mendacity |
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::exploding the myth
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bleeding from the
the odds
white jazz la confidential outside providence drive ears
sloan/pretty together
dj abilities/for persons with dj abilities garbage/beautifulgarbage fabolous/ghetto fabolous cannibal ox/the cold vein backstreet boys/drowning pj harvey/stories from the city, stories from the sea radiohead/amnesiac timbaland and magoo/indecent proposal modest mouse/everywhere and his nasty parlor
8 crazy nights
harry potter and the sorcerer's stone monsters, inc. prozac nation mulholland drive my first mister hearts in atlantis high heels, low lifes waking life ghost world index finger
medianews
daily variety detroit free press cnn nytimes arts&leisure espn.com: nba tvbarn reality blurred memepool chowhound the onion modern humorist fuckedcompany mrscott dslreports saddle creek records POKEY penny arcade atlas |
9.30.2001
i'm back in nyc. as always, everything that needs to happen is completely fucked up . aka my dsl go byebye thanks to cuntrag terrorists. i sat on hold with earthlink for 4 hours tonight. they told me that it's a routing issue (pretty much everything in town is being rerouted since verizon's west st co was destroyed) they have to send a covad tech out to my building to check on the box in the basement. WHAT THE FUCK. excuse me, but were there little innocent-killers lurking up on 111th street, snipping highspeed data lines? is this part of the multitiered assault on america? i don't think so, jack. so this means i am right back where i was a year ago: sitting on the couch, watch tv, waiting for verizon/covad to pretend to show up, but not really show up. sigh. meanwhile, i'm feeling cruddy and i think i'm getting sick. also, robert redford is shirtless in at least one shot of the last castle, if the preview is to be believed. hellooooooooo, roy hobbs. other than the dsl debacle, though, today was pretty good. the drive in from ct was easy, moving stuff from the car to the apt was easy, CHICKENFRIED redecorated my apartment and made it far more fabulous than it was, jeremie and sheri and i went to barney greengrass and jill and their friend poul joined us, and i had a corned beef and chopped liver sandwich, and i got knishes at zabars, and then jill came back home with me and we watched rushmore and a bunch of tv and it is just so fucking good to be around people. special props to jeremie and sheri for being super. not that we didn't already know that. i left my eyedrops in greenwich, and my over-the-door hooks in manchester. i'm at peace with this. you haven't really been someplace unless you've left a piece of yourself behind.
i just wrote the shittiest tv column EVER. we went to sushi dinner tonight in stamford. it was really outstanding. then i shit out a shitty tv column of shit. now i will go pass out in sheri's bed. 9.29.2001
i'm at jeremie and sheri's. their half-house (halfway house?) is still awesome and i want to live here. drive was good, packing was pretty painless, as was shipping off my bike. cost $40 on greyhound. forgot to mention from the trip in to boston, there was a black kia sportage with slightly tinted windows. we were sitting in traffic, not moving, for an hour or so. i looked over at this vehicle, and inside was.. a gelatinously fat man, early 30s, completely shirtless, picking at himself. bj the futonboy showed up right on time. he was everything i dreamed he would be, except desiring of moi. oh well. 9.28.2001
i read the script for joy ride back in 1999, when i was living in la and the title was squelch, which is a way, way better name for a movie. apparently it was all downhill from there.
bj the futonboy is coming to fetch the futon at 930a. he is in high school. swoon. i haven't met him, but given that he's in high school i'm pretty sure he's swoon-worthy. maybe he'll want to test out the mattress before he goes, just to makes sure it's, you know, um, usable. that could happen, right? i'm going to bed now, and i will get up at 7a to clean/pack/etc. i am in love with the daily show, hardcore. here's a quote from tracey ullman about how much she loves jonjon. i saw him walking his dog a few years ago, pre-tds. (but not necessarily pre-fds.)
right, so. i finished my three onmag items, brendan didn't call, and i celebrated by going to have a billy burger at the bar. the billy burger is a burger with swiss, canadian bacon and bbq sauce. i'd had my eye on it since i started going to the bar, but never had the nerve. tonight, i did. and it was good. the bar has a challenge, which is to eat four billy burgers, an order or two of fries, and a gallon or so of coke without vomiting on the premises. apparently people have actually succeeded. scary. but i'm not sure which is scarier: consuming all that food, or the steaming burgers image on the website. sheri and jeremie aren't coming until tomorrow morning. weather issues. i'm somewhat relieved, somewhat disappointed. cousin zach is writing for the crimson. i will now be referring to him forever and always as zsam. futonboy needs to come get his futon mattress tomorrow morning, but i have yet to speak with him about it. uhoh. "you want every day to be like
i'm sitting here waiting for brendan haywood to call. during the five minutes i had my cell phone off, the wiz called to tell me that brendan might call be later, or monday, and the pr chick would call in advance. yeah, right. bah. two items down, one to go. i cleaned out the fridge. it was grody. al the table lender came to pick up the table he lent y and i. now i'm using the stool as a table. my laptop sits on it just fine. but i miss the table. christ, i have so much to do. sheri and jeremie are coming in a few hours. panic.
okay, this sucks. the wiz is still not returning my calls. i have to write three onmag items in the next few hours, plus the brendan haywood story that i have yet to get the interview for. yeah, i've got half of it written, and i've got old quotes from draft night, but goddammit this sucks. boston was good. the busride home was fine, although i had to wait 20 minutes for a cab. the busride to boston, however, was a nightmare. perhaps the driver was new, or just an infirm idiot. either way, he took all surface streets once we got near boston. yes, all surface streets. that's right, all surface streets. it took two hours to get there, instead of one. uncle daniel was in a pissier mood than usual (if possible). when i'm around him, i feel nervous and i feel thankful, because i think i ended up with the best brother for my dad. we broke the fast at dan/carol's friends the shulmans. they have two floors of a brownstone on beacon st, in the same building where my aunt and uncle used to live about twenty years ago. their apt is gorgeous and wonderful and lovely. their daughter, however, is antisocial. and the food was very ungood, except for my fabulous kugel. in my dream this morning i was in a small single-engine plane. it went down. a man sitting near the pilot (no cockpit, everyone in the same space) tried to save us but he couldn't reach in and rench the controls away from the pilot. we plummeted into water, went down deep. he and i made it out. nobody else did. it felt worse being a survivor. everyone pushing and asking questions, giving me looks, asking why we lived when others didn't. then i charleyhorsed my left leg in my sleep and woke up. 9.27.2001
i'm fasting, which feels a bit like a joke given that i sort of fast voluntarily a lot of the time anyway, or at least practice. this is what happens when your appetite bids you adieu. i really dislike the rabbi at my aunt and uncle's shul. i also really dislike long, lengthy self-congratulatory discussions of how great one's temple is, and long, lengthy appeals for money. cocksucker, motherfucker. transcribing sucks so much. there is nothing more humiliating than being forced to listen to your own shitty interviewing skills, over and over and over again. yesterday trl premiered the new nsync video. god, i can't wait til i have a tv of my own. this is SO unacceptable. i am watching the premiere of the video for "gone" and they are NOT eating fried chicken. there isn't even corn on the cob! 9.26.2001
survival of the phone-est. i was sure about two minutes into the interview that it was all going to shit because my cell phone was buzzing worse than usual, so i asked tracey if i could call right back and i used the land line (because i am a genius, i brought my land tap with me just in case) and it was perfect and we started talking again and warmed up and then it somehow turned.. pretty good. tracey ullman continues to be k-r4d. she has dsl, and she likes to make fun of the things she wore to the emmys in the 80s. meanwhile, the wiz is ignoring me again. i am pissed. i know they're probably deluged with calls since mj is back for reals (btw, mike, nice gesture with donating your salary - now how about your nike endorsement fee?), but they know damn well what i'm calling about and that it has nothing whatsoever to do with j-bomb, even if i'm planning on asking brendan how he feels about playing with The Man. grr. time to walk the dog. her name is sophie. she is white, and tiny, and weird. 9.25.2001
strike that, it's pouring now and coming in the window. fall rain, fall storms. and the clap of thunder.
moving right along, probably not going to get to talk to george carlin, or at least not in time for my deadline. the wiz is still refusing to speak to me because they think i'm after mj. (i'm not.) i have no idea what's up with wil. left a message with williams sonoma for some backup details. good news! fabio and his are just fine. i, for one, was very concerned. wilford brimley also seems to be doing a-okay. in fact, i think he's been working out. so the survivor 3 contestants have been announced by cbs. the show starts 10/11. that's really scary soon. i can't wait. i was wondering today what would happen if a contestant on a reality tv show died after the show was taped but before it completed its tv run. (angel juarbe, the winner of fox's murder in small town x, is among the wtc missing; he was a fireman.) not necessarily in some large-scale disaster, but even something as relatively innocuous as a heart attack. real world is running a disclaimer of sorts before the episodes now, that says they are showing this new york season unchanged as a testament to the integrity and resilience of nyc. (whatev.) and i still think they're removing wtc shots in the unaired episodes. but how do you remove a whole person? would you? how would that work? hmm. it's been raining all day. this is fall rain, not summer rain: a persistent grayness, a constant fall of water, a cool wind, and the changing of the leaves. this is not summer rain.
