Author Archives: Wistar

Music for Your Landscape

I drive to DC fairly often to visit friends, and when I’m there, left to my own devices, I take pleasure in listening to the worst radio stations in the world. I usually have fairly decent taste in music, but the second I get into the DC/Northern Virginia area I want to listen to Top 40 Billboard countdowns or DC 101. [Haha – the DC 101 homepage is currently featuring “Sum 41 Pool Party Pictures.”] I will be driving down Route 29, listening to something really cool on CD, and then the second I get on Route 66, I start hunting for the radio station playing Rihanna’s Umbrella song. I tell myself that I just want to be familiar with what the kids are listening to, so I’ll know the songs next time I get invited to a high school party, but really I just have a sick fascination with bad popular music. Like the new Fergie shitfest that is supposed to be so heartfelt. That is truly one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard. And yet it goes so well with Northern Virginia’s endless chain restaurants and strip malls. If I tried to listen to the Pixies or Sonic Youth while driving through McLean, my stereo would probably explode.

Important Stuff I Did in the 1960s

Last night I went to DC to visit my friend Keith, whose birthday is tomorrow. Everyone say happy birthday to Keith! Keith is the best. He does not judge you for thinking tapioca pudding is a good late night drunk person food. He is also the ideal person to accompany you when you go the wrong way on the Beltway at 3 in the morning. This is because he knows all the words to every Meat Puppets and Shangri-Las song, and those CDs happened to be in my car. The Shangri-Las help me and Keith relive our teenage years – growing up in small mid-Western towns in the early 60s, drinking malt milkshakes, putting nickels in the jukebox. Keith likes to question why the rebellious leader of a motorcycle gang is hanging out in a candy store. I respond that when I say I’m in love, you better believe I’m in love L-U-V. He had never heard the PSAs at the end of Myrmidons of Melodrama, so that was a treat. Mary Weiss advises the young lady on a date not “to barge on ahead like a baby elephant.” In the early 60s, baby elephants were controversial figures, infamous for their wanton and whorish ways. They were thought to be perverted and sick little beasts capable of corrupting women from good middle class families. But then in the late 60s, Keith and I launched the baby elephant civil rights movement, redeeming baby elephants from their undeserved reputation. However now the public service announcement’s baby elephant simile doesn’t make as much sense. Just try to understand it in its historical context.

Word of the Day

How come Dr. Dictionary’s “Word of the Day” is more like “No Words of Three Days and Then Ten Words of Five Seconds”?

Sleepy Little Town

This morning Darren drove me down Locust Avenue to retrieve my car, abandoned the night before so we could carpool to Superbad. As I drove home, I realized how sleepy Charlottesville is. Downtown, I was the only person waiting at the stoplight in front of an empty Lucky Seven convenience store. The former gas station/five star restaurant Fuel had For Lease signs in front of it. The few cars I passed on the road dawdled along at 20 miles per hour, the dulcet tones of NPR emanating softly through their windows. Only the sidewalks were minutely populated with lesbians out walking their babies and cute kids out walking their back-to-school puppies. And I wondered if this soporific Saturday morning could be attributed to the arrest this week of Charlottesville’s serial rapist, a man who has terrorized women in the area since 1997. The alleged rapist was described by his neighbors as a kind family man with a wife and four children. He held two jobs – one delivering newspapers for The Daily Progress and one working in the meat department of the Harris Teeter grocery store. [On a side note, my older brother once described this UVA-coed-frequented grocery store as a “great place to meet chicks.”] But now, due to DNA evidence, the rape threat has been neutralized and the women of Charlottesville can unlock their doors again.

I don’t want to give too much away, but in Superbad Seth Rogen plays a cop and he explains to the victim of a liquor store robbery that there’s no chance of them catching the perp because he didn’t ejaculate on the crime scene, leaving DNA evidence. So smooth move, serial rapist. You are a stupid jerk. Now I will go brunch complacently on organic omelettes and fresh fruit from Whole Foods while reading the New York Times on my sunny, rape-free back porch.

Porn for Women

This is a funny book:

Porn for Women

Hehe. And porn for men would be…oh wait.

Proper Chainsawing Attire

This afternoon my little brother Stephen got mad at me because I made him put on shoes when he chainsawed a tree that had fallen across the road. He was walking toward the tree shirtless, barefoot, with a chainsaw in one hand and a can of gas in the other. I said, “No way. Turn around. Put some boots on.” I mean, my parents have broken-down cars in their driveway and a stuffed, roadkill fox in their living room, but I draw the line at barefoot chainsawing.

Ice Cream Gone Missing: A Telephone Conversation

Hey baby!

Hey… Listen, I had a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream in the freezer, and now it’s gone. Have you seen it?

No. What kind of ice cream did you say?

Chunky Monkey. By Ben & Jerry’s. It’s got bananas in it. That’s really weird that you don’t know where it is, because I purchased it, and put it in the freezer, and I haven’t seen it since.

Yeah, I don’t know anything about that.

I was looking forward to eating some after a long, frustrating day.

Yeah, I can see that.

I just wanted one or two bites.

Totally.

You’re sure you don’t know where it is?

No way. Bananas in ice cream? Gross.

The next day a pepperoni sausage pizza and two pints of banana-flavored ice cream mysteriously appear in the freezer. One is flavored Banana Split and it already has a big dent in it. Some little kid must have gotten into it at the grocery store.

PS Diana, you were my roommate once. Who is the little elf that follows me around and eats all the ice cream?

Mistakes I Have Made

On summer days, do not put your jeans on right out of the dryer.

I have a little notebook for my writerly notes

Like a lot of pretentious writers, I keep a notebook in my purse for jotting down story ideas and snippets of dialogue and untraceable garbage like this: “Stuck behind the Frito Lay truck/Christmas stocking.” I’m not exactly proud of this notebook, and I’m careful not to write anything down where people can freely wonder what I’m writing. However, a couple weeks ago I went to a family reunion in Vermont and I made the mistake of pulling out my notebook and quoting from it. It was late at night and I was many beers into it and I was with my cousins, who you would expect would comprise a warm crowd. But no. The second I started flipping through the pages, saying “Wait guys – I have something in here that relates to that extemporaneous joke you were just telling,” I did not hear the end of it. When people are riffing and hanging out, do not pull out your notebook, looking for material. It is like getting caught cheating on a test, but at an institution where your peers actually care and will shame you for that sort of thing. But wouldn’t it have been worse if I had memorized the quoted line before I went out that night? If I had thought, “Better learn this line by heart because I might be able to use it at the bar tonight.” Isn’t that so much worse?

The quoted line, spoken by a Mountain-Dew-consuming friend I used to work with who had just come back from her lunch break to Arby’s, delighted that she hadn’t hit much traffic:

“Everybody must didn’t decide to go thatta way.”

And believe me, I humiliated myself further by saying, “But isn’t the syntax incredible? Didn’t you guys notice the syntax?” Shortly thereafter the Murrays called it a night.

Iraq & Peru

This morning I was thinking about the earthquake in Peru and the victims of the latest bombings in Iraq, but how do you commemorate tragedy in a blog? People read blogs like this to escape, to be whisked off into someone else’s solipsistic universe. I actually thought of having “a moment of blog silence,” but then my eyes rolled out of my head.