Author: pseudoisaac

I have a new bike on the way! (From Walmart). And before you judge me,
know that I would have LIKED to buy a bike from a local shop such as
Freewheel Cyclery, but I do not have four thousand dollars to spend.
This one is 170 bucks and has generally positive reviews online.
(Denali men’s road bike, 26″) And many people object to shopping at
Walmart on the claim that it is full of environmentally unsound crap
from China, while continuing to shop at Target instead. But I would
point out that all of Target’s crap comes from China as well, they
just market slightly better-quality products. But a lot of it comes
from the same Chinese factories and travels the same thousands of
miles. And another thing, I will totally make up for any negative
environmental impact by biking to work instead of driving, and also
what is up with people and their goddamn cell phones? And screw those
dumb news reports about “sexting,” making it seem like a nationwide
epidemic among youth. “Vodka eyeballing” also is fabricated. Ok,
breathe.

My St Patty’s Day experience

18 Mar 10

A friend invited me to the St Patrick’s Day celebrations at a Minneapolis bar. When he asked, the following joke came to mind: “What is green, two blocks long, and has an IQ of 40? The St Patrick’s Day parade!”

But my good nature obliged me to come along. After all, the occasion would offer opportunities for male bonding and the society of ladies. And had not Ireland provided the world with fine whisky and the classic beer Guinness, the serving of which had been elevated to an art form?

Having convinced myself with these happy thoughts I drove to meet my friends, and an assortment of HORRORS greeted me. The human grotesqueries paraded before me as if they were choreographed. Each act seemed to vie with the previous one to outdo it in DEPRAVITY. I write from my desk now, whence I can quickly reach the toilet if necessary. It is only from this position of safety that I risk bringing back my nausea in describing the TOTAL PERVERSIONS I witnessed last night. I advise you to keep some sort of emesis receptacle at hand as I recount what I saw.

First, there was coming across Sean Doneghy. This man, a friend of a friend, emitted a radius of body vapors from his considerable skin surface. In his drunken recognition, he greeted me by bumping me with his stomach, which might have been funny if I were not half his weight, and if I were not gagging inside the bubble of humidity that surrounded him. As I reeled from the impact I reflected (behind a forced smile) that Han Solo could not have selected a more CHOICE TAUNTAUN than Sean to shelter his lost friend Luke for the night. Indeed Sean’s guts could have kept an entire CUB SCOUT TROOP comfortable through a bitter Hoth night, as long as they could bear the smell. Luckily MY sense of smell was impaired by the glass of whisky I had tastefully requested from the bar. Once Sean left I entertained the idea that the Irish people’s predilection for whiskey arose from its knack for overpowering the musk of their own unwashed bodies and shoeless feet. And I had just finished the whisky when the next OBSCENE act was staged.

I realized that the bar full of fellow revelers was in fact an abscess, and the booze had finally lanced it that night and let it run. The “pus,” so to speak, was the other people oozing forth from the entrance along with me, as I stepped outside to put my jacket in my car. As I walked back to the door of the bar I waded through a stream of DEBAUCHED people being extruded from the flesh of the bar. They were UNMOORED FROM DECENCY, bleary-eyed, groping like ZOMBIES for their cigarettes and their cell phones (on which they were no doubt arranging DRUNKEN FORNICATION for later that night). I moved through them, AGHAST, trying not to touch one of them for fear she might lurch at me with vodka-laced vomit erupting from her throat. I finally made it back into the bar and re-joined my companions, only to witness yet another ACT OF VIOLENCE TO THE HUMAN SPIRIT.

For I had, you see, filled my bladder because of the two pints of Guinness that I had (quite tastefully and fittingly) ordered. I announced my intention to urinate to my friend. He warned me, quite accurately, that the men’s room’s walls were wet up to chest height with urine and that it smelled like urine too. I thanked him, knowing I could handle a little piss. But what I encountered in addition to piss was a picturesque mound of vomit. As I knelt to examine it (as anyone would do), I indulged in playful speculation about the sequence of events that had left it there. The vomit was voluminous, a half a stomach-full maybe. The splatter radius was wide and its edges jagged enough to suggest that the depositor was bent over at the waist rather than face-down on the floor. It was both in the urinal and below it, making me think the poor guy sincerely believed he could hold it in, until he finally popped, right there at the urinal. And finally, a wadded length of paper towel lay smeared on the periphery. He had no doubt grabbed it as he staggered in from the dance floor. Now the paper towel was a virtual tie-dye of orange and brown, and it was sopping wet. I stood up and peed in the far urinal, then washed my hands and re-joined my friends. I had wondered as I peed what the next DERANGED SPECTACLE would be.

