August 31, 2006
So she says to me, "If you want a mint julep you'll have to go down to the creek and pick us some mint. It grows wild here."
2:24 PM | [permalink]
White collar or workingclass: any job is worth keeping if you don't have to shower afterwards.
6:25 AM | [permalink]
August 30, 2006
Traveling to old friends means telling old stories to new ears.
11:27 PM | [permalink]
This is the airport in Kentucky that I'm flying into tomorrow:
Sun Aug 27, 7:58 PM ETWhich means it's time to remind everyone that my two novels are actually sequels and I'm working on a trilogy. If I burn and die, coated in bluegrass jet gass, please give me the John Kennedy Toole treatment. Oh, and someone has to finish the second novel for me (outline is on my kitchen table) and figure out what the third would be.
LEXINGTON, Kentucky (Reuters) - A Comair jet crashed and burned in a Kentucky pasture on Sunday after a failed takeoff on a short runway, killing all but one of the 50 people aboard, authorities said.
"Ground scars" at the end of the shorter runway, a smashed perimeter fence and debris from the jet spread out over hundreds of feet (meters) indicated the plane's trajectory was from the shorter runway, NTSB investigator Debbie Hersman said.
Labels: Novel
11:45 AM | [permalink]
August 29, 2006
The cell phone belt clip is one of those things that I would love using, but hate seeing. It's definately the pocket protector of our generation. However, there is only so much room in my tight pants. As such I cannot wear a belt clip, but I wouldn't be against some clever person creating a belt-buckle wallet that would hold my metro car and not look like I should be picked up by the short bus.
UPDATE: Some asshole figured it out!
4:35 PM | [permalink]
There needs to be a word that means "a one way street going the other way" because a simple thing needn't a cumbersome definition.
11:27 AM | [permalink]
August 28, 2006
Today is not a good day for this.
9:42 PM | [permalink]
August 27, 2006
Let dreamers whine
Of the pleasures of wine
For lovers of soft delight
But this is the song
Of a tipple that’s strong
For men who must toil and fight.
Now the drink of luck
For the man full of pluck
Is easy to nominate
It’s the good old whiskey of old Kentuck
And you always drink it straight
By this time next week I will be rid of the wealthy New Yorkers I normally serve and staying with the world's greatest family in Kentucky.
Of the pleasures of wine
For lovers of soft delight
But this is the song
Of a tipple that’s strong
For men who must toil and fight.
Now the drink of luck
For the man full of pluck
Is easy to nominate
It’s the good old whiskey of old Kentuck
And you always drink it straight
By this time next week I will be rid of the wealthy New Yorkers I normally serve and staying with the world's greatest family in Kentucky.
2:29 PM | [permalink]
August 26, 2006
Paying too much for a domestic flight online only reminds me that I'm not as clever as I used to be.
7:54 PM | [permalink]
Like most people I relate to, I take my electronics personally. Yesterday after a very slow night at work I got my phone out of my locker and it only had enough battery life left to read the text messages of what was going on that night. "LOW BATTERY!" My phone warned, blinking the empty cell in the corner. And even though I wasn't tired until right then, I went home immediately thinking I needed a recharge.
3:40 PM | [permalink]
Is there a word for when something isn’t ahead of its time but completely in it—but from a while ago? Not something retro or something futuristic. But something that slips into your memory as permanent, just because it always has been to you? Like a giant oak tree you may have passed everyday on the way to school or and beat-up old house that never seems to get fixed and never seems to get any worse—where even the untreated plywood over a missing window pane seems in place? That’s what the Sunrise Convenience Store will always look like to me.
Even now as I run away from home I can’t even feel nostalgic for the place, because it is all right there just as it always has been. With the sign on the door that promises “Facsimile Service” like it’s a bright future headed to your homes—but which you might sample inside today. Step into the Sunrise Convenience Store and see the future of the past. Try out their Automatic Teller Machine.
