Jesus Is Tragic

So I'm feeding my boss's cats and one of the system administrators' cat this holiday weekend, and they both have HBO On Demand, so I've been catching up with Season 2 of Deadwood. Tom Nuttall's got hisself a bicycle, about which he says, memorably (approx.)

My bicycle can traverse boardwalk and ravine with equal aplomb; anyone who disagrees... sucks cock by choice!

Ain't that the truth. And then Bullock's step-son dies. So. The guy who plays Wolcott (also known as the guy who played the coward Jack McCall) sure is a motherfucker of a motherfucker-player.

Had a pleasant Thanksgiving with the family last night (though a postprandial cup of coffee at like 10:00PM gave me nightmares and panic attacks all night). My dad has this story that he tells about when he was in boarding school, in which this friend of his orders a teach-yourself-hypnotism kit off the back of a comic book or something, and the guy actually learns how to hypnotize people effectively enough that he's able to have some fun with some of their friends in the dorm (incidentally, this has gotta be the only time something purchased through the mail like this has not been a ravenous disappointment). So he hypnotizes a guy to believe that he's got a pair of sunglasses that'll let him see through girls' clothes, and the guy follows this one girl around for a few weeks wearing a goofy pair of sunglasses, and, you know, he hypnotizes some dudes to bark like dogs, etc. But the piece-de-resistance is when he hypnotizes this big dumb jocky guy to think that he's a log, and then... that's it -- he can't snap him out of it, presumably, as my dad explains, because a log can't see or hear or anything. The guy had to be brought down to the infirmary and eventually to the local hospital to get zapped or gassed or whatever to bring him out of it. And eventually he's totally fine and everything, but it was a tense three or four days, apparently. So I always bought that bit about a log not being able to communicate, but last night I was thinking about it a little more and it seems a bit implausible that this meathead is so deeply in tune with the concept of "logness" that he becomes completely comatose. I bet it was something deeper and creepier that happened, like some neural switch that my dad's friend accidentally toggled in this guy's brain. Anyway, moral of the story: Not. Getting. Hypnotized.

So it's looking like I might be getting a cell phone -- my mom gets some kind of special deal if I piggy-back onto her Verizon plan, so I think I'll probably be doing that pretty soon. If that's the case, I'd need to start paying for my own Internet, so I might want to sign up for one of those trifecta dealies that Time Warner does where you get cable modem, cable TV, and VoIP for like $100 a month. If you work it all out that's basically what I'm paying now, but without the cable TV. I'm oddly excited -- up until a few weeks ago, I was pretty goddamn sure the cell phone was bullshit, but I've been paying attention to how much fun my friends seem to be having snapping photos and hooking up and storing each others' numbers and all that, and I do understand that when in Rome, etc. So I'm giddy.

On the RMS-fanboy front, in case M-Biddy or someone missed this on Slashdot, Bruce Perens relates an incident of beardo hellraising at, I think, some UNESCO function:

I humorously remind Richard that he and I both have immunity as delegates, and he responds "You mean, I should have shot that guy Kramer?" Kramer is the CompTIA representative who comes along to these things to relate an pro-software-patenting and generally anti-Free-Software viewpoint which gets Richard very steamed up. There's a laugh, and I explain that our immunity probably doesn't go that far.

I saw the Harry Potter movie with Devin on Tuesday, and it was okay, you know. Not as much vision, let's say, as the one that Cuaron directed, but it's fun and exciting, and Ralph Feinnes sure does a fucking good job. That guy who plays Harry Potter, though: Not. A good. Actor. Tonight I'm going to try to see the Sarah Silverman movie with Tom and K-Rod. Also trying to throw together a dinner party tonight with The Rase and some friends. No luck as of yet; we'll see how that goes.

Good Morning, Heartache

You're like an old friend,
Come to see me again.

I went to The Game this weekend! It was me, Devin, Maggie, Tom, Ted, Katie, Dan, Emma, Katharine, Previn, Nate, and some cetera. I'd never been to this or any other football game at all, ever, and I hadn't been back to campus (as far as I remember) since graduation.

