The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover

"The secret to being a bore is to blog everything."
--Voltaire

It's been a while. Less blogging means I have been doing more living. But living is overrated, even lichen does it.

I wont give a full account. Like J. Alfed Prufrock, I am in danger of "measuring out my life in coffee spoons." And little drink umbrellas. Life has been a swirl of scenes viewed through second-hand smoke, refracted through wine glasses. I've made some new friends, caught up with old ones and had a bit of sport.

Eye-sex is a pasttime. Survey the room and begin to cull the herd. Isolate several promising cases. Collect data, gather intelligence. Note the cocked wrist. Does he appear to be laughing wryly or with the blunt, underdeveloped sense of irony of a frat boy? The table is obscuring his shoes and manner in which his legs are crossed, if at all.

If caught, do not break eye-contact with your quarry. Like pleading the fifth, it is a denial that only incriminates. Like staring down a dog, it shows weakness! We're mature about this; besides no harm can come. At best you now have a whole new set of options in front of you. At worst, you have given someone a compliment and increased the net amount of delightful analyzable nuance in the room. Hold for two beats then look away, back at your friend you are talking with, as if you were paying attention to her the entire time.

If you happen to be on the recieving end of this attention, say at a State Dept. Foreign Service recruitment function, by a guy graying in his twenties (nice!), don't queer the deal by disagreeing with everything he says. Even if he is ostentatiously wrong, wrong, wrong. Priorities, Grant!

Out of the gutter and into the empyrean. Salman Rushdie came to town several weeks ago. Seeing Rusdie in person, much less sitting just feet away from him was a trip. There he was, in the stale old Wonders Hall kiva, under the same oppresive flourescent light that crushed many a freshman lecture. But with Salman the light shone off his bald scalp like a halo. He, Our Lady of Militant Secularism.

When he said essentialism was all bosh and described Saleem Sinai as a "cultural minority of one" I poked Drew sitting next to me and relayed a note: I love this man. Yes Salman, testify! Gender, religion, nationality, orientation: even if identities do fracture along these lines, these fractures themselves split further--like cracked paint--in ways entirely unique to each individual. Insofar as hyphenations tell us anything, they don't tell us much worth hearing.

There. From hormonal shallowness to masturbatory abstraction in just ten short paragraphs.