And even though the Sunrise Convenience Store always opens before you knew it closed, The Hartford Journal chains a coin-operated newspaper box to the corner of the parking lot. Each day the new issue, with the key stories half under the fold, gets propped into the window of the box. Just one issue. One to tell the fifteen-minutes of rush hour each day that the Hartford Journal may be shrinking, but it still knows what happened yesterday. One issue to soak up the box incase some drunk from the only bar in town stumbles home and tries to make the paper live up to its nickname (The Hartford Urinal). These boxes stand in the strangest places. Often in the middle of a country road, chained a telephone pole next to a sandy pull off onto someone’s farm. As if you might care enough about Connecticut news but not subscribe. Instead they stand in hope that you might pass by at forty-five miles an hour, catch a headline, jam on the brakes and reverse into a James-Bond maneuver to grab that one paper on your way to work. This has to be a service recommended by the same guys who argued long ago to remove the phonebooth in favor or a payphone that juts out awkwardly under a sign (“Call From Your Car!”)
On the door of the Sunrise Convenience Store are three posters. One of a grampa with reading glasses, one of a little girl in blow-dried pigtails—both smile face-first into a twist cone of chocolate and vanilla soft serve. The third poster probably came in a box from the future along with everything else and advertises Magic Shell, the chocolate sauce that hardens on the ice cream. All three posters look bleached from the sun, but in a way they have never not been bleached from the sun. The forward-thinking people who designed the clapboard, one story, fall-out-proof building and its wooden sun with yellow triangle rays must have seen into the future and brought back these UV-proof signs that can never get any more bleached than the blue-faced family and their blue magic shell that might somehow taste like strawberries.
It doesn’t smell the same. I mean: it doesn’t smell—the same as it always did. It always didn’t smell. One more time: the way that it does not smell today is the same way that it never smelled. Coffeepots never come off the burner, the deli case never seems cold enough, and the car air fresheners may have been delivered from an all-blue future too. Jumbles in the Journal and tonight’s winning lotto jackpot are the only indicators of today’s date. In here you might send a telegram or you might send a longer note on their facsimile machine.
Even now as I run away from home I can’t even feel nostalgic for the place, because it is all right there just as it always has been. With the sign on the door that promises “Facsimile Service” like it’s a bright future headed to your homes—but which you might sample inside today. Step into the Sunrise Convenience Store and see the future of the past. Try out their Automatic Teller Machine.
And even though the Sunrise Convenience Store always opens before you knew it closed, The Hartford Journal chains a coin-operated newspaper box to the corner of the parking lot. Each day the new issue, with the key stories half under the fold, gets propped into the window of the box. Just one issue. One to tell the fifteen-minutes of rush hour each day that the Hartford Journal may be shrinking, but it still knows what happened yesterday. One issue to soak up the box incase some drunk from the only bar in town stumbles home and tries to make the paper live up to its nickname (The Hartford Urinal). These boxes stand in the strangest places. Often in the middle of a country road, chained a telephone pole next to a sandy pull off onto someone’s farm. As if you might care enough about Connecticut news but not subscribe. Instead they stand in hope that you might pass by at forty-five miles an hour, catch a headline, jam on the brakes and reverse into a James-Bond maneuver to grab that one paper on your way to work. This has to be a service recommended by the same guys who argued long ago to remove the phonebooth in favor or a payphone that juts out awkwardly under a sign (“Call From Your Car!”)
On the door of the Sunrise Convenience Store are three posters. One of a grampa with reading glasses, one of a little girl in blow-dried pigtails—both smile face-first into a twist cone of chocolate and vanilla soft serve. The third poster probably came in a box from the future along with everything else and advertises Magic Shell, the chocolate sauce that hardens on the ice cream. All three posters look bleached from the sun, but in a way they have never not been bleached from the sun. The forward-thinking people who designed the clapboard, one story, fall-out-proof building and its wooden sun with yellow triangle rays must have seen into the future and brought back these UV-proof signs that can never get any more bleached than the blue-faced family and their blue magic shell that might somehow taste like strawberries.
It doesn’t smell the same. I mean: it doesn’t smell—the same as it always did. It always didn’t smell. One more time: the way that it does not smell today is the same way that it never smelled. Coffeepots never come off the burner, the deli case never seems cold enough, and the car air fresheners may have been delivered from an all-blue future too. Jumbles in the Journal and tonight’s winning lotto jackpot are the only indicators of today’s date. In here you might send a telegram or you might send a longer note on their facsimile machine.
3:10 PM | [permalink]
August 25, 2006
Somedays it would be great if a big egg timer would go off and Martin McDonagh would run into the room with his laptop, snatch mine and yell "Switch!"
12:46 PM | [permalink]
August 24, 2006
My brother and I were drinkingall the kinds of budweiser that aren't called budweiser and playing Snatch, which, to me, is the only way to play scrabble if you're not a complete asshole who just likes making other people wait.
