"Hat and Beard" (Eric Dolphy, Out To Lunch)

Headed for a weekend in the city so Chi they be acting bashful, to paraphrase Kanye, but a couple notes before I go.

--Me, updated: Love Is Good, my futuristic rock 'n' roll with a robot play, is getting produced in late August at the Directors' Club here in the NYC. More info on that as it appears.

--Also, Saturday Night Rewritten is coming back this fall f'sho-sho, probably October.

--Working at a temp gig is always interesting when your desk isn't just an empty desk in the back corner of the office next to the water drip...that is to say, when you're at someone else's desk. At this job, I'm at the desk of "Kathy," a desk with more tacky crap than 8 out of 10 Bennigans', including:

-Bahamas shot glass
-A card with a cow on it, text reading "Love One An Udder"
-Several teddy bears of some charitable origin, unless the tag "I was born to fight cancer" on the bears means something I don't understand.
-A boring, "inspiring" story in a plastic frame titled "Self Worth"
-"A Formula For Success," which reads like:

Believe in the Do
not in the Don't
Believe that
you Will
not that
you Won't
More comes with
a Yes
than with
a No
The first step in Achieving
is Thinking it so.

Now, there's no completely wrong ideas in this shitty poem, although the punctuation is boggling, the meter is simple, and the author won't be vying for poet Laureate of New Jersey. (Even if it were still possible to vye for the no-longer existent position. Fuck McGreevey. I heard Baraka read that poem live, and even if it wasn't his best, it wasn't at all that offensive.) What it made me wonder is, what inspires me to continually look at? What would I keep at the same position of my own desk? A few ideas:

1) Picture of A-Rod being punched in the face by Red Sox captain Jason Varitek.
2) Picture of Herbie Hancock making a really funny face, rocking out on a keytar.
3) Hypnotic spinning lights and colors that quell my desire to knock down every cubicle in the joint with repeated flying roundhouse kicks.
4) Cow card reading God Bless Mooo All.
5) Ass. And titties.

See y'all in a few.