Erotica

Last night I dreamed I was on a basketball team with John Stockton, Reggie Miller, Shaq, and Jared from Subway. Whenever Jared had the ball, the crowd booed him wildly. In this dream, I did not play basketball any better than I do in real life—terribly—but I assumed they would cheer for me, since I didn’t touch any kids. I was disappointed, however, and they only liked the pro basketball players.

Today is the day that Marty McFly visits in Back to the Future Part II: October 21, 2015. If you haven’t watched the original Back to the Future lately, I strongly recommend revisiting it. It’s pretty much a perfect adventure movie, and one that contains remarkably little violence by the standards of what stories we tell today. Plus there’s a DeLorean. That car was kind of a joke in the eighties, but now it’s remembered as the car from Back to the Future. In that sense, at least, John DeLorean’s letter to the film’s producers was oddly prescient.

Today I am in New York. I got in to LaGuardia around eleven last night and made great time into Manhattan, right up until we got to the FDR, which had been blocked by an accident. I spent the next 40 minutes or so driving down Second Avenue from 125th to 6th Street. It was a good way to come back to the city, since it amounted to a slow parade of buildings I remember with different things inside them. It’s been 14 months since I was here last, which is the longest I’ve gone without setting foot in New York City since 1999. We ate tacos at midnight, and I wondered why I ever left. Then a siren woke up me and the fire escape pigeons at 5am, and I remembered. It’s still pretty great, though.

Combat! blog is winging its way to LaGuardia today, and I have but little time. I have to put all my cosmetics into TSA-compliant bottles, because of that one plot that didn’t work, and don my TSA-compliant underwear because of that other one. And I have to change the water in the goldfish tank, do a couple quick edits for clients, trim my beard, shave my shoulders, exfoliate my teeth, re-foliate my hair—all sorts of stuff, really. I shouldn’t have stayed to talk to you this long, but here we are. While I ease into a swivet, how about you read this fascinating New York Times story about Anna Stubblefield, who fell in love with her profoundly disabled ward. Now she’s awaiting trial. The question of whether a technique called “facilitated communication” allowed him to finally express his true intellect—and his love for Stubblefied—or whether she merely put words in his mouth is one for the courts. Now it’s one for the readers, too, and it’s sticky. Check it out. I’ll just be in 18C, pretending to sleep.

The brothers of Delta Fresca Nu drink a bucket of rum to help the poor.

As you probably know, the University of Montana banned fraternities and sororities from holding events that involve alcohol last week. Evidently things got a little out of hand over homecoming weekend. In a stern letter to chapter heads, Caitlin Parker warned that “our community has lost track of our purpose as value-based organizations.” And the frats went dry.

It was bad news for me, since I just pledged to Delta Fresca Nu. As a man in his thirties, I thought my button-down persona would contrast with frat life in hilarious and interesting ways, like that movie, Crocodile Dundee. But it turned out to be tedious and embarrassing, like that movie Old School. All my frat brothers want to do is help sick kids, and now I have to do it sober.

You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. I’d like to take a moment to thank my editor there, Skylar Browning, for letting me do stuff like this instead of telling me to go to hell, as the AP Style Manual instructs. He’s a good man, and thorough. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.