Then this devolved into a suprisingly complex drinking game with the tiles called "Consonant/Vowel." And I remembered something I learned as a university student: if you can sip your drink while playing a drinking game, you may want to make sure your health insurance card is in your wallet.
Then this devolved into a suprisingly complex drinking game with the tiles called "Consonant/Vowel." And I remembered something I learned as a university student: if you can sip your drink while playing a drinking game, you may want to make sure your health insurance card is in your wallet.
9:02 AM | [permalink]
August 23, 2006
True story:
Martin Luther King Jr. came to my hometown as a boy on an exchange program from his home church. He spent his summer working beneath the hot nets of our then and still thriving tobacco farms. Culbro Tobacco. Just a child then. With a mind full of girls and prayers and duffle bag full of clothes that wouldn’t fit at the end of the summer. He worked the fields just a few miles from Dad’s house, back when this neighborhood was the only game around. Where a Barbershop on the edge of the world marked the end of civilization as they knew it, and saw the beginning of cornfields, tobacco fields, and a series of deep woods forest where the latest in bomb technology went to pieces. Martin Luther King Jr. awoke before dawn to ride into town with the other boys on Sundays and pray inside a big white church while the big white eyes in town finally saw them blackfolks they keep reading about. Martin Luther King Jr. liked Connecticut. He liked working the fields and singing with his friends from home. He liked getting his hair cut at Ray’s Barber shop. He liked the smiles they got on the way through town. He even liked the way white people sing in church. The program took Martin Luther King to Hartford, where he was allowed to sit anywhere he wanted in the restaurant.
That summer, Martin Luther King Jr. says, that summer was the dream. He returned home, but something inside of him never let go of the tobacco nets. Every time he passed a restaurant or a church he remembered the time and the town where ten o’clock Sunday morning wasn’t the most segregated hour in the country.
The Barbershop still sits there.
Growing up we had our hair treated by the half blind owner/operator of Ray’s Barbershop, itself once the only game in town. The ghosts of Ray’s old war buddies squinted into the sunlight from the old, super-sepia photos on the walls. The one story barbershop that time and The Archie and Jughead comic subscription forgot. You could go there before school and (without fail) wait in line, reading up on what Jughead and the gang were up to thirty years ago, while the next old man in line tallied up the bodies on the wall for the old man in the chair. “That one there, number 27. He’s dead. So’s he. And he. The umpire never made it through the season.” Ray the Barber, always Ray. Stuck in that neighborhood like Barbershop itself, no matter how many public schools and swimming pools they put in. Ray The Barber—the fullest name god could give him or us teetered in there at six every morning from his house a block and a half down. First by foot, but by the time I stopped using the booster seat, by moped. The last I heard he still came it at six, parked his pickup in the closest spot and closed for a long lunch. A lunch that might just last until the morning.
In the eighties—when the picture quality of televisions increased and the quality pictures decreased, Ray would brush your neck with powder, wrap a paper bib around you and synch the apron around it. In the middle of asking you about how many girlfriends you have and how many homeruns you’ve hammered out—same answer, whether the truth or the lie—Ray would glance at the jittery, color-separated images of the world tearing itself apart. The guns and the drugs and the ketchup-as-vegetable in school lunches; those angry young men with the pink hair and those angry young men who should be in chain a gang, not in gold chains and gangs. Ray could cut your hair blindfolded, and he might as well because even with the TV off he couldn’t get it even. But with the TV on Ray watched the walls come down and the others go up. He watched as these funny little men in funny little hats fought each other in deserts for funny little reasons. (“Maybe you could cool off them A-rabs with Ray’s shave. Looks too hot in the desert for them thick beards. Think the Navy might call you up, Ray? Get you back in action?”) The wars. Ah, the wars we had back then. Cold Wars, gang wars, media wars, drug wars, cola wars. Not a single Simsbury bomb went off. Not a bunker-buster, nor a Patriot. With the end of mining, and no more major highways to blast on through with, the hypothetical wars kept the industries going on TV and in the factory. The war had come home now as the refugees from the cities huddled inside of giant, three story houses and waited for the news to come in on the TV as the popcorn came out of the microwave. The news of muggings and car jackings and that, that disease Gay-Related Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. Ray would look at you in the mirror and clink-dry his straight razor and shears and comb, clinking them free of the blue, debugging power of Barbasol. Typical Navy man, that Ray. With the instant cure for crabs, and only the thinnest hope that it might kill whatever else you picked up.
