Craig Davidson

Tuesday, July 29th

Odd things in my Mailbox

Hi All,

Two posts in two days! What the hell's happening here?

Anyway, I get stuff in my mailbox. As most people do. Like, the other day I got an application to be a school bus driver. Just stuffed in the ole letterbox. I don't know who'd apply to random applications stuffed into mailboxes. Me, potentially. The other day I got this letter from France. I reprint it, with syntactical and grammar errors intact:

Dear Sir Craig,

I am a grandmother of 86 years, confined to my home by old age, and to make myself useful and leave a memory to my great-grandchildren, I thought to built for them a small collection of autographs which will testify to the era in which I lived. I would be very grateful if you could help me by sending me a document/letter, photo, book, signed or autographed by your hand. Thanking you in advance for your kindness of which I am now very grateful, and I send you, my very respectful greetings.

... It's all very nicely written, in a very neat and precise and untrembling hand. It seems so odd, not least of all because I've never made my mailing address public. Now I do appreciate being called Sir, I'm a real stickler for being called it, in fact, but why would an 86-year-old grandmother call me so? Plus why would an 86-year-old French woman read my book? And write in such wonderful English? She would most likely be the oldest person to have done so. Additionally, why would a middlingly-successful, violent, bizarre writer like me testify to the era in which an 86-year-old woman lived? I could only testify to, if anything, the perversion of her era.

Needless to say, I'm still sending her something. But it's weird, what you'll get in your mailbox.

More French news, this time on the movie end of things: After some back and forth, the film option to RUST AND BONE was picked up by Jacques Audiard, a French filmmaker:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002191/

So, that's very nice indeed. I've had most of my work looked at by filmmakers and my first book, THE PRESERVE, is now on a third-draft of its script, but as yet lacking financiers. So this is the first time I've, y'know, been paid for my work by a filmmaker. Mr. Audiard, as longtime readers of this blog may recall, was the fellow who's very nice brushed felt hat I spilled water all over at La Ronde, in Paris, when we met last year. So, my stumbling clumsiness aside, he's decided to press forward on the option. My thanks to him, and to Francis and Marie at Albin Michel. There's no saying a film will be made, but still, I think it's great the ball's rolling forward. I will keep everyone abreast of events as they unfold.

All best, Craig.
Craig Davidson on 07.29.08 @ 04:00 PM EST [link]

Monday, July 28th

Is that funny?

Hi All,

There are often things I find funny and I don't believe others would probably find them nearly so funny as I do. For example, when I was in highschool---I was just thinking about this today, and hadn't thought of it in probably a decade---me and my friends would fuck with the CB radio enthusiasts club. I don't know what this club did, exactly; if you've ever seen a car with one of those massive buggywhip antennas jutting up off the trunk (I saw one today, which got me thinking) that car has a CB radio. Whether or not the driver is part of a CB radio enthusiast's club---organization? fraternity?---well, who knows? Every Thursday night the CB radio enthusiasts would gather in a parking lot near the middle of town and do whatever such enthusiasts do. Surely they didn't talk on their CB radios to each other: why, with radios whose only real perk is being able to broadcast great distances, would they congregate in a parking lot to shout CB semaphore at each other? They were terribly serious. They had all sorts of numerical codes to translate serious information, like #17: I need to urinate. No, really, I don't know what 17 meant. Anyway, a buddy of mine had a CB radio so we'd park someways distant from the CB clubbers and tune around until we found their frequency.

US: Breaker, breaker, come in breaker.

CB ENTHUSIAST: Breaker Five here. Over.

US: You're a massive tool. Over.

CB ENTHUSIAST: Come again? Over.

US: You're a massive walloping tool. Roger dodger, over.

CB ENTHUSIAST: Who is this?

US: You're a giant jackass. 10-4. Over and out.

Sometimes they would get riled enough to challenge us to a fight. We'd say meet us at such-and-such a place and drive there and park across the road while these buggywhip-antenna-shod cars pulled into the lot and the CB enthusiasts fumed. It was meanspirited. I realize that now, and quite honestly I did then. I was seventeen. That's a slim excuse but it's the only one I've got. Anyway, there are things I enjoy now, like doily-crafting, that the younger generation would mock me for. Well, okay, I don't craft doilies but certainly there are things I do that are entirely nerdy. I won't tell you what, though, since if you follow my blog you no doubt consider me your GOD, or at very least some minor deity with certain superhuman powers, and I don't want to shatter your faith.

