evolution

S' is proud to announce the launch of their new website, www.sapostrophe.com. It's currently a vacant lot of a webpage, but one with pretty wildflowers sprouting from the cracks in the concrete. Check it out, and drop us a line if you have any expertise in such matters.

We, you see, have little expertise. Yet to compete in the modern rock race one needs graphics, a visual hook, an entire aesthetic. Great songs are a bonus, but alone they can't make a band cool. That's why we have fancy pig logos. Nothing screams "indie!" like a gaping porker with your band name branded on the backside.

They Return to the Villa

MS and BP, after systematically painting the town various shades of red and mahogany, return to their extravagantly decorated living room. MS sits in his black, high-backed, leather, heavily-padded king chair, and BP grabs a stool and snorts a quick line. Meanwhile, MS kicks his feet up on his desk and says in a leisurely tone, "The world could be ours. The world could be ours."

The musicians then phone short, amply muscled sherpa BK, just back from another Everest expedition, and engage in a conference call during which they brainstorm ways to make money to pay for their fledgling album, which without any shadow of a doubt will be hailed as a paragon of artistic genius, a fierce singular statement squelched too long by The Man, being The White Man. Their ideas range from the gutter to the sublime. They are sticks twisting in the wind.

(1) Enroll in Pfizer's phase II pharmaceutical trials. (Pfizer's headquarters is located but a mile from MS and BP's palatial estate). The money could be big, but phase II means you are the first human beings to try a drug formerly tested in dogs. Moreover, likely they would collect urine for a toxological screen to ensure that participants are not junkies.

(2) Sell their goods. But BP, after a long snort that leaves the tip of his nose heavily powdered, remarks that this would mean that they can no longer do their own stuff.

(3) Rob houses.

(4) Rob jewelry stores.

(5) Beg their parents for money.

(6) Make money legitimately, perhaps by bartending or waiting tables or washing dishes in a filthy kitchen.

(7) Look for twenty dollar bills people may have dropped on the street.

After some time, they tire under the weight of their ideas, and decide to hope to run into street bills. (A stiff moral sense is their tragic flaw). BK leaves the country again for another expedition. BP collapses in a pile of crank. And MS bites his nails, and thinks, "Money --> Power --> Women? Or is it, Power --> Money --> Women? Or maybe, Women --> Power --> Money? No, definitely not the last one." He retreats to his bedroom, where he cracks a book. Before he turns out his nightlight, he resolves, ultimately, that that shit don't matter. Though easy to say alone in your room.

Asleep, he dreams of places wide and far.

McClintic Apologizes to Bonnie Cohen for Previous Blog

So sorry, Mrs Cohen. I really don't know what came over me. I'm watching football with this here son of yours and I seem to have consumed too much beer. But your son, that is, Benny Profane, is drinking water, pure natural spring water.

McClintic's Favorite Swear Phrase

Cocksucking Motherfucker

super superlatives

The Hammacher Schlemmer component of the SkyMall catalog contains an impressive quantity of items that out-perform all others in their class. I imagine the crack HS field team spent many days scouring the chaotic markets of Burma, wiping the dripping sweat from their brows and calling mission control on their satellite phones, before they fulfilled their quest to find and sell the best-ever electronic pants presser. How their eyes must have lit up at the sight of it when they finally found that device in some steamy back-alley. "It can be wall-mounted," they exclaimed, exhaustion forgotten. "By God! It includes a pants-stretching mechanism!"

On the other side of the globe, an HS executive and his wife on holiday in Quebec City take a wrong turn on their way back to the Sheraton. They're returning from a long, pleasant evening at a particularly well regarded and well secreted opium den hidden in the converted upper story of an old firehouse in the shadow of the old fort. Their minds fogged by poppies they turn right when they should have gone straight and enter through a low-brick archway into a small courtyard where once French fur traders would gather to drink rum and reminisce. Now it's empty, with a light snow covering the frozen ground, with the exception of a small fake tree. Catatonic as he is, the executive immediately sees that plastic shrub for what it is, and he cries out as he falls to his knees. "What the hell, Jasper," drools his wife, annoyed, but he doesn't look at her. He gazes adoringly at the thick flame and crush resistant branches, the PVC needles, and sighs, "The world's best pre-lit Christmas tree..." Then she sees it, and her annoyance melts into astonishment. "Oh!" she cries, "But it can't be!" "Yes," he says, quaveringly but resolutely. "It does have 135 percent more commercial-grade lights than ordinary trees."