“It all started right here,” he would say to all of us and none of us. “It coulda ended here too. All I had to say was, Sorry, we don’t serve your kind here.” Before I even knew what he meant, Ray would sidle up to his ancient cash register and squint at the buttons as if they tended to move around on him. Poor Ray, with his touch tone phone and his press-button cash register. Why did they have to flip the numbers on these damn things? Hard enough as it is. Ray would punch in the numbers—with the timid caution that anyone of his Archie readers might use when putting a needle to a record— take your four dollars and send you home with a dried, hardened piece of Bazooka Joe.
Martin Luther King Jr. came to my hometown as a boy on an exchange program from his home church. He spent his summer working beneath the hot nets of our then and still thriving tobacco farms. Culbro Tobacco. Just a child then. With a mind full of girls and prayers and duffle bag full of clothes that wouldn’t fit at the end of the summer. He worked the fields just a few miles from Dad’s house, back when this neighborhood was the only game around. Where a Barbershop on the edge of the world marked the end of civilization as they knew it, and saw the beginning of cornfields, tobacco fields, and a series of deep woods forest where the latest in bomb technology went to pieces. Martin Luther King Jr. awoke before dawn to ride into town with the other boys on Sundays and pray inside a big white church while the big white eyes in town finally saw them blackfolks they keep reading about. Martin Luther King Jr. liked Connecticut. He liked working the fields and singing with his friends from home. He liked getting his hair cut at Ray’s Barber shop. He liked the smiles they got on the way through town. He even liked the way white people sing in church. The program took Martin Luther King to Hartford, where he was allowed to sit anywhere he wanted in the restaurant.
That summer, Martin Luther King Jr. says, that summer was the dream. He returned home, but something inside of him never let go of the tobacco nets. Every time he passed a restaurant or a church he remembered the time and the town where ten o’clock Sunday morning wasn’t the most segregated hour in the country.
The Barbershop still sits there.
Growing up we had our hair treated by the half blind owner/operator of Ray’s Barbershop, itself once the only game in town. The ghosts of Ray’s old war buddies squinted into the sunlight from the old, super-sepia photos on the walls. The one story barbershop that time and The Archie and Jughead comic subscription forgot. You could go there before school and (without fail) wait in line, reading up on what Jughead and the gang were up to thirty years ago, while the next old man in line tallied up the bodies on the wall for the old man in the chair. “That one there, number 27. He’s dead. So’s he. And he. The umpire never made it through the season.” Ray the Barber, always Ray. Stuck in that neighborhood like Barbershop itself, no matter how many public schools and swimming pools they put in. Ray The Barber—the fullest name god could give him or us teetered in there at six every morning from his house a block and a half down. First by foot, but by the time I stopped using the booster seat, by moped. The last I heard he still came it at six, parked his pickup in the closest spot and closed for a long lunch. A lunch that might just last until the morning.
In the eighties—when the picture quality of televisions increased and the quality pictures decreased, Ray would brush your neck with powder, wrap a paper bib around you and synch the apron around it. In the middle of asking you about how many girlfriends you have and how many homeruns you’ve hammered out—same answer, whether the truth or the lie—Ray would glance at the jittery, color-separated images of the world tearing itself apart. The guns and the drugs and the ketchup-as-vegetable in school lunches; those angry young men with the pink hair and those angry young men who should be in chain a gang, not in gold chains and gangs. Ray could cut your hair blindfolded, and he might as well because even with the TV off he couldn’t get it even. But with the TV on Ray watched the walls come down and the others go up. He watched as these funny little men in funny little hats fought each other in deserts for funny little reasons. (“Maybe you could cool off them A-rabs with Ray’s shave. Looks too hot in the desert for them thick beards. Think the Navy might call you up, Ray? Get you back in action?”) The wars. Ah, the wars we had back then. Cold Wars, gang wars, media wars, drug wars, cola wars. Not a single Simsbury bomb went off. Not a bunker-buster, nor a Patriot. With the end of mining, and no more major highways to blast on through with, the hypothetical wars kept the industries going on TV and in the factory. The war had come home now as the refugees from the cities huddled inside of giant, three story houses and waited for the news to come in on the TV as the popcorn came out of the microwave. The news of muggings and car jackings and that, that disease Gay-Related Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. Ray would look at you in the mirror and clink-dry his straight razor and shears and comb, clinking them free of the blue, debugging power of Barbasol. Typical Navy man, that Ray. With the instant cure for crabs, and only the thinnest hope that it might kill whatever else you picked up.