We arrived in New Haven at around 9:00ish, I think, and stopped off at Rudy's (across the street from 123 Howe where I lived the summer after junior year) for drinks. It was a real mad-house, and New Haven was absolutely goddamn freezing. I think there's something wrong with my boots -- my toes were like ice the whole weekend whenever we were outside, and my socks would be wet whenever I took the boots off, even when there it hadn't been raining outside. Maggie said, helpfully, that I should get myself checked for diabetes. But I digress. Devin and I broke away from the group for a while to take a walk around campus. We talked about what it would be like if we sort of jumped back into student life after having been in the working world for two and a half years; I still find it hard to believe that we (or I, at least) made it all the way through. It's sort of like a four-year pressure cooker. At the same time, though, I think people can pretty much adapt to anything; I never really felt like I couldn't handle it at any point of my college career, even when I actually couldn't handle it. Anyway, we all got totally blasted and eventually returned to Ted's house and conked out.

The next morning at around 10:00 AM we headed out to the tailgate, which is this big binge-drink that happens before the game actually starts. I tagged along with Previn while he said hello to a bunch of his friends at the Harvard half of the tailgate; I was hoping I might run into some of my Harvard "friends," but none of them seemed to be there. We ended up grabbing some gross little hamburgers from the Yale Dining Services tent -- the staff recognized us, which was nice and unexpected. I miss having an unlimited supply of gummy (yet fiber-rich) cafeteria food. The tailgate was a little dispiriting, since it was so chock-a-block with assholes; the Yale Heavyweight Crew team, for example, was having a "homeless party," replete with a trashcan fire and a bunch of douchebags from Greenwich, CT who'd slashed up their leather bomber jackets and sewed patches into their corduroy pants. I took a picture for evidence's sake but it didn't come out.

A cold morning in the Elm City

At around 1:30 we hit the stadium. Half-time was just finishing up and Yale was ahead 14-3. I tried to follow the action on the field, but I was so cold and it was so far away that I ended up just watching the clock wind down. No funny pranks or anything this year as far as we could tell, though some Harvard kids managed to lure Handsome Dan over to their side of the stadium, and the campus police had to go retrieve him. The fourth quarter finished in a tie, 24-24, and during overtime Yale fudged two or three plays and Harvard was able to score another point or something; we left before that happened. Pictures follow:

The new Handsome Dan inflatable: Wrinkly

The Yale Bowl, 180 BC

A happier group of fans have I never seen

At one point, this guy in front of us a few rows down just put his head down and started puking. He and his buddy were eventually herded away by security, but afterwards people would keep walking through the puke like they weren't seeing it was all over the goddamn ground. We kept yelling at them, "You're walking in puke! You just stepped in vomit!" But they never learned. Turns out that guy wasn't the only puker -- the tunnel we used to exit the Bowl during Yale's last-second choke session had like four pukes in it. Boola boola!

It was already getting dark as we walked back to campus from the Bowl; we headed over to Master Krauss's residence at Silliman for a little alumni reception. I crapped in the dining hall bathroom, which brought back some memories. Dean Flick stopped by for a chat while we were all reclining in the Master's common room. Apparently he thought I'd been dating The Rase all this time; I set him straight on that one. After Master Krauss kicked us out, some people wanted to "see the new couches in the dining hall common room," so we went over there, but there were no new couches. Some people went to this sushi place called Miya's to drink "sake bombs," which I think are shots of sake mixed with a half pint of Japanese beer. Katharine and Emma and I ditched out and went back to Rudy's, though I did take a picture of a swordfish at Miya's.

Don bites the bullet

Real or really really real?

Later on, in front of Yorkside Pizza, Katharine and I saw this girl sitting on the curb who looked borderline vomitous. We were going to offer her some help, but Ran, who'd showed up out of nowhere, alerted us to the fact that the Ford Explorer that the girl looked ready to puke on had D.C. plates and was actually packed with Secret Service. "If she throws up, they can handle it," he said. I'd hope so.

We played Mafia at Ted's house that night; the Mafia took the initiative by eliminating one of their own during the first night, which totally threw Ted for a loop. It was a very long day. I still feel kind of strung-out from being consecutively pickled. But, you know, when in Rome...