These finds and others, brought back by weary, khaki-clad teams from around the world, slowly accumulate behind the cast-iron gates at the Hammacher Sclemmer ranch (or "The Bunker," as it's affectionately called). The world's largest inflatable play pen (220 square feet!) gathers dust next to the best space-saving TV wall mount and the first digital picture-taking spotting scope. A special vault that opens only when three different vice-presidents simultaneously insert small keys and twist (to the left) contains two special superlative gems, entrusted to the company by a top-secret subcommittee of the United Nations: planet Earth's largest crossword puzzle ever devised and the biggest write-on map mural of all time.

It must be a great honor to store these national treasures, but also a great burden. SkyMall, we salute you.

Cam the Man

Episode IX:

Exhausted from another epic recording session, Sphere and Benny are still too wound up to call it a night. Sphere skips around the studio with his sax, chanting nursery rhymes and prompting incoherent shouts of dismay from adult members of the Korean clan who live downstairs. Benny's Korean is admittedly rusty, but he's pretty sure he hasn't heard the words for "indie rock" or "turn it up." He throws his snifter of Johnnie blue against the wall and, as the glass shards firework onto the carpet, announces his intentions to paint the town red.

Neither Benny nor Sphere are entirely sure where the phrase "paint the town red" comes from, but best guesses are that the "red" refers either to the spilled blood on the wild frontier or to the color of lights in shady parts of Detroit. Alternatively, there may have been an 1880s American slang word "paint," meaning drink, as in, "I'm a-gonna paint me some of these here 40s." Likely this usage comes from the flushing of the face and nose (more noticeable among Koreans) that occurs with imbibing of drinks of an adult nature.

Ultimately the origins may have been irrelevant, since before you could read the last paragraph twice Sphere and Benny are chugging dark Mexican beer in a dark Michigan bar and meeting Iranians. One Iranian, specifically, named Cam ("as in camcorder") who opens, Kasparov-esque, by hailing Sphere as a fellow Iranian. Sphere vows that he is not, but rather half-Indian, half-Italian, which leads both he and Benny simultaneously to the same lame joke: perhaps they average out to somewhere near Iran. Cam thinks this hilarious and laughs high-pitched as if he is choking on helium.

Cam assures Benny and Sphere that, despite approaching them at a bar and laughing like a girl, he is not gay. To prove the point, he points out a nearby table of three girls and does the math. "Three of us and three of them- coincidence?" How could it be? Cam himself cannot approach these non-coincidental girls, however, because he says, he is not as attractive as Benny or Sphere. "You guys are the good-looking ones!" he fawns, before adding, "I'm not gay!"

When a female friend of Sphere's stops in to pick up a brush and help out with the painting, Cam is quick to offer the sage wisdom he has developed over his years in the statistics department. "Tell her you are 18 inches!" he proclaims, giggling and reaching out for Sphere's crotch. "You are so huge!" Then, recoiling, worried: "I'm not gay...." Later, after wandering off to have long, intimate conversations with the manliest woman in the room, Cam returns to ask if he can tell our heros something lewd. He does, and it is remarkably lewder than they expect. It is an amazingly misogynistic comment that does nothing to make Benny nor Sphere increase their estimation of Cam's desire to sleep with women.

Finally wound down, Benny and Sphere bid Cam farewell and begin the long hammering of lids onto the paint cans of frivolity, the washing of obstinate gin from the tattered brushes of another long evening. Tomorrow is another day, a day in which they will once again begin their treacherous ascent of Mt. Indie Rock armed only with their battered instruments, e-Bayed recording gear, and the advice of the mysterious Sherpa BK. Who knows what three-chord anthems lurk in the heart of men?

Fie Upon El Icicle

In its basic form, an icicle is a pendent, conical spike formed by the freezing of dripping water. Like with love or bitterness, each layer depends on the last one before it. Indeed, the process is a slow accrual that comes to a sharp point.

I see them everywhere, most commonly hanging off the sides of roofs, but also from trees, the bottoms of cars, utility poles and fences, on rocks near waterfalls or ground water seepage points. I even see them clinging to the bricks on walls.

Perhaps the reason I've noticed them this year is because the ones outside our new apartment are some of the biggest, heaviest, most jagged and ribbed icicles I'ver ever seen, or been close to. How satisfying it would be to reach out and knock them out single file at their thick bases! They'd be like a line of Dominos going down, falling down straight like divers and stabbing the snow, or else shattering into a hundred pieces. I've seen both happen. But I can't reach them from our porch. When I can, it's only one or two at a time.

