monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the anti-punch issue

i won't pretend that nothing made me ball up my tiny fists and flare my nostrils this week; glenn beck is, after all, still on the air, and his desperate plea to return america to its lost, puritanical, shame-driven state of yesteryear didn't ring all that tunefully in my ears. porn addiction, like all addiction, is troubling, but a little porn here and there, provided it was made by consenting adults (and don't assume no one wants to be involved in that sort of thing; am i the only person willing to admit to regularly watching the girls next door and being enthralled by the glossy, caricaturish mountain of crazy that is bridget marquardt?), can be a fine thing. the more we castigate people for being human, with all the attendant human instincts and urges, the more we fuel the seedy, deviant underworld that beck so fervently wishes to eradicate--but of course i wasn't counting on him to approach the issue rationally. and then there's this guy, and, as ever, this guy, though to a lesser degree; as distasteful as i find him, when it comes to his limp-wristed swats at malcolm gladwell i'm generally content to leave sailer to his sophomoric, colbert-esque nailedjagasms and move on to more deserving subjects. but if one more person tries to convince me that it's more offensive and exclusionary to say "happy holidays" than it is to say "merry christmas,"* i swear i don't even know what i'll do . . .

it is the holiday season, though, and my heart is ablaze with the giving spirit, so i've chosen to focus this week on things that inspired a sensation opposite that which makes me want to open up a fresh can of whup-ass. i don't know what the opposite action is, exactly, but i think it involves clasping my hands together and doing that little squat-bounce move that small children who haven't figured out how to jump up and down do when they're very excited. that's a mouthful, though, isn't it? let's call it the yippee dance. the truth is, for all my moping and whining, i do that dance a lot; sometimes it's about personal, somewhat senseless things (e.g., my cat just lay down on her side and tucked her perfect feet up under her chin), and sometimes it's about still personal but slightly more reasonable things. i find it prolongs the effects to ignore the universal merits of the origin and just take the little cloudbursts as they come. and i'm in sharing mode, like i said, so here are some things that made tiny irridescent stars swirl around in my head on saturday.

i got up extra early to meet my ex-roommate (who's a lovely girl, despite her unfortunate passion for violent, destructive hookbills) in the south end for the 2006 bazaar bizarre, a craft fair for the city's underserved eccentrics. i lusted after all kinds of beautiful things, like a sock zombie that was crocheted to look as though it were drooling blood (from pepperberry) and this dish by ambrosia porcelain, but at this point in december i'm on a strict purchases-for-others-only diet. it was tough, but so am i--at least, i was, until i found chad walker, whose sweet, strange, misshapen cartoon characters stole my heart so swiftly and completely that i almost had to sit down. i did buy two prints and a button for a friend, but i folded and bought two prints for myself, as well, because they were so perfect, and perfectly me, that the yippee dance overtook me and i couldn't say no.
































the captions don't show up here, but the one on the right reads, "portrait of earth-like planet . . . you can tell it's not earth because there are less jerks." the second says, "for a moment we both feel better--rescued beetle." i didn't hug them in front of chad, because that might have made him uncomfortable, but i have hugged them several times in the privacy of my own apartment. carefully, mind you; i wouldn't want to crease them. the realization that somewhere in some other part of the world one person whom i had never met had been sitting at home being sad and pensive about all of the same things i'm sad and pensive about when i'm sitting alone at home--it's deeply mobilizing, in a way. suddenly i want to double down on all of my efforts to change those saddening things, because i was just one and now there are two, but if there are two there must be millions, millions of us with our one voices fading into the static and buzz swelling up around the jerks on this planet that is earth and not earth-like, and we're all waiting for someone to do the little bit more that will tip the scale in the direction of enough. the odds are maybe not in favor of that someone ever being me, but one never knows. i could imagine never being so angry with anyone again. one other person on the planet thinks there is grace in saving a beetle, and suddenly i am filled with hope.

so i came home with my swag and ate a sandwich and prepared for round 2 of my happy, happy day: going to see the lemonheads at avalon. you likely do not remember, and no one would blame you for that, but i also saw the lemonheads on december 16 last year. evan dando and i have a lifelong habit of falling into anniversaries. between 1996 and 2000, i was able to see evan every year within three days of my birthday, and twice the show started the night before and carried over into my birthday, and it was like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain. then there was a brief transition period where things were a little less consistent (although in 2003 i did get one last rock and roll birthday), but in 2004 i caught him on december 17, and now we've established a shiny new pattern. i do love me a pattern.

what i do not love is driving to lansdowne street and paying an arm and a kidney to park in a garage for three hours, so i decided to take the train. how hard could it be? i wondered; i take the train everywhere else, and fenway park is the draw in this city. getting walking directions to it from the train stop ought to be the easiest thing in the world, and what more reliable source for public-transportation-related directions than the massachusetts transit authority web site? it's got "authority" right there in the title, after all.

NO! the transit authority told me to turn right when i had to turn left, because it assumed i would have the sense to leave the subway through the exit on the other side of the street, and even though i was almost a hundred percent certain that i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign, i carried on, and on, and on and on and on . . .

it's no one's fault but my own that i was too embarrassed to walk into a convenience store and admit that i had lived in boston for four years and had no idea how to get to fenway park from the t stop two blocks away, but i was, and so i wandered back and forth through the boston university dorms and under the overpass and up and down commonwealth ave. for an entire hour before i finally convinced myself that i really was sure i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign. and then i only had to walk for about four more minutes, because of course the avalon was right there.

by the time i got inside i was chilly and sore and very upset with myself, and the club was packed and the lemonheads had already been playing for ten minutes, and that made me feel about four dozen times worse. i picked a spot against a wall and shifted from one stiff hip to the other, scowling. but two and a half songs later i was already forgetting that any of that bad stuff had ever happened, and when evan played his genius, ballady cover of the misfits' "skulls," which i love and don't get treated to nearly often enough, i actually did the yippee dance right there in the middle of the club, and an hour later when the set ended i was so blissed out and permasmile stricken that i would happily have jogged all the way home with the transit authority's web master on my back. it just proves what i've been saying for the past fifteen years: evan dando fixes everything. if we piped bootleg recordings of his acoustic numbers into diplomatic meetings around the globe, the world might be a very different, and much improved, place. thank you, evan's wife, for making him so happy, and thank you evan for making me forget what wanting to sock a pundit feels like. i hadn't known it before, but i think there may be no lovelier thing to fail to remember.

there may or may not be punch blogging next week; it's christmas, sure, but that means i have to spend the day with my family . . . i won't worry about it yet, though. for now i'm going to delight in these tiny things that i've found, and i'll deal with the rest of it if and when i must. you find a tiny thing too, and if you're smart you'll carry it with you everywhere you go.







* three cheers to the united states postal service for rolling out six holiday stamps this year, including this one:


so pretty! at least john potter still believes that it takes all kinds.