Last night I decided to try it one more time, and with every muscle in knots I found to my amazement that I was going to make it. Ten seconds to spare at a point where I'd just had two. Run. Run. Run - like the dream where you cannot run as fast as you like, run -

Made it! And now I have my life back.

You’re always surprised how drained you feel after a really good bout of gaming; you’ve been tensing and unclenching for an hour. This is also known as Charles Atlas’ “dynamic tension” - muscles, working against muscles! Every gamer ought to be buffed out - and under that protective layer of Dorito residue, they probably are.

Found a cheap host - and I mean, cheap. How one firm can charge $500 for something and another charges $15, I’ve no idea. Maybe I misread the site, and they only offer “wib” hosting, or “wab” hosting, and after I’ve handed over my credit card number I’ll get a card in the mail inviting me to bring my wub on over, provided it is in a kennel and has all its shots. We’ll see. Tomorrow I’m switching hosts, and will begin the wretched task of moving this monster from one set of whirring platters to another. The site will live in Wisconsin instead of Atlanta, and I’m going to miss that Southern aspect; I don’t know why, but there was something cool about knowing that my site sat in a clean white room in Georgia.

I’ll be taking the week off to do this. The site will still be up, although there might be a day or two when she hiccups and there’s nothing, but don’t worry. It will not only be back by the weekend, Friday at the latest, but it will be so new and im-fargin’-proved you will not believe it. Long-lost sites will be up (except for Interiors; not yet) and new stuff added. All of Flotsam Cove, from day one. Curious Lucre. The Bureau of Corporate Allegory. Microfilm Follies. And! the hardly-at-all awaited University of Minnesota site. Minneapolis Modern, which is all nifty 50s and 60s stuff, including the Deadburb series and other delights, is ready to roll for the summer, as is The American Gas Station; the entire Dayalets vitamin series will be added to the Institute in May, etc. Four hundred MB of storage space, unlimited bandwidth: finally. Finally!

I feel like sticking it to my old host by putting up warez and MP3s, but I am not that sort of man.

Too good to be true. Happily, a Bleat reader has stepped into the void and offered an alternative - actually, several have, and I bless you all; when I catch up on my mail I’ll thank you.

So. Even though I said I was taking the week off, I’m obviously not; I am depending on people who click here by force of habit or come through Tim Blair’s Blogwatch to fill this suddenly empty auditorium. I’m just writing this while I scan some new stuff for the Cove. A writer tonight asked where I got all this crap, and the answer is boring: I found it in an antique store or the newspaper archive, or someone gave it to me. I have a friend named George who passes along things he finds; his wife, who also scours thrift stores, is almost singlehandedly responsible for Interior Desecrators’ raw material. And people mail me stuff every week, as well. Cecil has his Teeming Millions; I have my Georges. Today, a co-worker joined the Army of Georges by handing me a scrapbook he bought at a garage sale - a 1930s children’s composition book that was filled in the 40s and 50s with cake recipes. (Aunt Jenny makes a down-home appearance, bless her childless heart, but Calvin remains dead.) The book has no clue to its owner’s identity, just multiplication tables and penmanship practice. It also had a church bulletin from the Westby-Coon Prairie Lutheran Parish, H. O. Aasen, Pastor, dated June 25 1950, saved for some inscrutible reason , and the names sound like a roll call of my North Dakota childhood: Pastor Aasen, Rev. Andreason, Rev. Jensenon, Rev. Ulvilden, and the ushers Rudy Nustad, James Sveen, Leif Flugstad, Janet Hagen.) I scanned what I could for the Cove, and when I took the book off the glass a piece of paper fluttered out - a receipt, as Aunt Jen would call it, for fudge fluff cake. On the other side, however, something quite different.

Westby Youth Makes Supreme Sacrifice at Korean War Front said the headline.

I wonder if my paper would say such a thing today, given it can’t even bring itself to call those who blow up nailbombs in wedding parties as “terrorists.” There’s a picture from high school of Cpl. Russell Haakenson.

Mr. and Mrs. Emil Haakenson, siding on a farm north of this city, received a telegram on Tuesday brnging the sad news that their son, Cpl. Russell Haakenson, 19, had been killed in action in Korean on Friday, October 13. . . .