I got home late and drunk from a work-related party last Thursday and found the following message on my answering machine -- I couldn't even make it out completely at the time and I just decided it was a wrong number. Well, I just sat down and transcribed it:

Hello, how do you do? Do you notice that a lot of Spanish still have that itching powder, like, in the schools, they have 'em a lot and they don't like the teacher or something. They'll throw it on 'em, that white itching powder. Like in Dodge High School in uh... and John F. Kennedy in the Bronx. They don't like the teacher or the substitute or something, they'll just throw it on 'em all day long, they think it's funny. Anyway, this is a random phone call. Have a nice day. Bye.

Hmmm. Not clear what this means.

On the way home from CT we stopped off at a rest stop on the Hutch and we bought some gross things for lunch. While I was waiting on line to pay, though, I caught a glance of myself from behind in the security camera monitor, and it turns out I have this huge bald spot right in the back of my head. Not like a thin part that's exposed by combing my hair a certain way, but an honest-to-god bald spot. Jesus. I don't want to put any of that hair tonic shit on my scalp; if this is what Mendel had in mind for me, then so be it. But maybe Mer was right when she said I should find someone to marry me before I lose all my hair.

Cheese Lice

Devlin brought over two choice little ironic movies last night. The first was called Funky Monkey, and it was about a trained chimpanzee assassin that's rescued by his handler (Matthew Modine, who plays Alec McCall with remarkable skill, considering the character is apparently, not kidding, a black ops commando with the IQ of precocious 7-year-old) and teaches a fatherless little boy how to win at football. Not kidding. Highlights of the movie include

• The chimp actor's propensity to finger its nipples absent-mindedly whenever it's not doing something else
• A bumbling security guard's off-hand joke about having to take a job at ZIT (Zoology International Technology) because he didn't have a college degree -- if you have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny; if you don't have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny
• Matthew Modine's character literally crippling / murdering a whole bunch of dudes in fairly gruesome ways -- skateboard to the teeth, thrown into a bunch of buffet tables and chairs, whacked senseless with a fiberglass surfboard.

So that was good.

The second had been shipped to him along with the first, for pretty much no reason that we could discern. It was an animated version of the movie Ben-Hur, refocused, by Good Times Entertainment (of Quigley fame), so that it dwelt a whole fuck of a lot more on the Jesus shit in the original novel by General Lew Wallace. Best of all, though, Judah Ben-Hur is voiced by Charlton Heston, who sounds a whole goddamn lot older than the little Jew on the screen. Heston gives an interview that's included on the DVD that consists of a bunch of responses to what must be questions by some interviewer (though you never hear what they are), edited together in a series of disorienting 30-second takes. A choice segment (approx.):

This story is a classic. Whenever they produce a film or a stage show out of it, it plays around the world; millions of people see it... Why do I think this story has endured? One reason... apart from many others: Whenever they show the film, it plays around the world. And it keeps coming back.

Another great part was late in the interview he's talking about how great it is to work with the middling assortment of voice talent they'd assembled, and he cuts a noisy, heedless old-man fart. Like, "frrrrrp!" Tom and Devstar thought it might be somebody shifting around in a squeaky chair on the set, but I'm gonna stick to my guns. T'was a fart.

On Tuesday, T-Bone's friend Alex had gotten me and Ted tickets to a taping of The Colbert Report, so we checked that out and it was super fun. We had to wait on line for a real goddamn long time, but once we got inside, Colbert was real nice and the taping of the show itself was a marvel of efficiency. They literally do a single take for practically everything, and there was a bit with audience participation (the Bring 'Em Back / Leave 'Em Dead face-off) that they taped during the warm-up that was ready to go and on the monitors at the time they taped the actual segment like 10 minutes later. Since we were in the front row (the theater's tiny; only about 100 seats), I saw that Ted was visible in one of the shots. Tom claims that he could see himself, too, which, I think, would have meant that I'd be there, too, given the order we were sitting in (actually, come to think of it, maybe not...). I wanted to check when the put the clip on the web site, but it doesn't seem like that was one of the ones they picked. Stephen took some questions from the audience at the beginning of the show, and my only regret was that I didn't ask, "Can you give Marc Maron a job?" The production staff was real serious that we be really high-energy, lest we kill Stephen's "buzz," so I was worried about putting him off his game. Probing questions from the audience included, "What do I need to do to get a job writing for your show?" and "I heard you used to be in an improv comedy group. Is that true?" Jesus fuck, people.