i love it when i call somebody's pr rep because they haven't called me like they said they would to figure out what time i would be interviewing the somebody, and after asking if i'm calling to confirm the interview and placing me on hold for a few, the rep tells me "oh, you can call the somebody at 330p today." yeah, too bad i have to be ON THE BUS then. i'm still into the capital letters thing. anyway, i stood my ground and asked if i could interview the somebody tomorrow, and after some more time on hold, my wish was granted. tracey and me, 2p, tomorrow. w00t.
could there possibly be a more unlikely pair than leo and arthur c clarke? i woke myself up at 430a because i decided to before i went to bed. i'm a dork. it was raining. now it's gray-turning-to-rain out. i'm half-tempted to go to andy's for breakfast, except i'm not hungry so that seems like kind of a waste. i have to be at the bus station for the 330p into south station. i have to interview wil wheaton, who has not replied to my email. and i have to make a bunch of phone calls. let's get it on. 9.24.2001
i was sitting here and suddenly the only thing that i craved in the entire fuckforsaken world was a coke and twix. this involved putting on pants, which i did not want to do, but i did it, and my hooded sweatshirt, and my tevas, all while on the phone with my brother, but i saved it for after we got off the phone and he explained to me the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist because he's all mentally competent and shit, and in this most excellent of ensembles i went to langley and got coke and twix. they have moved the chocolate out onto the main floor. it used to be kept in the fridge. there used to be a sign over the non-chocolate candy that said "chocolate in the fridge ------------->" and there was the chocolate, in the fridge. i'm not sure why - i think the place is air conditioned - but it was pleasing to the tongue and kept everything nonmelty. overheard in the church parking lot at the end of the block as i passed by: "you just have to convince her that acting is acting and has nothing to do with reality." high school drama? i think so, in both senses of the word. when i write langley, i think clarice starling. which is strange, because langley is cia, and quantico is fbi. i have been suffering from an implacable thirst since saturday, and i do not know why. but i have just been guzzling. it's not natural. here's a craptastic story by yours truly. feel free to laugh at how much i suck. it occurs to me that twix are really little more than chocolate covered animal crackers. something to think about. my nutrition is really quite abominable this evening. i am everything mr van eck warned us about in fifth grade, when he told us about his "friend" who had to have his stomach "replaced" because he ate a snickers and a coke every day for lunch for like years. and we all believed him, every one. thy sugar is quick. my knee is wigging out in caffeinated, beavis-like joy. BUNGHOLE. ngahngahngah.
i started eating leftover chicken tenders, but i think cedar garden has ruined me for food today. blech. dad came up with a bunch of good tracey ullman questions. i'm coming up with some more. i'm so goddamn productive, goddamn. complicated complicated complicated complicated HATE HATE HATE. there needs to be an easy way to start over. i could start over, easily, but it won't be easy. there's so many things and people i don't want to leave behind. the problem with having no motivation to do anything means i don't have any motivation to do this, either. it's too hard. whenever i see people on the street now, i want to shout 'fuck' at them, because i think that will maybe make me feel a little better. my bottled spring water that i drink because i am afraid of tap water in my own home comes in plastic gallon milk jugs, because i am cheap and buy the cheap kind. i finally nailed down what the odd taste is that i detect whenever i drink from the jug: essence of gallon milk jug plastic. it's more unpleasant now that i've actually pinpointed what it is. cocksucker, shitballs or fuck.
word to the wise: cedar garden, located across the street from CREMELAND, is neither cedar nor a garden. discuss. i went to this not-so-fine eating establishment because i figured a middle eastern place around here could use the business, and i could use the shawarma. oh, i was so wrong. their entire menu was american food (the restaurant advertises 'american and mediterranean dining') except for like five dishes on the back. i foolishly ordered the kafta kebab, which was all kinds of awful. all i wanted was a goddamn $5 shawarma sandwich, but nooooooo all the 'mediterranean' food was like $8+. i am no longer full of pity for them, and i was the only patron in the entire place. and they had a cigarette machine. then i went to CREMELAND (see, this was all an excuse to get ice cream) and they still only have three flavors. paid $1.35 in late fees at the library. forwarded manchester mail back to nyc. mailed rent check. and then i went to this sports shop, because i wanted a monarchs tshirt, but then most of the store turned out to be sports cards and i was in heaven and i stayed for half an hour browsing. i bought a few surprises for a few special people. tee hee. it is taking all of my willpower not to keep them for my greedy self. all of it. ALL OF IT.
the lineman is back. he was out behind the house he must be giving cable or whatever to. he's wearing about five tool belts and is doing his thing 20 feet off the ground. his helmet matches the ladder. i wonder if he'll fall.
there's a lineman outside in a 'tri-wire' truck with an att logo on it. i have the sinking feeling this will mean my cable modem will shortly be rendered useless when he fucks up. the lineman has set up a few cones and put a yellow ladder up to the power lines. i watched him poke around in the back of the truck, then left the window. now he's.. gone. totally gone. i keep wondering if he is collapsed behind the truck where i can't see, dying from a heart attack or stroke. or robbing and raping some poor old lady across the street. danger is everywhere.
it is very foggy out. this is the first time i've seen manchester fog. it blocks out the mountains and the buildings a few miles away. and the sky is a michigan gray. in my dream the uzbeks or the ukrainians or some other u-country was hijacking buses in the streets of huntington woods along some water, a lake, and blowing them up, and i was all worried about andrew because he had left the week before but then it turned out he hadn't and the boys and i all had a group hug in the middle of the street before running to safety. and my brother dropped my portable cd player in the water as we were walking to the car. 9.23.2001
it's the things that don't change that make you feel. i'm bored and avoiding work and reading random things on the web and then suddenly there's brian's cyrano de bergerac to angela and my heart skips five beats and stutters back into action with a renewed aching vigor and i know that it was meant to be. me. and televisionfiction. but i wish it was me and an actual person. maybe someday. yeah, right. "and i'm sorry."
CREMELAND is fired. i rode down there only to discover they had but three flavors: vanilla, strawberry and bubble gum. ugh. so for the privilege of going down there to discover this most disheartening of facts, i got three bugs in my left eye, a noseful of garbage smell, and all around annoyance. i took the long way home, cruising by poor paul's (there was a lone guy in there with a power tool, so i decided to avoid it), then going to the shitty 7-11/citgo on the off-chance they had gotten a clue and a coke flavor in their slurpee machine. no such luck. agg-ra-va-tion. at least i've gotten some good exercise today. and another bowling blister. if i kept up with bowling regularly, i bet i'd get a bowling callous. and how cool would that be? that's right, it would be too fucking cool. i should take a shower. i now have three layers of stink: bowling, biking, and more biking.
the sun just disappeared below the horizon. it's setting now in a vastly different position than it was a month or so ago. movements of the earth, constant as time, i suppose. i did some brief recon on grad school. admissions deadlines are all around december 1. i don't really feel like going to grad school, but applications are a goal to work towards and admission would provide me with another option, on top of other options which i do not know. so, hmm. i don't really think i'd be able to get in - personal statements elude me, as well as actual screenwriting except for a few faint bursts of whatever. but i'll try. can't hurt to try, except to drop my self-confidence another notch or two, which at this point isn't very detrimental imho. damage done, and all that. i have no idea what to ask tracey ullman. i need to transcribe this williams sonoma stuff. i think i'll go get ice cream instead.