I did not have to wait long. Soon enough a 40-something man with an acne-scarred face and a tight T-shirt walked by and stared at the CROTCH of a female friend of mine. He nearly spilled his beers on us (he had one plastic cup in each hand) as he slurred, “You frim Iowa or sumthin’?” (“Are you from the sex offender treatment facility down the street?” I wish I had retorted, but I only thought of that later). He was probably from Coon Rapids or Prior Lake or something. Eventually he left to harass other young people.

I turned and awaited the next ACT OF DEPRAVITY, knowing that with each passing hour the man’s drive back to Lino Lakes or whatever was bound to become drunker and sleepier.

But the night petered out uneventfully as great big SLOBS afflicted with NO-EXIT STUPIDITY continued to sputter and collide. They had to get close to hear each other speak over the music. One would put a hand on a damp shoulder and deposit spittle and slurs into the other’s ear. Taken together the sweat, breath and spilt beer raised the room’s humidity considerably. Prime habitat for FUNGUS, I noted. Eventually the Coon Rapids man disappeared. He had probably found some drunk girl and was tailing her, like a hyena after the diseased wildebeest that has wandered from the herd. The dying down of the celebration fit, I suppose, with the LANCED ABSCESS analogy.

And that was my St Patty’s Day experience. Tomorrow I am joining the monkhood and leaving society.

3 Mar 2010

Kurt bit me!

Kurt bit me! And it was hard enough to draw blood from my hand. This is only the second time this has happened, the first time being when he was very young and jittery.

I had been feeding him several chocolate-covered espresso beans I was gorging myself on, and he pierced my skin unexpectedly with those sharp incisors of his.

The espresso beans were delicious. They came from my mom in the mail as a birthday present.

But the thing is, I had bought those espresso beans for my dad for Christmas, only three months before.

It was obvious that my mom, in her forgetfulness, unknowingly re-gifted me with a present I had given to them!

A sinking feeling came over me as I began to think of the espresso bean mistake as a faint outward ripple of inner decay. Perhaps it was a sign of incipient dementia and my mother was approaching a steep decline in cognition over the next decade or so. Perhaps I would witness the woman who raised me as her mind dissolves, and merges with oblivion, and she disappears. Perhaps Kurt’s outburst was the end of an unbroken jagged thread leading from my mother’s sickened brain to here, to a painful rat bite on my hand, with two drops of blood seeping out.

But I looked up abruptly and shook off these dark thoughts. Inclining as I do to exaggerate the negative, I had invented a sinister chain, a most-ominous-scenario of events. Maybe there were other explanations, more likely and plausible explanations for why Kurt bit me.

For instance maybe it was the caffeine in all those chocolate-covered espresso beans I was feeding him.

25 Mar 10

On My Lack of Home Internet Access

Since moving into my new apartment I have not had the Internet tubes. I found them too expensive and sought to test the fickleness of my loyalty to a minimalist aesthetic. An unexpected consequence of this has been my new lack of access to porn. So, I subscribed to Playboy. That is, the print magazine.

In each monthly issue are tasteful images of boobs and digitally minimized vulvar creases. Of course a subscription costs money, too. But hey, at least I’m not looking at the nasty stuff, right? What I am asking rhetorically is, do I need to look at “hentai” images of mutilated schoolgirls being raped by monster tentacles? Do I need to watch Ukrainian home videos of men engaged in acts that lead to unintentional traumatic rectal perforation? And most of all, do I really need menstruation porn in my life? The answer, I know, is that I do not need to jerk off to all this stuff.

I just really, really want to.

In an another, unrelated realm of my life, it has become apparent to many acquaintances of mine that I do not have an object for my finer gentlemanly feelings. But my options for meeting people are limited. Kurt doesn’t have a network of friends that I don’t know already. A further consideration is that he is a rat (and a male one besides). He is my hetero life-mate for sure, but as a rodent he cannot provide the companionship and tenderness of an actual human being. A final disqualification is that if I cut off the supply to him of Funyuns, salami and beer, he would savagely turn on me.