So Stallman mentions his (former?) girlfriend on his 'blog sometimes, and I think I found some pictures of her. She's not half bad-looking, considering she's a Bride of Beardo, eh?

Yesterday, on a whim, I bought the Misfits album American Psycho at Best Buy, and it has this great song on it called "Hate The Living, Love The Dead." I'd forgotten how much the Misfits sound like HEAetc., esp. with regard to the sort of fast, straight-ahead drums and well-articulated guitar. There was a different Misfits album (think it was Famous Monsters) playing on some speakers at the store, and when I asked the clerk he said they didn't have it in stock, but he also mentioned that Michale Graves has a solo project he's working on that I should check out, so I did -- I'd forgotten until I got to his site that he's a real contemptible Republican nut-job. So, you know, there's that.

!Mi hermana y mi hija!

I'm watching a murky, rambling Spanish movie with The Rase called Sex and Lucia. The back of the DVD box says it's supposed to be "the most erotic movie ever made." Now, I'm not saying I didn't "pop wood" during the mother-daughter porno-actress jerk-off scene, but come on. Seriously. Another critic called it "intensely erotic," which, like I told The Rase, is the last way you'd describe something that actually was intensely erotic. Those film faggots.

Making a lot of progress in Call of Cthulhu, though I pay for every step forward with a hissed curse and a thrown controller. Someone on their bulletin boards was complaining that the game doesn't stack up well against Eternal Darkness; they called it Mythos-Doom, which I thought was pretty funny. I do agree, though, that Eternal Darkness is probably more faithful to the Lovecraftian ethos of futility, madness, and incomprehensibility, even though it comes in a brighter, shinier package. CoC gets all the historical details correct -- and visually, it's spectacular -- but its treatment of the... viscera of the subject matter is a bit shallow, basically a selection of relevant passages from some well-known texts. One gets the sense that the designers and voice actors didn't fully grok the material. There is, however, a fairly awesome scene in which Jack awakes to find a shoggoth slurming and slorming across the ceiling towards him: "Oh, fuck," says Jack.

Maggles flew out this week from L.A.; we homphed things and chugged things. She flew back this afternoon, but she'll be back next week.

Working on projects, feeling good. I ran with Tom today and didn't stop once; talking makes the run go better, for sure. Seriously thinking about getting some new-fangled phone-cable-internet dealies; a cell-phone, too, since everyone's on me about that. Everyone's riding me.

The Fire Next Time

So the Halloween Parade itself was kind of a drag -- against Tom's urging, we walked over there from my office, and it turned out that Ted was on the other side of the street, unreachable because the cops had closed off the entrance to the West 4th St. subway. The place was totally thronged with people -- pushy, awful, ugly people -- to the extent that you couldn't see the individual people marching in the parade, only the giant-size floats and costumes. Granted, those were pretty sweet: lots of Burton-esque papier-mache skeletons; this Mothra-like thing made an electrifying appearance; and Webster Hall had a float full of naked ladies, none of whom appeared to be chicks with dicks. After about an hour, we got tired and bored and forced our way across the street into the West Village. I had a terrible burrito at Burritoville. Just awful. Getting home was difficult, too.

"JAYNE COBB HAT" arrived as promised, but a few days too late. It looks ridiculous. According to a laminated card included in the shipment, I am Jayne's Hat Brigader #89. Or #39. Can't remember.

Tom's begun an epic game in which I am a contender. The rules are here.

On Sunday I went to go see the movie Paradise Now, starring Palestinian Clive Owen and Palestinian Holly Hunter. The movie was great -- a little depressing, mind you, since it is about religious zealots waging intractable war against each other over an utterly undesirable repulsive piece of land -- but everyone is quite good, with and without beards. Katharine bailed after the movie, but I swung by Degraw and Ted and I went out to eat at Los Pollitos Dos, which I'd written off as not being that good because their burritos (my barometer of quality for Mexican restaurants, for better or for worse) are not super good. But it looks like everything else on their menu is super good. So Ted and I talked, laughed, wept (a little), then went home and drank grapefruit juice and gin, which is pretty tasty.

And then this weird little thunderstorm happened.