bowling was good this morning. i tried out some new tactics, none of which worked too well, and didn't bowl as well as last week (i think..). the regulars were there, except the annoying kid and his dad. wonder why. this was my last sunday morning bowl. i find that terribly bumming. i need to find a method of monster bowling in nyc. afterwards i got brunch at the diner. the coke there is topnotch. i want ice cream. maybe later. i read everything i can get my hands on, whether i ought to or not. fears not allayed. this map makes me unbearably sad. but not as much as this one. here are my bowling scores. i opened the first 134 game with three strikes in the first four frames. it was all downhill from there. oddly enough, though, i capped off nearly every game with either a strike or (more often) a spare. when it counts, it counts. fear my mad alley skillz. games: 16 9.22.2001
several things before i eat some ibu, go to bed and finally finish my book: at the bar this afternoon there was a guy who looked just like junior soprano, right down to the level of his hairline and the frames of his glasses. i'm sippin' on labatts contemplating this amusement when another guy across the bar actually leans over to uncle junealike and says, "hey, you look just like that old guy on the sopranos! right? right?" and the old man gets a sour look on his face like this happens to him all the time and all he wants to do is suck on his jack and coke and kibbitz with the hag next to him, who is not his wife, who called for - get this - a single of crown royal and a separate manhattan straight up. she then proceeded to pour the manhattan into the glass of crown royal, and drink the mixture. like she refused to let the barchick mix her own crown manhattan. (i did not note any separate angostura bitters, however.) victor wong has apparently left us, although i can't find anything about it in the mainstream press. this is sad news for those of us crossing our fingers for a fifth installment of the three ninjas series. barrett has resurfaced in lala land and informs me that those crazy daily arts kids are now not only plagiarizing, but actually putting entire wire stories in the paper with their own bylines. somebody needs to lay down some serious smack. perhaps if i'm bored later in the week.
the month of october is 31 days, and i don't start work again at tvg until the 29th. so right now i'm thinking: trial run. i could go home for a couple of weeks, two and a half, three, and try detroit on. see if it feels as good as my old nikes do from ninth grade. i could go to the psychiatrist that dad mentioned to me. see how it feels. see how it goes. i'm still having a lot of trouble understanding exactly why i need to go home to do this, and why dad thinks i need to (in my head, i mean; i understand perfectly well in my heart, and i'm not angry about it). and whether that's the right answer. when i've gone away from michigan for a period of time, which i've done several times already, i experience a sort of rebirth, where i am in unfamiliar surroundings and everything is wonderful because nothing is there to remind me of what i've left behind. and it's good. it's so, so good. and then after a few weeks or months the doom and gloom creeps back in, and everything goes gray, and i miss all the things that made me so unhappy because nothing's really changed much, just the scenery and the players and the props. the worry is still there. the past is still there. the dread that holds hands tightly with breathing is still there. but living in nyc now is different, because i'm supposedly an adult, a grown-up, and i take care of myself, i get my own jobs through my own methods and manners that i don't quite understand but somehow seem to work, at least for the shortterm, and i pay my own rent, and when i spend too much money on eating out i have nobody to blame but myself and nobody to yell at me but myself because the funding comes from me alone, and i have my own friends and activities and apartment and things and, like, life. i have my own life. i've somehow asserted my independence without managing to feel independent at all. am i supposed to just drop that so i can crawl back to the ol' womb and slough off my psychoses and neuroses in relative comfort? because i could do that. it would be easy to do that. it would be easy to go live in my room, take care of my dog, join a gym and stop destroying my body with lethargy and poor nutrition, hang out with my upcoming family, have a great kitchen and a bigscreen tv and (i would assume) a car of my own and a million free movies and pistons games and a city that runs through my blood like thickened coney chili. it would be easy to have one less thing to worry about when i try to fall asleep, namely how i would get home if there was another assault on nyc/etc, or a war with a home front. it would be easy to not have to have a fulltime job just to pay the exorbitant rent on my apartment. (and also because i suspect this is all going to require more than once a week visits, and i don't know how that will play with working five days a week.) it would be easy to continue to do the work i do that doesn't require me to be in any particular place as long as i can submit my stories reasonably close to my deadlines. it would probably even be easy to pick up a job, or just freelance work, at the few detroit publications. it's not like i haven't had the very vaguest of offers. but i have my own life. and if you looked at it from the outside and didn't have any knowledge of the inside, as long as you didn't look in my bacheloresque fridge, it would probably look pretty normal. and it's mine, even though i don't necessarily feel that i need a life that's mine and not controlled (cajoled?) by someone else. it's mine. it's just that i don't enjoy it as much as i should. as much as i probably could, if i chose to do something about it. i'm going to choose to do something about it. i'm going to be puzzling this out for a while, i fear. decisions are torture. "a fly girl by any other name would still be that
my other dream involved an airplane (duh). first the captain gave us a bunch of instructions, then kept trying to take off and failing. we must have covered 50 miles on the ground or so, and never made it into the air. just couldn't find a long enough, straight enough stretch of runway to use. for a while we were taxiing along a freeway to another airport. and at one point we were trying to gain speed through a cornfield that the pilot kept telling us was abandoned, but i wasn't so sure. i thought we were destroying somebody's harvest. i watched the michigan game at billy's. during halftime they spent 10-15 seconds showing some college boy trying not to cry and failing. it was sad. michigan winning 38-21, however, was not sad.
okay, this is getting a little out of hand. dad called at 10a (been up since 830a, so no matter), and he has been calling every day since he dropped the definivite 'move home' bomb. what is up with that? is it merely to ascertain that i have not hung myself in despair? i could hear him gnashing his teeth, trying to keep back the four words ("are you an alcoholic?") he wanted to ask when i told him i was going to watch the football game at the sportsbar. har har. this is all strange to me because i guess to him/them i have suddenly become this basketcase of depression, but to me, all is normal and as it has been for the last ten years. i might be tired of the status quo, but i can deal with it. dreams included taking gabe to move to school but there was all this great architecture and he ran away out of the car anyway, and the geez was there as a male cheerleader in the marching band, which i did not understand but turned out to be because he had finished syracuse in three years, started a business and gotten rich, then fallen down somehow and had to go back to school. he had pompoms. at western. er, huh? who knows. also birchmeier was hosting a show on bet and pretending to be black, like he had a fake afro and everything but he was worried that the viewership didn't like him, and i tried to tell him about how great the f word is. and something about oversized, red-checked overalls. aight, football time. 9.21.2001
just talked on the phone with david for 47, count em, 47 minutes. it was really nice. it's funny, the things and the people you miss. i need to work on being a better friend. somebody please tell me why george clooney looked suspiciously like ricky martin on the telethon. maybe it was the fudging of the webcast lens, but it was dubious at best.
that didn't last long. robin emailed again to say, oops, it turns out they don't need me until the end of october, not the beginning. that's okay. i can take care of business in nyc for a month, write, hopefully, and sit around worrying about when the world is going to end. what happened last week is finally starting to seem real. to be real. but there is still that awful minute where i wake up, and i see it happen in my head, and i say, no, it's too fantastic, it can't be. and the awfulness is the underlying knowledge of the truth, and the unchangeability of fact. i'm starting to get really scared about nuclear war and such. more so than i usually am, anyway. it's something that drives me back towards detroit, where i feel safe and secure. i look out my window and imagine i see mushroom clouds, and the flash of light, and the relentless nothing rushing towards me, swallowing everything in its path. and it's weird, that i'm that frightened - because i feel like i'm not that afraid of dying. i'm afraid of how i die, but not being dead. and what i'm mostly afraid of is surviving, or people i love that love me surviving me. if none of this is going to matter in three weeks when we're all obliterated, what the fuck does it matter where i am? why should i do anything? why should i try to maintain normalcy and balance? why shouldn't i crawl home and sit on the floor in a ball challenging the outside world to poke its way in? what's the point? because. because. because. somebody somewhere is going to press a button, somebody is going to say "roger that," and somebody else is going to unleash a flood. "so, no, of course we can't be friends
showered, dressed, checked email, figured out the near future.
next on the list: spinach pie.
the day is already picking up. first, a reason to move back to detroit. then, email from cousino and a phone call from uncle morris, the latter of which was in part to invite me to break the fast with him next week. what a difference a year makes. rest of the day: shower, dress; go get some spinach pie from the bakery; call the wiz for the umpteenth time; call smg's rep; call on george carlin; call on tracey ullman; pitch this, this and this for wts. damn, i need to find some better sites. and oh yeah, i also got the new garbage album. score!
