Sturm Und Drang

Poor Hulles.

Last night turned out somewhat differently than I thought it would as the day dawned. But I am nothing if not resilient. I ended up being pretty okay with dancing the Safety Dance for my cat and writing enough notes for 300 more blog entries. Lucky you. If I type really fast I can achieve the Hulles Triceratennial in one out of the two months in Minnesota that are warm and we can all get together and party down and you can go back to wherever you came from saying, "Dang! Hulles was a lot cuter in my imagination! Maybe the [husband/boyfriend/paperboy] isn't so bad after all!" This is a service I like to provide to all of my readers that meet me in person.

But I'm really excited about the notes for the additional 300 blog entries. I was getting down to notes for 80 posts or so and frankly starting to become concerned: "Ohmigod! What if I dry up and start writing about how cute my cat is and people quit reading me and I end up with two readers (who, by the way, will be Cristina and Anne, God bless them both) and everyone realizes how much I suck and they have a huge party of all the people who used to read me and they all get hammered and talk about how much I suck and sleep with each other and mock me even worse than I can possibly imagine in this paragraph?" [As I wrote that last sentence I was laughing to myself: it would be worth it if even one of you described that party accurately in a blog post as long as you also posted pictures. - The Management]

But not to worry. I am resupplied. And if any of you are feeling like you don't know what to write about in your blogs (like, for example, Terri Schaefer) come to Saint Paul and sit alone in an establishment of my choosing for two hours with a pen and a Ladonian passport that has a lot of white space and see if you are not replenished as well. And if you're not, you can write about how much I suck in person for at at least a blog post or two and get that much mileage out of it so the trip won't be a total loss.

I know, I know, I'm betraying just a teensy bit of self-doubt in this entry [insert some emoticon here if you can figure out how everyone seems to be able to type when their laptop is sideways] but I still think I'm hilariously funny and besides I have my cat and a readership that I adore -- right up to the moment they have the party I described above. And who knows, just maybe when you're at that party you'll decide I'm not so bad after all. "Jeez! Maybe Hulles really is a decent writer and an okay guy and he isn't a loser after all! ..... Nah, he sucks, toss me another Miller Lite and let's get naked!"

I hate you.

-- Hulles

Whew

Once again it's a Three Blog Night. (You have no idea how long I've been waiting to use that.) Besides this one, today I also published Still Life With Plastic and The Next Next Best Thing. I think at this point I have met my penance for sparse posting and will now go back to one post a day whether you need it or not. But I really like the two entries mentioned above; I hope you do as well.

I do think the little bottle from "Still Life" needs a name. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

It's funny. Once I post something I really like, or in this case two things I really like, once I hit the "Publish" button there is a sort of an ominous silence. What I desperately want of course is an immediate reaction to my blog entries from somebody, pro or con. Fawning adulation is to be preferred however.

It gets even funnier when I think of what a real author like Anne Frasier must go through: when she hits her metaphoric "Publish" button she has to wait a long time for a reaction, long enough for her book to be published and reviewed. I only have to wait a couple of days or at most a week to find out what you guys think. And I still get the heebie-jeebies. No big deal, I just think it's interesting is all.

And one other tidbit: I made the inspiration of The Prado read the piece and she liked it. I got a hug (see post) and her permission to use her name instead of just her initial in the dedication, so I'm altering the entry for this purpose. And by the way, she completely cracked up at Lollie's comment that "Beautiful yes, agreed. But somewhere, some guy is thinking that he is just sick of her sh_t." (I made her read it.) So good work, Lollie, you nailed it. And good work Jadie for having a sense of humor about all of this. And whew, I might add. She (Jadie) is as tall as I am and could probably kick my ass into the next county if she wanted to.

Ciao.

-- Hulles

Electric Sheep

Yes, "possibly real."

One thing I always try to keep in mind as I write about you guys and read your blogs and respond to your comments is the Turing Test. Alan Turing was a British mathematician who did pioneering work in computer theory, and is most noted for the aforementioned test of whether or not a computer could think. He claimed that a computer was truly intelligent if you could hold a fifteen-minute conversation with it and not be able to tell it was a computer.

I just extrapolate from Turing's theory a little bit. What if all the interconnected computers in the World Wide Web have really reached a critical neural mass and achieved sentience, just like in a science fiction story I read once? How do I know that you people are real, and not just the elaborate prank of a vast artificial intelligence that apparently has nothing better to do? I suppose one test of this is whether or not this post actually makes it to Blogger. If not, and I am mysteriously killed by a runaway driverless beer truck on the way to the redundantly-named Nina's Coffee Cafe today, I guess that answers that, doesn't it?

