27 May 2008

Good line, but it's got a short shelf life.

Ms. Abstract Citizen and a friend made an ice run during a barbeque we attended yesterday.

Homeless guy: I'm not asking for money, but if you buy me some food, I wouldn't say "no."
[they enter store, purchase ice, and leave without purchasing food]
Homeless guy: No food?
Ms. Abstract Citizen: Sorry...
Homeless guy: You're probably voting for Hillary!!

23 May 2008

you archivist, you.

Pretty fascinating explanation of how you are actually contributing to the preservation of all of the world's knowledge when you go through that "are you really a human?" test to purchase concert tickets, which typically involves typing out a pair of words.

There should be a good word to describe this, other than the odious "synergy."

I think this is what I think about Indiana Jones

I mentioned this WashPost article earlier this week, for the sole reason that I think Hank Stuever is totally off-base. As I read it, Stuever takes his own failure to find a greater political or social context for the Indiana Jones movies as proof that they are a “meaningless void.”

He also offers the typical, half-jokey caveat that he knows he is missing the mark by a mile, but…onward he goes anyway. But I always thought the movies had a lot to say - largely about our relationship with the past. (Note: I haven't seen the Crystal Skull yet.)

If the films are indeed about our relatioship with the past, then it’s not a surprise that the first three films are set during the ambivalent 1930s – are these the halcyon days before the darkest hour of the twentieth century? Or are they a prelude to the darkness, a time during which a gathering evil was largely ignored?

Spielberg and Lucas have talked about their desire to re-create the campy, swash-buckling adventure films of their childhood. These typically would feature an Anglo hero fearlessly treading into the rainforest (or some other far-off place), fighting against vicious, savage tribes, and rescuing a bounty and a girl. The films promise adventure, heroism, riches and love. They are exotic, and typically only show the hero at “home” for long enough to establish that “home” is the opposite of adventure. For any little boy with a vivid imagination, it’s a tantalizing promise.

The Indiana Jones films, much like the Tintin books before, can rightly be slammed for their myopic view of non-white cultures. Yes, the Temple of Doom treats “Orienatlism” about as well as Tintin “African-ness.” (Tintin in the Congo, anyone?) And that is largely inexcusable – you won’t find me defending post-colonial boorishness here. But it's also true that one of the things implicit in yearning for the past is yearning for a kind of simplicity (cultural myopia?) that we can no longer afford. It is not innocent in that it doesn't wish away the evil done by imperialist forays - it simply wishes away the knowledge we have today of that evil.

Though I am probably somewhat in the minority here, I do believe that part of the imperial impulse exhibited by Europeans in the 1800s did arise from a genuine belief that "civilizing" the "other" was indeed a noble pursuit. Misguided, unilateral, and horrific in its consequences - but the original impulse, for some, arose from misguided charity, I think. Before I get painted as some kind of apologist, though, let me say that I also think that nothing excuses the reality of slavery and oppression that arose from European imperialism.

So I hope this is not a disingenuous position – but I think there is something in this about our past and how we relate to it. Certainly there is ambivalence about it. Indiana Jones, liberator of children in sweatshops? Not so much, I’ll admit, but on a personal level, I think most males of a certain age will admit to having Indiana Jones fantasies – about being the hero, about freeing slaves, about carrying the torch of enlightenment values to a place where they may not yet be prevalent.

Every good adventure that is centered around an everyman is somehow predicated on this imbalance – we have a hero who sees or knows something that the other characters don’t (the hero sees that King Kong is a frightened victim, he understands that the menacing “other” means no harm and attempts to overcome the language barrier, etc.) In the case of Indiana Jones, this is also manifested when he shows a clear respect for the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail (something the Nazis are incapable of doing.)

More importantly perhaps than an Edward Said-like reading of the Indy films is what they have to say about the personal realm. Though we do not know it until the third film, Indy is a “junior” who has taken a dog’s name for his own. We see him as perhaps an overgrown boy, but we aren’t told that he is just that until the third film. (It’s not a coincidence either that the third film features Dr. Jones Sr. and Dr. Jones Jr. having carnal knowledge of the same woman – Indy is, after all, pre-pubescent in the first two films and doesn’t confront adulthood until he must save his father and ponder immortality – which means he goes from being a teenager to being knee-deep in midlife crisis in about two hours, by my estimation, totally leap-frogging normal adulthood.)

