March 04, 2005

Twenty Questions With...

Many of you I’m sure have heard of the Proust Questionnaire. Perhaps it was given to you by a pretentious creative writing teacher, or perhaps you once had a pretentious girlfriend who made you take it while she read The New Yorker, listened to NPR, and sipped an iced chai. Or perhaps you’re an honest to God human being with a soul and you therefore have no idea what I’m taking about. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The point is that Chris and I just took the bloody thing and I will now share my answers with you. Chris' decided to keep his answers private, saying that a man's soul is his own business, and that if you want to take a peek into his that you'll have to shell out $14.95 in a few weeks to buy a copy of Foop!

However, my soul (and body) comes cheap. The only thing you have to pay is time.

Your most marked characteristic?

A constant craving to be caressed, rubbed, and squeezed by something, preferably living.

The quality you most like in a man?

A mustache.

The quality you most like in a woman?

A constant craving to caress, rub, and squeeze things. Namely: me.

What do you most value in your friends?

Drunkenness. Wild, reckless, frequent, drunkenness.

What is your principle defect?

My temper. May God help those who cross me.

What is your favorite occupation?

Pre-occupation.

What is your dream of happiness?

To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy walking distance, a French prostitute.

What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?

To have someone come up to you, split your stomach open, rip out your intestines, wrap them around your next like a tie, and force you to go on job interviews until you bleed to death.

What would you like to be?

Big. And I don’t mean like Tom Hanks in the 80s smash hit Big. I don’t want to be an adult working at a toy company and playing chopsticks with my feet. I want to be big like a frikkin mountain is big. I want to take up an obscene amount of space, I want to bat away the clouds like flies, and most of all, I want people to feel the urge to climb and conquer me.

In what country would you like to live?

Most people will probably say Italy, France, Spain, or somewhere similar. One of the biggies. Not me. I’d like to live in some random bullshit country. Somewhere like Burkina Faso. Or Canada.

What is your favorite color?

What is this? A first date? Fuck off.

What is your favorite flower?

Morning glories, because they don’t stay around long enough to get boring.

What is your favorite bird?

Pigeons. And anyone who says otherwise is just setting themselves up for disappointment. Because one day soon there'll be nothing BUT pigeons flying around out there. So you might as well get used to and learn to love them as I have.

Who are your favorite prose writers?

Chris Genoa, literary lunatic.

Who are your favorite poets?

Chimp Norris. His unpublished haikus are masterworks.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?

Murphy, from Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of a novel, Murphy.

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

Kind of a silly question to ask a misogynist, don’t you think?

Who are your favorite musicians?

Jeff Mangum. Anyone who denies thousands of people something they're desperately yearning for is OK in my book.

Who are your favorite painters?

Neckface.

What is it you most dislike?

Anyone who's made it through all of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

What natural gift would you most like to possess?

I'd like to able to start fires on command.

How would you like to die?

I'd rather not say. I don't want to give my enemies any ideas.

What is your present state of mind?

Worried that an assassin is about to rip my head off and eat it. Besides that, I'm cool.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

As a rule, I never answer questions with the word ‘indulgent’ in them. The same goes for the following words: trite, droll, epicenter, wry, exponential, oeuvre, baguette, and synergy.

What is your motto?

De opresso liber!

What event in military history do you most admire?

This is too easy. Hands down it’s the 300 Spartans defending the mountain pass at Thermopylae against the Persian horde.

As Herodotus wrote in his History:

... the small desperate band stood side by side on the hill still fighting to the last, some with swords, others with daggers, others even with their hands and teeth, till not one living man remained amongst them when the sun went down. There was only a mound of slain, bristled with arrows ... those with weapons still clutching them.

20,000 Persians died at the hands of those 300 crazy bastards. When I think of them, and I think of myself sitting here filling out this questionnaire, I have serious trouble looking in the mirror and not slapping the crap out of myself.

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