“It all started right here,” he would say to all of us and none of us. “It coulda ended here too. All I had to say was, Sorry, we don’t serve your kind here.” Before I even knew what he meant, Ray would sidle up to his ancient cash register and squint at the buttons as if they tended to move around on him. Poor Ray, with his touch tone phone and his press-button cash register. Why did they have to flip the numbers on these damn things? Hard enough as it is. Ray would punch in the numbers—with the timid caution that anyone of his Archie readers might use when putting a needle to a record— take your four dollars and send you home with a dried, hardened piece of Bazooka Joe.
8:41 AM | [permalink]
August 22, 2006
The general rule had always been to keep writing until the laptop batter went out. But now that that takes less than an hour, so do my writing sessions.
1:34 PM | [permalink]
August 21, 2006
Zadie Smith's White Teeth + Brendan Sullivan's White Flesh x 6 Hrs. On the beach / SPF 10 = Skin Cancer.
10:31 AM | [permalink]
August 20, 2006
There comes a time when you run from the cops with your older brother and you think, "This is not where i thought we'd be when we were on vacation, at 24 and 26, after we put your daughter to sleep."
1:16 AM | [permalink]
August 19, 2006
| Everyone in the world has probably already seen video of Bush singing "Bloody Sunday." But it's still worth watching. | |
3:46 AM | [permalink]
August 18, 2006
By the time I get to put out the fourth of whatever it is I end up doing, I really hope the semi-obvious Led Zeplin reference isn't played out.
3:00 AM | [permalink]
August 17, 2006
One of the nice things about Flickr is that within five seconds of thinking "Man, I miss that shitty little cafe from when I was in school in England. It rained everyday and I could ride that silly double decker in town and not do homework for a whole afternoon and call it breakfast." I can see someones pictures of it. Someone who is a much better photographer than me.
12:14 AM | [permalink]
August 16, 2006
Death of Fashion - Smoke and Mirrors
The first press will be hand numbered up to 500. And I'll give you the very first one if you can remix this song.
5:43 PM | [permalink]
August 15, 2006
Sure, I'm about a week and a half late on Mel Gibson jokes. (The best one being John Stewarts wrap up after he interviewed the direction of Who Killed The Electric Car? "Mel Gibson appeared in the movie and guess who he thinks did it?") But this is so weird/funny/well-done that I can't believe it came from the tabloids. Click on Mel's face.2:11 PM | [permalink]
August 14, 2006
I hereby accept Ben's
The rules are as follows:
1. Any sort of new content constitutes a post. This includes the posting of photographs, drawings, music, videos--whatever. A post is a post.
2. There is no minimum length for a post. Even a single sentence constitutes a satisfactory post. And if you're really lame, even a word counts.
3. Contestants must post every day. This is relative to the poster's timezone, and measured by their 24-hour timestamp. I know it's easy to forge timestamps--you're on the honor system, please don't cheat.
4. If a contestant can't access a computer, they can elect a substitute to post for them. The substitute can be another contestant, and can post for as many days as necessary.
5. Each contestant gets one "mulligan," meaning that everyone in entitled to one re-do.
The contest begins August 21st at 12:01am,
after which no new entries will be accepted.
Who's in?
Contestants thus far:
Adrianne - Ben - Brendan - Lily - Jeff
Mike - Nora - Sarah - Todd - Tony
TO JOIN THE CONTEST CLICK HERE
(Or possibly HERE)
The rules are as follows:
1. Any sort of new content constitutes a post. This includes the posting of photographs, drawings, music, videos--whatever. A post is a post.
2. There is no minimum length for a post. Even a single sentence constitutes a satisfactory post. And if you're really lame, even a word counts.
3. Contestants must post every day. This is relative to the poster's timezone, and measured by their 24-hour timestamp. I know it's easy to forge timestamps--you're on the honor system, please don't cheat.
4. If a contestant can't access a computer, they can elect a substitute to post for them. The substitute can be another contestant, and can post for as many days as necessary.
5. Each contestant gets one "mulligan," meaning that everyone in entitled to one re-do.
after which no new entries will be accepted.
