| legal action of the eiffel tower variety, bottom suit jacket buttons, urinary tract infections aglow |
[11 Aug 2003|12:56pm] |
Did you know it's legal to publish a picture you take of the Eiffel Tower during the day, yet a published photo taken of it at night is subject to copyright laws?
It kind of reminds me of the bottom button on a suit jacket. See, the bottom button exists to be unbuttoned. However many buttons there are, the one that's on the bottom is never to be buttoned. Now, before you ask why they include a bottom button, let me point out: It's like the last day of school. Remember the last day of school, when you were eight years old? You might have complained, "Why is today the last day of school? We're not doing anything today. We're just sitting around, watching movies, talking about summer vacation." Well, see, if today isn't the last day of school -- if the last day of school were yesterday, you'd have been complaining similarly.
Someone accused me just yesterday of having no sense of symbolism. Another someone asked me, "Don't you have any sense of formality?" These are questions they were made to ask by my Columbo-level of Fucking With People In Public.
Oh, oh, no: my sense of symbolism is in truth far greater than yours. My sense of formality is in truth far more acute than yours, in that I know formality, I know maturity, and furthermore, I know my own personality. I simply choose when to let each one show.
Yesterday, I stood before a rented church in a rented tuxedo with rented friends, after guiding a rented girl down the aisle. Be aware that the word "rented" does not indicate any kind of distaste. It simply means that everything was, for the moment, whether I wanted it to be or not, temporary. These are places and people whose time I can only share when situations and circumstances are in certain line. As I stood before this church, the top three buttons of my suit jacket were buttoned, following the closest thing the wedding came to a cinematic disaster: the top button had popped off, requiring the wedding director, the one who'd ask me at the reception if I'd like a plate for my slice of cheese, so I actually looked like I belonged here, to fish a safety pin out of her pocket. Everything went well. The top button -- which someone at the rental shop had tied on, maybe as a prank -- was buttoned, the bottom stayed unbuttoned.
So you may ask: why have a button, if it has to stay unbuttoned? Why have a fourth button at all? Why not simply have three buttons? And I tell you: because then the third button would need to stay unbuttoned. I tell you: I've seen it happen. I've worn three-button suit jackets with two buttons buttoned. I've worn two-button jackets with one button buttoned.
And then you say, well, the tuxedo vest you wore yesterday had buttons that didn't even have buttonholes. They were just kind of stuck in the "fastened" position. And I say: that's different.
In related news: I hate -- I fucking hate when people ask me what I'm eating. As a perhaps-not-normal person -- I've come to accept this, maybe -- I don't eat what more-normal people do. That's not to say I like being different, or that I'm trying to be different. It's just what I do. It's how I am. I won't start apologizing now, nor will I stop doing it now. I'll let the wind keep blowing, and keep eating the sometimes-hateful things I eat. You, people of the world -- including and/or not limited to my brother's wife -- please, don't assume that both because I like talking and because I eat these strange things, that I'm dying to tell you what they are, choking to tell you all about them. And don't walk into my kitchen and ask me what the hell that smell is. My mother used to make Polish ground-beef-filled-cabbages, the name of which I remember, and can even spell, yet choose not to do, and they smelled more horrible than horrible itself. Nothing I make for myself to eat smells that bad -- I cook bland things, to tell the truth, and then douse them in Tabasco; such is the lopsided sensitivity of my taste -- so you have absolutely no right to complain, or to pretend to be complain. And you can say I'm being pretentious when I say everything I've said in this paragraph, and you could say it until right now, when I say this: I don't hate you because of this. I simply hate that such situations arise.
I'm the bottom button on a suit jacket. There's a buttonhole I can see. I am aware of the buttoning process. I know all the rules and all the methods for being buttoned. Yet I shall not be buttoned.
I'm reminded of something Miyamoto Musashi says in the Book of Five Rings, about how his positions will make any person armed with two swords and the willingness to see invincible, and how this one guy in my Japanese class who thought "like a Japanese person" didn't understand the differences between lines and rays, or even line segments and lines, when I told him what I told him about Musashi's Geometric Invincibility. Yet, he read the book, over and over again, and said he did so because he absorbed the philosophy "like a Japanese person." That's pretentious; it's even more pretentious to tell me that I don't understand Musashi because I don't understand the symbolism of the Void, and I cannot give myself to the Void. I'd say you're just lashing out and grabbing at the last few sentences of a book you don't understand. I'd then ask: if I'm not the Void, what am I?
(In a connected note: I hear the Void in television commercials for wholesome family products where people smile with white teeth, and the music is a kind of throaty rock and roll where drums, bass, vocals, and guitar blend into one instrument, and I wonder: who wrote this? And I think: no one.)
In closing, I wonder how one gets a urinary tract infection. I've got cranberry juice on the way, over here. I talked to a fellow groomsman about Neverwinter Nights for an hour during the rehearsal dinner, only to see him that night drink half a bottle of NyQuil before bed, and then feel ridiculously sick about six minutes into the reception the next day. This diagnosed-as-genius brain of mine has put two hundred and two hundred together, and come up with both four hundred and "maybe I have the flu." This morning, I realize that more, though only after a strange experience involving the toilet.
See, as a person with much Inguinal Hernia Experience, I have honed my urinating ability so that I can hit a Cheerio in the dark from fifty feet. I have, at times, and jokingly, suggested that once I start my own religion, I'll propose an "Inverse Ramadan," where no follower of me is permitted to use the bathroom during daylight hours, so that by the end of the day, you might feel, with regards to urinary tract, how I feel every fifteen minutes. Yes, yes, I'm getting the problem looked at once I get some money. I'm getting the best-trained doctor to fish that link of small intestine off my bladder and out of my scrotum, and I'm going to make sure he has a good time doing it if it kills me.
Yet, yesterday night -- last night, if you like short words -- something strange happened. Allow me to relate:
That twelve-hours-without-making-water feeling arose. I stepped into the bathroom. Nothing.
It didn't go away. I had to squint to get to sleep.
This can't be good, can it?
Or is it simply fitting behavior for a bottom suit-jacket button?
If living -- nay, speaking -- nay, using words -- nay, trying to transform thoughts from thoughts to something else -- is essenced in being mistaken, how am I mistaken when my brain tells me, right now, that I have to go to the bathroom, and my words on this screen tell me that right now, "It's not going to work"?
I learned yesterday, and at a wedding, in fact, that I am too trained in my excretory sensitivity to ever, under any circumstances, urinate in my pants, even if I'd wanted to. In addition to ruling out comfortable scuba-diving and uncomfortable body-in-bed activities of the sleeping variety, this makes me something of a symbol myself, of myself.
Anyone who uses these traits in a character in a story is not subject to legal action, unless that story is a novel, and that novel takes place as night, when the lights are aglow.
That's all. I think we should call it a day for now.
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