finally slept heavy, but had a lot of weird dreams: bowling with david, but a bizarre ball that didn't make sense, and no pins, and kids on the lanes that wouldn't get out of the way. then i was in the angell hall of my dreams that i visit sometimes that is all wrong and not like the real angell hall, and there was a gift shop, and there was a great books area with photos of old students but i could only find a picture of david (hmm, why am i dreaming about him? creepy) and i got stuck in the elevator trying to go to floor three but i pressed the button too late and the other three girls in the elevator were mad and we went to floor 12, and then on the way back down it felt like the elevator was dropping. i also had a dream in which aunt laurie had to be sent to an asylum or something for being insane or forgetful or something like that. i was very confused because i thought it was me that was supposed to go. and i was on a bus. and grandma made me a sandwich, and i was debating whether i would stay on the bus and let it drive me to where i needed to go, or walk and take a shower. i decided to leave the bus and walk because i was supposed to talk to morrow and hadn't for like a month and he was supposed to tell me about his kid, who i think turned out to be a daughter. hmm. hmm. meanwhile, algol rebooted about half an hour before i woke up. there goes my beautiful uptime. this uptime is seriously gorgeous. i will share it with you. it's pretty interesting how these "operations" started getting named. (now would be a good time to say that stuff said in irc/im/etc does not necessarily reflect my views. although i guess you've all read the ass-baby manifesto.) 9.20.2001
i think i want to pitch ew a story on movie poster websites. not the ones that sell, but the ones about the artists. hmm. must do more research. also, cannibal ox/the cold vein still fucking rules. <oppsie> poor manhattan farmers
arrrrrrrrrrrrrrg. AARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG. so i'm washing dishes while my leftover turkey/gravy/stuffing is nuking in the microwave, and i'm thinking 'hmm, you know, i will email aunt laurie tonight after she's probably gone to bed so she can read it in the morning, i haven't emailed her since the big terrible' and then i eat my turkey/gravy/stuffing and check my email and what is there but AN EMAIL FROM AUNT LAURIE. why does that always happen? it's no fun being psychic if it makes me look like a bad niece/friend/whatever. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG. so irritated with self. so obsessed with expressing irritation with CAPITAL LETTERS. the next non-rain/gray day there is, i'm going downtown to the train store, and i'm going to find josh a really cool birthday present to give to him when i get back to manhattan.
when in doubt, orange crush can always be counted on to elevate the heart rate and the eyelids for at least ten minutes of pure productivity. i've got a bunch of calls in on onmag stuff and inside stuff stuff, and i'm really quite concerned about whether or not my cell phone is functioning properly. grandma is not the only one having trouble with it, jill also could not get through. balls. balls balls balls. i'm trying to leave my email address with all my phone messages, but it's hard to get off a phone message. can't count on people. in other news, my old big brother 2 story for ew got spiked due to the fact that, uh, the show is ending tonight. oops. but all is not lost - i emailed noah to let him know, and he said i'd get a $200 kill fee. and i'm going to pitch some what to surfs. these are good things, yes they are.
the attempt to go to sleep at 730p proved not very successful. i read for an hour, then listened to baseball on the radio, then lay awake for an hour, then passed out. and i slept for a long time, until about 7a when i woke up with a headache and dreams about seeing conor and simon playing together and selling old board games in the front row. but it wasn't really restful. i hate that. it's gray out today. i should go renew my book at the library, it's already a week overdue. ps yesterday i picked up my mail and what was there but a $47.64 check from buy.com from the mispriced monitor lawsuit settlement! i never thought i'd see it, or if i did, it would be $10. $47.64 is like.. three new cds, or two dvds, or a couple of books, or a good sushi/sake meal. mmm. sushi/sake. (why do i need cds? because i got deleted off all my sites. just what i need right now, the kibosh put on my music supply. sigh.) 9.19.2001
i just ate a tub of chopped liver. i'm a sicko. also dad wants me to move home, and i'm thinking about doing it. let the repercussions begin. feh. life is too complicated. if only i could sleep 24/7. wil wheaton, where are you?
missed the 10a bus, caught the 11a. went for dim sum in between. dumb, was halfway through eating before i desperately needed to vomit. managed to keep things inside until i got home. i have turkey, gravy, stuffing, challah and chopped liver. yesterday i had something of a long talk with aunt carol about how miserable i am. we shall see what the repercussions of this are. probably dumb, but i'm getting fed up with myself and how aggravated i always am with everything, which includes getting fed up with myself. an excerpt of aunt carol helping cousin anna rewrite her english paper: "why do you say delightful? i don't like that adjective." "how about.. pleasantly familiar?" "no, that's too good. we need to stupefy that up a little bit," "i did that on purpose." "oh, bullshit." "this is retarded. first of all, this is a passive verb." "i'm so sad, we got our scripts today and i wasn't there." "fuck the scripts. you should be able to do this without me. i want you to go through this whole paper and change all these sentences to active verbs." 9.18.2001
i'm staying in boston an extra night. it's good to be around people. didn't really sleep last night, but you can't have everything. i thought the rabbi's sermon was pretty crappy, as these things go. he didn't say a single original thing, just the stuff that's all over the sane news (as opposed to the kneejerk killemall news), the same stuff that's in everyone's mind. and maybe that's the job of a rabbi, to give voice to these thoughts, but unfortunately people all over the televisions and newspapers have already given voice to these thoughts. and he talked about how on tuesday when the shit came down they were deciding whether or not to hold hebrew school and stay open, and many synagogues closed, but they decided to remain open to show that we were strong and they were weak, and that it was safe to stay open, they knew it was safe to stay open, and i sat there thinking, how could you possibly know that? how could you know that it's safe? how could you know that missiles weren't inbound, that a man wasn't walking around with a pen full of smallpox, looking for something to write on? you can pretend. you can say, this is an act of defiance, and we will not be quieted, we will not go gently, but you can't know. to say that you know is hubris, and bravado, and a mistake. he also read aloud the passage from the usman farman's highly reported email to his professor about the brooklyn hasid who pulled him away from the wreckage to safety. he misquoted, excerpted, paraphrased. one does not say hell in a house of worship, even if the worshipper deems it necessary. and i have never heard anyone sound more bored when calling the blowing of the shofar. 9.17.2001
sleeping for three hours is not cool. i was going to walk to the station, but i'm bringing a valpak of sorts and my ew bag, and that would probably not be such a fun walk, so i called a cab. 9.16.2001
i wish i was in nyc so i could see the empire state building lit again, colored and constant and true. but this will have to do. also, proof that i continue to rule the internet: series one? i think so. okay, i'm going to stop scoping ebay for gpk stuff and go to sleep. yay.
productivity is good. i just emailed a pr guy about where they surf possibilities, and i'm fashioning an interview request for wil wheaton. this is proving harder than it ought to be, because i don't really know quite how professional to be. do i capitalize? do i write all clipped and proper? it's hard pitching accessible people. i'm not sure how to do it. so i'm just going to do it and hope for the best, namely, that he doesn't think i'm a moron. problem with getting people to respond to stuff: apparently my cell has been spotty, unbeknownst to me. i haven't had any real trouble calling out, and i received a few calls last week, but my grandmother told me she tried calling multiple times and couldn't get through. so who knows who else has been trying to call. the perils of having a 917, i guess. i'm feeling very drained, like somebody is putting my head in a circular vise and twisting. or something like that. guess the week is catching up with me, and the breakdown i had on the phone with grandma earlier. about time. i have to be at the bus station for the 930a bus to south station. if it doesn't rain, i'll walk. i wonder if my arm will hurt after two hours of bowling today. i have a clusterfuck of bowling blisters on the side of my right middle finger. doesn't hurt, kind of amuses me. the swelling in my knuckles has gone down. bowling is dangerous! my fridge smells really ripe. ..i'll clean it wednesday. paul simon is a calming influence.
monkey see, monkey do, monkey front, monkey back! hurrah. harvesting important info from email in case it crashes again.
monkey has been down all day. many reasons why this is bad, most importantly because i can't get to mail regarding onmag stuff, which is already overdue due to my incapacitation last week. i'm already screwed because i'm going to have to try to conduct business from boston tomorrow, where i'm going for the first night/day of rosh hashana. note to self: do not forget cell phone charger. that would be unbelievably bad. but this work to do will be good. anything other than is good. so i might go home for a few days next week. we'll see. depends how much a plane ticket would cost, etc. i'd almost rather drive. i love driving, the same way i love oxygen. i keep wondering if wtc will still be smoking when i get back to nyc. i keep wondering how i'm going to find my way when i inevitably get lost in chinatown, as i always do, even if it's just for a few seconds before i right myself, without towers to guide me. i keep wondering how i can regain the desire to eat. i keep wondering how i can face myself. i have to get out of here.