It turns out they're much more complex than I or maybe you had known. There are pages and pages on them. They have roots, evenly-spaced ripples that form from the competition between gravity and surface tension. They have small bubbles inside them. As they grow, vertical ridges and horizontal rings form on their outer surface. They grow downward and outward at the same time, but at different rates. Some take their time.

Even after their phase of active growth has stopped, they continue to change shape and appearance, even at subfreezing temperatures. Some ice may sublime to the vapor state, thus smoothing out the surface.

How funny, I just overheard a conversation about the icicles outside this guy's window! Everyone's talking about them! Someone said, "Those are some pretty impressive icicles. They're turning into verifiable stalagtites." Like he was complimenting him on his shoes. "Hopefully I can get out of here pretty soon. Knock on an icicle." Hardy-har-har, da-da-ch.

Apparently they can reach yards in length. But most become unstable before then, usually during thaws, and crash to the ground below. As such, they are hazards. They can also pull down gutters and damage buildings.

If you're lucky to get through the winter without being impaled in the heart by an icicle, then off you go to spring, pretending like nothing's ever happened. Yeah, the sun shines again and the air warms. You may even dance. But do you forget about them? You don't. And you're not very much like them. You can't sublime. You may be able to change shapes, though most of the time it's not willfully. And can you really make it out there?

The truth is, they're beyond me. They've got me hooked, they've got me going away. Which is why I think I'm going to do them in once and for all. I'll just use a mop handle, and down they'll go. It'll be so easy! Sometimes all these things take is a little imagination.

Last Night

I'd like to point out that a new dance club / bar in Ann Arbor called LIVE (at PJs) is a pretty good place to party. It's where D'Amato's used to be, on the corner of First and Huron. Last night the crowd was clearly largely not from Ann Arbor, as people were break-dancing. Ghostly product Jacob does a good DJ set with his friend. There was this girl in pink boots and a pink shawl. Her hair was blond and up and she had on huge hoop earrings. In short, she looked great, and she danced with passion and grace. There was also a girl who was just about as pretty but danced wildly, as if she were coked out, which she most likely was. The girl in the pink actually gave me the "you, come over here" signal with her finger, but I did the wise thing and gave her a smile and raise of my glass and stayed on the placid margins. First, I knew she didn't really mean it. Second, I knew that even if she meant it, if I had actually gone over and danced with her she would very soon cease meaning it. Third, why spoil the umblemished image? Even if things had gone fine and I had gotten to know her, likely I would've found out that in more ways than one she would be less than stellar. There was also a girl who was very tall, and when someone pointed out to me that she was beautiful, it occurred to me that when girls are taller than me I do not stop to consider their beauty. Is that wrong? Also, the guy checking IDs at the door is a dick. He's Asian and buff and was wearing a gray tieless suit. He was checking IDs of a "good-looking and fashionable" couple in front of me --- the guy was about six foot five --- and he had to stop and have a chat with them! When I heard him say "what's your name?" to the tall guy and extend his hand, I had had just about enough, and, like a tailback splitting his offensive line, ducked in between the couple in the middle of their conversation and presented forcefully my ID. The Asian guy said "Thanks" to me while flashing me a cold straight glare. But I was in.

The Cold, Hard Facts (Brought to you by Coors Light)

Simply to articulate the phenomenon of difference, I'd like to point out that in Iraq there is a trauma surgeon seeing patients, kids and mothers and the old coming in with legs blown off and eyesight obliterated by shrapnel and the shock of a bomb, while I sit here currently in front of a computer screen, sipping a latte. I have no sentimental agenda. I simply want to point out that these two things are happening in the world at the same time.

Huffy Henry

During a time like this, Henry’s pose on the toilet was erect, comfortable, untroubled. If he had a softer seat he might have stayed for hours, and he often thought about purchasing one of those smooth thickly padded covers. He would choose a primary color, red or blue, maybe even yellow. Or he would choose something else, his only criteria that it be bright and warm.

During a time like this, when the anxiety had mellowed and he could be happily cognizant of his own uselessness, he held and read no book, nor hunched over in desperation, but rather looked with serenity at the wall in front of him, glancing every now and then at the mirror-wall to his left and giving himself a little wink.

