2. Me: “Are you using that?” She: “No, it just won’t stop. I pressed the handle a moment ago and it’s still going. I’m waiting to see if it stops.” [Long pause. It doesn't stop.] Me: “It’s like the statue down the street.” She: [Blank stare.] Me: “The girl with the running water.” She: [Blank stare.] Me: [Uncomfortable, thirsty.] She: “Oh look, it stopped.”

3. A blonde and a blond, both wearing oversized white-framed sunglasses, driving in an oversized white SUV, neither saying a word.

4. Can you even imagine what would happen if Apple went into the microfilm reader business (iCrofilm? iRchival)? In an ideal world the aesthetic of microfilm readers would be super-sleek and modernist or exactly like this:

5. Spirulina is undoubtedly a con but I fall for it every time.

Scribbles on Working Assets notepaper, found in an otherwise forgettable book defending New Urbanism. From the Portland library.

Pictoral ode to Newsies, found, marvelously enough, in a volume of Emerson’s journals (also from the library). “Never Fear.”

Depending on the execution, this could be “art” but it could also just be “a thing on the internet.”

For some breathtaking fact-check work, be sure to click on the comments tab.

Think a blazingly accurate and devastating thought about someone more successful than you. Do not type it on the internet.

Make a cake. Not easily-shared, single-serving cutesy units like cupcakes. An entire cake.

Listen to music that does not have words in it.

Carry a book with you at all times, or as often as is practical. (It is practical more often than you think.)

Leave a generous tip for a terrible server when it’s clear he’s having a bad day.

Provide details about the schedule by writing it on a sheet of paper and handing it to the person with whom you are making plans.

Don’t iron your shirt. Do iron your sheets.

Deactivate 25-75% of your RSS feeds and/or Google alerts, especially the ones that include your own name.

Stop feigning interest in holidays that are stressful, overrated, or some combination thereof. Celebrate whatever holidays you damn well please. Next March 18th I plan to celebrate Grover Cleveland’s 174th birthday by denigrating James G. Blaine and eating a pickled herring, a Swiss cheese, and a chop. I imagine I will not be able to find much company for this, but no matter. Tiny defiances lend themselves to solitude more readily than grand defiances, which require a crowd both for impact and recordkeeping purposes.

When I admit that I wasn’t allowed to watch much television — except for Benson, which my uncle was on, and the evening news, which was educational/nightmare-inducing, in the Reagan years — people always ask what I was allowed to do. Well, I was allowed to watch movies, for one thing, even R-rated movies provided they possessed sufficient artistic merit. By this logic The Godfather was okay (Coppola), but Night Court was not (?). Lest you think I was raised in some hoity-toity high-brow cultural surroundings, let me assure you, Monty Python also passed muster, as did Kenny Rogers records — and, later, Kokomo-era Beach Boys, Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) and the YM subscription that my grandparents bought me for Christmas. At the time it seemed to make sense.

I read, too. There were no limits regarding reading material. Violence? War? Adult themes? Fine, on paper. My father collected the Doonesbury books and I spent the better part of 1986 parsing Death of a Party Animal, trying to understand the jokes. I was nine. There was probably something good on TV. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I went through a snobbish phase where I measured a book’s value by its word count; this led to the Year of the Russians, in which I told anyone who’d listen that I was slogging through War and Peace (although I’m sure I put it in loftier terms). Finally, after turning the last triumphant page, I told my mother that I’d liked the epic well enough, but felt the ending was weak — too abrupt, too many plot lines left unresolved. That’s when she pointed out the Vol. I in small print on my paperback’s spine. I never mustered the energy to tackle volume two.

As an adult this is fascinating to me, the cultural references we amass and the ones that pass by us like sheep in the night, how they frame the way we write and talk and think and regard the world. Which brings me to the title of this post, Neon Spaghetti. That was the name of my first zine. It consisted of twelve xeroxed pages, no name or attribution, and I made twenty copies. I don’t remember everything it contained, but I know my friend D. and I had reworked many of our gripes about the pettiness of public high school into anonymous screeds — scathing satire, we thought. I did the bulk of the writing but D. helped me linger after the final bell in order to slip copies into lockers chosen at random. The plan was for the recipients to discover the zine the next morning, read it, be blown away by its daring wit/fiery truths, and spread the word to everyone else in the hallway. We wanted it to go viral, even though such a phrase did not exist back then.