so on a sunday with no sports, i did.. sports. got up at 9a, sat around for an hour, went to the bowling alley and plunked down $18.50 for shoes and two hours of a lane of my own. i'm steadily improving. most of my games were over 100, and i had a 122 and a 130, and i hit several double strikes (one pair of which was followed by a spare). i saw a lot of the same people i saw last week. and i hit upon a method that increases the odds of a strike, which i was having trouble with last week. if i stand one dot to the left of center and bowl the way i've always bowled - no funny stuff, just mom's stance - i've got a pretty good chance of knocking everything down, with the ball rolling in slightly right of center. i used an 8lb ball this week, because some 7 year old girl was using the 6lb. hey. stop laughing. stop that. i got a chilidog and a coke at CREMELAND (ugh, poor food for day judgment) and then went to watch the manchester bears varsity football game at gill. once again, charging $2 admission for adults, but i walked in and was like 'um.. do i need to?' and the lady was like 'oh, youre a student, no' and i went in and sat on birdshit-encrusted bleachers. the bears got creamed. the 50/50 raffle proceeds were donated to the red cross, and the guy who won donated his winnings as well as another $100. nice. the bears got their asses handed them in a box with a tidy bow tied by the souhegan sabers. all i remember of my dream is that my hair was getting too long. bowling is very zen. zen is good. anything other than is good. 9.15.2001
getting around to checking hotmail, which i do rarely.. haven't since before wtc. it's nice to know that even while the world is ending, i can still Reduce Your Monthly Debt Payments up to 60%!!! and INCREASE SALES and get GREAT DEALS ON LIQUID VIAGRA (and, on a sadder note, i got a cybersaver weekly mailing from american airlines on tuesday). so i finally figured out today that spirit of the west/let the ass bray is actually about radiohead, because i'm a moron, and because who else spells thom with a th (tom withatee aitch)? hmm. and the more i think about this, the better the song gets. even if it might not be so nice to mr yorke. here's a picture of all the hoodlums from the hoodlum house getting tainted ice cream from the ice cream truck. i took it because i wanted to see if my camera could figure out if what i thought was the grateful dead logo on the back of the truth was really the grateful dead logo. my zoom sux0rs. there are booming noises that i hear out the window. backfires, maybe, or gunshots, or firecrackers, although i don't see any shower of sparks. maybe boston is collapsing. i almost wish it would, to give these thoughts some validity. i need to figure out a way to rip myself away from the computer, because this is getting more unhealthy than it already was. "i wanted to hate you
it's gorgeous out again today. i took a walk. there was a boy at the park named tim practicing post-up moves, spinbouncing the ball back towards himself, bumping against an invisible defender, faking, twisting around and powering the ball into the basket. he was young. he might be good someday. on my way to the park i saw a 14-year-old-looking boy in bizarre slippers riding a girl's bike. then at the park i saw another boy on a girl bike, except he was wearing purple sweatpants and sweatshirt and pink sneakers and turned out not to be a boy, just a girl with a really terrible haircut. then i got orange crush, and twix, because i like sugar, and sugar keeps me going until bowling tomorrow morning, which at this point is pretty much all that's keeping me going, period.
okay, this cannibal ox album is fucking amazing. starts up with a molasses-stretched sample from the big chill and just gets better and better from there. cnn is now running a tragedy montage using don henley/new york minute, which of course makes me think of.. the west wing. hmm. 9.14.2001
the bar truly does solve all problems. the noise, the intersection of larry king and madonna/what it feels like for a girl, the four beers even though i only got charged for three, it all meshes into this buzzing continuum of numbness that is truly welcome. a different kind of numb than watching/listening to streams all day. a kind where everything hurts a little less. until i get sober. don't really have anything else to say. go read my brother instead. he's far more articulate. cannibal ox/the f word just makes me go to pieces of joy.
no live coverage on internet==pain. listening to npr today; audio only, obviously. might try switching to a nyc npr station shortly. the flight path to the manchester airport is along my windowed wall. i just watched a plane ascend towards the cloudline and disappear. so normal. so strange. man, i have a shitload of work to do and i am so not doing any of it. tomorrow, i think. really. yes, really. i'm going to go read in bed. about baseball. long live the mick. (actually, reading about dimaggio and williams. but who's counting?) 9.13.2001
msnbc's stream is really terrible today. sigh. maybe i'll go to the bar again.
not sure how comfortable i am with all the movies getting new endings. i understand, but there's a little part of me that still gets indignant when art is sacrificed for the fragility of the public. although this does alert me to the sneaking of hearts in atlantis, which i desperately want to see. and then again, how much art can there be in men in black 2? sun's coming up, but on the side of the building i don't have windows onto. dig that dangling preposition. the amazon red cross is going to cross the $2 million mark in a couple of hours, if i'm reading it right. it's moving slow now, but it should pick up as people who aren't insomniancs start waking up. it is just laughable to say i know the feeling.
yesterday i couldn't look at footage of the impact. it was replayed every two minutes, and i'd see it coming, and i'd shut my eyes and turn my head. today i can watch it and not flinch. just marvel, in horrified awe. today i can look at a picture of the old skyline and spend an hour putting my fingers over the wtc towers and taking them away and putting them back and taking them away. here. gone. here. gone. but that's when my eyes are open. it's a different story when i close them. 9.12.2001
appetite coming back a little bit. yesterday i forced myself to eat a hamburger at the bar. i had a bowl of corn chowder for lunch today at andy's, and now i'm making spaghetti. mmm, spaghetti. wish i had some hamburg meat, though. i'm thinking about going to the bar later to drink. mmm, beer. msnbc overload. i can't believe i have no television. and no people. it makes me wish i was back in nyc, so i could sit on the couch with jill, or go watch at the bar with morrow, or take the outbound metronorth to sheri and jeremie's and cook and watch and chill in greenwich. bah. although i am usually nasty and non-charitable, today i gave money to the amazon red cross fund and called up the local red cross to see about donating blood. they said they'd call back later in the week with an appt or something. hmm. anyway, there are two problems with me donating blood: a) i can only donate blood if i weigh 110 lbs; b) i can only donate blood if i weigh 110 lbs. maybe if i go drink a bunch of guinness, that will help.
sat at the bar for 9 hours watching tv. information overload. walked home after gdub's eh speech (good, but clinton would have been better; clinton would have had everybody bawling; clinton would have bawled, himself, i have no doubt). clear night. the big dipper hanging low over the hospital i live across from. msnbc has a really excellent realtime live feed that i've been watching since i got home so i think i'll just park it in front of my laptop tomorrow. head swimming. going to listen to the radio in bed. the last time i was at the world trade center was in february, when i went to the evil headhunter. their dingy, crummy, depression-inducing little office was a block or two away, and i got off at the cortlandt/wtc subway station and headed over after several wrong turns since i hardly ever go down there. it was windy and cold and towards the end of the day and the streets were strangely empty. the thing about wtc is, when you're inside you don't really get how huge they are. but when you walk through the doors, burst from the warm lobby onto the cement plaza, into the chilly winter air, and you're suddenly so much smaller than you were seconds ago, that's when you get it. and then you look up. 9.11.2001
is this for real? am i awake? have i slept? i'm glad i'm in nh. i have no tv, so i'm going to the sports bar. 9.10.2001
"so how do you do it?" "you tell yourself that it's going to get better. that it has to get better. and then you believe it." "that sounds pretty simple." "it is, except you're lying. you're a liar. so you also have to forget that you're full of shit." "hmm." "complicated, i know." "hmm." "it makes more sense when you actually do it. obviously you haven't done it." "no, i haven't." "you will someday."
it's the contact. i got totally irrationally aggravated with it at long last and sprinted to the bathroom before i clawed my eye out of my head. there were little bubblies on the lens. weird. i will watch carefully to see if the problem develops with the new one. if it does, i will get cleaning products and clean them a few times a week or something. i have poor eyegiene. luckily, my eye doctor has given me the a-okay and has no idea how truly poor it is. small favors, i guess. <orbital>oi!</orbital>
it's amazing how i can sit and stare at the wall for an hour and think about absolutely nothing. except maybe joshua jackson, who is a bright buoy on the wall in a sea of off-white. or how i can waste my life with googly minotaur. all in the name of waiting til 8p when my evening minutes kick in, at which point i swear i shall make important phone calls to the likes of williams-sonoma corporate. i am utterly unable to stop this. my right contact seems to have a chronic smudge. even if i clean it, or put in a new one. maybe my eye is smudged and not the contact. whichever, it's really evil and torturous.
i can't figure out if i'm growing more freckles, or if i just haven't noticed the alleged new ones before. i will content myself with shoving po. it is hot out. i biked a bunch. i think i might have BOWLING SORENESS. which amuses me. here is the diner's list of blue plate specials from 9/5/01.
right, so. i figured as much. at least somebody had the balls to say it. "where do i go when the land touches sea?
interesting note: i went the whole day without being falldowndead exhausted. is it a result of the red bull wakeup brew? is it a result of dozing from 12-4a last night, waking up, gobbling meds, listening to coast to coast for an hour, then sleeping another four hours? is it the vitamins i've been trying hard to remember to take, but mostly failing? is it something else entirely? i don't know. but now i'm frightfully yawny. here's a definition of a yawn, from webster's revised unabridged dictionary (1913). now go learn about how mary kate and ashley are singlehandedly corrupting xian youth everywhere. (the story does not mention that the youth the olsen trolls corrupt include but are not limited to christ lovers.) 9.9.2001
more perfection:
the perfect sunday:
* - not really. but almost.