As for meeting people at work, that option is cut off because the patients my age don’t seem interested in flirting since they are so preoccupied with expelling the growing contents of their uterus or abscess or whatever the case may be.

Phew! All that said, does anyone have any nice lady friends they’d like to introduce me to?

1250
25 Feb 10

The Cooper’s hawk is back outside my window! In the past week I have
seen it there twice. Right now it is eating another pigeon it has
killed. And of course, the squirrels are poking around nearby quite
obliviously. When I saw it earlier it was on that frigid day when
light snow was coming down. It just sat there, with flakes collecting
on its puffed-out feathers until it shook them off. Not even the
squirrels were out, it was so cold. Today it’s much warmer and the
hawk is apparently doing quite well for itself. Since it’s a regular
visitor I think it may be time for me to name it.

I received an envelope addressed to *** Hanson, 1915 **** Ave S. The return address was hidden on the opposite side. It looked like it was a Christmas letter, perhaps containing cash. It may have come from a forgetful grandmother or wife. I thought I might make a quick twenty bucks if I were cold-hearted enough to open it and steal it for myself.

But I kept it and drove over to the person’s house today before work. He was an old guy in sweatpants and sweatshirt, there with his daughter. I explained that I was Isaac Hanson on 1915 2nd Ave, a similar address and name. He thanked me profusely for driving over and dropping it off. He shook my hand. I said you’re welcome and left.

As I left I thought of how awful it would have been if I had opened the card and taken the cash for myself. How could I look into the eyes of this nice old man and steal from him? The answer is, I couldn’t. I have a tender spot in my heart for old people like this. I think it compensates for the twisted knot where my love for infants and children should be.

Isaac

19 Feb 2010

15 Feb 10

As an update, I read in the Southwest Journal that the victim of the
shooting showed up to Hennepin County Medical Center five hours after
the shooting with a gunshot wound. But he refused to cooperate with
police, probably due to the “no snitching” code of street culture.
Luckily the shooter was arrested. But I doubt he will receive more
than a light sentence since there is no one to seek a conviction!

Proust and the Squid 15 Feb 10

I just finished a good book called “Proust and the Squid” by Maryanne
Wolf, a neuroscientist and child developmental psychologist. The book
is a brief overview of how the brain manages to read, how it evolved
to do so, and how it sometimes fails to read in the case of dyslexia.
I would recommend it – don’t let the stupid name put you off (The name
is only superficially related to the subject matter).

Wolf begins her exploration by meditating on a childhood love of
reading. Pairing her own recollections with a sentimental essay from
Marcel Proust about early forays into literary fantasy, she launches
into a description of the reading brain. She presents a summary of the
findings of modern neuroscience: brain scans suggest a novel
adaptation of ancient neural structures devoted to speech, spatial
recognition, and higher cognition. Autopsies of stroke victims reveal
severed links in the chain of reading comprehension. And the natural
history of childhood shows a progression from storytelling to decoding
of text to fluent comprehension to expert reading and going “beyond
the text.” The overall picture is of a human brain with no real
“reading center” but which has adapted through amazing plasticity to
accomplish automatically what took millions of years to develop:
experiencing another’s thoughts, mirrored through seemingly inert
symbols on paper.

As Wolf recounts, the transformation from oralcy to literacy took
place in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms but over many
thousands of years of human history (In some societies reading never
developed at all). The author describes the development of visual
symbols, the alphabetic breakthrough, and Socrates’ vehement
objections to what he thought of as the hollow wisdom conveyed by
written texts.

The last third of “Proust and the Squid” addresses Wolf’s day-to-day
work as a child psychologist: what happens when the brain can’t learn
to read. Multiple lines of evidence point to several theories, not all
of which are incompatible with each other. In essence, the dyslexic
brain has failed to co-opt the necessary neural circuitry for fluent
reading. But it may possess strengths in other areas due to the
brain’s tendency to compensate. Whether there is an evolutionary basis
for the rather high prevalence of dyslexia is the subject of brief
speculation at the end of the book.

I would recommend “Proust and the Squid.” It is a brief treatment of
the reading brain that will interest anyone who loves to read and is
curious about reading’s cognitive and historical basis.