Morning came, lockers opened, and Neon Spaghetti got the same response I got at Waterville High: most people ignored it, several made fun of it, a few people said it was interesting or at least well-intentioned. The following year I abandoned the anonymous classroom ranting approach and began a proper zine, one that had my name on it and was distributed just about everywhere except my high school, and that worked out well for a number of years. All of this happened because the Mister Paperback bookstore on Upper Main Street received two copies of Sassy each month, and I’d buy one and Leslie would buy the other, and that is how I learned what a zine was, courtesy of Christina Kelly’s Zine-O-the-Month feature.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t picked up that magazine, or if I’d been watching something on television instead, or if my parents had cracked down on my mail-order habit when the envelopes and manila packages began piling up. What if, instead of knowing the Cometbus tagline, I knew the theme song to Who’s the Boss? What if I could make jokes about Gary Coleman without having to Wikipedia him? What if I’d gone to parties where everyone was singing along to the new Michael Jackson album? What if I’d gotten invited to parties?

Sometimes I think all our differences are differences in place — cultural place as well as geographical place, the way my Texan cousins said “crown” instead of “crayon” and wore wind shorts before anyone I knew in Maine. And whenever I bring this up in conversation someone inevitably says something along the lines of, The internet is erasing all these interesting differences, everyone exists in the same cultural place, the internet has made the entire concept of place virtually (ha!) meaningless. Etc.

Maybe. I’m not prepared to believe that quite yet. Right now I think the nice thing about the internet is the fact that it gives us an efficient way of telling other people what it’s like where we are and finding out what it’s like where they are.

For example, I just told you about publishing an anonymous, carob-stained, G.B. Trudeau-fueled zine in central Maine. I did that right here on the internet.

The players: A woman, 40s-ish; her teenage son; an Unrelated Observer. All are in line (also known as “on line”) at the checkout.

Son: Hey, we forgot something. Be right back. [Son dashes away and returns moments later with a box of granulated sugar.]
Mom: Why do we need sugar?
Son: For the Kool-Aid mix.
Mom: I’m pretty sure that has sugar in it. It’s in the mix already.
Son: No, we have to add sugar.
Mom (reading label): It says it has sugar…
Son (turning the package of Kool-Aid over): No, see? It says “reduced sugar.” So we have to add some.
Mom: Oh, okay, you’re right.

* * *

Sometimes when the car thuds over a bad frost heave I think the phrase “frost heave, a roadway,” to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman.” Try it yourself and see!

* * *

After three decades on this planet I have decided I like the taste of coconut. I have no idea why or how this happened. It reminds me of when I was thirteen, the year I grew three inches between April and July — what up, cells that form my being? Who’s in charge here?

* * *

I have read, or am reading, a long list of books right now, some for “work” and some for “pleasure” although there is a sizeable subset that qualifies as both — a most enjoyable turn of events. Highlights include Ed Lin’s This Is a Bust, which evokes New York’s Chinatown so vividly I can see the sidewalks, smell the eels in white plastic tubs; Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, which I’d been saving for a treat and now cannot put down; Game Change, which is exactly the way you think it is; and fellow New England nonfiction buff Elyssa East’s Dogtown, which is both thrilling and impeccably researched.

FYI, southern Maine, events of note on the horizon: speaking of Ed Lin, he’s visiting Portland on Saturday, April 11. Don’t miss it. Also pay attention to “Heroic Tales from Portland” this Wednesday the 7th and the Maine Festival of the Book (April 9-11) — oh yes, and of course the first-ever Scratchpad Reading Series event on April 20.

Not bad for the little city. Not bad at all.

* * *

The post-procedure painkillers I popped half an hour ago are working their magic. My mouth has stopped hurting, the world’s edges have softened, my thoughts are verging on the grandiose. This is the point at which I should either stop typing or start typing faster.

A reliable source has suggested it’s time for bed. It probably is.

I’ve been feeling type-ish of late, despite having less time than ever to type things that are not on the regular typing schedule. Perhaps I will come back here and type for you soon. Perhaps I will even re-introduce the concept of “paragraphs,” which I’m told are all the rage these days. (LOL.)

