Get Your Own Box

Razor and Sarah came over last night and I cooked the shit out of some salmon, using this recipe I found on epicurious.com. I just kind of saw the recipe and liked the look of it, and I was a little worried that it wasn't going to come out well, but it totally did. So we ate some good food and drank wine and beers and Billy and Sarah played and liked The Warriors. But there must have been something off in my cooking (or maybe it was that I ate most of Sarah's plate), because I tossed and turned all night emitting gasses and having strange, brief dreams, including this one:

I'm scheduled as the opening act for an afternoon show by The Gaping Abyss at some dive in the heart of some desolate expanse of Queens, but I have no instruments and can't remember any songs to play. Chris keeps giving me pep talks, assuring me that I'll get up on stage (with a beat-up awful acoustic guitar he lends me) and the songs will just come to me, but I'm freaking out -- to the extent that my ass sweats through my pants and leaves a big gross sweat-stain on this tablecloth I'm sitting on. Sick.

When Sophie got up this morning at like... 5:00 AM to catch her business flight to NC, I woke up and felt completely awake and anxious, entertaining all sorts of grim fantasies in classic Julian style: "Why am I so awake so early? I haven't gotten any sleep at all tonight, practically!!! Am I finally going crazy? Is this what crazy feels like?" But, of course, as is literally always the case, I fell back asleep in 5 minutes, only to wake up at 8:00 AM feeling groggy and awful, totally wanting to get back into bed.

I'm getting pretty far in both The Warriors and Call of Cthulhu, such that both games have gotten too hard for me to play without cheating. It's inevitable.

My Halloween costume was kind of a bust. Like I said, JAYNE COBB HAT never showed up, so I sort of improvised with this white t-shirt that said "I BRAKE 4 REAVER GIRLS." Which doesn't even make sense because Jayne hates Reavers and isn't even in a position on the ship where he'd be "braking," period. I know that, people. But what really drove the point home that the costume wasn't gonna be a success was this pair of fancy-pants Park Slope teenagers hanging out outside the 11th St. Deli: "I brake for raver girls? What the fuck?" I was ashamed, and safety pinned my jacket up for the duration of the trip to Katharine's.

Which turned out to be a wise decision, since the train was hopping with mean teens looking to poke fun at: The goth-looking lady in the avant-garde "F Train" costume; a particularly unfortunate looking brother in full white-face and covered in band-aids who was going as "Marv" from Sin City (fake chin putty and all); and many more. I'm thinking about going to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade tonight, so, you know... there'll be more of that.

Say What You See, Gareth

Holy shit! Did any of you guys smell this yesterday? I caught a few whiffs of it late yesterday at work and at home in the evening, but I wrote it off as the final stages of a nervous breakdown (olfactory hallucinations? Those can't be a good sign!) and just went to bed and cowered under the covers praying for death until I fell asleep. But guess what -- not crazy!

"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes," he said. "It's pleasant."

Oh, indeed it were.

Kitty threw up twice yesterday, once under The Rase's bed.

So I spent most of last night playing a couple of new videogames I recently acquired, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and The Warriors. They're both great! CoC is actually quite dark and spooky although I was distressed to learn last night that I'm already about 20% done with it. There'd been a bit of FUD surrounding its release, and I was getting myself set up to duly purchase it and then be disappointed. But it's great! Like I told Tom, I met a little girl in Innsmouth (sportin' the "Innsmouth Look," naturally), who told me if I wanted to speak to her mother, I'd have to go up to the attic, because that's where she's kept. "Why's that?" asked Jack. "She bites," said Ramona Waite.

The Warriors is simply incredible, visually. I will say that there doesn't appear to be too much to the "gameplay" -- it's mostly punch-kick-grab-punch, though all the little "mini-games," such as uncuffing your compadres or throwing up a tag on a wall, are sweet. But the art direction and level design are just... wow. It's some serious Taxi Driver shit, guys. And it's not like it's a total departure from the sort of low-res, blurry rendering from the GTA games. They're definitely using at least a derivative of that engine, but there's been so much attention paid to making things look filthy and decayed and, you know, pre-Giulianian, that the whole thing feels very detailed and polished.

It's Saturday now -- I'm about to go to Katharine's Halloween party. What am I going as? Jayne Cobb, erstwhile mercenary of the good ship Serenity. I bought a knit cap on eBay ("JAYNE COBB HAT") that's apparently a replica of the "cunning" one he wears in The Message, but guess what: JAYNE COBB HAT ain't getting shipped here 'til Monday evening. So... Jesus.