Katharine'd planned and executed a killer birthday party for Emma on Saturday at an OTB that was practically located on 53rd & 3rd, though on the inside it looked like every other OTB in the world, which is to say, a cross between an airport and a hospice. We rented out a room and ate chicken things and bet on horses for like three hours, which is really fun, though I lost every single goddamn time. The final race of the evening included a horse named Sleazebiscuit. Surprisingly, he neither won, placed, nor showed.

Last Thursday I went to go see Emma's dad Jon Katz do a "reading" from his new book on dogs (no Hellmouths in sight) at the Barnes & Noble near my apartment in th' Slope. He's got a great presence and it's always fun to hear him talk, but it looked like there were people in the audience that kind of thought of him as a dog guru, including a woman sitting directly in front of me who was wearing what looked a like a blue prison jumpsuit and had a real serious wispy moustache -- the kind where the hairs are sort of translucent but they're fuckin' long, bra! She looked a bit like Scorpy.

The Rase is away on business basically all week again. I hope you guys will come over and hang out so I don't go crazy with loneliness and fear. Still having trouble with the truckbed segment in Call of Cthulhu. Send food / water. Kthx.

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.

You Foodies Make Me Sick

Last night I dreamed that I'd traveled to Mars as part of a photojournalist expedition to locate and photograph what life forms there were that could be found. In the dream, Mars was really lush and cool, and a bunch of humans -- holdovers from previous expeditions -- had set up apartments there, so there were comfy accomodations for all of us. We did manage to find one apparently indigenous life form, a practically naked woman not disimilar to Pris, who took a bit of shine to me. Unfortunately, like Pris, she turned out to have a bit of a murderous side, so I had to high-tail it out of there before consumating our relationship. But I remember thinking, in the dream, that I'd have a lot of sweet pictures to post in my 'blog. But I don't.

A couple of restaurants:

• Melt (not Milt, which would be pretty funny), over on Bergen and 5th was supposed to be great, according to my boss, who is an incorrigible "foodie," but the pistachio-encrusted cod drizzled with minty pea puree that I ordered kind of made me want to puke on Friday.
• Bogota, on the other hand, on 5th and Degraw, is pretty goddamn great. My entree came with a side of cilantro-garlic mashed potatoes, which I'm pretty sure I want to eat every day.

Last week, K-Flo got me and some others into this movie premiere party for Jenny McCarthy's new movie, Dirty Love. The movie is apparently loathsome, but the party was fun and the drinks were free. And the venerable Gawker photog, Nikola Tamindzic, was there to take these pictures! We are not in any of them, but basically everyone who was sitting near us got snapped. Insider info: Jenny McCarthy is shorter in real life.

Yeah, so in my ongoing efforts to be more spontaneous, yesterday I was walking by the Prospect Park Green Market, and decided to take a stroll through the baked goods section. All of the stuff was pretty warm -- I'm thinking it was baked that morning -- and this peach pie with a cool vine-and-leaf dough filigree caught my eye, so I bought it. Well, Tom et. al. didn't seem that interested, so I brought it home to Sophie, and we had some with our evening tea. It fuckin' sucked! Very bitter and un-peachy and swarming with cloves and cinnamon. Sophie reckons whoever baked it used an apple pie recipe and just swapped in the peaches, and I reckon she's right.

I played a bunch of Sid Meier's Pirates! over at T's place -- Captain Jerk Jenkins managed to rescue his long-lost sister and uncle who'd been sold into slavery by the Marquis de Montalban, but then he got bored.

The Five Points

So yesterday I went to -- or attempted to make it to -- five fuckin' parties. The schedule, in brief:

• 2:00 PM: Chrissy Rodney's going off to UCLA for grad school, so his dad threw a goodbye / birthday party for him
• 4:00 PM: My boss's engagement / housewarming party
• 6:00 PM Dinner party at my friend Asta's house
• Later: BBQ at Degraw St.
• Later: Gabi's birthday party, more or less around the corner from the Degraw St. residence