1a. I promptly forgot about the city when I got back to Portland and saw the pink sky over Casco Bay.

1b. Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about being in Maine and being in New York and being in places in general. It’s habit by now. At least I don’t bite my nails.

2. One of the (many) things I miss about zine publishing is the schedule: one or two issues a year, 32 booklet pages. For me that is a perfect level of casual-writing output. Frequent enough to be serial, spaced far enough apart to allow for rethinking, revising and general ruminating. The truth is, if I didn’t get paid to type things on a website every day I probably would not type things on a website every day.

2a. This is one of the (many) reasons I don’t type things here every day, or even every week.

2b. Or here, even.

3. In case anyone’s still reading, here is a picture of some sled dogs I met last month.

3a. Things sled dogs eat include: raw venison, raw smelt, hard-boiled eggs with the shell still on, raw carrots.

So when I say “I went to the cell phone store to look at new phones,” what I mean is “after acquiring massive amounts of information about various phones available on my carrier, I went to the cell phone store to look at the three I liked best and also to pepper the salesman with questions about specifics and plan costs.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m never a jerk about this. There’s no excuse for being a jerk to customer service people. I don’t care if you’ve had a bad day, or if the service is subpar, even. No excuse. I know this as a former customer service worker and also as a human being — look, it’s not rocket science. Don’t be a jerk. Do ask your questions.

At the store, with the devices in front of me, I ruled out one of the three contenders while I waited for the salesman to finish helping another customer. That left two options, let’s call them the “Blueberry Concavity” and the “Mamsung Palin,” to avoid any accusations of shilling. I quite liked the Blueberry Concavity but the Mamsung Palin had a number of attractive features, so I thought I’d see what the salesman had to say about the merits of one vs. the other. After pretending to listen to my preferences and concerns, he strongly recommended the Blueberry Concavity. “It comes in purple!” he said.

It comes in purple! It comes in purple! Oh boy! I am such a special princess!

But even special princesses need to access their data, so I asked a couple of questions about data plans and syncing with multiple email accounts, and the salesman was happy to provide technical details about the Blueberry Concavity…

…to my boyfriend. Who was standing a foot behind me, staring alternately at the wall and at his own phone (which, to be honest, isn’t as slick as either the Blueberry Concavity or the Mamsung Palin). Have you ever performed “improv theater”? Shut up, yes you did, in high school. I felt like I was stuck in a terrible scene with a selfish performer who simply would not “throw me the ball,” no matter how many times I “threw the ball” to him:

Me (to Salesman): This new version of the Blueberry Concavity has built-in wi-fi, right? Is that something that’s going to activate automatically whenever I’m near a signal, or do I just enable it when I want it?

Salesman (to Disinterested Boyfriend): It’s got the wi-fi, and you turn it on if you need it. There’s a setting where you can manage your connections.

Disinterested Boyfriend: …

Me (to Salesman, loudly): Great! Thanks! I think I will buy this phone, with my money!

Salesman (to Disinterested Boyfriend): Fantastic. If you’ll step over to the register, I’ll get the paperwork going.

I know what you’re wondering. Yep, I bought the purple Blueberry Concavity (according to the package, it’s “smoky violet”). I liked it better than the black one, and I always toss my phone in my bag or my pocket, and it’s easier to find if it’s a light color. I’d have gone with silver if that were an option, but it wasn’t. Also: I happen to like purple and its variant colors. Including smoky violet. In fact, today, I’m wearing a button-down shirt that’s distinctly mulberryish.

Yet for a good thirty seconds there at the store I debated my preference for the smoky violet Concavity, thinking I should choose the black one to make a point, to keep this guy from thinking he knew what kind of customer I am. You’re not closing a sale with that “It comes in purple” line, bub, not after talking over my head for the past ten minutes. Then I came to my senses. Just as there is never a good reason for being rude to customer service people, there is never a good reason to question things like your favorite colors. What the hell is the point of that? Why should anyone ever do that? You can’t make me do that, salesguy. I’m going to get what I want, and the thing I want happens to come in a color I enjoy. Done and done.

I should add that the salesman was wearing a pink shirt. It looked very nice on him, though I personally do not care for pink.