Who's in?
Contestants thus far:
Adrianne - Ben - Brendan - Lily - Jeff
Mike - Nora - Sarah - Todd - Tony
TO JOIN THE CONTEST CLICK HERE
(Or possibly HERE)
12:57 AM | [permalink]
August 13, 2006
2:14 AM | [permalink]
August 12, 2006
Very, very soon I am going to start the least-successful independent record label of all time. For the first time in my life I have a bank account in good standing and I am going to start a production of putting out tour-support records for DJ's to play and bands to sell at shows to make gas money. Hopefully I will someday expand into buttons and t-shirts. I need to find a legal way to keep none of the rights to the music.
All I know is that my new office is going to be sweet.
All I know is that my new office is going to be sweet.
2:13 PM | [permalink]
August 09, 2006
No matter what happens I look forward to saying this someday: "Yeah? That's easy for you to say--you're not tying together a trilogy."
11:26 PM | [permalink]
August 08, 2006
This pretty much explains to me why I may never publish a book, but why I like telling stories the way I do:
Our genetic inability to call a spade a spade and our compulsion to say no when we mean yes, and vice versa, are but surface manifestations of a deeply ingrained reflex to subvert, invert and pervert the English language. In Ireland, the words must fit the rhythm, often at the expense of logic or clarity...
The liberal, and frequently illogical, peppering of conversations with swear words by Irish writers is more a method of retaining a rhythmic pattern of speech than an expression of hostility.
8:46 AM | [permalink]
August 06, 2006
Our cab driver started crying on the way to the hotel. "You two look happy. Married?" Annie and I were in back going back and forth about whether or not we could eat dinner at Medieval Times a restaurant in Jersey where you drink beer and watch people joust. Annie's boss is a real estate developer who, upon hearing that we could not have air conditioning in our apartment, put us up in a hotel he developed near Giant's stadium in Jersey.
"You gotta cherish eachother. Cherish every moment you spend together," he said in a hoarse voice. "The woman I've been married to for thirty-seven years just told me she doesn't love me anymore. But I had a complete mental breakdown over it last week. I mean, what am I supposed to do?" I watched the New Jersey Turnpike ahead of us and realized that I might die.
"Maybe you just need some perspective," I said as Annie gripped my hand and begged me to shut up. But since Annie demanded that we eat in the hotel bar again (draft beers: Coors Light, Bud Light, Amstel Light; bottled beers: Coors Light, Miller Light, Amstel Light) instead of watching Jersey people joust, I wasn't going to give in. "We took a break once. It was good for us because it gave us a chance to start again on purpose rather than just trot along each day."
Annie's fingernails dug into my wrist as he kept talking. "...She says I've needed therapy for 37 years, but I wasn't ready to look into it. I guess I was just in a mode. I didn't take her for granted, but I didn't cherish her. Now I want to change, but I don't know if she'll have me back..." He was working up a big, cathartic lather, going on about how he supported her this whole time, how he used to be a restaurant manager in the city. How her grew up in Greenpoint and then moved to Jersey when he wanted to start a family. Two streams of unwiped tears rained down his jowls.
When we first got in the cab I was excited. He seemed like the kind of old-school NY cab driver that I remember from when I was a kid. Street tough, sarcastic, knowledgable white guys, who sailed around the city shit-talking the mayor at the worthless cops. Nowadays we have overworked Nigerian Cardiologists who are working on their english.
"I told her that if she wants out then she has to get out. Stop living in my house, stop driving my car, and go live the wild single life that you're looking for," he kept eye contact with us in the rear-view as dozens of trucks almost made this story a tragedy. "I hope to god she comes back to me. We're expecting our first grandchild anytime now."
He pulled up to the hotel and slowly inched up to the door as he finished his sad story. By now his tears had started soaking the collared polo shirt that his wife no doubt bought him years ago. We awkardly stepped out of the car and gave him a large tip. He deserves it even if he's lying.
"Wait!" he said when we got out. "If you two ever want to get out of the city and head over to Medieval Times, here's my card."
"You gotta cherish eachother. Cherish every moment you spend together," he said in a hoarse voice. "The woman I've been married to for thirty-seven years just told me she doesn't love me anymore. But I had a complete mental breakdown over it last week. I mean, what am I supposed to do?" I watched the New Jersey Turnpike ahead of us and realized that I might die.
