"In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life. Then he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve. Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat. The tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople. And then my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that--manuscript letters written for the home papers. But he was treading on dangerous ground, now. He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony. I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public." An abrupt digression at the end of a chapter dedicated to the description of sage-brush in Mark Twain's Roughing It. It is a fascinating chunk of writing.

Reasons why the Internet Rules

Americana Tropicana

These days are all, happy and free

And the final American jaunt of the summer comes to a close, with rain over Philly: slippery turns and car accidents, a dusty pink light emanating from behind the clouds, a pulsating, muted electricity from within them.

The long weekend was spent on a sailboat in Martha's Vineyard with my good friends Hasbrouck and Rebecca. The weather was ideal, the booze flowed uninhibitedly, the sun was strong, and the waves glassy and forgiving. Every night the stars sat unmasked and milky above the placid harbor, and the breeze would be light and chilly, and from off in the distance we'd catch whiffs of great coastal parties, of fireworks and thumping jazz bands. We sailed, tumblers in hand. We ate enormous sandwiches, pots of mussels, ice cream sundaes, steak, grilled off the back of the boat. I browned in the sun, I spilled red wine everywhere, I lusted over middle-aged men in white pants and seersucker sportcoats. But even as I write this, a morning later, my memory escapes me. Like trying to recall a dream. Let me just say this, in an attempt at summarization: we spent the majority of our time lying on the beach, exploring on mopeds, drinking on the boat, eating with our cocks, wearing our Nantucket Reds, and watching Happy Days. In every pocket of this adventure hid something interesting, or hilarious, or surreal, or extremely picturesque, or just really fucking rad. I don't know if it was the company, or New England; the Johnny Walker on ice, or the dewey marine air, but it was all just unsurmountable.

So that's what's been going on. Now back to the Burgh on Monday for moving in and scary-ass writing workshop. On another note, I don't know where this blog is headed. I suppose I just don't really have the time for it right now, to be honest. Maybe it would be best, for now, to declare a sort of informal blogging hiatus. Oh, don't be like that.

P.S. The Happy Days hierarchy goes as follows:
1. Howard Cunninghan (The semi-racist realist)
2. Richie Cunningham (the optimist)
3. The Fonz (the Byronic anti-hero)
4. Mrs. Cunningham (The master manipulator)
5. Ralph Malph (the enabler)

5.5 Chuck
6. Anonymous, objectified female characters
7. Potsie (The Machiavellian)
7. Joanie (The parasite on the side of humanity)

8. Black people (where are they?)

"So who

Mr. Feeney vs. Thomas Fucking Jefferson

Yes this exists. Yes I spent a portion of my 4th of July watching it. I also cooked and ate a lot of amazing food, drank mad brews, and jello shots, and I think at one point I watched Anchorman with Chris Moschella. Coconut cake and chicken salad throughout the weekend. Then we saw Beirut on Monday. Also this place is super hot!

While a hand made of water picks you up and puts you down

"I really love our classic, over-privileged, over-educated, over-indulgent weekends." H. B. Miller

Some stills from our annual booze cruise around the Chesapeake, as captured by Bailey Miller. While last year may have involved more cannabis and less engine faults, this year witnessed finger sandwiches and the dwindled remnants of a thirty-rack of PBR. There were also, back on dry land, pitchers of rum punch with breakfast, of Orchard Breezes with lunch, of Bellinis before dinner; beautiful bottles of wine, champagne in ice buckets underneath the cabana, drowsy rounds of badminton followed by anxious plunges into the pool. Drinking and eating and swimming and satirizing: that's what happened this weekend. Of course, this is all an exiguous precursor to the jaunt up to New England that is to come, which, I surmise, will be more of the same, just on an unimaginably more legit scale.

The point of all of this is that it's fucking ideal. And that it doesn't happen all the time, and that things change drastically and often, but some things, some traditions, like the priority of great, indulgent escape, sit remotely untouched, and savourable, and pristine among friends. Because it's good when we do things and we make things of ourselves and we achieve, that we evolve, that we harden, that we become people. But it's also very important that sometimes we don't. That sometimes we are spoiled, lazy, overprivileged, overindulgent, and completely fucking pointless.

Down the lane I walk with my sweet Mary, hair of gold and lips like cherries

Steak sandwiches, Arnold Palmers, chicken salad and cherry pie on the Keating Porch.

"Dynamite Ham"

[Easter Dinner, 2010]

"I'm gonna do all the grocery shopping for the White House myself."

"..but in the great demoralisation of the land he kept up his appearance."

[A Continuous Lean]

Sunday Reading

"There is in these scenes rage, revenge and some garden-variety sexism, but they are — in their force, in their gale winds, in their intelligence — charismatic, a celebration of the virility of their bookish, yet oddly irresistible, protagonists. As the best scenes spool forward, they are maddening, beautiful, eloquent and repugnant all at once. One does not have to like Roth, or Zuckerman, or Portnoy, to admire the intensely narrated spectacle of their sexual adventures. Part of the suspense of a Roth passage, the tautness, the brilliance, the bravado in the sentences themselves, the high-wire performance of his prose, is how infuriating and ugly and vain he can be without losing his readers." Katie Roiphe, "The Naked and the Conflicted," NYT Book Review, Dec. 31 2009

Clean up: the past two months