. . .He was born at Westby on October 27, 1930, and grew to manhood here. He was a member of the 1949 graduating class of Westby High School. During high school days he was an active participant in agriculture activities and FFA work. He is survived by his parents, three brothers Earl and Merle, Westby, and Verlin, South Dakota. The last letter the parents had from Russell was written on October 4; he was apparently getting along fine at that time.

One can only wonder if Russell enlisted because he felt left out - when your brothers are named Earl, Merle and Verlin, a name like "Russ" might be a subtle sign you’re the one the family wants to seek his fortunes in the great world beyond. The Social Security databases have nothing on Merle or Verlin; Earl shows up, but his SS number code refers to his profession, not his place of birth. (Railroaders got special codes, for reasons I’m sure someone will explain to me tomorrow.)

Westby is in Wisconsin, and there’s a “Haakenson Agribusiness” in Westby today, according to Google. I’m tempted to call them and see if it’s the same, but I believe I know the answer. I hope it’s them. I’d like to mail them this yellowed scrap.

It’s important to remember this sort of stuff. Whenever your life seems annoying, think of someone who grew up on a farm in the Depression, then put on a uniform and left home, only to wake up on Friday the 13th in Korea and take a bullet.

And the next time someone in a Pentagon press briefing asks about the possibility of American casualties, remember this: the day Cpl. Russell Haakenson died, it was commonplace enough that his death was noted on the backside of a fudge cake recipe.

So let’s remember him today.

Gnat amuses herself well, and will play with her Rolie Polie Olie dolls and crayons for half an hour; she will stare zombified by TV for 20 minutes when Elmo is on (and there’s occasionally a moment in an Elmo episode where the guy’s voice loses its Elmosity for a half-second, and it’s creepy and disconcerting; all of a sudden happy innocent Elmo seems like some horrid pervy deception; it's like smelling liquor on Bozo's breath.) Around ten I had visited every blog on my bookmark, and decided to do something productive: let's polish the wood cabinets. I had a bottle of Pledge Orange Oil Wood Polish, which I'd purchased at Target alone with the Pledge Fresh Orange Dry-Sheet Static-cling Swiffer refill sheets. (That sentence will look as nonsensical 500 years from now as Chaucer does today.) Orange has apparently replaced Lemon as the signifier of woodly goodness, and as a sensation-addled consumer intoxicated by the lure of the new, I applaud it. I like the bright saturated orange of the bottles on the shelf. Lemon - that’s oldthink, brother! I can’t wait to use up my stupid old lemon-scent Olde Englishe polishing cloths, which just scream of the ancien regime of wood care paradigms. So I sprayed & rubbed & buffed until the entire kitchen smelled like someone had detonated a clementine the size of Orson Welles' left breast. A few minutes later Gnat came toddling over, and whoop! she did a classic banana-peel pratfall; when I went over to give her a tickle I noticed that the floor was slick as freshly-Zamboni’d ice. I’d gotten Pledge all over the place, and it had made the floor completely treacherous. I was tempted to throw Jasper’s hedgehog across the room and watch him skid out the door, down the steps and out onto the lawn. But I love him too much to do that.

Gnat helped me wipe down the appliances as well, and by “help” I mean she demanded all the towels I was using, and got in the way. I gave her a towel of her own, and she staggered off around the corner, got a crayon, drew a line on the wall, and then used her towel to wipe it off. These ($*#$#$ crayons are making my life miserable - if she’s not drawing goatees and handlebar mustaches on her face, she’s eating them - and while I’m not worried when I see cerulean blue in the pampers, little flecks of red make you wonder if she’s shedding organ parts.

Finished another slab of that New York doc by Burns the Lesser (although I prefer him to his brother, who seems to think he has discovered his subjects anew. Look! Our flashlights have pierced this long-seal’d tomb, and what do our torches reveal? Jazz!). This segment concerned New York in the 20s, something I know a little about; it’s one of those inexplicable interests of mine that goes back to mid teenhood. So I knew where the program was going before it got there. Al Smith offered a role in the Empire State Building project while in the bathroom: check. Secret unfurling of the Chrysler building mast: check. The show lavished more time on Al Smith than he deserved - I’d have preferred more on architecture, speakeasy culture, radio or other mass media - but I loved the old footage of that old pol Al working the crowds. A bygone type of man, alas. Gold-crowned teeth stained from constant cigar consumption, a sweaty hank of hair plastered to his light-bulb skull, a raspy braying voice that could vault without effort the happy cries of inebriated constituents. How in God’s name did they expect him to win a national election?