“Raiders of the Lost Ark” opens with an exhilarating action sequence. Here, Lucas and Spielberg broke one of the then-cardinal rules of filmmaking: that the action is the audience’s reward, that we must work for it. Instead, the film opens in the midst of the action, like an early Christmas gift. The result is that the audience is joyfully infantilized.

Then, as soon as the opening sequence is over, we see Indiana Jones back in the classroom, teaching. He looks boyish with his glasses on, like a child wearing his father’s suit. A student blatantly hits on him, and he stammers, stumbles, and has a hard time going on. However, when presented with questions about the Ark of the Covenant, he becomes fluid, virile, all-knowing. Consider also his relationship with that horrid woman in “Temple of Doom.” He and Short Round have a clear “ewwww, girls are gross” mentality. And I don’t think it’s accidental that he should free a bunch of children in the film either: the films were always about freeing your own inner-boy.

Indy also offers something rare, which is the promise that history is alive – sometimes frighteningly so. There is a lot that the Indiana films don’t do, but nor do they aspire to that. This is maybe the one thing Stuever gets right – that they are about fun and childhood, but he misses the fact that they also remind us, ominously, that the past may not be through with us.

22 May 2008

Tom Waits interviews Tom Waits

Here. He is in rare form, but nowhere is this more evident than in the following exchange. Note the "glossary" tag.

Q: What is a gentleman?
A: A man who can play the accordion, but doesn't.

Fluminense 3 x 1 Sao Paulo

20 May 2008

"I shall please"

From Jerome Groopman's excellent (and highly readable) The Anatomy of Hope, a very elegant etymological summation and a note about the shift in how the use of placebos is understood by researchers:

The term "placebo," I learned from articles on the subject, is Latin for "I shall please" and is derived from the Catholic vesper service for the dead. In the past, paid mourners would participate in the service to pacify the grieving family.


Later he adds:

The inert placebo was meant to mute the background noise of the body processes, the random and supposedly meaningless oscillations that occur in our physiology. The outcome among the placebo-treated control patients was judged as the zero baseline and subtracted from the observed effects of the true therapy.

Recently, though, a number of scientists have questioned the assumption that placebos were inactive, contending that they have significant biological effects and...provide one of the clearest windows into the nexus between mind and body, particularly on how belief and expectation may affect pain and physical debility.

19 May 2008

Cross-pollinating

My good friend Jordan over at Wired for Music gives me a little room to vent about Nissan Pavilion and Radiohead, and he does some kvetching of his own too. His site is pretty rad anyway, so you should be reading it whether I am mentioned or not.

Back in the saddle. Unfortch.

A few observations, being back at work:

-My timing is off. I’m either too fast or too slow – too overwhelmingly present or barely there. I’m clearly overburdening some people and barely thinking of others.

-I don’t really have a new perspective on anything.

-When I drove during my hiatus, I made it a point to drive in the conservative manner that you’re supposed to in order to save gas. So, if there’s a light I know I never make, I would cruise toward it in neutral rather than hurrying to get there. Where I know there are downhills, neutral again, and coasting for as long as possible on the momentum generated. I accelerated slowly and rarely drove above 55 (even on the highway.) The result, based on one tank, is a bump in my city MPG from the 31-32 range all the way up to 36. Meaning an extra 40 miles out of one tank. This seems like a good thing, with the added bonus of taking some of the edge off the bellicose mentality of commuting by car. I only drive to work once, maybe twice a week anyway, but I keep noticing how it seems that half the people on the road drive as if they’re prepared for battle, and while I always wanted to somehow be above it, I feel like driving in a more eco-friendly way is finally the great cover I needed to act all oblivious to it.

-I had my first Tom Collins – actually a Hendrick’s Cucumber Collins, and it seemed dangerously tasty.

-Do they call it Amish Friendship Bread because you have to keep working on it like you do a friendship? Or is it because friendship comes in vanilla, chocolate, and banana flavors, and because friendships stay moist and fresh for ten days at a time? If so, Amish friendships are stranger than advertised.

-More so than any other dish, roasting a chicken makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, or done something the way it ought to be done. It satisfies the part of me that likes it when things are done the right way.

-Shooting in the neighborhood.

-This has Indiana Jones completely wrong. I I think I’ll write more on the topic later..

12 May 2008

Grandma humor

My grandmother has gotten to the point where she is really fond of gallows humor. When I talked to her on Mother’s Day, she shared this gem with me:

Three old men are contemplating their impending deaths and talking about that ancient fantasy – being present at your own funeral.

