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first few seconds of shaving
Saturday, February 27 2010
After I thought I'd taken care of my own personal business, I swapped out the 35 gallon poo collector in the brownhouse basement this morning. But that's not how my biology rolls, and by noon I'd already made a contribution to the new collector. As for the old collector, wrestling it out of the shit hatch hadn't been difficult. Out in the daylight, I could look at the pile and see what has been happening to it. In the places where accumulation wasn't fresh, an interesting fungus covered the surface with a dense fur of half-inch hairs. I wondered if perhaps part of its function in the micro-ecosystem was to provide an insulating layer, helping the pile retain the heat of its own decomposition.
Since a recent Sound Opinions podcast featuring Rivers Cuomo (of Weezer) fronting a Chicago riotgrrl band called the Cathy Santonies (these live performances are great, particularly the medley of "In the Garage" and "Heartsongs"), I've downloaded and been listening to the entire Weezer back catalog. It's not all great, but a lot of it is. There's something unusually endearing about the mix of playfulness and pathos in songs such as "Buddy Holly" and "Can't Stop Partying" (those are from both ends of their career). I especially like the way Cuomo casually tosses around ghetto street jargon in a completely suburban white boy affect (indeed, starting his career with "Why are these homies dissin' my girl/Why do they gotta front?"). I knew River's brother Leaves when he was a student in Oberlin College (Leaves taught me how to play the creepy atonal riff from Slayer's "Raining Blood" on a piano). That was before Weezer rose to fame and also before a serious car accident left Leaves with brain trauma (according to the Wikipedia entry on the Blue Album, the song "My Name is Jonas" is about the insurance hell that followed that accident).
In the bathtub this evening, I was reading a profile of Paul Krugman in the recent issue of the New Yorker and then shaving with the same Gillette Fusion blade I've been using for many months. The blade has grown rather dull, but I've found that once I've dragged it across my face a few times and endured the initial pain (which comes, I think, from the tugging on my whiskers), the process of shaving quickly becomes less painful, and I can get a good clean shave without any lasting trauma to my face.
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