State of Connecticut Update. From this morning's New York Times article: "HARTFORD, July 24 — An old couch. After nearly two months of bickering about how to solve their budget impasse, one of the few new ideas Connecticut leaders have floated is a proposal to sell old office furniture to raise money."
I'm reminded of the onion's "Our Dumb Century" Where the news from October 29, 1929 was "MONEY MONEY MONEY!" And the next day's frontpage headline was "PENCILS FOR SALE."
1) Currently I play the where-are-you-from game with all the tables I wait on. This is easier than you think, given the low but specific appeal of beach life in Delware. It's either Baltimore, Philly, DC or something obvious like Queens. Two crowning acheivements: "Pardon me, but are you from Ulster, Northern Ireland?" (by virtue of accent that sounds like a Scotsman making fun of the Irish.) "Tu estas de Puerto Rico?" (by virtue of her Spanish accent equivalent to the Boston brogue). You can always tell when Pennysylvania people come in. They're a state full of cows and a people who only order chicken.
2) Pennsylvania woman last night: "Can I get a chimi-jenga with a side order of hollow penis?"
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Hollow penis?"
"I'm really sorry, I can't hear you over the music. One more time?"
Speaking of the former collection of short stories that I now call a novel, we're doing another list.
Top five albums to listen to all the way through:
Wyclef- The Carnival. Every hit he's had solo, plus give the added structure of his court room skits.
Badly Drawn Boy- The Hour Of Bewilderbeast. Follows the course of a relationship and each song bleeds into another like...
Neutral Milk Hotel- In an Aeroplane Over the Sea. Je-esus Christ I love this album. Every person I know who owns this has purchased it/burned it and stored every emotion from that time in their life on every song.
The Postal Service Forgive me for being predictable.
Johnny Cash- The Man Comes Around. You can hear him dying.
Table full of girls came into my restaurant, I brought them food. They kept speaking to me at length whenever I came over, which is how I make my fortune. When I check on their drinks, they the blond haired one said, "I--I, can I ask you something--maybe I shouldn't."
"Can I get you anything?" Smile, pretend not to notice.
"Are we on the same page here? I mean--do you know what I mean?"
"The same page?" Act dumb.
"I just think you're adorable," her friends cringed, as friends should. "And, like, if you're not doing anything tonight--what time do you get off? Oh, I'm sorry, am I too blunt? Are you, like, with someone? I should have asked."
"Yes, I live up the street with my ladyfriend."
"Oh, but is she like your, you know your good friend? Is she your best friend?"
"My girlfriend."
"Right, but are you two...you know. Nevermind."
I attended to my other tables, and when I returned she said she wasn't asking for herself (which I doubted) but for a friend of theirs who works at their restaurant. I asked if their friend had trouble meeting people, or if they just liked setting people up. "Would I know her?"
They were visably embarassed. I tried to make things unawkward by staying to talk with them so they didn't think I was avoiding them. I asked their friends' name on my way to the kitchen. "Oh, this person's name is Steffan."
I served another table their drinks when something clicked, I walked back to the girls. "Oh, I get it. Steffan's a dude."
R.I.P. The Following Lines. You have served me well over the past year that I have been working on these stories. You've made me laugh and cry (not really). And helped me keep writing when all seemed too boring for vocabulary words. You are being cut because your services are no longer needed. But we salute you.
Removed from a story about getting lost on a gravel road in Missouri: "Hell, if my crotch burst into flames I'd sooner fashion a divining rod out of pretzel sticks before I'd ask anyone out here to direct me to a faucet."
From a story formerly titled, "No Fucking Way.""By the end of the school year my parents attitude towards the trip changed from, "No fucking way," to "Our way, OK?" They're not stories anymore, they're chapters.
Suburban question #1: "Suburban Milwaukee was exactly like my hometown, which depressed us. We wanted to go city to city and see what we could see. To meet new people. But it suddenly became apparent that suburbs we were more like religous fundamentalists: when looked at from the outside we had more in common with eachother than with where we came from. Terrible to say? Of course. But put Pat Robertson and Osama Bin Laden in a room together and see how they agree on how women shouldn't dress or why kids shouldn't listen to Rock music."
Suburban question #2: "Each Milwaukee suburb is exactly the same size as the others. Carved out by Northwest planners in perfect squares. Growing up it was very important to me that I wasn't from either of the neighboring towns around me because I saw them as different. But what if we were this similar? Would you get more creative or more nitpicky? ("Did you just ask if I was from Pocatuk? Geez, does it look like my Blockbuster doesn't rent R rated movies to minors?"
I'm in the beginning of something kind of nice. As I may have mentioned before, I'm now in the finishing stages of what I'm starting to call a novel. I refused to at first because I didn't want to jinx it.
It's about 225 pages, but as you can see from above, some of those pages are entirely crossed out, and some have nearly a whole new page of rewrites in them. Since leaving for England, I have kept a notebook on me--quite possibly the most pretentious looking of all available. Inside it are mean notes to myself. "You sound like an asshole whenever you mention book titles." "When you say this, it's pretty obvious when you're lying."
The notebook is arranged autobiographically, which is to say that when I read a note in it, I know that I am was on a ferry to Dublin at time time because next to it will be time tables and a list of shit I want to see.
(Then there's usually a list of moronic things I once wondered, or thought myself intelligent for noting: "French bread, french onion soup, and french kiss translate by dropping the fransais. What about Irish coffee? Irish step dancing? Irish pub? Irish temper? Paddy wagon?")
What I hope for in the end it to turn all this shit into three hundred pages. I'm doing it the pre-modern way, not to be vintage, but just to try it out, and I can't recommend it enough. I'm starting over with blank document files and retyping every single page. I thought this would be laborious, since I have already read it over and corrected it twice, but I love it.
For one thing, I got to sleep everynight feeling as though I have accomplished writing twenty pages, when I have really only copied most of them. The biggest help is that I realize that I have referred to one person as "Talkie McCellphone-Mutherfucker" within ten pages of calling someone else "Talking McFacinating."
Also, I just finished a rather well-written but ultimately dry book about the slave trade, and have enjoyed writing so much more ever since I started reading "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith.
Yesterday a policeman came into my restaurant and handed me a sheet of paper and told me to make sure that everyone got a chance to read it.
The first line? "Bethany Beach alert: three gypsies were reported stealing from area businesses."
I thought at first gypsy might be code for something. But no. Three people were reported trying to scam some local businesses and they had "thick european accents." That's the kind of town I live in. Someone gets robbed by someone faking an accent (French? English?) and they put out an APB on a wooden wagon with lace curtains.