So when I put the the Hulles Mythos together, I intentionally put a "p.r." (possibly real) by all of you that I have never met in the flesh. No matter how you might squawk in the comments to said post, you might all be dreams of electric sheep. ("Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" is the Philip K. Dick story upon which the film "Blade Runner" was based.) Actually, for all you know, I might be the creation of a Linux web server with a particularly warped sense of humor. If that was the case though, I wish I would have been dreamed richer. Poverty sucks, imaginary me or not.

The sharper-eyed among you might notice that Anne Frasier is an "r." I'm happy to report that I met her for coffee recently, and she is every bit as lovely and charming as I imagined her to be except more so. "Vividly real" would be an apt description of her as regards the topic of this post. I really enjoyed gabbing with Anne, plus I got the copy of her book in Polish that I had been clamoring for ("Zabawa W Smierc", with accents over the 'S' and 'c' that unfortunately this character set doesn't have). The book now resides in the place of honor on my bookshelf, next to "Fragments of the Delta of Venus" by Anaïs Nin, illustrated by Judy Chicago. That is, "Fragments" is illustrated by Judy Chicago, not "Zabawa". Anne's book in Polish has no pictures of vaginas that I have yet found, though not for want of searching. Perhaps the French edition....

Apropos of all this "imaginary you" stuff, a nominal friend of mine always teases me that Casti, with whom I am madly in love, is really a 400-pound male truck driver who wears a wife-beater and lives in New Jersey. "So what," is invariably my thoughtful and articulate rejoinder. That only matters if I end up meeting her/him for a Cardhu. Until then, Casti is a beautiful woman who lives in São Paulo and writes poetry and studies martial arts (no doubt preparing for our inevitable meeting), and I'm staying madly in love with her until reality slaps me in the face (see martial arts comment).

Before signing off, I feel obliged to relate something I learned to my sorrow when looking up Alan Turing to make sure I got his first name right. Encarta, my offline reference work, says that Turing "apparently committed suicide in 1954 , probably in reaction to medical treatments he was forced to receive in order to 'cure' him of homosexuality." Good lord, reality sucks sometimes, doesn't it? I much prefer you guys.

Thus, my motley collections of electrons, you are "possibly real," and so you will remain until I meet you. But real or imaginary, I'm glad you read my stuff. And who knows, maybe Stephen Blackmoore is really a hot 24-year-old blonde nymphomaniac cocktail waitress with a cute ass whose dad owns a liquor store.

We should be so lucky.

-- Hulles

Achtung! Newzbitzen! Neuigkeiten!

item: The mysterious and lovely Madame Sosotris, who strongly resembles Anne Frasier but is much mysteriouser, was kind enough to do a tarot card reading for yours truly. If you're curious you can find the reading here. I can't imagine that many people besides me would want to check it out, but I personally find it fascinating. I have been thinking about it lots. Thank you so much, Madame.

item: In a way I feel sort of bad about posting such a long entry about my kidney stone. I hope I made it interesting enough to read. I guess I feel a bit shy about exposing my plumbing adventures to the world, at least after the fact. I really liked the giant mouse thing though.

item: In yet another case of art imitating life, today I made my acting debut as a stalker in Chasing Windmills, the wonderful web video series that I always talk about. If you want to catch the episode, possibly more than one, I'll let you know when it/they air. My stage direction from Juan Antonio was “act creepy.” Gee, that was a stretch. I would have really had to struggle if he had said “don't act creepy.” Anyway, it was exciting and fun and interesting to watch those guys shoot video footage at the redundantly-named Nina's Coffee Cafe and at Common Good Books, that bookstore where the store manager gets ravished all the time. Lo, you'll like that one of the books I was holding in the bookstore sequence where I was “acting creepy” was Lolita by Nabokov. Just for you, baby. Hopefully it doesn't end up on the cutting room floor. For that matter, hopefully I won't end up on the cutting room floor. Really really really fun, thanks lots, guys.

item: Ran into an old friend last night, name of Mary, gave her my blog address. Really good to see you, Mary, it's been a while. Thanks for asking after my brother. For everyone else who isn't Mary: I so want her.

item: Recently I was in Costello's Bar (“If we wanted people to come for the service, we would have opened a church.”) and had the guy next to me say, no shit: “You look much too intelligent to be in a bar like Costello's.” I actually choked on my beer at this. I immediately wanted to respond with about eight different comments, the first being “Everybody looks much too intelligent to be in a bar like Costello's!” But guess what I did. Yep. I smiled warmly and said “Thank you.” This must have encouraged him, however, because later he said that I “looked like a Lutheran pastor.” Get out! I'm not sure what the Lutheran church has been doing the last twenty years or so, but if I look like a pastor it must have really fallen on hard times, poor thing. At this comment I actually laughed out loud and said “Thanks, I think.” Yes, the guy next to me was an old gay man, but he was hitting on me so gently and sweetly that I couldn't help but like him. Besides, he has excellent taste. I am a sex dog.

item: Thanks to Missy for correcting my German, see comments. The entry now has a new title! My credibility is thus reestablished at the stroke of a laptop. I also changed "life imitating art" to "art imitating life," which is more accurate, if less sly.