9.8.2001
well, that pretty much sucked. but the beer was good, the food was good, and about the third quarter this guy named dan sat down next to me and we shot the shit about movies and such. dan is a firefighter, and his brother is billy, as in billy's sports bar. nice guy. he told me that 99% of the women in bangkok are prostitutes, and the rest are farmgirls. i told him i felt safer walking around in nyc. he told me i had nothing to worry about here. maybe i'll go watch bowling tonight. nah. michigan==sloppy. not sloppy seconds. yuck.
in my dream my phone was on fire and on my bed and i put it out with my sheets. i napped for an hour. now it's time for football. i wanted to stay asleep, but i have more important things to do. they involve beer and pigskin.
was tired before. not tired now. want to be tired. my winds are unpredictable. *** and then the train whistles into the distance, into the stillness. his brother finishes and falls asleep. he turns on his side and waits for the clock to show all threes, the holy trinity of the early morning a passkey to slumber. by 3:34, he is gone. every night is like the one before.
okay, i have sufficiently calmed down. so the story is, nearly a year ago i posted to chowhound about eating in ann arbor, a large chunk of which was a love letter to le dog. just now i opened up my email to find:
i can't figure out what the bad means - my desperation for le dog is bad? who knows. still shitting my pants and dancing around the room in delight. 9.7.2001
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. chef jules from le dog emailed me. OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. le dog>*********************************
apparently i missed a chance to interview my man brendan haywood today. grumble. grumble grumble. pr chick didn't call me back. grumble. grumble grumble. but it's all okay. because. tomorrow. is FOOTBALL SATURDAY. [insert hardened marshmallows here.] it occurs to me that it's kind of strange that 830p comes before 1130p but after 1230p. when you think about it. i intended to go to a high school football game tonight for some routine evening activity ala mrscott, but when i got down to gill they were charging $2 to get in. i don't think so, y0. so i got some ice cream at CREMELAND and then went to the bowling alley. i wanted to stay and watch people bowl. watching people bowl is just.. fascinating. fun. i am demented. i felt a little too weird and awkward to just plop down and watch people bowling, though, flashing pieces on the lanes, etc. maybe if i'd had a beer. next time, maybe, maybe, maybe. (i did make an important plan for sunday, though: $9/hr for a lane 8a-1p. i figure i can get in 4 games, bowling by myself. that's a good deal. i'm going to do it, dammit.) i went back across the street to get my bike, which i'd locked to a post, and i didn't see it where i thought i'd left it and had a minor panic attack of sorts, thinking it had been stolen by high school hoodlums. then i found it, right where i'd left it. just not where i'd thought. ps crushlink is THE DEVIL. i refuse to play ball and put in my suspected crushes and contribute to the spam floating around the internet. so if it's you, 'fess up. asshole. (i'm not above doing their stupid hints, however; first name starting between f-j, last name 8 or more letters long? sounds like mr fabulous to me..) unless, of course, crushlink makes up crushes just to torture and flood people's email. which seems more likely than not. sigh.
and next on the list of suck, attbroadband decided to change my ip and gateway without warning. so i woke up to unfunctional net this morning, rebooted, got a new lease with new info. this is highly annoying, half my shit is tied to my ip address. so now i have to get everybody to change everything. crumb. shower, chow(d)er. 9.6.2001
i tried sleeping for an hour. didn't take. it is so aggravating to be able to wake up when i want but not sleep. it drives me insane and makes me want to tear out my hair. i desire clam chowder, but i'm not hungry. i just crave soup. and sleep. bah. *** he could see the park in the distance ahead. trotting now, he called to brendan. "wait up, bren. hey, brendan, wait." brendan didn't turn his head or break stride. his words floated back slow and heavy, a sugar-sweet mimic. "hurry up, idiot. hey, idiotboy, hurry." squig put his head down and hurried. he caught up to bren at the corner of the park, where the granite half-pillar stood guard. brendan tried to bounce the ball off the rockface. it passed his hands too low on the rebound, rolling out into the street. he flushed. "go get it, dumbhead." squig retrieved the ball and jogged back. he stopped in front of the granite slab, noticing for the first time that it had lettering. his eyes traced each shape, puzzling its meaning. h ha harr harri man harriman. harriman. a man's name. squig got scared. he remembered where he'd seen smoothed rectangular boulders with writing on them. and how many of them there'd been, a rock ocean, a stone farm, how it was creepy quiet, far away and strange. here he saw only one but maybe this was how they got started, maybe they were just planting the seed, like a pretty gray garden, a garden of - "gimme the ball back." "bren?" "gimme the ball back, stupid." "bren, who died?" bren stopped reaching for the ball. "what?" squig pointed at the granite. "who died? who's under there? who's harry man?" "you mental case. that's the park sign. harriman park, turdbrain." squig looked at the headstone thing again. he supposed it was possible. it could be a marker with no mark. but he wasn't sure. it looked so much like it belonged in that other place. "really?" "yes. now give. me. the ball." squig absently let the ball drop out of his hand and roll toward brendan, who glared at him. he scooped up the ball and slammed it back at squig, knocking him to the ground, then laughed and recaptured it and headed for the court. squig lay on the sparse grass in front of the sign. he started to pull himself up, then looked at the lettering one more time and put his head back down, ear to the ground. insects crawled through his line of sight. he held his breath, listening hard. he heard his heart pounding in his ear. it sounded like it came from without. it sounded like someone down there, people down there, way down, inside, somewhere, wanting out. he let his breath out, skip-stop slow. "get over here, ball boy," brendan called. squig stood up, wobbly. he gave harriman a last long glance and then left him to scratch his own way to the surface. but he wondered why it still felt like there was a dead man inside his chest, searching for an exit.
done, done and done. turned out okay. when i write these things, i worry that i'm not intelligent enough, or deep enough, or analytic-connective enough, or good enough, or mediocre enough. and now i have a yen to write about the rise of geektv. of how different things are now than they were ten years ago. teen shows then: 90210, the fresh prince of bel air, saved by the bell. the popular kids, the cool kids. teen shows now: malcolm in the middle, that 70s show, buffy the vampire slayer. not the cool kids. or is that too black and white? are there things i'm missing? as ad wisely pointed out to me, how related is this to the redefinition of the geek in the wake of the tech-entrepreneur boom? it's not that there weren't always geeks; it's that now being a geek is cool and lucrative. (or 18 months ago, anyway.) is this a paradigm shift in representations on television? is it permanent? or is it going to flame out like the nasdaq? hmm. hi, grad school. snort.
i've been at it all day and all i have to show is 300 lousy words. fuckity fuck. i need to get serious and stop fucking around. fuckity fuck. lice-ridden prose. shudder. on the plus side, i got a message from somebody with the wizards pr. so hopefully i can get the interview i want with brendan haywood. i'm sure the minute i turn in my (brief) story he will blow his acl and never play a single nba game. which would be a shame, since he got me to like him. and since i could use the money. my need to sleep seems directly proportional to how much sugar i consume. as in, i drink a code red and five minutes later need to nap. can sugar crash happen that fast?
woke up at 7a from a really unsettlingly excellent dream about jodie foster. she was taking me to a movie of hers, which i thought was going to be nell but there was no "MMMNGNGNNNNNGHHHH" involved so it must not have been nell. we were supposed to see the 2p screening but we got there a bit late so we had to wait for 3p. that was okay. and i made her banana bread but then i forgot to bring it with. and after the movie we were leaving and she was like "watch this" and walked into a huge full theatre and there was this deafening "OOH!" when everybody saw her, and then she just walked back out. except she might have been william sherak at that point. then she was back to herself and drove me home in her 760il, which was gray and had a funny license plate, and i told her thanks. for taking me to the movie, and for making me the movie. mmm. violent cartoons. playlist: bush/inflatable; jacko/you rock my world; nsync/that girl will never be mine; u2/walk on; new order/regret; jayz and eminem/renegade; radiohead/let down; ewan mcdropmypants/your song. it's not the natural, but we'll see if this helps. the only way out is through. and it starts with a shower and, possibly, a danish and, definitely, fresh air. i think the thing i like best in a song is silence, or the representation of such as a musical paradigm shift in a burst of grunge guitar in the midst of orchestral synth. "i was upset you see
i made fried green tomatoes. except i only used one tomato. they are good. i used salt and peppper and flour. then i fried them. i have two slices left. i am not hungry. i am less than hungry, but not close to full. i think i could successfully never eat again. but because they're there, i'm going to eat them anyway. then i'm going to go read in bed, and listen to the radio, and lie awake until i fall asleep, and when i wake up it will be 9a because i've decided i will wake up at 9a, and then i will write my tv column. i will feel like writing it. i will be able to write it. hopefully. 9.5.2001
judgment days. sleepless nights. i hate feeling this way. when i feel, anyway. which is slipping away. for the moment. *** he lost 21-16, and on his way off the court big socked him a good one in the gut. "won't get so close tomorrow, squiggle," he growled. squig said nothing, just grimaced. bigfoot gave him a dainty wave and strutted to the street. squig watched him go, then turned toward the backstop. he stood very still. so did she. is she waiting for me? she just stared at him. he jogged over. "hi." "hey." "you like basketball?" "not really." "i'm squig." "i know." she touched him on the arm then, there, in that place, and he felt his balls jump in his throat. "who are you?" she was still touching him - "a fan." her finger was there, right there - "no, really." it felt like burning - "tracye. tracye thomas." oh, god - she let go, then turned and started walking away. "hey, wait!" she was ignoring him. "can i call you?" she didn't respond. "tracye!" she let something drop from her hand. a scrap of paper fluttered to the ground. squig trotted over and picked it up. it was blank. then he flipped it. big letters, inhuman block printing: "NO." he looked back up and watched as she disappeared around the corner. without a trace, he thought, then laughed. yeah.
