Wilhelms

Last week I stayed at the Grand Canyon Hotel in Williams, Arizona.  Built in 1891, it is allegedly the oldest functioning hotel in Arizona.  It was the only place I could find with a room to let, and I am so glad.  I love it.  John Muir stayed there many times; I wonder if he ever stayed in my room?

As I have said, I prefer historic buildings to be a little threadbare, a little dirty, a little unrenovated.  I have a very Grey Gardens aesthetic, minus the cat pee.  This place ran through the 1970s, went out of business, and sat empty for almost 40 years (a "home for pigeons," they said) before the current management bought and "renovated" it.  By renovated, they mean they fixed the sewer, water lines, some electricity, and painted.  The wood floors are still 1891, almost completely worn of finish.  They didn't refinish the floors!  They are so creaky.  The banister is chipped and worn and you can see at least 4 different paint colors on it.  The rooms are furnished with all period furniture, including antique books on the bedside for casual perusal (I did, and was offended!).

I wrote this at the time and never posted it:

I am sitting on a small, squeaky brass bed, looking at a primitive walnut dresser/vanity on which is a 19th century vanity kit complete with hair-receiver and boot button hook!  A BUTTON HOOK.  The hotel is filled with early photographic portraits, some of which have faded so much that they may not be visible in another 25 years.  Needless to say, I am much pleased.  If my next door neighbor didn't have tuberculosis (not Doc Holliday or Val Kilmer so fuck them), this would be perfect.

People hate old portraits of babies and kids.  Why?  Because they look like killer dolls?  I'm over it.

Copyright: the twenties

The only time that "bathroom down the hall" thing sucks is when you're walking through this darkened area at 4 am with your hands out in front of you thinking, now is seriously not the time for any paranormal shit, plz/thx.

When I was a child, I read a weird horror story called "The Newel Post" about a newel post that anthropomorphized at night and, I don't remember, scared people.  Every time I see any class of a banister post, I think of the story.

Peeling mirrors, I prefer them

*Button hooks were necessary in Victoriana when super tight, heavily buttoned garments were en vogue.  A woman's boot could have up to 24 tiny buttons to fasten.  The buttons were small and the material was quite stiff, so the slender hook was used to reach into the button hole, grab that button, and pull it through.  Same with gloves and some men's items.  They must be a collector favorite, because I never see them around anywhere.

More About the Internet

Ironically, I judge people by how much time they spend online.  This is part of my ongoing "What the fuck is happening?!" slow roll freakout reaction to the internet.  I tend to view these people as suckers who either don't know how to disentangle themselves from the doubtlessly banal, pointless or sad things they must be doing online (getting into political arguments on reddit, looking at photos of their exes on Facebook, self-diagnosing on webmd, or...gaming*), or as people whose lives are shitty enough that the internet is preferable.

How do I explain my own presence on the web?  First of all, blow me, you don't know me.  Secondly, I am taking online classes, and thirdly, my best friends in the world all live far away, and how else am I supposed to communicate with them?  If those sound like bullshit excuses, it's because they are.  Also, the online class thing only works on older people.  Older people who won't ask questions like, "Oh, are your classes on Pinterest?"

I'm as guilty as anyone else of being too present on the internet.  The longer this goes on, the more normal it seems, and while I think I am probably only middling on the spectrum of internet-loserdom (somewhere, someone just leapt a horse over a fence or is Jeremiah Johnsoning it up in the wilderness, but someone somewhere else is on their (his, who are we kidding) 7th consecutive hour of World of Warcraft), I don't want to sink any lower.  That's why I'm no longer participating in any new sites that one has to join.  I sure hope nothing cool gets developed, because I am not signing up for it.  I think there are a lot of undetectable, negative side effects to the internet.  Comparing oneself to others is an ancient human favorite when it comes to self-damaging activities, and now it is possible to compare yourself to EVERYONE IN THE WORLD.  Wondering if you are attractive?  You're not, here are photos of 178,000 people who prove this.  Feeling like a champ because you made the Dean's List?  What a child.  Forget evaluating yourself against your classmates, friends or family to figure out who is having the best time; that's small time nickel and dime, as the greatest rapper of all time would say.  The sky is the limit for finding people who are better than you are.  There are people who are so much more successful than you are that your lame, second-rate brain can't even comprehend the magnitude of your whateverness. 

