I began today as I do most days: turning on an episode of Seinfeld I have recorded from the night before and then preparing and drinking coffee while watching it. Today it was “The Wait Out” from the last episodes of the seventh season. Kramer gets arrested after a series of events that began with him wanting to wear jeans again to assert that he is not getting old, that he has “the body of a taught pre-teen Swedish boy.” I then devoted my day to writing an excess of 1,200 words concerning the first two minutes of “the Contest.” I asked my dad if he had any thoughts on the joke that precedes George’s entrance, that terrorists do the laundry of their hostages occasionally, and he told me the story of the husband of an old colleague that had been taken hostage by Hezbollah in the seventies, was given clothes to wear in the local style—light, white cotton material—that were periodically washed by the captors. This made me entirely rethink the joke. It now seemed very callous to me. At a later stage in the essay I called my friend Kimberly at one point to ask her for her password at her account at our school because mine expired since I graduated. I wanted to look up “masturbation” in the Oxford English Dictionary to see what kind of history it had in figurative use. She refused to give me her password, though, as she used the same one for everything. The idea made her very uncomfortable. She agreed to email me the entry the next time she was at a computer. I was miffed but amused by this. I went for a walk with my mother and the dog at one point and decided to try on a pair of jeans that haven’t fit for a year or so, yet that I haven’t tried since I have recently adopted a healthier lifestyle. The fit was uncomfortable but I insisted the rest of the day that I was working them in a little. At one point I became distracted by Jason Alexander’s early career. I decided to read the entire plot summary of his first movie, The Burning, in which an alcoholic camp employee is maimed by a camper prank and returns to exact revenge, to see if the 9th-season episode of the same name was some sort of joke on it. I was unable to draw any such connections. When looking for scenes featuring Alexander on You Tube I was only able to find the trailer and “the infamous raft massacre scene.” This did, however, lead me to a lot of incredible commercials he made in the ‘80s. He did a sort of Music Man sales pitch to a group of people on the street that gets bigger and bigger for a new McDonald’s product that separated the burger and allowed the patty to stay hot and the lettuce and tomato to stay crisp. There was another great advertisement for Miller Lite in which Yogi Berra sits at a bar with a crowd around him, and Alexander right behind him, and speaks nonsense on behalf of the product, causing everyone to look increasingly confused, with Alexander’s consternation as the most visible in the shot. Eventually the email came from Kimberly and I learned that the first known use of figurative masturbation was by Byron in discussion of Keats’s poetry, that “such writing was the stuff of mental masturbation.” I finished my thoughts on the subject, watched the 10:30 Fox broadcast of “The Invitations,” did not find it very funny,[1] went to bed, masturbated, and fell asleep.
[1] However, while the George plotline has grown more disgusting than ever with this viewing, I appreciated for the first time the doubling of Jerry’s revelation, as vocalized to Kramer, concerning his own situation, that results from the doubling of himself in meeting Jeannie Steinman: “Now I know what I've been looking for all these years: myself! I've been waiting for me to come along, and now I 've swept myself off my feet!” which, by the end of the episode, becomes: “I think I may have made a big mistake. All of a sudden it hit me, I realized what the problem is: I can't be with someone like me—I hate myself! If anything I need to get the exact opposite of me. It's too much—it's too Much! I can't take it—I can't take it!”
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