One of them asks, “There you are, lying in your casket – what would you want to hear people saying about you? How would you want to be remembered?”

The first old man says, “I hope they talk about how much I loved my family – how I was a respectful son and a proud father. About how my family always knew that, no matter what, they were my first priority and that my loyalty to family trumped all other allegiances.”

The second old man says, “I hope they talk about how much I accomplished. About all my hard work and dedication to my job. And that even though I am gone, my work lives on.”

The third old man says, “Well, what I would really like, when I am lying there in my coffin, is to hear someone saying, ‘Hey look! He’s breathing!’”

09 May 2008

Rainy day videos

Rainy Days and Mondays, by the Carpenters.

08 May 2008

Embassy loop in the rain

No, I don't speak Spanish

One of the downsides of being from the only lusophone country in South America is that you look Latin, in a general sense - as I was once told by a cabbie in Dublin, "Aye, ya talk like a yank but ya du look latin, mafriend."

I suppose that, if I had been smarter when I was young and unattached, I would have been able to parlay my "latin" looks into having better luck with American girls. But I think a lot of immigrants go through a cycle of initially seeking assimilation (anglicizing names, for example - most people called me "Ed" for a number of years), and it is only after some time that they become quite comfortable with being a sometimes-other, sometimes-yank person living in the U.S.

Group politics have always been hard for me anyway, since I tend to go out of my way to distance myself from groups that become too group-y. Still, my first year in high school in the U.S., I was incredibly relieved to have a table full of Brazilians in the cafeteria with whom to spend my lunches. We sat in a section that was distinct from the white kids, far from the black kids, sort of like an inlet in the area where the latino kids sat.

I was taking soccer for my phys ed credit that year, and there were two of us in the class who weren't native Spanish speakers. One was a tall blonde kid with a hyphenated, WASPy name. The other was me, and going by my name and looks alone, it was assumed that I spoke Spanish. I always had to kind of apologize, explain that I was brasileno and only spoke poquito "portunol". They all thought I was being lazy, I could tell.

It made matters worse that one of the guys I had lunch with, Paulo (though when he played with his metal band he was just "Paul,") was more than happy to roll his "r"'s a bit more, learn a few new verbs, and drop the fake-spanish like it was his job. They would point to Paulo and say, "Pero Pablito habla espanol..." and Paulo would happily say, "Si, hermano!"

One day, after this little guy Rigoberto and I set up a give-and-go play that took us from one side of the field to the other and led to a goa, Carlos - short, squat, central American with native features, wide shoulders, arms as thick as my legs - got really angry with me and thought we were just showboating. He pointed at me, let loose a string of curses, and ended it with something like, "...and don't pretend you don't understand me, you cabron - I know you understand everything I'm saying."

It's somewhat true. I probably understand at least 50% of what is being said to me in Spanish, and it's also true that I'm lazy for not trying to speak it. I could probably take a few classes and speak it really well. It would certainly get me out of this awkward spot. As my mom once put it, "I hate going to Florida. Everyone speaks to you in Spanish." And I think what she's getting at isn't some silly English-for-America agenda, but rather the assumption that Spanish is somehow a common denominator for all of us from Latin America. Furthermore, I think it's presumptuous to speak a language you haven't studied. Sort of like Ornette Coleman picking up the violin on a record even though he was a sax player - it's disrespectful to all those who have studied that instrument or language. I could, then, but the fact is, right now, I don't speak Spanish.

Lord knows there are plenty of Americans who are surprised to hear that Brazilians don't speak Spanish. But a good portion of Brazilian immigrants assimilate well into Latin American communities, and the rest of us end up looking bad because of it, like we're crying exception, like we're the one person at the pool party who doesn't want to get wet.

By the end of my first year, I wasn't sitting with the Brazilian kids anymore. I had made American friends, which, if I'm honest with myself, was always my goal anyway. I still hung out with the Brazilian kids, even meeting up with some of them when I was back in Rio for the summer. But I could tell that, for most of them, seeing me in the hallway with my new "weird" friends - who wore fishnets, doc martens, had dyed hair and lots of piercings - was sort of like seeing the provincial upstart who didn't know his place. "He used to run with us, but now it's like this..."