three cups of coffee later, i have intense tiredness and a slight framework for malcolm. i spent the afternoon at the library and then in a booth at the diner and then at the park. it's another beautiful day. i wish i felt more into it. at the diner a crazy named molly was leaving and kaleb the waiter asked if she wanted to smell his incense and she was like "what?" and he said "check it out, i got incense" and shoves a big stick of incense in her face and she makes a hideous face and kaleb says "what, you don't like it?" and she says "no i don't like smells." then this big bearded guy brought kaleb over to the window by my booth and was pointing at his vehicle and telling how he'd put on those decals and detailing and was going to get chrome hubcaps and paint them black or something like that, and i could only see the roof of his car and thought maybe it was some cool car, but then when he left i looked out the window and it was a turquoise tiny truck that so did not require that kind of care. i saw marvin at the library. he was working with scissors and elmer's glue and newspaper clipping copies and envelopes and mailing things to far off places like new brunswick, nj. i think they were about space travel or something. marvin's last name is wallace. he misaddressed an envelope (i assume) but he had already stamped it so he cut the stamp out of the envelope and reglued it on a clean envelope. i am not making any of this up. i snooped surreptitiously when he went out to smoke a kool. meanwhile, i've been ratio'd on all my sites, which FUCKING SUCKS. i need to figure out a way to get record labels to send me shit. fuck. fuck fuck. fuck. i need to get better at writing longhand, on notepads, in notebooks, on paper, with pen. because mostly i just sit and stare at the lines and think of how much faster i could spill my thoughts with a keyboard. and how much i like my handwriting, how elegantly messy my printscript is. what i need is an invisible, weightless computer to bring everywhere. because for some reason, i find writing, hand-to-paper combat, actual physical writing, embarrassing. 9.4.2001
npoo just told me he loved my metropolis article. it's the little things that make my day. i watched say it isn't so just now. boy, did it suck. although i did enjoy the o jones fro. mostly it made me long for simpler days, when chris klein's voice was probably cracking and all i wanted to ask of heather graham was "how's annie?" *** "hmm? what do you mean, bob?" "it's dancing, it's jumping up and down like the people do on tv when the music comes on and makes them happy." "is that so?" squig's dad wasn't paying attention. he was concentrating hard on screwing squig's new bunk bed together. squig was in love with it already, even in pieces on the floor, even with his brother getting dibs on the top bunk. (squig wasn't in love with getting a faceful of baloney sandwich when his brother informed him of the dibs.) he was fine with that - let brendan have the top, that way he didn't have to admit he was a little afraid of being up so high. he could sleep safe, knowing an extra roof was over his head, like a house within the house. his own house that could be private. his. squig watched his dad put the screws in the proper holes, attach the proper nuts and proper bolts to keep everything right and proper and in its place, uncollapsible and firm. it would be solid and strong, just like his dad, he knew it. it would be safe and unchanging and solid and strong, the best of everything. he looked at the cha-cha happening behind his father's index finger knuckle. the blue-green vein was pumping in a steady rhythm. it soothed squig. it looked like the twisted roots of the oak tree out front, thick and alive. full of the juice that kept things running regular. he slowed his breathing and matched it, suddenly became aware that his father's breathing matched his own, that the vein was somehow tuned to the intake and exhale of breath. he took a step back. his dad was pressing down on a screw cover that didn't want to take. squig's eyes drank in his father: the sweep of hair across his collar, the giant-seeming boots, the frayed spot where his wallet peeked through his back pocket. but his eye kept returning to the hands, which were gentle and playful and powerful and had veins that danced as if to say, "look how happy we are to be alive, look how we love life and celebrate." squig plopped down on the floor and grinned. "what's so funny?" "nothing. just thinking about stuff." "yeah? c'mere. grab that hammer and whale on this a bit." squig obeyed. he took aim at the screw cover. "wait a sec." his dad took the hammer from him and wrapped his hands around it. "put yours on top of mine." "okay." he put his hands on top of his dad's, right over the pulsating vessel. he could feel it licking against his palm. they reared back as one and sent the hammer home. squig squeezed his eyes shut at the last second, and thought: this is what love feels like. he opened them just as the head hit the screw, slamming into the plastic-veneered wood. it was a perfect fit. he let his hands fall away from his father's, vein and palm the last bits to touch.
when we were waiting for the bus last night in nashua, i took gabe on a tour of all the hair salons in the one block radius of the station. there is seriously a stretch with four storefronts, three of which are salons. we were walking down the street and this guy was opening up his window and it caught our attention and we looked up and he was NAKED. another huge storm pouring down. i heart rain. the weather was gorgeous this weekend, which was good since it would have been dumb for gabe and i to sit around cooped up and we have to walk everywhere, but i heart rain. a gray storm with pelting rain and gavin rossdale providing the ambience, where the sadness is this hollowed out space in your stomach that you can't eat enough to fill. uh. okay: -- >>>> subscribe lilbowwow Hello from Sony Music - We have sent this message because you (at least, we presume it was you) requested to be added to the lilbowwow mailing list. If you do not want to be on the list, simply ignore this message and the request will be disregarded. Thanks! Majordomo@listserv.music.sony.com
so gabe is gone, i have napped, and dad is harassing me over im about what i'm doing up here. perhaps breakfast will do an encore. i feel dirty about it, but i am predisposed to like pretty much any bush ballad. the weekend was really excellent, as these things go. lga<->mht cybersaver this weekend on american. feel free to come visit! ps there are still bugs in my nose.
holy fuckballs it is early. i just woke gabe up. he has a 9a flight. we're going to grab breakfast at andy's and then i'll shove him in a cab. and then i'm going back to sleep as long as my stomach will allow. yesterday was really good. dim sum was good, although gabe is never allowed to sit in the position of power again. he is incompetent at keep hungry dim sum mouths fed, and not just because he can't eat shrimp. at scott's we watched the sports night pilot, and then nypd blue marathon on courttv. i heart the blue so very much. like all good television. scott's coworker ken came, as well as kenny and caroline, who does in fact exist even though ken for some reason likes to keep us separate. i smell a rat! it was all well and good, except when ken accidentally introduced gabe as "erin's little sister," which was just well and hilarious. "squash it!" 9.3.2001
rip, pauline. i wish i'd been around in your heydey, but luckily words live on forever. (or unluckily, as readers of this waste of space will attest.) (also, i am reminded that i keep meaning to get some kael books, but never did. hmm. well, birthday is soonish.) (god, i am such a poseur.) (and pathetic.) (and a tool.) (tim taylor for reals.)
we're leaving in ten minutes for the bus station. boston beckons for dim sum, and then worcester for piggy pig pig ribs. i need to not stay up so late. 4a is late. but at least i was talking to people, as opposed to just aimlessly surfing. because i've done that. and it's dumb.