The program also served sparkling flutes of Fitzgerald, our hometown boy who, like all famous hometown boys, ran away to Gotham. While Gatsby is a great novel, I don’t think it’s the quintessential 20s novel - it’s too dependent on its rarified milieu to speak for the age, only for those who didn’t have to go into the office. I prefer John O’Hara’s “Appointment at Samara,” which is far less sentimental and has a sweaty, clammy desperation that makes its hero’s damnation much more believable, and more effective. Who cares what happened to Gatsby? (A North Dakota boy like myself, I should add.) Who cares why he moons over Daisy? I suppose his distant sense of mystery and pleasant menace is supposed to make him an archetype for a glamorous era, but that could just be laziness or lack of imagination on Fitzgerald’s part. He built a book around a cipher, which is one of the reasons the book is endlessly discussed, and assigned in college English lit classes almost out of habit. You can make a nice academic career around explaining a cipher. O’Hara, on the other hand, seemed to think it was the author’s job to explain his characters to the readers, and hence his characters seem much more solid than Fitzgerald’s glimmering ghosts, O'Hara's scenes are full with merciless sunlight, not gauzy twilight and flattering shadows.

Hearing the excerpts of Fitzgerald’s work solemnly intoned over the shots of nighttime Manhattan, I remembered the one true thing about F. Scott Fitzgerald: man, was he hammered. Teased from their context and presented as epigrams, his observations have an alcoholic efflorescence, a certain bubbles-up-the-nose quality, but they’re sad and wistful at the same time; they’re both drunk AND hungover, and that’s what makes him good. To paraphrase Homer Simpson: Fitzgerald was the best argument for, and against, prohibition.

That he ended up a beer drunk is somehow sadder than if he’d been a whiskey hound. It’s as if he committed suicide with paper cuts.

You were walking Gnat along the parkway to the garage this afternoon. You were thinking of Fitzgerald. You were thinking of other such authors who were draped with the mantle of the Voice of Their Generation, and you thought of Jay McInerney, who wrote an entire novel in the second person: “Bright Lights, Big City.” That was a novel about the boom years of the 80s, which now seem lost in the explosion of tinsel that characterized the boom of the 90s. Two words make that book seem as distant as Gatsby: No Internet.

Of course they did a lot of coke. They didn’t have refresh buttons, so they had to make do.

Talked to my book editor today - I’ll be going to New York this spring to discuss Interior Desecrators, have lunch with potentates and endure liver-punishing Fitzgerald-like suppers with those who do not have to drive home, but can just slump drunkenly in the back of a cab. This will be even better than last year’s trip, since this time I am returning to a publishing house that is happy with me. Oh, my editors were always happy with me at the various houses, because they liked me and I liked them, but there’s a difference between your editor liking you and your House liking you. The fact that the Gallery debuted on 9/11 and sold out stunned everyone, including me, and so this trip has the whiff of a triumphal procession. Like Caligula returning from his great victory against Poseidon, for example.

I exaggerate greatly, but. Like Fitzgerald, like O’Hara, and many others whose company I do not belong, there is just something intoxicating when personal success is twinned with New York, however you define it and however short the moment. You can ascribe it, perhaps, to the physical compression of Manhattan - success in LA, for example, would seem diffuse and undefined, but when you look out your 54th story hotel room south at the Empire State Building, you get that king-of-the-world-ma feeling. It’s natural. It’s fun. It’s poison, too, because it’s so utterly fickle and fleeting, so utterly disconnected from the lives of the people who actually make up the city. If that’s how you define yourself, you crash hard eventually. (You’re a young author. You wrote a popular book. You were hailed the voice of your times. You dated models. You sucked ever thereafter.) But once a year it’s fun to stand at the window, open it up (that tells you what level of hotel I stay at) light a Partagas Sabrosa and think: this is what I dreamed of, and here it is.

I will go to the big Barnes and Noble off Madison Square, find my book, take it to the counter and ask the clerk if I can sign it; he’ll say sure, look for the sticker that says Autographed Copy, and then give me a look that says I might as well be from Mars.

Or North Dakota. Same difference.