Ramones Mania

Now I remember why baseball sucks -- it takes a perfectly good network, like Fox, and replaces all the good programming with fucking... baseball. So I'm finally (sorry!) watching this Ramones Raw DVD that Devin bought me as a birthday present the year before last, and you know what? It's totally fucking engrossing. It's basically a compilation of home movies the band made while touring in the U.S. and abroad, along with some totally sweet live footage for songs I think they didn't do live that much (including one of my personal favorites, I Can't Make It On Time). I think the best part is how dumb it at all is -- literally a double-digit percentage of the footage is of members of the band posing in front of some local edifice or pointing at a funny sign and waiting nervously to have their picture taken, starting to smile, not sure if the picture's been taken yet, glancing back and forth awkwardly, etc. And then there's the fucking terrifying footage from inside their car of them getting mobbed by fans in South America and Europe. My only complaint is that most of the stuff is from the post-Dee Dee era, so it's got C.J. in it instead, and that guy... he's not, you know, a Ramone.

Some other highlights:

• Gilbert Ramone
• Joey and Marky's appearance on Steampipe Alley, hosted by Mario Cantone
• Dee Dee's perverse insistence on taking a detour to go shopping for a Rolex in Valencia
• Holy shit, Joey wearing a fucking Dickies t-shirt!

Because I'm A Fucking Caveman

So yesterday, The Friends and I drove up to this place called Wright's Farm in Gardiner, NY, and went apple-picking. Katharine and I had devised the idea the previous weekend, and during a boring Monday or Tuesday at work I googled a bit and got some people on board. The weather ended up being completely perfect for our plans -- there'd be pretty much non-stop rain up in tha Tri-State for the past two weeks or so, but it cleared up completely and the temperature rose to 70 degrees during the afternoon. I'd never gone appling before (at least, not that I can remember), and it turned out to be a whole goddamn lot of fun. I took some pictures with the dij:

Tom's so happy he just doesn't know what the fuck to do.

The donut-making machine, as seen through the window of the store. The donuts get sort of squirted out fully-formed from this mechanical mixing bowl and then slowly floated down this stream of simmering oil, which cooks them along the way.

The ground was kind of marshy from it having rained the past 2 weeks straight, and lots of apples had already fallen off the trees. Alternately gross and pretty.

A ladder going nowhere; has Farmer Wright been raptured?

Sadly, on the last day Ted became feral.

Here's how it works: You pay like $5 and they give you a bag and send you up to the orchard, which is like a square mile of rows of apple trees, and you just fill the fuck out of your bag. I can't tell for sure, but I think they had about three types of trees -- there were yellowy-green apples, shiny red ones, and then these sort of dusty-looking pinkish-red ones. Maybe those last two are the same kind, I dunno. There were also a whole crapload of apples that had fallen off the tree, and which I guess they recommended you not pick up, so we whipped 'em at each other. Some of them were all mushy and rotten. After we filled up our bags (and took an embarrassing number of vanity photos), we headed back to the store area to drink cider and eat cider donuts, which taste about as much like cider as Apple Jacks do, but are also just as tasty as Apple Jacks. I snagged a jar of raspberry applesauce and we got a couple of jugs of fresh-pressed cider to mull with rum back in Brooklyn, and then we hit the road again. So, in closing, I've told you about picking apples in upstate New York, and if you like apples and picking apples, I hope you will consider picking apples in upstate New York the next time you go on a weekend trip to Gardiner, NY.

When we got back, some people took naps; I played X-Men Legends on Tom's old new X-Box. Then we went over to Katharine's to make the cider. There was some confusion over how to add the mulling spices we'd bought -- it comes in these nice looking little pouches that almost look like teabags, but it turns out that you're supposed to untie them and just empty that shit into the pot. The cider was really good, and we all drank some while we watched the first two episodes of Extras, which is reasonably funny. Then everybody went to a bar, except me -- I went home, because fuck that.

M-Biddy pulled the ill drop-in on Wednesday and we hit up the 12th St. B&G for some type good meat dishes. Tom came over and Luisa comped us Stripes at his behest, which turned out to be... not so good, though it did feature this choice bit of dialogue (from the "bonus" material, approx.):

Harold Ramis: I don't want to shoot anybody, I'm a pacifist!
Bill Murray: So you're saying even if some guy's raping your sister and you've got a gun, you don't do anything about it?
HR: This is my sister we're talking about; you practically raped her yourself one night.

