CAFFEINE

There is a moment in a caffeine high during which your delusions of grandeur are so grand that your heart opens and you are flooded with benevolent, indulgent love for the world and all it contains. It is the precise moment of reaching the summit of the high, the moment you can feel the hum of your central nervous system harmonizing with the hymn of the spheres. The moment before you go over to the other side and its attendant paranoia and jangly nerves.

If you sit in your office and drink an heroic amount of coffee and skip lunch, you can achieve and maintain this moment for quite some time.

Mmmmmmmm.

Before starting Mango Pudding Blues, we were going to simply cut anything libelous from our e-mail correspondence with C. and post that on the web. We dumped that idea eventually, when we figured out that most of it is libelous. Nevertheless, for those who can stomach it, here’s a snippet from today’s mail exchange. We join our heroes in progress, as they attempt to assign one another a topic for their next letter.

MPB:

...Not until you complete the assignment I gave you on August 2 of this year. I quote: “Please, a mini essay for me, entitled ‘Unrequited Faith: Morrisey at the dawn of the 21st Century.’

C:

I take your point. We have reached an impasse. That’s not a bad title for a thesis, you know. Mine is better “My only Mistake is I’m Hoping: Monty, Morrissey and Mediated Masculinity,” but only by a hair and only at the wire.

MPB:

I am still wiping the tears of hilarity from my eyes over the title of your thesis.

Do you think M. will be remembered as an architect of 21st century masculinity? Further, do you think you should send him a copy of the thesis and have him sing it in its entirety with Boz and the boys improvising behind him as his next solo album?

C:

Well, old boy, the point of a thesis isn’t so much to write an artist’s biography or eulogy as it is to do research in order to make and defend an argument. I do think M&M each created new space and provided different blue prints to generations of men who might otherwise have grown into C. Heston and J. Bon Jovi respectively. I think you continue to make the mistake of underestimating the potential for a sort of utopian impulse to reach kids isolated in ugly suburbs where positive representations of anything are difficult to find, through popular music and film. Aren’t you the one who subscribes to the symphony while sneering at any academic who wastes taxpayer money studying sitcoms? I’m not picking a fight, just reminding you of previous posts of yours.

As with most North Americans, can we safely say that you don’t see the value of academics in the social sciences or humanities?

MPB:

You do me a grave injustice, sir, for my tears of mirth were at the finely wrought cleverness of your thesis title. I was not laughing at it, but with it, dear, with it. And my question about Morrisey’s influence on the masculinity of the 21st century was asked in wide-eyed seriousness, not mockingly. And while I admit to a lifelong hobby of sneering and deriding academics, it is merely that; a hobby. And a man must have his hobbies, you know.

As for the ability of seminal freako artists to shine like beacons in the eyes of misfit boys in the suburbs even as their Hestonesque and Bon Jovi-like classmates stuff them into their lockers, you will find no greater supporter of them than I. Gimme you Jack Keroacs and your W.S. Burroughses and your A. Ginsburgs and your fucking pre-army Elvises and your Andy Warhols and so on. I am, and have always been, firmly on the side of the fags, beatniks, weirdos, losers, poets, junkies, misfits, pot-smokers, hippies, and cases of bad attitudes

C:

WHAT IS THAT THING?

Mango Pudding Blues spent much of yesterday hanging around the mailbox, waiting to see if the postman might bring any last-minute entries in the What Is That Thing contest. He did;

Why, it’s a pair of introspective binoculars

Or something whipped up for plausible hickey deniability.

Thanks for these, and hello and long time no see. This entrant appears to be writing in from the University of California at Long Beach, where we suspect he is pursuing some kind of haute academic career. In fact, several of Mango Pudding Blues subscribers are highly educated, and Mango Pudding Blues suspects one could paper an entire garage over with the distinguished degrees of its readers. We suspect this fact will be useful when we sell our growing mailing list to advertisers.

Mango Pudding Blues itself doesn’t even have a high-school diploma to decorate its walls, sad to say. Mango Pudding Blues flunked.

Well, anyway, thanks for all the entries, constant readers. Very funny stuff. To those of you who didn’t enter, we suspect you are leaning against the doorway, smirking mildly and believing yourselves to be sort of above these things. That’s okay. We feel that way much of the time too. We are not known for our pep.

