Hey, how was your lunch today? Yeah? Good.
Oh, mine was fine.
Well… there was this one part where A F***ING HAWK FLEW INTO THE RESTAURANT WHERE I WAS EATING, AND LANDED ON MY FOOD.
Yeah. really.
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I just stumbled across this awesome dub job done a couple of years ago by the guy(s) over at AKJAK, who replaced Darth Vader’s lines in Star Wars with James Earl Jones dialogue from other movies:
(The intro is a little awkward, and the song at the end is just puzzling… so I’ve set it to skip ahead to 0:44 when the absolute gold kicks in, and as far as I’m concerned, you can stop at 8:40. But it’s your life.)
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As the weather has gotten nicer and the day job has slowed down, I’ve been able to get out into the world with the bag o’ art materials here and there. Here are a couple of interventions that I slapped down recently:
ANT BATTLE - Central Park, Manhattan
FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH - Bushwick, Brooklyn
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This morning, I found that the subject lines of the four messages in my Spam folder, when read as a whole, formed a lovely and touching poem:
Previously: SPAMtastic: Prejudice, Conspiracy Theory, Has-Been Boxing, and the Tragic Loss of Britney Spears
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The unstoppable force of nature that is Juliet Wayne gave me this painting as a get-well gift recently.
She said, roughly, “This is a cockroach with only one testicle — I made it for you because roaches are really tough. They’ve been around forever and they can live through anything, and you’re gonna do the same thing.”
It’s rare for me to be speechless, but I really don’t have words to describe how great I feel every time I look at it …
Carl’s evil army dies a little more each week. Fast-moving doctors toppled the heart of Carl’s vicious empire and now the stragglers are huddled in their bunkers reading the tarot to make the simplest decisions and waiting for orders that aren’t likely to come. Perfectionist that I am, I’m not going to be happy until the last lonely soldier scratches out a suicide note with its nerve-chewed nails and gargles a muzzle full of lead.
My doctors are a hard-hitting unit of Inglourious Basterds that are willing to drop in and detonate at the slightest hint of an insurgency which is harsh and excessive, but come on — this isn’t 4-square in the schoolyard here.
For those of you that are rolling your eyes and thinking “Jesus, easy on the hooptedoodle, Simmermon”:
Now that my cancerous non-seminoma is out, the markers it releases in my blood have dropped dramatically, and continue to decline each week. My doctors refuse to take chemo off the table, which is smart both from a scientific and legalistic ass-covering perspective. I’m recovering pretty well from the actual surgical procedure, but it’s a three-steps-forward, one-step back kind of thing.
Some days I can walk fine and hang out a little bit. Other days the incision burns and everyone on earth is a complete barking bozo and everyone needs to just SHUT UP, JESUS CHRIST.
And then there’s this …
Read the rest of this entry »
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It’s true. That is an actual science fact. From science.
If you are of my generation, there is a very good chance that somewhere — be it in a frame, or shoved in a drawer or shoebox or wallet — there exists a school portrait of you with the infamous laser background that you just HAD to have because it was AWESOME, Mom! Come ON!*
So what we’re gonna do here is, were gonna give you a blank laser background which you’re gonna right-click or control-click and save after you follow that link, and then you’re gonna search Google Images for probably longer than you should ’cause you’re probably at work, and you’re going to use Photoshop or whatever your tool of choice may be to mash that bizness up, creating images that have been astronomically improved through the magic of laser backgroundification.
Then you’ll email them to andiamnotlying(at)gmail(dot)com, we’ll post our favorites, and we will have all wasted similar amounts of time that we will never get back, but we’ll have gotten a laugh out of it. Hopefully.
Deal? Okay. Save that background and get to it!
* P.S. — For your viewing enjoyment, a young lady named Lindsey Weber has been collecting 1990s laser portraits and posting them over at We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!!. Check it.
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One of my best friends from high school is a GED teacher for some really, really bad kids. He recently turned an act of classroom disrespect into a “teachable moment,” schooling the youngster in the art of writing an apology letter.
It’s all about the little victories, people.
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Those of you that know me well know that my sister and I love each other with a love that is tremendous, powerful, and savage. Like if Voltron were formed up out of grizzly bears and wolverines with killer beehives for hands.
I told a story about our relationship at The Moth’s GrandSlam a few months back — hope you enjoy it:
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Before I get to the cancer news, let me get something right up front: it has been a spectacular weekend. This weekend was like a commercial for weekends written by writers from the Wonder Years and shot by Robert Altman.
A bunch of my best friends came up to visit this weekend — two guys I’ve known since kindergarten, one guy since the seventh grade, and then my friend Mark Koch who’s been on the scene since ninth grade. He’s the new guy.
It was Mark’s bachelor party weekend. Nobody’s going to make a smash comedy hit out of it, as the whole enterprise was more bourbon and burlesque than blow and strippers. We had dinner at Peter Luger, hiked over the Williamsburg Bridge to have a look at the streetcorner that was the cover of “Paul’s Boutique,” walked the boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton Beach and saw a hot and hilarious burlesque show at Bar on A.
My roommate and upstairs neighbor kindly gave up their rooms for the cause and let us spread out in the building a little, too.
Not too shabby at all.
I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time. And at points I had my hands over my incision, afraid I was literally going to bust a stitch.
Instead I just stretched. Stretched and healed. I haven’t felt this good in a really, really long time.
So here’s the doctor’s news from the other day:
I’m healing up fine, textbook perfection, basically. The CT/PET scans showed one questionable lymph node up in my throat, but he jabbed around in there with his fingers pretty hard and said “whatever, I’m not feeling anything in there, so let’s forget about that one for now.”
There’s these markers in the blood that cancerous tumors give off — they differ by the type of tumor. But for simplicity’s sake here, let’s collectively call them Carl.
Normal levels of Carl in a healthy adult male might be between 0-5. My Carl quotient was burying the needle at 1,250 before surgery. So they drew blood from me a week after surgery, and whatever my Carl levels were, that’s the baseline right there.
Say I’ve got a Carl of 100 a week after surgery. Then a week later, my doctor expects me to have half as much Carl — a level of 50. A week later, Carl’s supposed to be down to 25. Eventually, those levels will bottom out and kinda flatline. And if Carl flatlines at a level that’s higher than normal, we start chemotherapy.
Awesome. Really, that makes sense to me — it’s careful and cautious, and following the results scientifically. What I wanted was for my doctor to clap and dust his hands off, then say, “that’s it, you’re done!”
But that’s not gonna happen for a good while yet. As a wise man named Tom Petty once said, “the waiting is the hardest part.”
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