I felt some guilt about it. I had always wanted to float freely between different groups, and I had felt boxed in by the Brazilian playpen. I had been trained on the specifics of American high schools by a seemingly never-ending parade of tv shows and films on the topic. Watching those movies and shows, I always knew that I wanted to be the kid who confounds everyone else's expectations, the kid who dresses like a freak but is quite nice, the kid who seems not to have an athletic bone in his body but who could outplay most American kids on the soccer pitch.

I always knew that I wanted to be friends with bad kids as much as I wanted to be friends with the good kids; I liked being friends with the preppy beer set and the bookish clove-cigarettes set alike. And somehow, in the worldview I was developing, I didn't know how to incorporate a group that was only loosely tied together by geographic accidents, the country of our birth.

Looking back now, this little story repeats itself endlessly. It happened when a Brazilian kid came to Wooster and I didn't know how to relate to him. It happens whenever I check into a hotel in a place like, ok, mom, Florida, or Texas, and the people at the desk speak to me in Spanish, or when I buy something at the Todito grocery store in my neighborhood. It happens even now when I make small talk with Brazilian colleagues at conferences, many of whom I have now known for a number of years, but around whom I still feel somewhat fraudulent, like at some point the "real" Brazilians will be separated from the "fake" ones. Even now, I wonder why I am not writing this in Portuguese.

Faz parte do meu show, I guess.

The Continuous Life, by Mark Strand

This is one of those poems that I think is just perfect. Not an awkward phrase in sight. Every word in its right place.

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children crouched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? Oh parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost--a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

07 May 2008

Transcending the premise or fulfilling the promise?

Thinking back a few months ago to a New Yorker article on the different philosophies of the presidency on display in the Clinton vs Obama rift - one of Clinton's staffers or strategists says that they view Obama's promise to transcend politics as a cop-out. The quote is something like, "We don't want to transcend the Democratic party; we want to fulfill the vision of the party."

The implication being that by enacting the Democratic agenda and presumably delivering a better reality to the voters, a Clinton presidency would also deliver a lasting progressive majority to the party. Until I read this quote, I had more or less taken it at face-value that Obama's promise was better politics - offering a third way without actually being a third party candidate.

This idea - whether it is better to transcend the rules of the game or whether it is better to play the game so well that you defeat your competition (achieving a kind of transcendence) - was, I thought then, endlessly fascinating. Now, however, I'm not so sure that it's that useful a distinction.

I recently got really into Okkervil River, and what I liked about Will Sheff's songwriting was that it was unexpectedly formal. It followed the rules of singer-songwriter folk-rock, for the most part, but it did so exceedingly well. I am pretty critical of lyrics, partly because I think the human voice is one of my least favorite sounds. So, in my mind, if you're putting words to something, the words better have a very good reason to be there. But I think Okkervil River succeeds in that Clinton way - it fulfills the promise of a good singer-songwriter, a genre that I was dangerously close to considering obsolete or quaint in light of something like the Panda Bear album, Person Pitch.

So, Okkervil River fulfills the promise of its genre - but in doing so, the group ends up having a kind of transcendent power. It also sort of rewrites the rules of the game because it is so good that it feels wrong to somehow treat the music as emblematic of a genre. So in the end, have they transcended the premise, fulfilled the promise, or have they done both?

This is different from, say, Tom Waits, who early on trascended - in sound, content, style, and format - everything about being a singer-songwriter. The problem is that since he transcended the premise with a trio of albums in the early 1980's (Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank's Wild Years) - Waits has been happily fine-tuning the details of his new landscape. Put another way, having transcended the game once, he then dedicated himself to playing his particular game as well as he possibly could. So, his albums now are about fulfilling the promise of what we might expect from a Waits album.

Again, where do I put these two? The ends up meet up at the same point - which is to say, like great music or not-so-great drugs, it elicits a specific need and fulfills it. I would never think, "Oh, I want to listen to some singer-songwriter stuff - let me put on Okkervil River or Waits." The thought-process with those particular artists goes from the specific (the artist) the the general (the genre).

This is totally distinct from how I feel about, say, the blues. I usually start with the genre (I want to listen to some blues) and then go to the artist. So that brings in the issue of what my expectation is when I choose something to listen to. And this is where it all falls apart. If I want to listen to some thuggy soulless hip hop, I will probably choose Notorious B.I.G. I don't want a transcendent experience from that. I want good production and moral bankruptcy, I want money, drugs, "sex in expensive cars," and other high-roller stories. I don't want Biggie Smalls to re-write reality for me or to make me thing. Ditto when you sit down to watch a romantic comedy - you don't want to be blown away. You just want a romantic comedy with all the familiar touchstones - will they make it, oh they won't, why is s/he being so stubborn and dumb, oh yay, it all worked out!