Das ist alles.

-- Hulles

Happy December (But Don't Please Don't Mention The C Word)

Happy December, everyone. November's over. No more Hulles birthdays. No more disturbingly quiet Thanksgivings. No more NaNoWriMoFos in my coffee shop taking up space.

You have to suspect that thousands of would-be novelists around the world are saying to themselves right about now, “What the hell was I thinking? November's finally done and I have a screaming headache, a bladder infection, and 50,000 words of insipid drivel. Next November I'm renting a million monkeys and a million typewriters and they can meet my verbiage quotas and get bladder infections.” Little do they know the ASPCA did away with the million monkeys thing years ago, plus you just can't rent good typewriters anymore. Hands up among you children out there who knows what an IBM Selectric is. Anyone?

Not everyone is uniformly glad that November is over, however. I speak of the sharp increase in the suicide rate among editors at publishing houses that always occurs in December. I guess they need to be made of sterner stuff. Perhaps they need to stiffen up the curriculum for English majors by devoting a semester to reading random cat blogs.

Speaking of publishing, my pal Anne Frasier just sent her latest manuscript off. Congratulations, Anne! If you aren't Anne and haven't read her books, you can find them listed on her blog static. They're suspense/thrillers, perfect for Minnesota winters, so read 'em and creep. Dang, I like that.

December First was Hilary Hahn's 27th birthday. If you don't recognize the name, she's a wonderful violinist (see sidebar) and I talk about her all the time. Happy birthday, Hilary. I didn't get you a present this year except for my continuing adoration.

In other trivial news, the astute reader might notice that I changed the format of the blog links slightly. With the addition of NYC Balderdash, whose blog can be very funny and whose blog you better not like more than mine, I decided that it is misleading to call the list “Blogs I Watch,” since I can no longer read all of them every day (and half of them half as much as they deserve) and get anything else done. I thought about dividing them into camps (the Minnesota Blogs, the NYC Blogs, the Writers, the Blogs Posted By Totally Hot Brazilian Women, The Just Plain Funny Blogs, etc. etc.) but some blogs fall into more than one camp so I gave it up for a bad idea. If I get around to it, though, it would be fun to summarize what the linked blogs are about on the sidebar somewhere.

And finally, I note with pride that my female friend (see NYCB's take on what this means) Shelly said I was a good hugger the other day. Damn straight I am. The line forms to the right over there.....

All for now. I am so out of here.

-- Hulles

Chapter 6: In Which We Meet A Social Worker

The other day I needed to earn gas money, so I sought out my avuncular pal Don and made him sit next to me at a local bar and buy me scotch (abeit cheap scotch) so I could entertain and amuse him at five bucks an hour. Great work if you can get it. You can rest assured that he received his money's worth, though -- Hulles was in prime form.

Unca Don returned from the Field Grade Officer's Latrine to find me talking to some strange woman that sat down next to me in his absence. If at this point you, like Mr. T., are thinking regarding this woman, “I pity the foo,” you would be spot on. Don sat down and I introduced him to her: “Don, this is Anne and she and I were just talking about driving behind city buses.”

See, this is where we separate the women from the girls. I had no idea what her name really was, I just decided then and there that she would be Anne¹. Bless the woman, she didn't bat an eye, she just continued with her bus story and politely incorporated Don into the conversation. (“I'm coughing because I was tailgating a bus the whole way here. I was trying to read the Minnesota statute they stick on the back of them.”²)

This woman turned out to be one of the funniest people I've met in a long time. After calling her Anne much of the night, I finally asked her what her real name was and discovered it was Charlotte, which I think is a pretty name. (Not as pretty as Anne, of course, AF, honest.)

Charlotte was a social worker by profession. I discovered this because one of the first things she said to me was:

“So who coordinates your services?”

Ouch. Ouch. I hope she was being funny and making a social worker insider joke of some sort. I don't look that down-and-out, do I? Say no. Please say no.

I'll just give you a couple excerpts from Charlotte's wonderful stories:

“When security came, they scattered like roaches.” Who cares what she was talking about? Anyone who would have cause to say that in a story is okay by me.