I also find this culture of display to be really weird.  You know damn well that most times a camera comes out at an event or on a trip, it's because they're already envisioning posting that shit on their Facebook or blog.  Yeah, they probably want to remember the moment, but they really want to share it with people who had no part in it.  I think they want to portray an enviable, constantly-interesting, well-turned-out life.  I guess anyone would want that, but really, that much?  I believe that most of these people who carefully craft their online images are actually unfulfilled, possibly unhappy people seeking to live vicariously through their own fictionalized lives.  Isn't it also fun to give no fucks about what people think about you, and to not be aware of what they think?  Yeah, I'm wearing an inside out Edgar Allan Poe shirt and my grandma's bra (story for another day); you have a problem?  If you do, guess what, don't care, and in all reality, probably don't know.  It's for the best!

I totally buy all of these alarmist articles on HuffPo about how the internet is eroding millenia of lessons about human interaction, self-perception, blah blah.  I read these articles on the internet.  I know. 

This brings me to my long-anticipated point.  I have spent a lot of time not on the internet this week, and have thereby discovered a type of productivity hitherto unknown to me.  Thereby and hitherto in the same sentence, are you still reading?  I have been cat-sitting at my grandmother's house.  She doesn't have cable.  She doesn't have wifi.  Her computer blows.  To entertain myself, I have been forced to do homework and read books, and it has kind of been the time of my life, within reason.  After three consecutive weeks of totally fucking off with my classes, I have completed a great deal of work.  I have read several books!  I wish I could say that I was also completing other tasks, but it's too hot and my S.A.D. is still in effect due to summer.

So basically, I have to figure out how to draw a strong line between me and the internet, because I would like to continue my newfound success, and really, I kind of hate being informed of what every person I know is doing all day long.  I experience guilt and embarrassment when posting to Facebook.  I am only really interested in what about 3 of my Facebook friends have to say.  Again, what is this life?!  I don't like enough other people to have signed myself up for a constantly rolling bottom ticker about their kids' first days of school or what they ate for dinner or all of their wrong political opinions!  No!  I don't need to read every blog and article, and I sure as hell don't need to read the comments on them.  A decent portion of my time online is spent saying shitty things to other people based on their wrongness, and while I generally stand behind this, in the end I am only giving myself a heart attack.  How many internet arguments have resolved with anything like, "Hey, I never thought about it that way! Thanks for your perspective! No hard feelings, pally!"  No.  They end with people trying to curse each other with their keyboards and telling each other that they hope the other gets hit by a bus in front of their family.  As someone who is genetically predisposed to being pissed off, I really don't need this shit.  I have plenty of things to be mad about all by myself without ever having to read what some fucking jag in Kentucky thinks about "the feminist agenda".

Obligatory commentary re: the internet isn't all bad: duh.  I understand that I would not be able to cook anything or find cheap textbooks or figure out where to go on vacation or know everything about anything without the internet.  I mean, I guess there are encyclopedias and recipe books, but I am on a schedule here.  I have made friends on the internet; good ones, too.  Anita and I met on Livejournal in 2001, and she is one of my best main-style buddies for life!  The internet allows me to commiserate with other people and/or learn that no one's life is necessarily going the way they want it to, which is apparently a necessary comfort.  Without the internet, I would not have Bitches Gotta Eat, Angeliska Gazette, Hark a Vagrant, Achewood, innumerable awesome podcasts, and the veritable universe of blogs written by middle aged gay men ostensibly for the main purpose of NEVER LETTING NORMA DESMOND DIE.  And I wouldn't have found my new 100% greatest life inspiration Caitlin Moran, or all of the other things I need in order to enjoy life.  I would still be able to send long, rambling letters to my best friends and to hear about their lives all the time, but this makes it faster.  So, great. 

But I'm seriously still going to scale it back.

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*Obviously I have done all of these things, except gaming, because come on.  I think I left out what most people are actually doing online, though: PORN.  I forget about that one.

I seriously have to explain the grandma bra thing at some point just because I don't want that one dangling without clarification (not that it gets better!), but I have to go not be at a computer now.

Thoughts Upon Being a Grown Ass Man, Part I

Oh god, I must turn away from the internet at some point.  I'm obsessed with the idea of social networking profiles staying up forever, long after the person has died.  I hate the idea of this.  Digital memorials are chilling, disturbing, weird.  I don't want my last internet-words to remain published forever.  Hanging there like a wraith of yesterday, forever exclaiming about the obnoxiousness about Dr. Phil's twang.  

I like the idea that there is some anonymity in death.  Like it or not, death makes us quite unavailable; unavailable for conversation, and generally unavailable for perusal. 