To simplify the above paragraph: we want what we want. And that's where I think the insight stops. The distinction between transcending the premise or fulfilling the promise is helpful in categorizing how successful an artist is in their own context, but it doesn't tell us anything about why we want one or the other or whether it is better to be one or the other.

You can draw this distinction into other venues - is Chris Paul transcendent or is he distilling and fulfilling our idea of a pure point guard? Do you want a good burger to re-write the rules for other bugers, or do you want the best conventional burger you can get? As with many things in life, I find it pretty easy to classify things at first, then I realize my categorization system is flawed because I've overthought it, and I end up not being anywhere closer to understanding why I may want one thing over another, which would be the point of classifying things in the first place.

Recent Listens (through May 6, 2008)

Recent Listens:



Jimmy Smith - The Sermon
Chico Buarque - Construcao
The Mountain Goats - We Shall All Be Healed
The Word - Live at the Electric Factory, 12.28.97
David Allyn - Don't Look Back (Xanadu 101)
Albert Ayler - The Spirit
V/A - Goodbye Babylon, discs one and two (collection of early American religious country music)
Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry Sing (Folkways release)
Atmosphere - Lucy Ford EP
Herbie Hancock - Empyrean Isles
John Lennon - Mind Games
Charles Earland - Black Talk!
Johnny Cash - American IV (The Man Comes Around)
Faure - Requiem
Arnold Schoenberg - Symphonies 1 and 2 + Verklarte Nacht
Shivaree - I Oughta Give You a Shot in the Head
V/A - Mountain Music of Kentucky (disc one)
Prince - Purple Rain
Why? - Elephant Eyelash
Liars - Drum's Not Dead
Radiohead -6.9.01
Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds, and Nigerian Blues, 1970-76 (both discs)
Chick Corea - Friends
Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes

04 May 2008

What Would You Do For Free Papa John's Pizza? (Twice)

Ugh. So, the saving grace from the losses in basketball is that Papa John's has decided to blow its promotional load all at once. And considering that the Abstract Citizen household, much like the rest of the nation, is facing a time of economic uncertainty, free pizza is the kind of pizza we currently favor. Even chain pizza - except for Pizza Hut, which I believe is made from fermented bread, regurgitated tomatoes, and distilled ex-lax.

As nice as it is to have coupons for two free pizzas, claiming them proves very troublesome. It's carryout only, and you have to claim the pizzas the next day. (What are we going to do with two whole pizzas? Lord knows, but again, they are FREE pizzas, so we will gladly accept the challenge.) I google "Papa John's Adams Morgan" and get a hit on 14th street. Googlemaps says it is just below Columbia Heights. Great. I place the order, am told that they will be ready in 15 minutes, and kill some time before heading out. As I step outside, it starts raining. Hard. I scurry to my car, stick the key in the ignition, turn it and...nothing happens. Profanities start hopping around my bedraggled brain. Instead, I think, "Screw it. I'm going to put on my running shoes, grab a couple plastic bags to protect the pizzas once I get them, put on a rain coat, and I'm running over there." I also have a conference call in 50 minutes, but the 2400 block of 14th street should only be about a mile away, so I'm not too worried.

I literally sprint over to 14th street, and start looking. Several blocks later, no sign of the Papa John's. I'm well past the 2400 block - I'm in Columbia Heights, being eyed warily by the decidedly non-yuppie sidewalk types. I call back and discover that the Papa John's that was listed as being on 14th street is actually at 20th and Penn. More profanities. I ask if there isn't a location on 14th street, without mentioning that i already ordered two pizzas from the 20th/Penn location. I get a number, call, place an order. Guy tells me that it's just above 14th and U. Sweet - I'm only about 9 blocks from U. Off I go. The rain is coming down in big chunky drops now. Pregnant rain drops. Pregnant with triplets. Fat triplets. Enormous rain drops. You get the point.

I get to U street, and again, the familiar refrain - no sign of a Papa John's. UGH. Call back. Plead with the guy - now I have 10 minutes before my conference call, and no matter what, I have to sprint back home. I prevail on the guy to grant me a waiver on the carryout-only clause of our binding agreement. He does, but tells me the pizza will be on its way and at my door in - you guesed it - 10 minutes. Off again, again at a full time sprint. The rain drops get bigger, somehow, and harder, and faster. I'm calling Ms. Abstract Citizen for moral support, full steam in the rain, explaining where we are, and indicating that our "free" pizzas are going to cost us a generous tip to the delivery guy.

