DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

“Hi, this is Ramon calling from Pacific Bell. I’m calling you today to sell you a bunch of crap you don’t need or want. Interrupt me if you want to get a word through, or I’ll just leap right into my sales spiel until, beaten down by the sheer weight of my diction, you’ll commit to another $20/month worth of uninteresting telco services that we’ll later charge you to disable —”

OK, that’s not exactly what he said, but it gives you the idea.

“This sounds great,” I chirp in my friendliest, most gullible voice. “I’m on the other line, though; could you hang on for just a sec?”

The prospect of a sale inflated his professionally cheerful voice to the point of bursting. “Sure!” he gushed. By reflex I wiped the earpiece of my phone on my pantsleg.

And then I pressed the “hold” button on the telephone, and put the handset back into the cradle. I had no intention of picking it up again. I wanted him to rot in hold hell, without even sappy music to keep him company. Let him wait that first minute, expecting me to return at any time, maybe filling out the order screen with my personal data, optimistically checking off a full complement of revenue-bearing services… and the second minute, wondering what’s taking so long, but still sure of a pending sale… and a third minute, beginning to believe I’ve forgotten about him, seeing the sure sale fade away, fingers still poised above the keys and the order form half-filled-out… and the fourth minute, starting to sweat, falling behind his quota, watching the clock… and the fifth and final minute, anger welling up as he backspaces through all the data he’d entered into the order form, realizing I had no intention of ordering anything and that with a few simple words I’d tied him up for over five minutes, preventing him from bothering the next half-dozen victims on his list in a timely fashion.

Thanks for playing along, Ramon. Good luck with that quota. Call back anytime!

Tags:
posted to channel: Privacy
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

Its cover proclaims it to be “the most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow,” which I’ve never heard of, which should tell you how many ambitious American novels I read. I discovered this book through a “you might also enjoy” link at Amazon, and although I don’t remember what title I’d been researching, the recommendation gnomes at Amazon were right: I also liked this book.

It’s vast, or I guess “ambitious” if I were a lit scholar. Either way means the same: 600+ pages with frequent detours into microbiology, art history, and music theory. It’s fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The writing is brilliant, obviously so even to a pedestrian pop-fiction aficionado like me. The text contains dozens of instances of subtle wordplay that will delight the language geeks in the audience. Here are two examples:

A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor’s cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler’s area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering’s side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. (p. 248)

Our happiness was pathetically outscaled: forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of contiguous squalor, a deep brown demographic smear, a disappointment per square mile that left the three of us several digits to the right of significance. (p. 292)

In construction, this story is similar to Cryptonomicon, which is also long (err, “ambitious”) and peopled by memorable, complex characters. Both stories span 50 years. Both stories contain detailed and intelligent forays beyond the narrative. Both recently appeared in a Jon Carroll’s list of “brainy, pyrotechnical novels” (along with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which I’ve added to my reading list for the summer).

At the heart of Powers’ story is the obsession of one character with DNA (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from very few base compounds) and with Bach’s piano composition “The Goldberg Variations” (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from a simple base melody). While the discussions of biology and life science did not appeal, the analyses of Bach’s music did, so much so that I wished I’d had a copy of the music handy, as a soundtrack to the text. (For reference, the recording that captivated Ressler is Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording, catalog #BWV 988.)

This book is challenging, but challenge has its rewards. I recommend it.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

posted to area: Fiction
updated: 2004-04-19 05:53:31

A surfer once told me that surfing isn’t a sport or hobby, but a way of life. He became philosophical about it: the majesty of the ocean, the power and beauty of the wave… (and then, true to form, he lit up a big fat doobie.) The surf-buddy movie Point Break illustrates the same connection between wave riding and introspective analyses of consciousness. “You’re not going to start chanting, are you?” asks Keanu Reeves. Patrick Swayze laughs. “I might!”

Allan Weisbecker doesn’t chant, but he can put into words exactly what it feels like to ride a wave. He also puts into words what it’s like to captain a ship loaded down with a couple million dollars’ worth of pot into someone’s front lawn, for lack of a suitable offload dock, near Long Island Sound.

