present tension

A vile and mean-streaky harridan whom we used to call the Sausage Lady has published a “memoir” (quotations here suggesting a high degree of self-aggrandizing fictionalization) that tells how she was abused and victimized when she was a fat ugly little whelp. She keeps popping up in my occasional political cartoons, including this throwaway from 2003. Oh, yes—she’s the one with the bag of mail.

Postscript, May 2008. Not long after writing the above, I learned that the Sausage Lady was dead. Yes, even as her Fat Girl made her a bestselling author in her 60s, she was wasting away with many different forms of cancer (including pineapple cancer, which Harold liked best). Well lots of us get cancer from …

I keep eight or ten blogs, mainly for experimental purposes. Their content is often diary entries. This is purely a matter of convenience. It is is easier to crank out a few lines of personal musings than to lay in “Lorem ipset"; moreover the diary leaves a little flag about my mood and activities during the last update.

Diaries, not coincidentally, were the main purpose of weblogs when they first sprang out of the slagheap seven or eight years ago. But many blogs today are really e-zines, created to promote one’s business or hobbies or social interests. Nothing wrong with that, but when you open your diary to the public, it ceases to be useful as a diary. …

Coming back from the wine shop and grocery store this evening, I saw a tall, stocking-capped, familiar face emerge from the elevator in my building on 57th Street. “Jay Martel!” I said. He turned around. Slightly befuddled, he recognized me after a half-second. He had his current girlfriend or wife with him. Looked the same as when I last saw him in 1990. He’s been a TV writer since that time. Nickelodeon, then God knows what. Out in LA now. I asked where. “Fairfax and Olympic.”
Oh! I said, near Tim! Tim Hill, nephew of George Roy Hill, is a musician and director (a Muppet movie, something else) who was Jay’s best friend at Stanford. For a while in the …