End of story. I make the call, the pizza gets there, I tip the guy five bucks, and we call it a day.

Until Saturday rolls around. Again, the day after a Wizards loss. Since AAA replaced my car battery, everything has been fine. We have two more coupons for free pizza. This time Ms. Abstract Citizen places the order, because I don't want to be type-cast as "Mr Free Pizza." We get in the car, I turn the key and...

Nothing happens. Dead battery, again. Profanities, again. This time we confirm the location and walk the mile and a half over there, except that we had already gone for a six-mile run earlier in the day. So, this is not a pleasant time, but again, 35 minutes later, we are the proud owners of two free Papa John's pizzas that we don't particularly want, but...here we are. Now I am waiting for my second AAA visit in almost as many days, fearing that I will need to take the car into a mechanic.

If you say something twice, it means something else the second time. But if the same lousy thing happens to you twice, it's just that - a lousy thing that happened to you more than once.

That Novel I Will Never Write - Part 1

Rules:

Protagonist needs a wound. Ideally more than a lost love. Death in his past? Perhaps a death for which he feels responsible?

Ideally the wound has a phsyical corollary. I would say a scar, but Harry Potter has made that outré. Not like a missing limb or anything grotesque - it should be something that only Protagonist knows about, that is probably never to be manifested. Like, he can't pole vault higher than 7 feet because his rotator cuff will never be the same. Or he will never be able to hold his breath for more than 70 seconds in a swimming pool because his brain's density has been irrevocably changed by diving below 30,000 feet to save the life of the person whose death for which he feels responsible. Something along those lines.

Protagonist's decency - his fundamental humanness - is established when he does something kind when no one is looking, for which he expects no reward. This is how we know he is a Good Guy. For example, we see that he is very careful about making sure that the people in front of him in line at the grocery store have right of first refusal when a new register is opened.

There is something Protagonist always does, or something he never does. Like, he never takes cream with his coffee because he thinks he only deserves bitter coffee. He doesn't say so, exactly, but this is reinforced later on when he consistently declines to order dessert. [Are we in a city, where Protagonist routinely eats out and orders coffee? Or are we on rural terrain, where Protagonist declining sugar means simply that when a guest is present, he cannot produce sugar for the guest's coffee? Because he is a rustic type, right? Ugh. This is terrible.]

Or, he always wears a hat when he is outside. Or, he always whistles popular tunes but with a dirge-like, funereal tempo. Ideally, whatever he always does or doesn't do is tied to his wound. Like, he threw away the research that would lead to a cure for diabetes, so he feels he cannot eat sugar. Or he always wears a hat because he accidentally killed someone by dropping something on their head.

It is critical that Protagonist not be too erudite or too intellectual. His understanding of abstract concepts is derived from very concrete, simple tasks. He is a smart guy and all, but he's not a guy who ever says, "Oh, that reminds me of a New Yorker article I just read." You know, the kind of stuff I would say. Ideally, he says, "Well, you can't figure this problem out any more than you can figure out how to lay down new tile without a wet-saw." Remember to google "wet-saw" before he says something like that though.

Protagonist has one of the following, in whom he confides: a pet; a dumber friend who thinks he (the friend) is actually a smarter friend; a friend who actually is smarter; a zany relative; a group of peers, who are more or less interchangeable; or a random child, who occasionally says unexpectedly clever things. (Note: don't make it a kid. Kid-actors who play roles that involve saying prescient things usually make people like me want to strangle them.)

Protagonist is repeatedly propositioned by some superficially attractive member of the opposite sex. Either Protagonist is blind to the propositions, or Protagonist is dimly aware but knows that something very rare and precious would be lost in this transaction if it were ever to occur. (Note: The transacation can occur, but the context will be very important.)

When we come to the end and Protagonist has found whatever it was that was missing, Protagonist will no longer do whatever it was that he always did; or he will do whatever it was that he never did. Or he will do the same thing he has always done, except he will do it consciously and deliberately as opposed to distractedly, which is how he would have done it in the past.

[Note to self: This is terrible. Needs to be started over and made less "As Good As It Gets"-y.]

Saturday Six Miler