Here's what actually happened: Got up to Chris' at around 3:00. There was a nice spread from Fairway, including that ketchup-and-mayo macaroni salad that Chris fell in love with on the trip to Newport. I had a whole bunch of that stuff. I left Chris' at 4:30ish, intending to take the 2/3 down to Borough Hall to walk to my boss's house. Unfortunately, the U.N. assembly had basically ruined all downtown train service in Manhattan, so I hitched the 1 to Chambers and then took a cab the rest of the way. When I got to my boss's place, I started feeling like that macaroni salad was going to come up on me. I pinched a startlingly large loaf, but it didn't seem to help. Around 6:30, I excused myself and left for Asta's in Astoria. By a stroke of good fortune, the G was just pulling in at Bergen St., and I took it to the end of the line, which, as bad luck would have it on the weekends, was three stops short of 36th St., where I needed to go. I waited for about 20 minutes for the V, which should have gotten me the rest of the way, except that there is no V service on the weekends at all. So I left the station, still feeling like I was going to puke, and wandered around the vicinity of Court Sq. looking for a car service in the rain. That place is a fucking wasteland! I pretty much gave up after about 10 minutes, since I was already practically 2 hours late, and turned right around and took the G all the way back to Smith and 9th, and walked from there to The Friends' place. I walked over the Gowanus Canal, which stinks, even in the rain. Got there at around 9:00 and called Razor to get Gabi's address. He was still at Pizza Box, but gave me her number, which I promptly forgot. I did have a great time at Degraw St., until Drunk Ted showed up. Jesus.

The Rase is here to stay! She moved in the weekend before last and promptly left for a week. But we are having a fun time, and she is a great roommate -- cleans, cooks, etc. -- except that she is replacing all of my comfy (but, yes, ugly) furniture with stuff she buys at IKEA. We watch a lot of movies, free rentals of which are provided by Luisa, a friend Tom made for me at the video store with the simple donation of a Rockstar Warriors t-shirt. Hook-up for life, she says. I'm married, but can I give you a hug, she also says.

So last weekend Katharine, Tom, Ted, Emma, Don, and I went on a pretty spontaneous road trip up to this cabin that Katharine's dad owns in Cape Cod, and I had a totally wonderful time. I ate a whole bunch of fried seafood, bacon and delicious grilled hamburgers; drank beers and blender drinks; and actually swam a fair amount. Even the drives up and down were fun (granted, Ted had to do literally all of the driving, everywhere -- we all just got to look out the window and sing along with the stereo). I think some photos are in order:

The cabin, starring Katharine and Tom

This is the first beach we went to; the water was stultifyingly frigid, but Tom and Ted managed to get themselves submerged for a few seconds

Out by the bay, found this dead horseshoe crab that, by some miracle, had not been picked clean of its legs and insides and stuff. So of course I had to lick it.

Another one of the crab, because you really care.

Most of the actual beach beaches on the Cape have these huge sand dunes (not sure if they're man-made or not) leading down to them

The beach we went to on the last day (Monday -- I took a long weekend) had a bit of a red tide problem, which I think you should be able to see here. Stank. I maintain that you're not supposed to get that seaweed on you, seeing as how it, oh, I don't know, exterminates all life, but Tom was chugging it down by the bucket

Sadly, on the last day, Ted died.

Ouch, the pizza I was eating burned my mouth. So what happened on the cape... there was some barfing, a little moaning; a big fat toothless dude with the demeanor of a 5-year-old came up to us while we were waiting for some clam chowder at P.J.'s and said that he'd driven 10,000 miles for their lobster rolls and couldn't believe the prices were so high this year. He'd have gotten two, he said, but now he'd just have to settle for one. Oh yeah, and I also went running in my new ASICS running shoes that I bought. T, T, and I ran about 5 miles up and back this lakeside road, the most I've ever run before, though I did have to stop a few times. The shoes are great -- they totally put a spring in my step, but the left one is still pinching the fuck out of my ankle.

The Weekend Web

Inspired by Maggles, here's what was going on on my 'blog a year ago (though this fucker is way more than a year old):

• I was still doing "quality assurance."
• I had just marched in the NYC protest of the 2004 RNC.
• I had a girlfriend.
• The Distillers were still together.
• I still talked about boring computer shit all the time.

So.

I've been talking less political shit up on this piece over this last year. Mostly this is because the news is all so bad that it just makes me upset to write about it, but: Am I alone in feeling indignant about being asked to give money to a relief effort that should be shouldered primarily by the fucking government to which we pay our tax money? And furthermore to a relief effort that gives comfort to a gaggle of red states that voted in this government and thus deserve nothing but contempt as far as I'm concerned? It's time their citizens learned what it means to vote Republican in this day and age -- it's death, man. Politics is life and death. (And that's why I don't write about it in my 'blog.)