A Hawk Meal 9 Feb 10

A few days ago I looked out of my window near Nicollet and Franklin to
see a hawk picking apart a rock dove that lay on a branch nearby. The
pigeon was prone, straddling the branch, and the hawk was definitely a
Cooper’s hawk. I pulled out my guide and verified it: I confirmed the
wide white tail band on the distal rectrices, the rounded tail tip,
and the relatively large size that distinguished it from a
sharp-shinned hawk. This bird was at the northern edge of its winter
range, but apparently was doing quite well for itself. Even more
impressive, it retained the yellow eyes of a juvenile, yet managed to
survive in a Minnesota February, learning as it went.

I watched as it picked at its prey, looking around with each bite.
Once it even seemed to look at me as I peered through my binoculars.
It pulled out about a foot of small intestine, which dangled from the
branch with down feathers stuck to its moist surface. The hawk pulled
out the stomach and cast it down into the yard below. The neighbor’s
dog (named Theodin from Lord of the Rings?) would probably investigate
the lost organ the next day.

The bird picked away at the ribs and spinal column and then ate the
liver, lungs and heart. It ate a large yellowish organ I didn’t
recognize – a pancreas maybe? The (rather dumb) neighborhood squirrels
were extremely curious about the newcomer. The poked around on the
nearby branches very close to the feasting hawk, even crawling on the
underside of the branch on which the bird sat. They occasionally gave
their chittering “danger” call when a glimmer of recognition overcame
them.

Later I looked up and saw the hawk fluff out its feathers and sit
plumply on the branch, with the corpse still at its feet, with gray
down feathers stuck to its hooked raptor’s bill. It eyed with seeming
irritation the squirrels that clambered around there. They were
oblivious to the threat a Cooper’s hawk posed to them. These stupid,
ignorant city squirrels were so fat off dumpster fare they didn’t even
bother hibernating like their country kin. Why conserve fat stores
when you can feast daily on pizza crusts and apple cores? I wished the
hawk would kill one of them.

Later the hawk was gone, only the pigeon’s remains were left on the
branch. Two fully feathered wings hung down from the branch, with two
bloody-bare scapulae. The whole apparatus hugged the branch pronely,
as if it were a ghoul awaiting some demented backrub. People walked by
unknowing in the alley, below and beyond where I watched. If I were a
hawk, I would take the greatest joy in being a city bird – stalking, killing,
dismembering and eating hapless pigeons amidst the people and buildings all day long.

17Jan10 – Shots fired outside my apartment building

0030
I was trying to get to sleep when I heard a prolonged altercation
coming from the direction of Franklin Avenue. It sounded like
inner-city black women screaming at each other in argument. More
likely they were cheering on or trying to break up a fight. Then I
heard about seven rapid gunshots, followed by silence. I got up to my
window and watched as the apparent gunman ran into an adjacent yard as
if for cover, cocked his gun (I even heard the metallic click), and
then ran north through the alley. I heard one final shot about 20
seconds later and then called 911.

The police arrived within two minutes. I fully expected there to be a
dead body in the alley. But there is little activity now in the
immediate area of the shooting (the alley just north of Franklin Ave
between 2nd and 3rd Aves). Hopefully the shooter had very bad aim. I
will walk by there tomorrow as I fetch my Sunday paper from the gas
station. Then I’ll read of whether anyone was killed.

0100
Through my binoculars I saw an ambulance pull away with lights
blaring, meaning a victim must be inside and alive. I saw another pull
away with no lights on and I assumed the worst.

I noticed that the officers weren’t yet searching in the area where I
saw the man run and cock his gun, so I went down and told them what I
told the dispatcher. The officer thanked me and said they were pretty
certain they had the shooter. I asked about the ambulance and he said
no one was actually shot, there were just some injuries from glass
shards. Thank goodness. Apparently he really did have terrible aim.
All the police need now, the officer said, is to find the gun.

It’s been a strange two days on my block. The day before the shooting,
I found a resident sex offender notification on the doorstep of my
building. The 29-year old guy, in the color photo provided, looked
like a total creep-o. And now he lives a block from me. I’m not
worried though because I am apparently not his type (cognitively
impaired twelve-year old nieces).