"Maybe you just need some perspective," I said as Annie gripped my hand and begged me to shut up. But since Annie demanded that we eat in the hotel bar again (draft beers: Coors Light, Bud Light, Amstel Light; bottled beers: Coors Light, Miller Light, Amstel Light) instead of watching Jersey people joust, I wasn't going to give in. "We took a break once. It was good for us because it gave us a chance to start again on purpose rather than just trot along each day."
Annie's fingernails dug into my wrist as he kept talking. "...She says I've needed therapy for 37 years, but I wasn't ready to look into it. I guess I was just in a mode. I didn't take her for granted, but I didn't cherish her. Now I want to change, but I don't know if she'll have me back..." He was working up a big, cathartic lather, going on about how he supported her this whole time, how he used to be a restaurant manager in the city. How her grew up in Greenpoint and then moved to Jersey when he wanted to start a family. Two streams of unwiped tears rained down his jowls.
When we first got in the cab I was excited. He seemed like the kind of old-school NY cab driver that I remember from when I was a kid. Street tough, sarcastic, knowledgable white guys, who sailed around the city shit-talking the mayor at the worthless cops. Nowadays we have overworked Nigerian Cardiologists who are working on their english.
"I told her that if she wants out then she has to get out. Stop living in my house, stop driving my car, and go live the wild single life that you're looking for," he kept eye contact with us in the rear-view as dozens of trucks almost made this story a tragedy. "I hope to god she comes back to me. We're expecting our first grandchild anytime now."
He pulled up to the hotel and slowly inched up to the door as he finished his sad story. By now his tears had started soaking the collared polo shirt that his wife no doubt bought him years ago. We awkardly stepped out of the car and gave him a large tip. He deserves it even if he's lying.
"Wait!" he said when we got out. "If you two ever want to get out of the city and head over to Medieval Times, here's my card."
12:29 PM | [permalink]
August 02, 2006
My ocillating, Stevie Wonder fan is about as helpful as Stevie when I need a ride home. Annie and I haven't slept in many nights, laying awake on our new sheets and trying to feel the healing power of stevie. The bars on our windows mean the only AC we can buy is five hundred dollars making the following options more viable:
1) Stay in a hotel. There's a Marriot in Brooklyn that mind as well be in Albany or somewhere on the Pennsylvania Highway. But if we go that far Annie wants to stay in a fancy Manhattan joint. Which is the NY equivalet, to me, of wanting to get a drink but deciding--as too many people do--that it would be best to leave the spacious, affordable bar in your neighborhood where you have friends and high fives and wait in line at some tiny, chic shithole while you trade sneers with complete morons. I assume that if we stay in a chic hotel that there will be blow in the bathroom and that we will have to wait inline to use our own bathroom because young models will be crammed in our bathtub with rolled up traveler's checks up their nostrils.
2) Join the Proust Society at the Mercantile Library and sweat it out there, writing all day. But like all things that cater to the wealthy and don't give a shit about working people, they're closed for August while everyone is in the Hamptons.
3) I could always get wasted at The Pool Bar at Hotel QT but they don't open until five.
4) Take the scoot to one of the many wonderful, free public pools in Brooklyn. But we left the scoot at Beauty Bar last night because Annie and I have this disease that makes us poor drivers when we drink alcohol. They are surprisingly not gross. And if you don't mind young obese children with no parents in sight calling eachother faggots it's not a bad spot.
5) Ride the air conditioned subway all day.
6) Go to the starbucks across the street. It's in a train station mall, so I will feel like I'm wasting my summer at my parent's old house, trolling for ass all hopped-up on foam.
7) Cold showers. Which are never fun or lasting.
11:50 AM | [permalink]
August 01, 2006
I can't wait to blog about what just happened. But Ben will do it better.
10:22 PM | [permalink]
1) There was an air conditioner in my apartment when I moved in. But because we have bars on the windows I could only prop the AC on the night stand and vaguely point it out the window. When I woke up on my first morning, I walked downstairs and found a quart of run-off in between the dry-wall and the paint.Now we just have one fan. It distracts me from writing because Pete's roommate onced described an occillating fan as "Stevie Wonder." And everytime it blows on me I imagine Stevie, swaying back and forth and smiling alone in the studio when everyone else breaks for lunch.
2) I forgot that Ben, Julia, and I were going to start a band or a 50s comedy group.
12:17 PM | [permalink]
Secret to Happiness