Friday I went out with my boss and some co-workers to this really great New Orleansian restaurant called Stan's Place over on Atlantic and Bond -- they snagged their chef a month or so ago from Louisiana after he was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, and apparently he's still sleeping on one of the owners' couches. Whatever the story, that guy can cook. I ate a whole goddamn Cornish Game Hen stuffed with some kind of oyster-mushroom compote. Jesus. Everyone should go to that place because they just started serving dinner and it's been pretty empty so far, according to my boss, who is a repeat customer.

I gotta get a new digital camera, I'm telling you. This old Olympus 360DL from 1998 homphs down batteries like nobody's business, plus the pictures it takes, while fairly high-res, have his weird prismatic washed-out quality to them, like the lense is covered in a thin layer of dirty soap. It would be nice to have something a little bit better, maybe that could focus itself and do some of that digital zoom shit.

The apartment is full of flies. It's really weird. I've emptied the cat box and taken out the garbage and done the dishes, and they keep showing up. The fly-swatter's been doing overtime -- I killed like 4 yesterday and twice that many this afternoon, even a couple of them fucking on the side of the fridge. I wonder if my downstairs neighbor is dead.

The Public Gets What The Public Wants

...but I want nothing this society’s got
I’m going underground

Apparently this song, which they use as the lead-in to the first hour of the terrible, terrible Majority Report on Air America, is by The Jam. This is a great song; I've been listening to it and others on my own personal 'The Jam' radio station on Pandora.com. I wouldn't have known who it was by if if I hadn't come to Emma's friend Khalil's DJ debut on Saturday at the Laila Lounge in Williamsburg, no easy task, considering it was the gorram end of the world out there. I aimed to hop the G at Smith & 9th, 'cept the F was skipping to Jay, and... fuck it, it's a boring story. But here's a thing that happened on the F train I was on that got it stuck in the station for an extra 15 minutes:

A bunch of what I can only describe as Brooklyn townies -- chubby white kids in backwards baseball caps and sports jerseys, their faces so squished by cheek fat that they squinted -- were horsing around in the last car of the train, where I was, and one of them gives another a shove that sends him stumbling up against the smoked glass window in the door to the conductor's booth. To everyone's surprise, the plate of glass just falls out of the frame, revealing that the booth is empty. After recovering from the shock ("Yo, I think my ribs is broken! This kid broke my ribs, son!"), they begin to hatch a plan:

"Does the intercom work? Get on the intercom and say some shit!"
"Say 'This is a soul train to Queens.'"
"Hahaha soul train!"

So yeah, one of the little creepuses turned on the intercom and muttered something about that train being, in fact, The Soul Train, amid much tittering and gibbering. When the train pulled into Jay St., the doors opened briefly and the perps ducked out, carrying the glass from the window with them ("I'm'a hang this up in my room, son!"). So did I, and after the doors closed a second later, I saw a pathetic-looking MTA official wearing orthopedic shoes and those goggle-style coke-bottle glasses hobbling frantically towards that last car.

Fuck, it's cold outside. Am I right?

I gotta get a new toaster oven. The one I've got now is the one my dad bought me as a graduation present, and about which he said something like, "This is the Rolls-Royce of toaster ovens, Julian" -- typical dad B.S. It's a fine toaster-oven, though, except that ever since I moved into this place, the goddamn door won't stay shut. Something about the spring and the expansion of the frame when the toaster gets hot, I don't know; you can force the door closed at the beginning -- it makes a terrible cracking noise -- but then it bursts open like half way through the toasting cycle.

The Rase and I have now watched the whole of Firefly. I'm a little depressed that there's no more of it, because the more I watched, the more I loved it. Creepy synchronicity: Both The Rase and I loved Jayne Cobb, hated all the women on the show. Well, that's not true; that Saffron chick was kind of cute, if a pain in the ass.

Here's a thing that happened to a friend of mine (name redacted to protect the guilty): We were walking around my neighborhood, shopping for an ashtray for this friend's apartment, and at this friend's request, we stopped at this little tchotchke boutique on 10th and 7th called Toto, that was obviously not going to have anything like an ashtray. Nonetheless, my friend asks for one, and the shopkeeper manages to locate a very nice cheap little bowl that really didn't deserve to be used as an ashtray. As she's ringing us out, she says, "...no, I'm not going to say anything; you know what I'm going to tell you." My friend turns to me and says, perhaps a little more snottily than necessary, "What'd I tell you? Everybody does this: 'I'm not going to say anything, but you know you're not supposed to smoke.'" The shopkeeper becomes visibly flustered and says, "Well, it's a little different for me... you see, my father and brother died from smoking-related illnesses." And with that, she begins to cry a little bit. Jesus Christ. Deep inside, you know you're him.