Good times, crap result, United 1, Metros 1. I'm going to let this guy do the full recap. I'm of mixed feelings: I'm surprised United' season, especially after DeRossario's injury, ended so well, they are better than the sum of their parts, their lack of imagination (a result of the inadequacy of their parts) drives me nuts. Here's the offensive game plan: kick the ball over the top for Pajoy to run onto and dribble ball ineffectually out of bounds three out of four times. And here's my rant: I hate, with every ounce of gratuitous hate I save for these games, hate when keepers punt 50-50 balls out of the box rather than play the ball to defender who begins building through the midfield. Hate it.
Having said that, I unreasonably think United can go to New Jersey and steal a win - Metros suck too, especially in midfield - but United need score first and then survive Benny's bus-parking. As for MLS rindydinkness, why would MLS assign the same referee to consecutive games of the same team, especially when the first was controversial and contentious? United tied Metros last night all by themselves, but why introduce that variable into the result? Here's Shatzer, here's Webb, here's Galarcep. Oh, ran into Big C, here's his new daughter Greta!
- Just to clarify: I care that people read, just care not to care so much that people read that I write what I don't want to write.
- The Cincinati Kid, good friend of Landru and friend of this blog, in response to K's remark about how much it sucks to be in Ohio before the election, Kindly sent me an email: The truth is, we're about to commit ritual seppuku. I imagine Planet must be experiencing some of the unavoidable incoming that we have. And oh how I've tried to avoid it. I've long given up radio for my ipod in the car. Even NPR is becoming cacophonous. I don't watch TV, but even watching shows on the internet has become painful. Sports, the Daily Show, even YouTube videos are now peppered mercilessly with political ads. And not even tolerable ones that might be informative, but mostly the "elect US so THEY don't eat your children" variety. What your favorite Ohio denizen might not be getting, though, are the unceasing phone calls. We have unlisted numbers, and we're still getting about 20/day on our land line and 10 on each of our cells, almost all robocalls. We have caller ID, so we don't answer anything that our phones don't recognize. Doesn't matter. If the voicemail isn't turned off, the robo-caller bulldozes through the answer-recording and bloviates on all of its talking points. I'm estimating about 70% are from NRA-tied groups who warn us that THIS ELECTION is the absolute MOST CRITICAL (well, to use your words, since the last and until the next) in protecting YOUR 2nd AMENDMENT rights (which, as I understand it, aren't even at issue in this election, but whatever), so you better get out and VOTE or else those liberals and Obama will EAT YOUR CHILDREN. No idea on how we got on any of these call lists. We have to answer and hang up or the message will keep recording for several minutes. When we come home from work, we have an inbox full of recordings to delete.
- Why is the Left defending Obama? Honest question: what percentage of everyone who votes for POTUS on Tuesday if voting for versus voting against?
- On the above.
- What is the use?
- What's your reason for voting for Obama?
- Is Paul Ryan still the Republican VPOTUS nominee?
- Voting as prisoner's dilemma.
- On third parties.
- No, you didn't build that.
- X-tr3m3 weather conditions.
- The cause of cancer. Holyfuck, look how old we are.
- He is his generation's greatest academic fraud. I say that admiringly.
- One squashed toe.
- For love.
- The Weird Fiction Review.
- Found my The Clean stash!
TRIPTYCH FOR BELIEVERS
Richard Tagett
I
Hung up on body parts in the particulate daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body, the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No time for ballads, the table is set.
II
Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen.
III
The music is an absence of colliding masses. You can cut your feet on the proverbial and be too close to hear it, the other music, the suffocation of things that can’t fly. A beautiful cacophony flutters in the brightness of dead calm as true objects lost in the politeness of daylight fill the grail of a new primitive. You choke on little candles and all through the night your legs cramp in the sweat of the moonlight. For no good reason a tenderness of geese is billowing in the curtains, as holes in the face open and close and paper scorches sky with futile encryption. Those armchairs foundering in the scum of the surf. Deafness craving disaster green in the spine, knowing the cocktail party’s over. Now it’s all red and your lips are trembling in believability, but it’s only a flickering image in the dark quadrant of your eye bending the light as they mow the daisies under the stars, for no good reason. 