The room in which Henry shat had three green walls and the mirror-wall, a spotless slippery white tiled floor, a gold rack for toilet paper, a white state-of-the-art, utterly uncloggable toilet, and a green rug situated in front of him so that his feet did not get too cold. On the walls without mirrors hung black-framed pictures. One was a Steiglitz photo of a very young girl with a dirty face and eyes wide and crazy from too much working, one a perfect photo Henry had taken in Mexico of a bare spiky tree silouhetted against the blue sky, and the other a drawing of the fattest and happiest-looking Buddha Henry had ever laid his eyes upon. It was during times like this, when he didn’t have to work, when he didn’t have to go against himself, that Henry felt most like the eternally cross-legged Buddha. Earlier in the day he had welcomed the unexpected urge to defecate as one might welcome a knock on the door from a good friend--something to do not productive professionally but rather in a more basic and human and generous way. To shit, to talk to a friend, to eat a hamburger.

But Henry’s ass was starting to hurt and he knew that if he stayed much longer, the urge now gone, the seat would redden his skin and even start to hurt the bone. He wiped. He sent his waste tumbling, wailing away.

From Tom Bissell's story "Death Defier"

There really were, Donk had often thought, and thought again now, two kinds of people in the world: Chaos People and Order People...It was not meant in a condescending way. No judgement; it was purely an empirical matter. Chaos People, Order People. Anyone who doubted this had never tried to wait in line, board a plane, or get off a bus among Chaos People. The next necessary division of the world's people took place along the lines of whether they actually knew what they were. The Japanese were Order People and knew it. Americans and English were Chaos People who thought they were Order People. The French were the worst thing to be: Order People who thought they were Chaos People. But Afghans, like Africans and Russians and the Irish, were Chaos People who knew they were Chaos People, and while this lent the people themselves a good amount of charm, it made their countries berserk, insane. Countries did indeed go insane. Sometimes they went insane and stayed insane. Chaos People's countries particularly tended to stay insane.

Hemingway on deadlines

From The Green Hills of Africa:

But it is not pleasant to have a time limit... It is not the way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to Paris with two years in which to make good as writers or painters after which if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers' business. The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as there is you and colors and canvas, and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way.

you've got a nagging suspicion

From an abstract in the Journal of Advanced Nursing 25(1) pp 38-44:

Notions of the 'postmodern' pervade various fields of study, but have rarely been applied to the practice and theory of nursing. This paper uses some conceptions of the 'postmodern' to remedy this.

Response to Jody Rosen's article on Billy Joel from slate.com

Fair enough, Jody, fair enough.

But I think defining his problem as hubris is harsh. Why not just say the guy tried a few things that didn't work, and a few that did? They're all still out there, and we can just skip "Pressure" and "We Didn't Start the Fire" for "Vienna" and "Italian Restaurant." To say that a guy's efforts to make a different type of song is evidence of his excessive pride is, to me, presumptuous.

Secondly, did you have to write this?

Reason I ask that is because, you know, look at Billy now. He's in and out of rehab, he crashes his motorcycle, he's famously sad, he's weeping in his corner. Part of this his surely his deal --- his lyrics are treacly and they expose him to lashings; he after all puts the alcohol in his own mouth; he's maybe too angry and might try too hard. But he's also been screwed over by record companies, and he's received probably numerous condemnations such as the one you delivered (indeed in this sense you are not saying a whole lot that is new). Could you maybe spare him? The quality of mercy, after all, is not strained.

All this reminds me of an article I read once by novelist Robert Stone comparing the work of Jack Kerouac and Herman Melville. Stone in the end appreciates Melville's work much more than Kerouac's. He then adds, "But let us, Kerouac's survivors, remember how much the work from which all this comes moved so many young people, and also remember how cruel, how brutal and heartless most of the mainstream media were to Jack Kerouac and his work during his lifetime. How in ridiculing his unarmored, vulnerable prose they broke his too tender heart and helped destroy him."

As uncool as it may make me, I'm asking you to be nice.

winter returns

Seasonal Affective Disorder is the name hypochondriacs have bestowed upon their reflexive dislike of the end of November. It is apparently the result of overproduction of melatonin, a sleep-related hormone that the brain secretes from the pineal gland when it's dark out. If the brain could be convinced to output even more melatonin, we might all hibernate through the winter. Hibernation would make us all happier, especially as we would then be obligated to devour potato chips and milkshakes all autumn.

Winter depression was elevated to Disorder status in the early 1980s by National Institute of Mental Health researcher Norman Rosenthal. I bet Norm and his colleagues were pretty thrilled by their acronym, SAD. I wonder how many other catchy names they tried. I'm guessing they started with Pinealic Enhanced Sleepy Sadness Induced by Melatonin In Snowy Months (PESSIMISM) and moved on from there.

