I am clearly not in the mood for revenge.

  Inevitable fussy shirt shot 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

Some years ago, my old roommate in San Francisco told me he had been innocently reading along some otherwise innocuous movie review from Mick LaSalle in the Chronicle when LaSalle, seemingly out of nowhere, grouchily mentioned the film's "obligatory bathtub masturbation scene." My roommate was of course puzzled, since he had been out to the multiplex on more than one occasion without having realized that contemporary cinema was of late awash (so to speak) in the hackneyed use of this bathtub trope.

But I understand the critical impulse toward such instances of crabbiness, occasions when one's idiosyncratic internal accounting system totes up its columns and suddenly comes to an internally consistent but perhaps outwardly baffling conclusion along the lines of LaSalle's sniping over bathtub masturbation. One notable instance of this phenomenon was the time about twelve years ago when I was living in Sunnyvale and getting up every morning at 5:00 AM to commute into the City for my first bookselling job. I had been dragged out one weeknight (against my better judgment) by my then-girlfriend to that one big Country and Western bar in the South Bay, and after an evening of some sullenness and no doubt passive aggressive silences on my part I was dropped off back at my place, a duplex I shared with the pseudonymous sometime commenter to this site, Dokrokket.

Young Dokrokket at this point in his life was a commuting post-baccalaureate pre-med student who kept hours similarly brutal to my own. I came into our house to find him doing what he did nearly every night, cooking up his lunch for the next day. And for some weird arbitrary reason I suddenly found this incredibly irritating.

"I suppose you're just going to put that in some tupperware and . . . and  . . . stick it in the fridge," I snarled. "Or something." I then fixed him with a baleful glare. When this sally met with no response aside from a dignified silence, I stomped upstairs and went to bed.

(Dokrokket later told me that the only appropriate response to my remarks would have been to knock me to the floor and pound me repeatedly. Being the fundamentally decent guy that he is, he decided to refrain from answering.)

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that you can all check out Fussy and see all sorts of folks who have offered themselves up as models for official fussyware. I have no doubt that my entry into these ranks will count as some sort of psychic breaking point for someone out there and I will provoke some strange irrational backlash. For this, my apologies.

UPDATE: An extensive and somewhat unsettling two-minute google search yielded up this related review from LaSalle, a look at the French movie Secret Things:

Like most French films, "Secret Things'' begins with a scene of a beautiful woman masturbating. But "Secret Things'' goes beyond most French films. It soon tops this with a scene of another beautiful woman masturbating, and quickly trumps that with a scene, set in the Paris subway, in which the two heroines help each other masturbate. Ten whole minutes go by before the next masturbation scene, but it's a good one.

Comments

[Mrs. Kennedy]

I'm speechless.

[G.]

Well, I'm not trying to draw any direct parallels here. But I have this thing where I always worry that my participation in anything means it's on its downhill slide. This is no doubt false and simply a lingering psychological problem left over from hanging out with alternative-music snobs (with whom I was always three or four cycles behind).

Of course, now I just hang out with a three-year-old and write about third-hand memories of cinematic bathtub monkeyshines. What is worse, I just don't know.

[The Family Man]

That movie is now at the top of my Netflix queue. Because I love the French language.

[DOKROKKETT]

You really despised the South Bay. One time when you were visiting from the North Bay you commented, "Whenever I'm down here I want to vandalize something."