“Talking myself to sleep at one more Hilton” by John Ciardi.

Well thank goodness that’s taken care of.  I was beginning to think I’d hallucinated that poem.

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I have a favorite hotel chain for when I go to conferences.

I think this might make me a (mildly) bad person.  Or if not bad, then sad.  And if not sad, then surely old.

That said, the chain in question has a lot of good qualities: rooms that are on the cheaper end of the business trade (primarily because many of them are “European” style), fluffy towels, marble-this and granite-that bathrooms, free internet, central location, and quite decent attached hotel bars. 

That said, when one’s rubric of quality involves measuring the decency of an attached hotel bar, one has most definitely entered Prufrockian territory.

Speaking of which, I’ve been trying to place a poem we read in 11th grade English (you remember — the class taught by the “Hey, Kool-Aid!” woman).  It involved the line “the doors of my father’s house are open Hilton wide.”  Does anyone remember this piece?

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When I was at this conference in New York, a number of people were shocked to hear how much I hated Texas.

This came as a surprise to me, as I had assumed people just knew about my antipathy.  I refrained from going on about it (in the past, I mean) so as not to come off as a crashingly depressed bore. Come to find out, of course, that (shockers) people are not intimately familiar with my interior life, and that in fact most people took my equanimity at face value.

Useful knowledge, that.  I’ll have to remember that for the future.

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Apparently this does not mean quite what I would like it to.  Instead of meaning the pleasure that comes with discovering anew things one had known in the past, it means instead something like a newly discovered joy for antiquing.

If this were a real phrase in German, instead of something I just made up, I mean.

Oh well.   

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The bestest best man’s toast evah.

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Namely, the interval between the last time he flew from Texas to California (Memorial Day) and last weekend (when we flew from Tomatoville to the Windy City for a family wedding) was, quite simply, longer than any other interval that involved leaving Texas during the past four years. 

Contemplate that for a moment.  We were so desperate to leave Texas that we couldn’t even stand to be there ten weeks, not once over the course of four years, without leaving for someplace else.  “Someplace else” including such exotic destinations as Spanish Fort, Alabama, the place that Mobilians point to with pride as the utter antithesis of white flight; or [shudder] suburban Atlanta, where my one of my graduate school roommates — the one that lived with me in the last house in Cambridge — did the kind of ethnographic research that, god willing and the creek don’t rise, gets one tenure at the “junior college by the South Bay”). 

Wow am I glad to have shook the dust from my boots of that awful, awful, place.

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I am totally a terrible person for saying that, but it’s true.

Does it help that I’ve been to Queens instead (for real, I mean, like Flushing for real, not just to LaGuardia on my way to Manhattan in a livery black town car, though I’ve also done that, but on a different trip)? 

Probably not.  Oh well, I can accept being, you know, that guy.

Of course, it probably doesn’t help that I am also author of the line “sure, I’ve lived in Inman Square, but in the last house on the Cambridge side of the line.  In a house, with a bidet.  Which we never used, but instead used to house a Wandering Jew.  And no, I have never lived in Somerville, thank you very much.”

I’ve slept with people that’ve lived in Somerville, mind you (which, perforce, entails sleeping in Somerville.  I am by no means brahmin in keeping these distinctions).  But live there?  Nope.  Never had the, um, luxury.  Yeah, that’s the word I’m looking for, I’m sure.

;-P

Anywho, so yeah, it’s true.  I’ve never been to Park Slope.  Or Williamsburg.  Or Red Hook.  Or even Jamaica (the really cheap flights are always to LaGuardia, after all). 

More to follow re: the inalterable ickiness of Midtown (Manhattan, that is).

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The biggest rat of them all is abandoning the sinking ship.

I am not sorry to see this happen, it is true.  However, I am somewhat curious as to what prompted the manouvre.

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So, someone* once had a theory about missing socks, absent pens, and over-plentiful coat hangers.  It went something like this.

See, you know how socks disappear?  Meaning, you put socks into the washer, and then when you take them out of the drier somehow you always end up with an odd number?  And you know how pens have a tendency to disappear as well?  Well, it turns out that socks, in the social jumble of the washing machine, abandon their mates every so often.  When they do, the head straight for the company of single pens (’cause once you’ve gone ballpoint, you can’t every go back, right?).  And when socks and pens get together, the progeny of their union is, you guessed it: a coathanger.  Thus we can explain (a) why pairs of socks eventually become singletons, (b) why pens mysteriously absent themselves when you’re not looking, and (c) why closets always have a super-abundance of wire coat hangers.

By the by, I totally didn’t get the Freudian implications of this theory in high school.  I swear.

Anyway, I was thinking about this as I was cleaning out some of the drawers of the china cabinet in my parents’ dining room. 

You know how, in most houses, you always have a drawer-that-shit-lives-in?  AKA, a junk drawer?  The repository for, typically, anything from paper clips and push-pins to business cards, odd-shaped lightbulbs, dead pens, miniature sewing kits, pennies, campaign buttons, and short lengths of cord?  That drawer? 

Well, in our house, it turns out that the drawer-that-shit-lives-in somehow, magically, mysteriously, migrates. 

That’s right.  All the contents of the junk drawer get up — presumably in the middle of the day, when all good people are at work — hitch up their little junk gypsy-caravans, and set up camp in a new drawer.  I haven’t yet figured out what causes the periodic migration of the junk drawer, of course.  Perhaps it has something to do with population density and the necessity of settling new territory to relieve intra-group tension (you know how testy those push pins can get when overcrowded, after all). 

This is the only explanation I can think of for the fact that, as I was cleaning out the drawers of the china cabinet, I discovered no less than five drawers in which candles lived. 

Five candle drawers?  WTF?  I mean seriously?  We have enough stubs to illuminate candlelit dinners for a month. 

And don’t get me started on the number of drawers in which I found note-cards.   I think I’m set on my thank-you correspondance needs for, oh, two years at the very least.

* I am unclear precisely to whom to credit this theory.  I first heard it from an acquaintance of mine from high school — whom readers of this blog may remember as that guy who was obsessed with Les Miz.  However, TLCNYC credits the theorem to Jules Pfeiffer. 

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