ghost of hotels past

Another change in this iteration of self-aggrandizement: I’m eschewing my solitude in the blog universe to cross-link and riff off of other bloggers’ posts I enjoy.

The first victim: Ms. Aubrey Sabala, who today dissects a past relationship and its tie to a specific place – Atlanta’s Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Her post struck a chord particularly because I had just finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which touches a bit on ghosts, on how a place can be haunted by its past inhabitants.

That seems to me so frequently the case with relationships – a place, a song, even a smell can bring back a memory of a person, of times shared with that person, so very powerfully. I like Aubrey’s post a lot – especially the last paragraph – because I’m not sure we can ever fully banish those ghosts, completely exorcise them. The best we can do, I think, is acknowledge them, learn to live with them in the background, while focusing on the living, the here and now.

And, of course, if you happen to have an Atlanta Ritz-Carlton ghost that isn’t quite far enough gone yet to coexist with peacefully, I happen to know that particular hotel serves one hell of a dirty martini. A little liquor goes a long way in putting such hauntings in their place.

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January 12, 2004

talk amongst yourselves

In newly re-minting this blog, I’ve made several breaks with long-standing self-aggrandizement tradition. Today, I make one more: you, faithful readers, will now be able to comment on my postings.

Sure, comment systems are nothing new, and an ever-increasing number of bloggers are playing host to the happily chattering communities that often evolve within the framework of such sites. But for years, despite requests to the contrary, I strongly resisted that trend. Why? Quite simply, I just didn’t care what you had to say. The whole point of self-aggrandizement is that it’s about me, me, me. Have something to say yourself? Start your own damn blog. Have something to say to me? Write an email. Besides, as several regular readers pointed out in such emails, for whatever reason, my writing style often ‘leaves very little else to be added’. Why then even bother with comments?

And, even if just by email, I did frequently hear from readers. My recent latke essay, for example, spurred nearly two dozen people to email in their reactions, from latke-cooking tips to reflections on the nature of religion, with a heap of vague praise (‘you write very well!’) lumped in between. But, as I read through one such email, it suddenly occurred to me that I’d been looking at things all wrong. Comments aren’t a break from the hyperbolic narcissism this site is meant to embody; they’re an extension of it. Comments wouldn’t just be people talking – they’d be people talking about me!

With that stunning realization in mind, I had no choice but to include comments on the site. After quickly retooling the s-a code, comments will now take their rightful place below each of my entries. So, go ahead. Opine away. Just remember, it’s still all about me.

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carded

Headed up to Oakland last night to cook dinner with Helen Jane. Without a recipe, we winged it on chicken parmigiana, which came out surprisingly well – particularly the homemade sauce. Apparently, the secret to cooking Italian food is consuming several bottles of vino in the process.

Helen Jane’s husband, James, is recovering from a serious fall that left him wheelchair-ridden for several months, though by now he’s up to crutching around with great aplomb. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with HJ on the set of I Love Your Work, enough to determine she’s one of my very favorite people, but I hadn’t spent nearly as much time with James. So I was particularly glad to spend an evening with just the two of them – sort of a chance to further feel him out. By the end of the night, I’m pleased to say he’d earned the official self-aggrandizement stamp of approval.

As the two had been unable to hit the bars (or, really, leave the house) for the past few months, they’d instead honed their card games skills to an impressive peak. Intermixed with cooking, drinking and eating, we blew our way through several games of Coolio, Egyptian Rat Screw, and an excellent variation of bullshit (possibly called ‘fourshit’?) that I taught. The latter game requires both strategy and the ability to seamlessly lie through your teeth, which left James and I to battle it out while Helen Jane – whose tendency to dissolve into fitful giggles when bluffing put her at a bit of a disadvantage – mainly egged things on.

Eventually, we ended up on their porch, where Helen Jane and I shared blogger gossip (accompanied by much eye-rolling by James), and we all generally shot the proverbial shit. It was one of the most delightful evenings I’ve had in weeks, and as HJ’s best friend Hilary (another recent addition to my very favorite people list) just managed to break her leg in three places and may consequently be coming to stay with Helen Jane for a few nights (thereby expanding Oakland’s apparent mini-Bellevue), I suspect I’ll be making it back at least once more through the course of this quick jaunt out West.

Ah, jet-setting, jet-setting.

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January 11, 2004

crawling back

I know, I know. I supposedly quit this weblog thing for good, cold turkey, just two months back. But, I swear to god, weblogging is more addictive than crack. Plus, while I still am aiming to write the longer sort of articles that precipitated the move away from blogging, I realized quickly that I often had short tidbits to share that didn’t really justify pages of their own. Hence this iteration of the site, which blends a weblog on the front page with hierarchically organized long-form content throughout the rest of the site.

And, yes, quitting and un-quitting is nothing unusual in the weblog world. (Welcome back HJ!) Hell, I’ve done it at least yearly myself since logging my first post nearly five years back. So, in celebration of my utter predictability, I close with this comeback quote from one of my un-quits two years back: “Yes, boys and girls, like a veritable phoenix rising from its digital ashes, the daily dose of vitriol returns. Sorry mom, but it’s cheaper than therapy.”

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January 10, 2004