Nevertheless, we are thankful for those who are, and the spectacular prize is, even as we write this, winging its way to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to the reader who correctly suggested that the thing up there to the left is

“A portable soprano didgeridoo”

Imagine how that would sound! Um, the prize is not actually winging anywhere just yet. It’s still being manufactured. We will show it to you before we ship it to the lucky reader.

* * *

YET MORE HOUSEKEEPING

We apologize to those who had the misfortune of reading sunday’s post any time before this morning. Dizzy with glee over our own overheated prose, we were more than careless about the conversion of the type to something readable on the web. We have since cleaned up the problem, and thank all the readers who hastened to point out our errors. Our attention to detail in the markup is piss-poor, we admit.

Oh, and remember a while ago when we said that all of the stuff that we were gonna do here, technically, had been completed? Lies lies lies. In fact, there are many more glitches yet to tend to. For instance, there’s the matter of the Old Mangos index page, in its dowdy off-the-shelf template. More serious is the lack of a navigation, once one has visited an old mango, that can take one home. We are ashamed of these problems, especially since our long-suffering back end people tell us that more and more readers are visiting the archives these days. We will, eventually, fix these things. Really.

And speaking of our back end, reports suggest that something with an IP address that says “googlebot” has been tearing through here lately. We don’t really know what that means, and we are too lazy to ask our technical assistant, although she is right now working away just one desk over. But we’ve been trying to stamp the little fuckers out where ever we see ’em. They’re fast!

Which reminds us of the reader concerns we’ve heard regarding Google. We still haven’t decided whether to bother with it. We have been highly gratified by the word of mouth of our readers and its success in spreading the Mango Pudding Blues around the world, as noted. We now ask that you redouble your efforts, with special concentration on potential readers who have money, fame or political or cultural influence. That is all.

SEVEN THINGS WE BELIEVE

At Mango Pudding Blues, we believe that the Yukon Gold is the finest potato.

We believe that mathematics is humanity’s best attempt to understand God.

We believe that the Timex Ironman is the only watch you really need.

We believe that large-ish doses of anti-oxidant vitamins really do slow the aging process.

We believe that one should wear perfume, even to – perhaps especially to – public events that discourage the wearing of perfume.

We believe that one should chuckle privately to oneself whenever one hears someone (usually someone describing a thing’s design) use the words “clean lines”.

At Mango Pudding Blues, we believe that the increasingly widespread use of “24/7” is one of the seven signs of the apocalypse. We have seen its use creeping into even the staid brochures of the corporate world lately, and we are aghast. We are similarly aghast at the now-fully-entrenched use of “like” to mean “said”, and we feel that those who use these neologisms are buck-toothed backwood hillbillies of the absolute worst sort.

You know what we’re talking about. You’re like, “oh, sure. I never do that. Do I?”

And we’re like, “well, actually, you do. 24/7, dude.”

We are, now that we’re really gettin’ warmed up, super-aghast over the “like” problem. Let’s face it, “24/7” is obviously a faddish non-word that cannot last. But “like”, well, “like” is another story. The use of “like” for “said” is indicative not only of lazy language use, but of a kind of lazy thinking that Mango Pudding Blues abhors.

We at Mango Pudding Blues delight in mocking our enemies, and one time we were trying to mock a particularly odious enemy who was a top-notch user of “like” for “said”, and we were reduced to sputtering speechlessness. We couldn’t bypass our language superego to produce the necessary level of boneheaded caveman lizard brain syntax that allows “like” to work. And then we realized that the people who do it are not only replacing “said”, they’re replacing an entire set of verbs and an even larger set of sentence structures and tenses that allow us to tell stories rather than act them out.

So, we might say,

“I was sitting outside at the café when I saw him. I shouted his name to get his attention, and he whirled around and saw me. I waved him in. “Got any money?” I asked when he reached the table. He just rolled his eyes and pulled out his wallet.

While they would say,

“I’m sitting outside at the café and I’m like, [makes face of recognition] “Stanton!” And he’s like, [pantomimes whirling and making face of recognition] and I’m like, [waves both arms, then makes gesture waving the imaginary Stanton in] and I’m like, “got any money,” and he’s like, [pantomimes digging for wallet while rolling eyes]...