we needed slurpees. there is a citgo/7-11 a few blocks away. y and i tried going before and they did not have coke slurpee, but i was hopeful this time. but did they have coke flavor? no. did they have cherry flavor? no. did they even have mountain dew flavor? no. they had FANTA RASPBERRY. we went to store24 a mile away and i got a klondike bar and 50 cent off coupons for beverages, which i will soon apply to red bull. (7-11 has this amazing chili cheese dispenser, where you press a button like on a fountain pop machine and cheese or chili drips down from the bowels of the contraption. it is incredible! it didn't look like it had ever been used or worked, so while gabe was getting money from the sketch atm i pushed both buttons. gross grossness came squirting out. then i turned and saw that the guy behind the counter was a sad old man, and i felt horribly guilty because he would have to clean it up. i am mean. i can be mean without guilt to people i know; sometimes i enjoy it. but i can't deal with being mean to anonymous people. i think too much, and i'm too empathetic, and these are reasons why i will never be president of the united states. or even student council. or even the east side club. (east siiiiiiiide.)) 9.2.2001
i heart bowling. gabe and i went bowling at my place of refused employment. three games. did either of us break 100? nope. did either of us care? nope. did i use an 8lb ball? nope. did we stop playing because i got sick of it? nope. we had a prebowling lunch of CREMELAND ice cream. mmm. CREMELAND. we had a postbowling dinner of CREMELAND fried clams and hot dog and onion rings and coke. mmm. CREMELAND. in between we went to gill stadium and watched peewee football in the form of the manchester bears. peewee football is highly amusing, most notable in the audience it attracts. this guy sitting behind us was totally into it. gill stadium has a whiff of oldness about it; i sat inside for the first time (only the outside looking in until this afternoon) and realized what it was that was so familiar. i asked gabe what it reminded him of and he immediately responded with the right answer. gill stadium could have easily been home to the rockford peaches.
there are bugs. everywhere. there are bugs in my nose where my right nostril has developed a tapeworm. there are bugs on my back were my sleeping scrubs graze my skin, putting on a show of taunts and teases for the football field of nerve endings. and there are bugs in my dreams where i am drinking from my jug of water and at the bottom are blond-colored mini-worms with mini-worm legs and an imgunnagetYOU swish-swish-sweep manner of movement in the water. and i drink the water anyway, because i am thirsty, and i already have a tapeworm inside my nose, and spiders plowing my back, so what do i care, really? 9.1.2001
gabe and i walked downtown and back and hit the diner in between because CREMELAND was closed. long walk. nice walk, cool air and no fear of perpetration of crime. there is some weird shit in manchester. i mean, i suppose there's weird shit everywhere - hell, nyc is the king of weird shit - but here there is mystery that i do not feel confident enough to take the measures to defuse. we walked by a storefront at lake and pine that i had never seen before. mike's pub is behind it, but i had never seen this place opened - always assumed it was the downstairs of an apt building, i guess. we walk by, and light is spilling out through a screen door that has no screen and an inner door that is propped open. inside everything is yellow-brown, dingy lights and light wood paneling and along the long far wall people are sitting at tables facing towards the long far wall, all in a row. and there is a big fat man sitting in a folding chair at the front of the place watching tv. we watched them a few and finally deduced that they were playing video poker or something, some tabletop game that kept their interest and attention. and i don't have the balls to go in and ask what the fuck, even though i'm dying to do it. maybe they were actually playing tabletop pacman, and they were all drugged pacman savants used as a tool of namco's world domination plot, and the fat man was a pacman bouncer to keep out the unclean. we also walked past a building that has mystified me since i got here. i pass it nearly every day, at lake and hall, straight up the top of the hill from massabesic. on the front it says "i.o.o.f 1908," which means it's old, and then beneath it 'dearborn memorial hall.' ioof wasn't that hard to unearth once i actually looked for it; what purpose the building serves now, though, is unknown. half of the windows are bricked up, but there are a few a/c units in the place; it doesn't look like anybody lives there but the front vestibule doors were unlocked and inside beyond the locked inner doors there is tinsel leftover from christmas. we found a phone bill for "john foxboy". i found his phone number. i could call him and ask. but i won't. when we were walking back we passed by the sign i pass every day, in front of a miniparking lot sort of for old cars, that says "x mastres coming december 10." i have passed this sign every day i have been here, but up until last night i thought it meant "x masters," like some wwf or racing thing or something. then it hit me that it was "xmas trees". duh.
billy's>*. i walked in, sat down, said i had two questions: 1) do you have guinness and 2) can you get the michigan game. the answer to both was yes, and within 30 seconds i was watching opening kickoff. dtv is a beautiful thing. gabe's plane is landing in a few. i'm still a bit buzzed. making dinner should be interesting, to say the least. and the rest of the weekend.
the living room is now reasonably clean. lost motivation to get clothes off my floor. who cares, really, anyway? threw out a bunch of paper crap and other garbage. neglected to clean the fridge. blah. blah blah blah. blah. blah. i took a bike ride after my shower to get some exercise in before gabe comes. can't bike when he's here. grabbed some rice and beans and a couple of alcapurrias at don quijote - $4.50. buzzed by a coffee shop i wanted to check out. there are no coffee shop coffee shops around here, just nondescript rooms with venetian blinds and faded cocacola signs and old men in v-neck undershirts. and i don't fit. i'm going to billy's on the off chance that they're carrying the umich game. i'm doubtful. nothing could be that easy when all i want is to watch football. it's great to be a michigan wolverine, but only if you live in the right state for regional coverage.
it is unclear why i am awake. grr. it is unclear why i am feeling ill. grr. perhaps water will help. but this feels like lack-of-sleep nausea with a special indefinable something thrown in for fun and profit. the storm finally kicked into high gear around 3a. i watched for a while, then went to artbellland. it was an area 51 special. this one guy called up saying that he knew what they were doing at area 51: gnr, genetic nanotechnology robotics. art asked him how he knew and the guy replied that he had a CREDIBLE SOURCE from the INTERNET who used an ANONYMOUS REMAILER. i was laughing in my half-sleep and then for real because art basically told him he was an idiot. say what you want about him and his crackpot theories, art has no tolerance for morons.
this storm is fired. the radar picture is off the hook, the sky is flashing some sort of thunderous morse code, but is there rain? n-o spells no. screw it, i'm going to sleep.
another storm's a-comin'. i'm debating staying up for it. i'm feeling tired. as usual. i have started on a regimen of eating a multivitamin per day in the hopes it will perk me up. i am such an old crank, it is obscene. plus i forgot to go to poor paul's. but it was raining. so i have an excuse, of sorts, even if i did go out later and risk life and limb to acquire a pot. i need to get some reflective tape for my bike and helmet if i'm going to ride at night again. *** "cripe," he said to arthur dickory of lawrence, who had bowled a 290-288-257 trifecta even the cooters lose it in the end and shoved back from the table. "i thought this was bren's week." he repeated it louder, adding a "mom" to the end. "the only sullivan i see sitting around doing nothing is you," she replied. "you know he is. he's just doing it somewhere else." with someone else "well that's somewhere else, and you're here, so get your ass out to the curb." she lit another smoke, which set off a spasm of oxygen-choked coughs. squig winced as he walked out the door. somewhere else, in all its vague glory, was all he wanted. but whenever he thought he'd found it, it slipped away into nothing. if he could just get a handle on it, see it when it was there, touch it, know it - but he was stupid so fucking stupid you stupid idiot you think you're getting out well you're never getting out so don't even bother stupid and blind and tongue-tied when it mattered. and he knew it. when squig took stock of his assets, he found numb acquiescence close to the top, sandwiched tight between toleration and bitterness. he could never operate more than two out of three. he had not yet come into his prime. he wasn't sure he ever would. patience was hard to maintain, cruel and uncaring in its passive-aggressive state of being. patience was very, very hard to maintain. three cans stuffed with refuse waited for him at the side of the house. squig only had two hands. outnumbered again. he sighed as he grasped a handle in each, garbage leaking out, streaking his skin with slime, and headed for the street. he dropped the cans at the curb and stood still, sniffing the air, trying to parse the coming weather past the reek. rain. rain coming, fury and wetness and clean. more importantly, no hoop. can't play in the rain. the ball slips away, scampers toward the backstop away from constraining fingers. no hoop today. just inside, in there, with her, and without him. think you're getting out well you're never getting out so don't even he turned back to the house, trudged towards the finish line of the task. refuse relay for one. yeah, that's funny, you're so funny, you're such a comedian, you kiss your mother with that mouth, wiglet, squiglet, do ya, you think you can take me, you think you can take me, you think you can take me? he plotted trash talk in his head for tomorrow. nothing comes easy for him. but it can't rain every day. "it can't?" "nope. 'cause when it's raining here, it's sunny somewhere else. and when it's night here, it's daytime there." "wow." "i learned that in a book, bobby boo. that's why you read, so you can learn things and think about things and see things you can't see by yourself." "i saw mark reiser eat a worm yesterday at recess." "yeah, but did you see him eat a worm in china?" "it was on the playground and we live in AMERICA." "it's daytime in china right now." "how do they know it's day if they can't see the sun?" it was a stupid question. squig knew that it could be daytime without the sun, just like it could be nighttime without the dark. hours trip you up and walk slow and run fast and it's dark more than it's light. in squig's world, anyway, which included china and america all at the same time in a mixed-up mess of crayola'd boundaries and three-point arc and fear. no hoop today. |
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