I have actually considered including in a living will document the passwords to all of my internet personae, so that a trusted person may unplug them all!  Delete, delete, delete.  I will not undulate on the internet for eternity. 

But while we are all still alive, the pages of the past continue to fascinate me.  I have spent many days idly reading back through a friend's Livejournal lately.  It is five years of a girl; it ends in brilliant, masterful, absurdist accounts of a life, and descends back through the years into the everyday rambles of a grown child.  She stopped posting in 2009 or something, although she is around somewhere.  I read this journal and I can't get over how witty, how sharp, how sad, but how continuous it all is. 

Then I look to see what I was doing on some particular day in 2004, 2006, 2008, and am reminded of why this journal may not need to stand sentinel to my former days.  

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little hell flames wrote, 2005-05-11 18:12:00

i've fixed the hole in the crotch of my jeans with safety pins, just for the night.

i'm terrified, but so lazy.

• 2 comments

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The reason this came up, aside from the fact that I've been devouring her journal like a weird life manual written by a contemporary Los Angelean Charlotte Bronte, is because I can't remember my old Myspace password.  I haven't logged in in years, and none of my old passwords work.  Do you know what this worst thing ever is?  Having a hilarious password.  You can't tell anyone!  So I tried my old hilarious passwords and my not so hilarious passwords, and I'm locked out.  The email I used is old and defunct, so I can't retrieve it.  And my profile is public.

So there I am forever, for the rest of Myspace, dangling in my early 20s, scowling in bars, epitomizing all that I was then. 

I suppose it'll be all right.  I'm not a revisionist anyway.

gother, Myspacer dayz

"Now that damn cowboy is President." 1901

A bar room memory from Theodore Roosevelt's "An Autobiography," 1919:

"The only time I ever had serious trouble was at an even more primitive little hotel than the one in question. It was also on an occasion when I was out after lost horses. Below the hotel had merely a bar-room, a dining-room, and a lean-to kitchen; above was a loft with fifteen or twenty beds in it. It was late in the evening when I reached the place. I heard one or two shots in the bar-room as I came up, and I disliked going in. But there was nowhere else to go, and it was a cold night. Inside the room were several men, who, including the bartender, were wearing the kind of smile worn by men who are making believe to like what they don't like. A shabby individual in a broad hat with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the floor talking with strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the clock, which had two or three holes in its face.	52
He was not a "bad man" of the really dangerous type, the true man-killer type, but he was an objectionable creature, a would-be bad man, a bully who for the moment was having things all his own way. As soon as he saw me he hailed me as "Four eyes," in reference to my spectacles, and said, "Four eyes is going to treat." I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language. He was foolish to stand so near, and, moreover, his heels were close together, so that his position was unstable. Accordingly, in response to his reiterated command that I should set up the drinks, I said, "Well, if I've got to, I've got to," and rose, looking past him.	53
As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands or whether he was trying to shoot at me. When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head. It was not a case in which one could afford to take chances, and if he had moved I was about to drop on his ribs with my knees; but he was senseless. I took away his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in a shed. I got dinner as soon as possible, sitting in a corner of the dining-room away from the windows, and then went upstairs to bed where it was dark so that there would be no chance of any one shooting at me from the outside. However, nothing happened. When my assailant came to, he went down to the station and left on a freight."

So it basically went like THIS.

I love the stories of the tenderfoot nerd who flings himself into a wild west lifestyle after his civilized life falls apart.  It's what everyone wants to do, right?  I was surprised in one of my 19th century West classes when so many students said "oh hell no" when asked if they would have considered moving out in the 1860s, or whenever.  The myths of the West are so powerful and ridiculous, singing cowboys and conquering American gods and all.  They all seemed to wish to hang onto those whitewashed interpretations of history, yet still wouldn't go there themselves if they had the chance.  Contradictory and stupid, like much popular memory of the topic.

You can read TR's autobio online!  HERE.

Informative Post

Ugh, no one understands me.  Only the Cure's 1993 live version of A Night Like This understands me.

This is the best version of this song that exists.   I love every second of it in ways that I should love people, if novels be believed. 