You'd think that I would love the winter. My ancestors are all from chilly parts of Europe, many from isolated bits of Russia where they wear fur and drink vodka and slap each other on the back making hearty "brrrr" noises. The cold should unearth happy ancestral memories from out of my DNA, make me smile a great polar bear grin and go romping naked in the white snow under the gray skies before I come back to my senses.

Instead I lock myself up in a room with glaring artificial lights and play games of hearts on the computer. You can shoot the moon, over and over again, for an entire game of computer hearts. During November I sometimes wish I could shoot the moon, just to wipe the knowing smirk off its glowing face. "Yeah," I'd gloat, as it oozed blue cheese through the stratosphere and onto the sidewalk, "If I could float above the clouds, far out of the reach of the knife-cold wind, I'd radiate too." And then, glaring at it, I'd suddenly notice how pockmarked its face was, once your eyes adjust to the glow. The moonshine is just a cover, a furtive bathtub gin that can make even the stoutest Russian forget a lifetime of punishing abuse. Goodnight moon.

See, Seasonal Affective Disorder will drop you like that. You're on top of the world, taking out satellites, and next thing you know you're huddled in a dirty booth in a greasy diner, eating potato chips and chugging milkshakes.

McClintic Goes to a Cubicle

"Oh, but let me tell you, I just love quiet at night. There's this comic I saw of this woman sitting in this wine-dark chair -- my chair is in fact the color of red wine -- and over her head is a sign that says 'coffee' and there's a cat by her feet and she's reading a book. That's exactly me at night. My husband, we have that Lehrer guy on at night, we just have it going, but it's just chatter, talk talk talk, and after a while I can't stand it. I just want quiet. My husband can't believe that I just finished a book and am started on another one. He tells me to take a break, but what am I gonna do?"

"Do you drink coffee at night?"

"Sometimes I drink coffee, or tea, although I drink an awful lot of diet lemon-lime soda. And I have to admit, I just love playing games on the computer. Bridge, solitaire, there's this game that you play with yourself, I don't remember what it's called, but it just makes the most wonderful sound, it has this wonderful sound of falling water."

"I like Pac-man."

"Now I find pac-man too fast. Those guys are so little on the computer and I can't keep up. But at the arcade that was the only game I played. At Detroit Metro Airport they used to have pac-man and I used to play while waiting for my flights. I just loved it. I love watching them run around and the sounds the game makes."

Outside, there's snow on the cars. There's work to do, data to enter, diseases to take care of, people to talk to, forms to be processed. Outside, it's cold. There's winter on the windows, gray sky-screen, green coniferous. Inside, computers hum. It's like being around family. The bright beautiful constancy. When I turn it off, it sighs sadly. It seems that, outside, everything is outrageously peaceful, and, true, I almost envy the stillness. Not really wanting to go anywhere because right here's just fine thanks because things tend to come along of their own sweet accord.

The Cosmos

Odd characterization of McClinctic Sphere, named after Thelonious Sphere Monk, legendary and "iconoclastic" (according to a practice SAT test I took in high school) piano player who pioneered a style called, curiously, BEBOP. Oddly, Thelonious sounds like he can't play, but he sounds clumsily good. Because turns out he really can play and his pretending not to able to is his way of asserting his dominance, as if to say, "I could play like a virtuoso for you if I wanted. Instead I'm going to try and make music." So McClintic, on taking his practice SAT test so as to get into a good college so as to acquire universal admiration manifested in a collective pat-on-the-back that knocks him over, so as to, indeed, so, when he reads this practice question he doesn't answer anything else, for he realizes his birthright, his namesake, so to speak, which is to be musically legendary and iconoclastic. That's when he starts playing his saxophone ad nauseam. He goes away into a sort of hiding, stops bathing and dressing for the most part, and toots away in the woodshed that is his bedroom, skipping school, first learning from the past masters but then going his own funny way --- not funny as in ha-ha, but funny as in peculiar --- until he sounds like a perverse mix of Ornette Coleman and a cricket. Indeed, according to him, and to the other few visionaries in the world, this IS music, and he makes it without joy or despair, as if he is making a dinner of rice and beans. And to those that spurn him, he says, "Fuckin' A!"

MCCLINTIC ATTENDS HIS COUSIN'S DAUGHTER'S 3RD BIRTHDAY PARTY

I arrive in a bad mood, and decide to sit on the couch, not talk to anyone, and stare at the football game on the big screen TV. I'm quite happy to do this.

