didn't break up with HER, now, did he? As the afternoon wore on to evening and it became apparent that LFE would require scaffolding to remain upright, my love for these folks deepened. Pettiness seeped out of me (the first time THAT ever happened!) and I vowed to stay in touch.

Months went by, and I saw them sporadically. As the time went by, LFE's wife and I became the best of friends. She is the kind of person who makes every moment spent with her shine. She listens without judgement, a trick she must have had to perfect in order to live with the constant barrage of LFE's incessant repeating of himself. Honestly, who do YOU know who tells you the same story three times in rapid succession? She has a warped, brilliant mind and is, to me, the epitome of the word "lovely." She's magic. And I'm lucky enough to know her.

I mention all of this because I got a present from her yesterday. She had painted a beautiful face in oranges and reds, embedded flower petals in the paint and added a verse from a particularly apt poem. It was the best gift I have ever received and it made me cry. I am far away from a friend whose support was all I had at some times in my dark New York life. I regret that I am not there to support her as she struggles with her own issues of career and family and love. I regret that I cannot shine for her the way she shone for me; shedding light onto a path I did not know existed.

My wonderful, wicked, silly and lovely friend! I'll forever remember one experience as indicative of the surreal and sublime nature of our friendship: We walked through a cemetary near her house in the thick sunshine of a fall morning, laughing and talking about our lives. The cemetary is so large that one can hardly ever expect to see another live human as you walk through it, but see one, we did. We passed by, hushing our laughter momentarily in case he was there to mourn. As we walked on, my friend kept looking back over her shoulder in the direction we came. Finally, I asked her what was going on. "Dude," she replied, "That guy is looking at us and whacking off onto a gravestone. Oh well. You gotta do something, right?"