A blog by Dan Brooks
It’s just shy of 5am here in Missoula, and I am about to begin the arduous process of being there in New York. While I spend the next several hours getting frisked and jostled and mechanically questioned, how about you read this article about Whit Stillman, whose new movie opens selectively in April? I heard about it on my air traveling bourgeoisiephone. Combat! blog will be back tomorrow and full of falafel.
The photo above was uploaded to Facebook by my friend Lucas. Here I use friend very loosely.* I haven’t seen Lucas since high school, when he was a year behind me. While we were friendly acquaintances, we never really hung out, and we certainly haven’t kept in touch since then.
We became friends on Facebook sometime last year, presumably due to the “people you may know” feature. Lucas is a person I might know, had we not both left our hometown essentially for good at the end of high school. As it is, he is someone I know not at all, except I knew immediately when his wife went into labor and that he lives in LA and where he goes to lunch pretty much every day.
From left: an elephant, a penguin, Amos McGee, Dan Brooks (dead)
Guess who lost ten pounds in the last four days? If you guessed Ugandan refugees or someone else with real problems, you’d be right, but I would still glare balefully at you and demand soup. Then I would not eat the soup, because my throat hurts. My throat hurts so much that I make an involuntary motion with my arm every time I swallow. It hurts so much that I actually went to the doctor, who A) feigned pity and B) gave me antibiotics. So now I am fevered, swallow-averse and nauseous, and the self-pity—the real kind of pity, the purest form—rolls forth like, I dunno, breakfast. There is no Combat! blog today. Probably, there will be no Combat! blog tomorrow. I’m sorry that everything has been so crappy this week, but I’ll make it up to you on Monday. Or I will be dead. Either way, everyone will be much happier.
Lawyers, back me up: if a man is wearing boxing gloves, you can legally hit him in the mouth, right?
Miracle Mike Sebba and I used to amuse ourselves by discussing where and when in world history we would most like to live—Paris in the twenties, Greenwich Village in the fifties, Plato’s Athens, Da Vinci’s Venice. Strangely, Alabama and Mississippi never came up. At no time in recorded history was either of those states any fun. Even under the Cahokia—arguably its peak civilization, and certainly the one that consumed the least Jack-In-the-Box—Mississippi was a terrible place to live. And Alabama in the early sixties was an exciting, historically significant milieu only in context of the shittiness of all previous Alabamas. Both states consistently vie for the lowest literacy rate in the Union. But they were able to put aside their rivalry to agree on one thing: they love Rick Santorum.
A lazy, stupid flu virus attacks a perfectly good blasto-something.
It is Tuesday now, and I’ve still got the flu like a motherfucking fireplace. If you are delirious with fever, don’t spend two of your four waking hours watching Downton Abbey, or that cadence will get in your head and make your recurring dismemberment dream weirdly dry and proper. I feel better today, although I do not feel anything that could be described as good, and hopefully tomorrow will see a return to form. In the meantime, how about you enjoy this clever advertisement? Props to Spencer for the link.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI&feature=youtu.be