What up, hombres?
Google found my blog, so I had to take it down for a few days while they processed my "removal" request. I'd never seen an Earthlink home page come up in my search results, so I figured Earthlink had some kind of restrictive /robots.txt file, but I must have been mistaken. Anyway, now I've got my own robots.txt, ready to get re-processed 90 days from now. It's so hard to have a blog, don't you find?
The stupid copyright stuff I've been bitching about for so long got resolved sort of informally, which makes me a little nervous, but we'll see what happens, I suppose. I'm allowed to work on gzochi, at least. Now I'm jus' eating some carrots.
Last night was sort of hellish -- I bought this tiny little microwave on eBay a little while back, and UPS, in characteristic fashion, had made two failed attempts to deliver it to me at times when I would definitely, definitely not be home. So yesterday I was like, "I'm'a get this thing tonight." So I called UPS and they told me I could come out to their Brooklyn facility (104-01 Foster Ave.) between 8:00 and 10:00 PM -- decidedly non-optimal time, you know, but I ended up having to stay late at work, so, you know, okay. So the first bad thing that happened was that I forgot the trouble that Mer had had when she'd gone to pick up a package there and just pasted the address from their website right into MapQuest. So MapQuest gives me an address that would be easily reachable by taking the F to Avenue I. I leave home at 7:00, reach Ave. I by 7:30, and start looking for it. I'd remembered Mer saying it was right outside the station, so I knew something was wrong when I'd walked down Foster Ave. for 30 minutes without finding it. Finally I popped into an auto-body shop and asked the mechanics on duty. They said, "Yeah, people are always coming in here asking about that. I have no idea where it is." A bad sign. But I kept walking and eventually ran into a bona fide UPS guy in his truck. I said, "Hey, do you guys have a warehouse around here?" He said, "Not around here -- we've got a warehouse on Foster, but it's all the way down at Rockaway." I said, "Okay," and kept walking, thinking if I just grit my teeth I could walk from E. 7th St. to Rockaway. Well, 15 minutes later I found myself at the B/Q station for Something-or-other St. and I'm like, "Maybe I should just go home, because I don't know where I'm going."
I get home at 8:30 and Mer informs me that she'd tried had the same problem -- MapQuest is stupid and doesn't understand the number 104-01. If you punch it in as 10401 (which, given the numbering on the houses where I was walking, seems reasonable), then you get a totally different address. Basically, you have to take the L to the end of the line, and then you're right there. Now, a normal person might just put it off until tomorrow, but that's another day of having UPS stupidly try to drop it off while I'm not home, even when I've told them on the card that they can basically leave my package anywhere they want, and I like to wait until a situation is really ugly before I cut my losses and leave, because then, you know, it's just so much sweeter when you get what you want. Anyway, Round 2. So I decide I'm gonna take the B to Prospect Park; transfer to the S and take it to Franklin; take the C to Broadway Junction; and take the L to the end. It's like 8:40, and I'm kind of ticked off, but , you know, I'm gonna get this thing. So I get to the S and it finally chugs out of the station, and I'm thinking, "Okay, the S only makes three stops -- there's Prospect Park, the Botanical Gardens, and then Franklin." Wrong -- there's something between Botanical Gardens and Franklin, and that's where I get off. Unfortunately, no other trains stop at this mystery stop, and by the time I realize that I'm in the wrong place, the S is fading off into the distance, and, you know, it only comes like once a month. So I leave the station (actually, I leave the station, have second thoughts, pay again, then realize there are no other trains and leave again), and pop into a deli. I ask the proprietors if they've got the number of a cab company, and they're nice enough to call up Evelyn for me. (I buy a bag of Utz to be a good patron while I'm waiting for the cab.) The car finally comes, and the driver takes me to Foster and Rockaway. Well, it's not there. But there are some police officers just kind of hanging out, so we ask them if they know where the place is. "Yeah," one of them says. "Um... just... um... take a left up here and drive all the way down. It's the tallest building around here, you can't miss it." Okay, thanks, officer. We do, you know, what he says, and we're driving, and we're driving, and finally we're at a big intersection, and no UPS. So my driver flags another person down and asks where the UPS building is. The guy tells us to just keep driving straight for like 4 or 5 blocks. So we do that, and we pass the place where we were before, where the cops were, and finally we find the building and I get my microwave. The whole cab ride, which lasted about an hour, only cost me $22.00. Top marks, Evelyn.
But man, Mer'd told me there was nothing out there, and she wasn't kidding. It's all one-story warehouses and garages and lots full of towering heaps of scrap metal. It's like a different fucking planet, especially at 9:30 at night during winter. It was like the chilling perpetual pre-dawn wasteland where Fraidy Cat and the ship full of gay pirate mice dwell in a limbo of fear and despair. The graffiti on all the buildings was particularly surreal -- it was all done in the old-fashioned balloon style, and the accompanying pictures were mostly figures from 1980s pop-culture, like Mario Mario and Michael Jackson. I felt like I was in some creepy arcade game like Bad Dudes -- you know, that part of Bad Dudes where a car service drives you around.
I read Italo Calvino's Numbers in the Dark. It's a mixed bag. "Dry River," "Numbers in the Dark," "World Memory," and "Montezuma" were good. The other ones I could take or leave.
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