Anyway, as I was saying ... there are things I find funny that I'm not sure a lot of other people do. Take, for instance, this YouTube video, which set me off on an hourlong YouTube veg-out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p0QtJMKt1s

... did that tickle your funnybone? If not, I'm not sure I can blame you. I guess Absolut vodka got a bunch of young, web-famous sketch comedians to come up with odd advertisements. I don't know that it makes me want to drink Absolut, but it made me laugh, by myself, in my big empty house, a sound which, in bouncing off the high empty ceiling, was terribly forlorn. But of that no matter! Thank god my neighbor didn't summon the men with the butterfly nets! Then again, they may've conceivably carted him off instead. Anyway, so, I laughed. The hairdos alone are priceless. And the sudden rage of the one guy. Then the capper: 'Both of my parents died a couple hours ago.' Yet I can see others watching that, like my father, and being all "WTF?" Not that my father's ever said 'WTF?' That led me to a bunch of other videos. Like this one, from a show produced by the two dudes on the couch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRXK9RHWJy8&feature=related

... I mean, should I even be laughing? Why am I, exactly? Probably because of the Sesame-Street-ish look of it, the slowed down speech, and the general idea that anyone would broadcast to the world what they do when they pee. And yet, it almost feels meanspirited. Laughing at it, I mean. Some boys probably do have to sit down when they pee. They have a ... trick knee, or something. The Jimmy legs. Who knows? Just the way the baseball cap sits so high on his head is ridiculously funny to me. 'Mind your own biz / I'm just takin' a whiz!' Still, there's no question I laughed.

Then I hit a bit of a rough patch---not in my life; just surfing YouTube---until I came to this, which I will leave you with:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAwR6wjqL_I

All best, Craig.
Craig Davidson on 07.28.08 @ 09:41 PM EST [link]

Sunday, July 20th

Slushies / Business Opportunities

Hi All,

So, summer's here and I'm in the mood for thirst quenchers. Every summer I go on a slushie bender. I head to the various establishments peddling ice-based drinkable substances and go hog-wild. I've become somewhat of a connoisseur of such imbibibles. Some I like quite a bit. Others rank rather low. Here are my four most trafficked Slushie destinations, my faves, and my least faves.

Craig Davidson on 07.20.08 @ 04:39 PM EST [more..]

Saturday, July 5th

Gardening

Hi All,

Some people love gardening. They have gardening in their bones. Some people take to it later in life. Some who you'd never peg as gardeners. My uncle John, for example, who in his youth was a drinking-poolhall-fighting-carousing sort of guy, gets misty-eyed talking about the cucumbers he's growing. My Mom's a rabid gardener. A rabid pruner. We were golfing once and while waiting to tee off she was picking all the dead petals off the petunias and zinnias planted along the tee-off box.

Me, I really hate gardening. In fact, I don't garden. I'm a greenery ripper. I don't plant anything. If I could salt the earth of my backyard or cast some voodoo spell to keep the green stuff from growing, I would. Today I had to go out and do my twice-yearly (if I'm lucky) 'gardening.' This means I put on a gloves and rip every green thing that's managed to grow in my postcard-sized backyard. It's mainly all covered in flagstones, but still, shit grows.

I wouldn't do it at all but I took a look the other day and it'd pretty much turned into a botanist's wet dream out there: all manner of weeds and prickly fauna. Jungle-like. I figured before long the Neighbor's Association would be rapping on my door to tell me my yard was driving property values down. Plus everyone's roofs got reshingled last fall and there are still some stray roofing tiles in my backyard, so I figure they'd 'mellowed' enough to be picked up at last.

I'm the grim reaper out there. If it's green, I rip it out. There were some old plastic tags stuck in the dirt, put there by the house's previous owner I guess, which potentially identified some of the greenery I was tugging out as perrennials, or wild chives, or Fountain of Youth weeds, but anyhow, I tossed the plastic tags into the trash sack, too. But it was a pretty rough experience. I accidentally kicked a paving stone which stirred up an ant's hill. This reminded me of the time when I was maybe seven when I booted this giant football-sized anthill at my elementary school; everything was just hunky-dory until those ants started climbing up my trousers and I ran around the playground, shreiking and blubbering, rolling on the ground like I was on fire. Those weren't biting ants, either---the ones I disturbed today were. Biting, stinging, whatever. I watched one climb up my shoe, onto my sock, my calf. What an industrious little critter. Then it bit the hell out of me! I did that weird little frightened dance where you swat half-assedly at the thing that's bothering you then sort of hop around a little. Then feel like an idiot.

I didn't know there were stingy-biting ants in Calgary. I thought that was down in the Brazilian rainforest, where you have to watch out for pirahnas and those things that swim up your urethra and release little spikes into your urethral walls. And as much as I admire the ant for taking me on---it would be like one of HP Lovecraft's Elder Gods showing up and me clambering up on its tentacle to bite away at it---I had to try to be noble enough not to spray the hill with weed killer. I didn't. I almost tried to pit a potato bug and an ant in mortal combat, also something I'd've happily done as a kid, but I'm really too old to harbor that sort of gruesome curiosity.

Then I accidentally sprayed weed killer on my hands, which apparently is caustic---who knew?---and so they're still tingly and itchy as I write this. Then I saw a millipede, which are bar-none one of the most disgusting creatures in the world. If I had to chose between waking up in the dead of night to find a hissing cockroach eating my toenails or a millipede squirming between my toes ... probably the cockroach. Plus millipedes (or centipedes) grow big as hell and even eat mice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CL2hetqpfg

...did you watch that? Jeez, you really shouldn't have. Try getting that out of your head.

I hate gardening.

All best, Craig.
Craig Davidson on 07.05.08 @ 03:29 PM EST [link]