“Today in a meeting some geeky guy I work with who never says anything said my cookies were 'charlicious'. Ohmigod, was he hitting on me in front of 15 other people?” She later confessed that another guy in the meeting said they were “charlectable,” which she liked much better.

“Yesterday I bought a bag of chicken feet for $2 at El Burrito Mercado. I have no idea what to do with them, I just thought they were cute.” She went on to say that her daughter just shook her head and sighed when told of this. Cristina knows how she felt, don't you, dear?

Etc. etc. This is my blog, not hers, and I tell the jokes around here, dammit. Just know that she was very funny, and delivered everything in a perfect deadpan, which was exactly right.

“So, Hulles, was she dishy?” is the question I hear you asking because I have your computer's built-in microphone bugged. And yes, it does too have a built-in microphone, read the manual. Anyway, to answer your concerned inquiry, my mother always told me, “Hulles, dishy is as dishy does.” Much like you, I have no idea what this meant. I think it means “dishy is in the eyes of the beholder.” So sure, she was dishy, even before I put on my Scotch Goggles.

But the point is that she was fun to talk to and I enjoyed her company very much. And now I want to buy a bag of chicken feet for $2 at El Burrito. Not only can I figure out many household uses for them, they'll make great Christmas gifts for my friends once I paint their little nails in festive holiday colors. “Don't thank me,” I'll tell them. “Thank Charlotte the Social Worker.”

-- Hulles

1Yes, it was Anne spelled with an “e”. Hey, I made it up, I can spell it how I want. I must have been thinking of my newly-bald friend Anne Frasier at the time.

2In the Twin Cities, the buses have a yellow sign on the back that says according to state law you have to yield to them. Unfortunately, if you're close enough to read the tiny print on the sign you've already run into the back end of the bus.

I Can Explain....

I don’t really think about getting laid all the time. Honest, Mom, I’ve been so busy at the law firm (and yes, I still expect to make full partner any day now) that I had to hire a ghostblogger to keep up the Hulles entries recently. It turns out the college student that I retained for this purpose was both a crazed sex fiend and a smart*ss, a deadly combination. At least it was for him; his lifeless corpse is folded up in the trunk of my Audi as I write this. Good thing the weather’s cold here in Minnesota this time of year, otherwise that could be quite a mess, hah hah. (See, I remembered that I shouldn’t use those emoticon things, Mom, since you have so much trouble these days with tilting the computer monitor on its side.)

So yes, everything’s fine, I’m still married to BethAnn and she and the labs are doing just fine. Besides, even if I was playing around you don’t really think Cristina would help me in that kind of sordid behavior, do you? She’s such a sweet girl. Sure, maybe Juan Antonio would, but I would never ask his help. He’d set me up with someone like that Amber girl (see photo) in “Chasing Windmills,” which would kill me for sure. What a way to go though, hah hah. (Note to self: call Juan Antonio.¹)

Speaking of BethAnn and her barren womb, remember Heather III, my daughter from my sixth marriage? Guess what? It turns out she wasn’t killed in a horrible accident involving a beer truck. We ran into each other while commenting on Anne Frasier’s blog just the other day! (You remember Anne, the woman who writes the large-print zombie stories....) BTW, I already have a junior partner working on a defense for my not paying child support for seventeen years, so don’t worry about that. And guess what else? It turns out that Heather is homeless and needs a kidney! I already explained to her how she couldn’t live with me, my cat is allergic to white girls, so I gave her your address. I hope that’s okay. And about the kidney, you won’t be needing yours pretty quick, right? Just kidding, hah hah. But now that I think of it, I wonder if her blood type is compatible with the ghostblogger’s? That would be a win-win situation for sure. (Note to self: follow up on this right away, the weather’s supposed to get warmer.) See? I still remember how you taught me never to throw anything away that you might need on a rainy day.

So other than that, not much new. I did post my Dark Chocolate Raspberry Mousse recipe on my blog the other day. Remember that one, and how much trouble Grandma and I got into because of it? Boy, that was a scary time for a while. I thought I might not make partner at the firm after all. Good thing one of the senior partners found pictures of Grandma while he was surfing blue-hair porn and decided the whole thing was really quite understandable. It helped that I gave him the recipe and the name of Grandma’s nursing home, hah hah. (Darn it, it’s driving me crazy not to use emoticons!)

So that about wraps it up. I have to run, I’m having one of my people take all the Seans and Heathers from my previous marriages to a hockey game tonight so I need to call the ex’s and make sure this counts as a visitation. Tough being both a lawyer and an ex-dad these days!

And Mom, just to let you know, it should be safe to read my blog again from here on out. Love ya.

-- Hulles

1Sad to say, my Mom can't even tilt the monitor enough to read italics anymore, which is why I can get away with putting Notes to self in this blog entry.