Our point here is that “like” is the gratingly noticeable tip of an enormous iceberg of apathy towards, or inability with, the use of language itself to tell stories. It’s indicative not of poor use of language, but of an abandonment of language altogether in favour of acting.

And almost everybody we know under, say, 32 years of age who was educated in North America does it. 24/7.

* * *

THE LAST TIME I SMOKED POT

I once briefly worked with an Asian woman who called pot “the pots”. I would do something stupid and she’d be like, “have you been smoking the pots?” I always got a kick out of that.

The last time I smoked the pots was several years ago. Well, three maybe. I was never really big on the pots, but I’ve always thought I ought to be. Ideologically, I’m pro-pots. In practice, I just never really get around to it. But the last time I smoked the pots was at the end of a little six-month or so period where I really put my mind to it and got me some pots and smoked it. Smoked them.

I found smoking the pots with other people pretty unsatisfying. I’d get all baked and laugh endlessly about stuff that I couldn’t breathe enough to explain because I was laughing about it, and then after a while of that desperate laughter I would sit there dumbly drooling with the others, watching one tiny corner of an episode of the Simpsons and marvelling over the stunning range of colors that can be transmitted via red, green and blue phosphors.

One night I came home after one of these sorts of be-ins and turned on the radio and flopped down on the couch, all screwed up and crazy but not yet ready to hit the hay. I don’t know what channel I had the radio on, but Soundgarden’s song Burden in My Hand came on. I was lying there, pretty much drifting off to sleep, when I noticed for the first time what an incredible amount of space was in between the instruments in that song. I noticed the huge amount of sheer sound, the sweet dripping wet soundiness of each sound and the vast structural intelligence that put the sounds together. I listened to that song on the radio for hours. Days. When it was over and the spell broke, I sat up and whispered, fuzzily, affectionately, to myself, “eureka”.

Because here, on the verge of giving up the pots as a waste of time, I found the killer app; music.

I stopped smoking with others, and would instead pick an evening here and there when I could clear my schedule and unplug the telephone and crawl into music. Records were good, but the radio was even better, because I could hear music for the first time. Music that I hadn’t already heard. I could feel the tickle of new neural pathways being forged by the purest, most beautiful form of information.

One night, the last night I smoked pot, I was lying in my bed in the dark, listening to some blues tune. Nasty gutbucket guitar, horns, girlie backup singers, some sweaty lead singer who I thought was perhaps a big fat old black woman channeling the entire human history of the southern United States. I began to see the music. Synesthesia. What I saw was a perfectly drawn Hannah-Barbera cartoon of a band of hounds in a moonlit junkyard, locked into the primordial blues groove. The sensory feast was so delightful that I felt a welling up of excitement in my chest that I could not contain. It rushed up my throat and I hollered, “good lawdy, mama! Git me a bucket!” in a spasm, limbs akimbo. It felt so good I did it again.

“Good lawdy, mama! Git me a bucket!”

Oh, yeah. I am not making this up.

Anyway, the hounds keep on playing under the yellow moon, song after song, to my continued seizures of joy, because I had stumbled on to a live performance broadcast. That was the good news. The bad news was that eventually the deejay came on and popped my bubble by telling me it was Colin James, which was such a stinging shot to my entire musical belief system that I am a little surprised that I’m admitting it to you now.

But not even the news that I had ascended to ecstasy on the coattails of Colin James was enough to pull me back to earth. I began to wonder about why I preferred one musical artist to the next, and why any musician chooses this note over that note and in the grand accumulation of those choices, those preferences, builds a body of work. I saw how everything we do, every life built, is built on preferences, but nobody knows where preferences come from.

And I was lying there, baked, and I fell into an Escherian mathematical reverie in which I saw myself lying there, baked, falling into an Escherian mathematical reverie in which I saw myself, lying there, baked, falling into an Escherian mathematical reverie and so on, and I saw that each of those moments, or frames, if you will forgive such a flat metaphor for what was really the sum total of my every sensory input at any given micro-moment, was fully accessible, piled one atop another, forming great threads that I was at liberty to surf up and down. I could slide up and down these huge crystalline strands and pick any moment in my past and re-access its full sensory memory. It was all still there, and I saw that the history of humanity was built, at its base, not of cells or atoms but of these infinite threads created by thoughts just like the ones I was having while lying there, baked, falling into an Escherian mathematical reverie.

That’s the last time I smoked the pots.