Charu, an attractive married family friend with one daughter, comes into the living room munching on pistachios and tells my father and me a joke. I reluctantly listen, largely because she's attractive (I used to flirt with her back before I was convinced that she wouldn't leave the box). She tells about half of it in English, and half in Punjabi, but I get the gist, which is that there is this man who is making a cross-country bus trip and is squirming in his seat the whole way. When someone asks him why he's squirming, he looks in his pants and finds an ant. Very angry, he broods on how he will punish it. Killing it instantly would be too easy. He wants to make it suffer. Charu's punchline is bipartite, which to me seems to be her first mistake. She delivers it in awkward rapid-fire: first he tells the ant to walk back across the country, then he changes his mind and makes it live in Detroit. She erupts in high-pitched machine-gun laughter, and my father in low-pitched. They look to me for my reaction. I find the joke unfunny. Nonetheless I force out something that resembles a laugh, but also a cough, gag, grunt, or snort. I think I need to recalibrate.

My father has one of his own. "What do rednecks do for Halloween?"

No one knows a thing.

"Pump kin."

This I like immensely. Everyone except Charu laughs.

Then my cousin's husband, Arun, father of birthday girl Anushka, sits next to me, slaps my thigh, and says, "So McClintic, tell me about hepatitis A. How is it spread?" Arun has a bushy mustache and wears glasses. He's on his way to India tomorrow, and stacked with pathogen prophylaxis.

I savor the explanation. "The transmission is fecal-oral."

I leave it out there in the open air, trusting that someone will riff on it in some way. Unsurprisingly, it's my father, who tells Arun that what this means is that you do not buy samosas from the samosa vendor who goes to the bathroom, doesn't wash his hands, then rolls samosa dough on his thigh. Everyone laughs again. I realize that I enjoy scatology. "Don't eat samosas that are made in the bathroom," I add, probably unnecessarily.

The gauche talk ceases when the kids -- there are six of them, ranging from 2 years to 10 years old -- come into the living room in a dense group to play "Put the Round Pink Circle on the Clown's Nose." It's a variation of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey," I guess. The kids take turns blindfolding themselves and finding the clown poster. One of them, a short 2 year old with a small head and huge eyes who looks like an amalgamation of Chauncey Billups, Carlos Arroyo, and my dad's colleague manages to place the circle directly on the clown's crotch. The birthday girl, a good Hindu, puts it on his forehead. Aseem, a tall 10 year-old, places it on his head. In the end, no one gets it perfectly, so they all get candy.

I enjoy watching the kids go for the elusive nose. The game seems simple and pleasureable, so much so that I almost want to participate. The whole thing is a welcome diversion from the adult talk that has sprung up in all corners of the house. Some dude I don't know, who probably thinks I don't know anyone and am lonely, introduces himself forcefully. For a moment I think he's going to stab me, and I flinch. We exchange names, then neither of us says another word. The kids are pretty and having fun. I spend the next twenty minutes being amused by them.

Then I smell dinner. I fill my plate. I take an almost religious pleasure in the food. Chick peas, mattar paneer, roti, chicken, rice, other stuff. Most likely all really bad for you, but incredibly good. I stare at it longingly and lovingly. With everyone else engaged in similarly devoted forms of eating, the place takes on a silent, meditative quality.

But, quickly, sadly, it's over. Full, I get sleepy and doze off. When I wake up, I hear people talking about how nice some wife is to some husband, how she fixes his outfits for the week and how they have such a good relationship, how they're good friends, how they care about each other, etc., and I feel the doom-and-gloom descending again like a bold gray cloud. I take a pillow and lie down on the floor. I glance at the TV. I glance at the clown poster. Someone has placed the circle perfectly on his nose. It seems way too late to me, and the rest of the night becomes a dazed series of agreeable expressions.

The only thing I remember is when Anushka sits in front of her cake with a big "3" on it and we sing to her and then she spits on the candle and cuts the cake and scoops up a little icing with her finger and sucks it clean. She has a round face with fat cheeks. She's wearing a pink flowerly dress and a pink tiara. We clap and we kiss her, take pictures of her, and she looks out of the corner of her eye at us a little bit shyly and then lowers her head into her chest. Then she giggles, jumps up and down, and looks delighted.

"Anushka, tell everyone how old you are," someone says.

She looks at her mother. "Tee," she says sheepishly.

Tee! Tee! Everyone repeats it at least once. Then cake! Cake! Everyone eat cake! The portions (big cubes), plates, forks, ice cream (mango kulfi), are parceled out quickly, and quickly, and quietly again, we go for the fat.

Suave robot 

Pensive Robot