He has created, in this autobiographical adventure, a fascinating and eminently readable journal of his 2-year odyssey into Central America, a search both for a long-lost surfer friend, and the perfect wave. It’s at once a road story, a travelogue, and a nonfiction fantasy. There is a maturity, or an honesty, to the storytelling that makes Weisbecker a sympathetic character even when he’s violating international law as well as the ocean he loves so dearly. I laughed a lot. I also felt like I began to understand the lifestyle that is surfing.

Weisbecker finds both of the things he sets out to find. In the process, he also creates a wonderfully entertaining story. I recommend this book. I so enjoyed it, I’m planning to read the author’s earlier novel, Cosmic Banditos.

(The Amazon page for this book contains more positive reviews, one of which reads so much like what I’ve written here that I wish I’d seen it first, and saved myself the arduous process of composition.)

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (hardback)
• Author’s Intro

posted to area: Non-Fiction
updated: 2004-03-19 19:41:18

I believe in the value of a full systems purge: no solid food for couple days, for example, or a fresh OS install onto clean disks. Sometimes, starting from scratch gets you to a place that you can’t have gotten to otherwise.

Of course this philosophy doesn’t work so well with my motorcycle. I made it downtown before the engine died completely, as I determined with a sinking (and decelerating) feeling that probably I hadn’t put any gas in the tank in a few weeks. Damn.

So I trudged down the block toward the gas station, to run into a friend who’d seen me walking (uncharacteristically) with my helmet in hand. He offered to accompany me to the filling station, which is the same as a gas station but 50 years older.

I’m not a graduate of Dale Carnegie’s fine courses in how to win friends and manipulate people, so I asked a question whose answer, I could have predicted, would be “no.” I asked, “Do you have a gas can I could borrow?” This is a pointless question, because these folks sell gas cans. Sure, they could “loan” me one, for $15, and I’d get to keep the can at the end.

Anyway, true to form, the guy says “no.” I was momentarily flummoxed, searching for my next tack. But my friend leapt into the breach and handily rescued me — he pointed at the clerk’s nearly-empty Nantucket Nectar bottle and said, “Can we have that bottle?” The guy was so shocked at my friend’s brash request that he agreed. He hadn’t even finished drinking it.

We rinsed the bottle, dried it as best we could, and filled it with $.16 worth of gas. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for a filling station to sell gas in non-approved containers, but once the bottle had been filled, the safest course for the clerk was clearly to let us take it, get it off the premises as quickly as possible and hope we didn’t get hit by a car before we crossed the property line.

This story feels like it needs an ending, but nothing much else happened.

Tags:
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

Killing time before a flight, I stepped into the restroom to brush my teeth and wash my hands — my ritual of pre-travel disinfection, an attempt to arrive with no more bacteria than the ones I’d brought from home. It became immediately apparent that if my mission was to avoid bacteria, entering a public restroom was perhaps an unwise course of action, for the stench of the place was overwhelming. I was unpleasantly reminded of an under-ventilated outhouse at a park in Canada, in which the constant exposure of the sun on the building’s corrugated roof raised the inside temperature to a point where the festering slop below the seat had fermented up a magnificent stink, enough that even the flies couldn’t stay long, and I attempted to relieve myself while holding my breath, which is again an unwise course of action if the capacity of one’s bladder is larger than that of one’s lungs, as I realized must be the case when I lost out to the burning in my chest and gasped several deep, heaving breaths, ensuring that the airborne fecal matter had ample opportunity to lodge itself in the deepest reaches of my bronchial tubes, far beyond where normal shallow breathing might have carried it.

So anyway, I walked into a more-than-typically crowded men’s room at the airport, and was immediately assaulted by the raw stench of the place. I hastily cleaned up, curiously eyeing the line of guys behind me. As I was drying my hands, I noticed that all the urinals were available, but all the stalls occupied, and five guys in line, waiting, listening, and no doubt holding their breath… when from one of the stalls came a second assault on our senses, the sound of, ahh, a successful if violent elimination, an auditory display of digestive prowess that washed over the line of would-be stall patrons in a palpable wave. I saw in the mirror that two of these guys were actually rocked back on their heels briefly. One of them blinked, seemed to consider his situation for a moment, turned on his heel and left the room. And then another! Really, nobody had to use the toilet that badly.

As I left the room I led a parade out the door, as everyone who’d been in line had decided to seek a less-densely-soiled bathroom further down the concourse.

Tags:
posted to channel: Travel
updated: 2005-07-20 21:06:06