Jack went off to the NAMM convention down in Anaheim yesterday. He was supposed to be exchanging professional secrets with his deep industry contacts, but it sounds like there's a fair amount of fanboy joy going down, too. Jack called last night and name-dropped ten famous-but-not-to-me bass players he'd met within his first hour on the floor. I'd put them down here so you could see if you know who they are, but their names all finished their drinks and excused themselves for a moment and then forced themselves out through the men's room window that I thought I'd painted shut. Oh, but I do remember one! "I met Prince's bass player," he said. I remember that because Jack didn't know his name either but we both know who Prince is. "Let me guess," I said, "he's a big black guy." "Church guy," said Jack, ignoring my racist racial profiling.
Anyway, last night Jack was in the Disneyland Hotel not watching porn and I was left in peace to do a few things at home. One was to ruthlessly pursue my quest to crush Brian at Word Twist on Facebook -- he wins almost all of our games but now that he got laid off his mind is slipping he's becoming less competitive and generously let me win a few he's more brutal than ever. Secondly, I wanted to transcribe for you some of the best bits of this book of personal ads Antonia sent me for my birthday. Here are two favorites:
You were reading the BBC in-house magazine on the Jubilee Line (12 November), I was coughing hot tea through my nostrils. Surely you can't have forgotten? Write now to smitten, weak-kneed, severely burned, bumbling F (32, but normally I look younger). I'll be quite a catch when my top lip has healed. And this brace isn't for ever. Box no. 7432.I am the literary event of 2007, or at the very least the most entertaining drunk on my ward. Please visit (Mon-Thurs, 5-7 p.m., bring chocolate, and gin). F, 41. Box no. 4365.
The third thing I did was watch Wit, which I've had for probably a month from Netflix. I kept trying to persuade Jack to watch it with me. "It's directed by Mike Nichols!" I thought for sure that would pique his interest. "What's it about?" he asked. "It's about Emma Thompson dying of cancer," I said brightly. I should have known he'd never watch a cancer movie in a billion years, even if William Holden and Ava Gardner both came back from the dead with a bottle of 40-year-old scotch and acted it out in front of him in their boxer shorts.
So I watched it last night by myself and cried my fucking eyes out. I needed a good cry but there's usually too much going on for me to commit the time it takes to get good and worked up for one. But lately I've felt like I've had a sort of emotional cold and I needed to sit in front of an emotional humidifier with eucalyptus and a towel over my head to draw it out of me. I think you can have a cold in all parts of your body and this is because of my mother. I remember once when I was a kid my eye was a little red and puffy and my mother said, "Oh, you have a cold in your eye." She gave me a damp washcloth to put on it and I laid down for an hour and the next day it was gone. Since then I've also been known to have a cold in my vagina, the flu in my lower back, and nostril plague. But this week was the first time I think I've ever felt like my heart needed to blow its nose. So it did, and I did, and Jackson was perfectly content in the other room eating pizza and doing his homework and watching a DVD of the first season of 30 Rock.