DID YOU LEAVE BECAUSE OF MY ATTIC WIFE

TEXTS FROM JANE EYRE

I just finished Jane Eyre the other night.  I'm not sure how I got around reading that 15 years ago, but I should have anyway.  I read such crap when I was young and impressionable!  Jesus, I'm surprised I'm not worse.  If I ran out of things to read back then, I'd just take something off my dad or stepmom's shelves.  That's how I first read Gone with the Wind.  She told me it was too adult for me, and I said I'll be the judge of that, p.s., you're not my mom (although I like you better). Later, I accidentally read a grocery store class of romance novel, because the cover had a woman in a historic looking dress (the part that the Byronic Fabio had still dangling in his teeth), and probably developed some confusing ideas.  Then I read some bad Dean Koontz novels about Hells Angels and killer blobs.  I guess it's better than what I would have gotten from my mother's shelves.  Autobiographies by Goldie Hawn or maybe Sally Field, and guides to Have Stronger Thighs in 30 Days!

So anyway.  Texts from Jane Eyre.

IS IT YOUR SEXY COUSIN
"ST. JOHN"

JA says No

There are lots of days to choose from that could be representative of American Independence,  but John Adams (who really knows best, I would think) was planning on our celebrating the day on July 2, not 4.  The 2nd makes more sense as a momentous day, as it was when the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia to vote on a resolution of independence from Britain.

July 4 is when the Congress adopted Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, but it wasn't signed then.  There was no grand convention of guys applying their signature all at once; they just trickled in whenever, and most didn't sign until around August 2.

Right away, Adams had ideas about how the day should be celebrated, and naturally he told his wife all about it, writing two letters in one day.

___
July 3, 1776, AM:
     "Yesterday the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was or will be decided among Men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, and as such they have, and of right ought to have, full power to make war, conclude peace, establish commerce, and to do all the other acts and things which other states may rightfully do." You will see in a few days a declaration setting forth the causes which have impelled us to this mighty revolution and the reasons which will justify it in the sight of God and man. A plan of confederation will be taken up in a few days."

July 3, 1776, PM:
     "The second day of July, 1776, will be memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great Anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp, shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forever."
___

John; would you settle for hot dogs and blackouts?

Nevertheless, the 4th is the day that was adopted, because celebrating the Declaration apparently seemed like it had more gravity than the day on which the Congress was together and cast a unanimous vote to throw off their parent country.  I disagree, obviously.  But then, 50 years later, former and recently reconciled bffs John Adams and Thomas Jefferson managed to die on the same day, within hours of each other on July 4, 1826.  The coincidence is so strong that it seems quite relevant.  July 4 it is.

See here for the Massachusetts Historical Society's massive collection of Adams letters. 

And here is some exciting and appropriate music for the holiday.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse

epictetus

Season of the Witch mixtape by Recspec.  No revelations, but enjoyable of arrangement.

Rehab Addict

Rehab Addict is my new favorite tv show.

This woman flips historic homes in Minneapolis, but before she puts them on the market, she renovates them to something resembling their original condition.  That is, she tears out all of the ugly things that bad, bad people have done to the houses through the decades, and replaces it with as many period-correct elements as she can. 

Why do people buy historic buildings and mutilate them into modern looking buildings?  If you want something new, get something new (you fucking son of a bitch moron jagweed asshole)!  Leave the old ones alone.  When I was house shopping, I hated walking into a cute 1930s bungalow only to find that it had been gutted and renovated in approximately 1987.  NOT ACCEPTABLE.  Maybe I'm weird, though.  As I have detailed at some point, I grew up in a 1950 time capsule.

Our house was the Phoenix winter home of a mildly eccentric old man who had kept the house in such pristine condition that my dad didn't see fit to change much but the carpet and the strangely cushioned kitchen tile.  All of the furniture and incidental items of the house conveyed, and my dad kept it all.  I was too young then to realize that this was a little weird.  The prior owner had had a daughter (by then middle aged), and one of the bedrooms of the house was still painted pink, with a little pink velvet vanity chair, a ceramic piggy bank in the shape of a cocker spaniel, and a 1950s jewelry box.  These became my things, and I still have the dog.  I still have their pink Pyrex set, '50s egg cooker, monogrammed glasses and so many other random old things that I've forgotten what was theirs.  So what I'm saying is maybe my perception of this situation is different from that of other people.  I'm somewhere between "normal person" and that couple in NYC who live year-round as though the year is 1940.

Anyway, Rehab Addict is full of awesome tricks and easy ways to rehabilitate sad, abused properties.  What I love the most is that she salvages everything she possibly can and puts it to some use.  She seems to mostly deal in Craftsman style, teens-era bungalows, which she picks up on the crazy cheap at auction.  She's doing the good work.  Perfect job.