Remain calm if this picture appears to creep closer to you

The Bleat! by James Lileks!™… First things first:  my self-introduction.  I'm James Lileks!™  and I'll be your host this evening!  With a little luck, at least one of us will retain our dignity.  Or in my case acquire some.

Flipped through a catalogue today, spotted one of those tall, frosted lemonade glasses and immediately pictured myself at a charcoal barbeque furnished with every latest retro boomer fetish that's ever been repackaged and marked up 5000% at upscale home improvement chains.  You know the ones I mean.  They're the sort of stores where you see professional couples take that first heady step towards realizing materialism really is the perfect substitute for achievement.  Or where career women confront the fact that buying stuff is a lot more fun than pretending to work as hard as men all day.  The way Mean Girls pretends to be as biting or as funny as Heathers (although, honest Abe, I haven't seen either movie and am deeply ashamed).  I'm not even sure if that last sentence makes sense but this is the Bleat, we don't gotta have us no steenking logic in the…how does that go?

The appeal of those stores?  It's like being reminded of a comforting past that's neither real nor actually comforting.  It's just reassuring to know that when we die my generation will leave behind a load of crap so vast, you won't even be able to bury it all.  And most of it will be fetishized replicas of our parents' crap.  Look upon my preserved artificial childhood, ye mighty, and despair!  (Whoa, a Shelley reference and I'm not even through fiddling with my peenie.)  When the last one of us finally goes, the world will become a post-apocalyptic double feature starring Charlton Heston where everyone lives in the shattered remains of strip malls and warring gangs with names like The Marauders fight each other until Heston, who gets mercilessly beaten in act two, and his designated female love interest…and then…so they…I have no idea where that one was going.  I think I was watching a movie or something.  Things just went dark for a minute.

Self-introduction.  Right.  Moving on then.  You probably know me from my Better Homes and Gardens web archive, which is flourishing nicely, thank you, or from my 500,000 word web page about everything adorable my little adorable daughter does and every word she has ever spoken, of which I am unduly proud.  And proud of being unduly proud, if that's possible, which I sure hope it is.

Don't think I could ever bring myself to strike my daughter across the face, so it's a good thing my wife is the disciplinarian.  Don't I know it!  I wouldn't be smoking cigars outside or acting like a fully aproned house-husband if she weren't more of a man than I'll ever be.  Her latest job (I'm not allowed to ask) seems to involve leaving the house around 10 o'clock in the morning and coming back at 11:30 at night smelling of whiskey and cheap perfume.  Speaking of which, ever since my wife started dating again she's been shirking the few household responsibilities she still accepts as hers, and one of these days I'm going to drink up the nerve to say something.  One of these days.

Been staring ahead quietly after that last paragraph and it finally hit me what I was thinking about.  Our modern world has no time for quaint old words like "o'clock".  If you listen carefully, no one says it anymore.  "I'll see you at three."  "Let's have dinner at seven."  "O'clock" is just too much extra work for our busy lives, it's gone by the wayside like those wonderful brick edifices or the official male costume of hat, three-piece suit, and painfully tight leather jockstrap.

There's a time and place for empty irony, and a time and place for shallow nostalgia.  And that time is now o'clock!

Editor's Note:  James Lileks will be contributing to Udolpho.com for the rest of 2004.