sunday best-of blogging

best song to listen to over and over for five hours as you hurtle blank-faced down an unfamiliar highway while coming to the eviscerating understanding that that future you kept having visions of is never going to be yours: "makin' pies," patty griffin.

best explanation for that pointed, shooting pain just behind and slightly above your left eyeball, which you assume is the result of a stroke, or perhaps an aneurysm: you have just finished reading this passage from david grann's september 19 new yorker article on his experience in the brazilian rainforest, where he attempted to retrace the steps of the early-20th-century explorer colonel percy harrison fawcett, who disappeared searching for the remains of a primitive civilization:

as we passed the manso river, where fawcett had got lost . . . , i kept looking out the window, expecting to see the first signs of a fearsome jungle. instead, the terrain looked like nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. when i asked taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, "gone."

a moment later, he pointed to a truck heading in the opposite direction, carrying sixty-foot logs.

"only the indians respect the forest," pinage said. "the white people cut it all down." the mato grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. between august, 2003, and august, 2004, ten thousand square miles of the amazon, an area the size of massachusetts, were cleared away—and, in the past year, at least another five thousand square miles were lost. the state governor, blairo maggi, who is one of the largest soybean producers in the world, told the times, "i don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here. we're talking about an area larger than europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about."

ow. ouch. why do people say things like "barely been touched" as though it's a state of sin, as though human beings are failures for having let things go on that way? what size would it have to be for it to be worth worrying about? that of the united kingdom? of japan? of fucking rhode island? when will there be so little left that everyone will agree that we ought to back down? here and there up crops a lorax who cries out for the trees, but all around him are blairo maggis (even in his heart the devil has to know the water level) and the small earnest voices are lost in the din of buzzsaws and bulldozers and the jangling of cash tills, and i'm ready to start carrying that book around and soap-boxing on street corners—but books are made of paper. i suppose i'll just have to commit it to memory, but after all that my small voice won't be heard any better than the rest. it seems like common sense, doesn't it, to never let there be only one last anything? to not allow the earth to become so changed that we would not recognize it? and even david grann, i'd bet, went home and did nothing differently.

ow. ouch. but i have to keep reading the hurtful words, so i don't forget to speak other ones. i'll just never understand, that's all.

best addition to the season's first significant snowfall: thunder and lightning. i hear this combination only forms in new england. you folks are fairly well spread out, though, and probably better traveled than myself, so if you know something to the contrary please correct me. even here in new england, i've only seen it happen in december. i know nothing about weather patterns or fronts or atmospheric pressure, nor do i care to, so i'm free to sit on the radiator with my forehead pressed against the ice-crackled window and whisper "thank you, sky" over and over and over as if i were two and hadn't yet thought to understand anything. if it doesn't happen anywhere else, i suggest you all spend one month in or around boston every winter, because it's spectacular.

best drawing to use as a logo on a business card:



my ultra-fabulous best friend of fourteen years made this, and i've claimed it, because after sticking by him for that long i've earned dibs on just about everything. you can see more of his sketches here. he was putting lots of drawings up on his flickr page for a while, but lately he's been a bit of a monkey and replaced the drawings with lots and lots of pictures of himself without a shirt on, which you also may enjoy, depending upon your personal tastes. i see more of him in the artwork than the photographic self-portraits, but that's how we work; i'm a writer and a storyteller, and he always hears more of me in the anecdotes i tell about other people, or sometimes even in the pauses. we're lucky that way. if you're interested, he's working on a swell series of pictures of the abandoned mill in the center of our home town. i do love me some abandoned buildings. forgive their frequent photoshoppiness, the application is new to him and he's still pretty excited over it. if you have negative things to say about his work, don't say them here; he's been my partner in crime since he was a skinny weirdo in bike shorts and oversized hypercolor t-shirts, and i'm anything but objective about him.

most visually entertaining anti-smoking campaign: the charming antics of the baby-faced bobbleheads at ashtray mouth. (thanks, spine, for bringing them to my attention.) the tv spots combine so many of my favorite things—creepy children, garbage-pail-kid aesthetics, macabre humor, disjointed music-box melodies—that i forgive them for being, well, not all that effective. cigarette mouth tastes bad, it's true, but you'll get over it if you like the person you're kissing enough. i mean, i've never tasted cat vomit, but i doubt it's truly similar, and some people eat fish heads on purpose. do i want to kiss them? probably not. but if i found out franka potente and john cameron mitchell smoked, it wouldn't stop me from aiming for them in a tequila-infused round of spin-the-bottle. i think these folks are better suited to back an anti-morning-breath campaign. now, that shit's nasty.

best animated short featuring a bug being buggered by a bug: spoilsbury toast boy 2. i couldn't adore david firth more if he were a tiny floating moose with bubbly eyes and a platter of tuna sandwiches on his head, and believe me, my feelings for that moose are intense. every cartoon david makes lately twists the tarnished, pock-edged blade in my amygdala another third of an inch to the left. that's love.

best patient history: written on a request for lumbar-spine radiographs: "past history disco, current recurrence of signs; check for damage."