The Rase is moving in tomorrow, she says, around 1:30 PM. The apartment is not 100% ready, but nearly so -- I just have to finish cleaning grease off of some of the more grease-absorbent surfaces in the kitchen. I've put a lot of work into tidying this place up over the last few weeks. It's going to be weird sharing this space with another person again. Hopefully I can be a grown-up and not freak out about it.

Had a relatively crappy run tonight. My chest is still sort of tight from being sick earlier this week.

Last night I went up to visit Bill in his new apartment up on 105th St. The place is definitely nice, and they're getting a good deal on it, I can't remember how much. But he made me a delicious dinner and we played some Crash Bandicoot on the X-Box, which was awful. Billy kept saying he was impressed with the production, given that it had obviously been developed by some kind of bargain-bin company who'd acquired the rights to the character at a police auction or something, but maybe he's got a different definition of the word than I do, 'cuz every level looked like a gay disco with a particle effect infection. Lizards and wizards, don't you know. Saturday The Abyss play possibly their last show, as Chris is heading off to UCLA to run scam on their PhD program.

Prefontaine

That's right, I'm like fucking Prefontaine or some shit.

But right now I've got a fucking cold and I feel like crap. I think it's mroe or less my own fault, since I went out to see The Gaping Abyss on Friday and stayed out 'til 4:00 AM. And there was a lot of hooting and hollering on my part while they played a sloppy, punky set. But I could tell by the end of the night that my throat was gonna be fucked up. And it is.

Did a shitty job of it, but finished painting the trim around the window. I may have to get some titanium white (or whatever the ceiling's color is) to do some touch-ups. I also played a bunch of Halo 2, which is really fun. I never got too far in Halo 1, maybe because of some extreme frustration in that initial level where you're trying to dodge the Convenant on that moutainside where you touch down. But it's gonna be different this time. Maybe.

I also cleaned the fuck out of the bathroom, which was getting fairly disgusting, dust-wise. You can't really tell so much, but the dark, dank nooks are significantly less dark and dank. Plus, I found this neat little hand-decorated Mexican-looking matchbox under the radiator. It's got sequins all over it and a picture of a skull ("La Calavera") but no matches. Horror!

Tom lent me Kung Fu Hustle, which is delightful; I picked up Mer's copy of Ulysses and am trying to get into it.

Scary Face-u

So this was on CNN's front page for a while on the day that BTK guy got put away. How fucking creepy is this? This weekend is going pretty good so far, after a pretty stressed-out lousy week. I had my first non-California roll sushi last night at my boss's house and then spent some time at a bar with the friends. Then I had brunch with the friends this morning at this place in Carroll Gardens called Banania, which was, you know, pretty good. On the way home I ran into Sam Frizzank, who told me he'd invited me to a party over at his place a block away from mine (his e-mail had gotten routed to my HotMail junk folder), so I think I'll do that after I get back from yet another work-related BBQ that I'm leaving for in just a second. The best part, though, is that the fucking kitten is finally gone. "Big Kitty" is obviously a lot more relaxed already. We had what Tom calls a nice long "love-up" this morning, with the result that my eyes and nose were streaming all day. That's right. Me and kitty.

I wanted to paint the living room this afternoon -- I even traded in the white semi-gloss I'd bought last week at Pintchik for a white eggshell plus primer at the urging of my co-workers -- but I was so beat after carrying it over from Flatbush and doing the laundry that I think maybe I'll just do it tomorrow.

Sometimes when I'm taking a leak at work and just sort of staring down into the urinal I kind of zone out a little, thinking about some problem I'm working on or whatever, and when I snap back to reality I have this millisecond fear that I've pissing into the wrong thing. Like, pissing into a wastebasket or something.

Update: Now it's Tuesday -- I meant to finish this sooner. Holy shit, though! I just finished my first full run around Prospect Park. 3.7 miles or some shit, and no stopping, not even on that widowmaker of a hill at the end. I just sort of kept on goin', and I was sort of thinking, "well, I'm just gonna keep on goin'." And I did. It didn't even feel like anything, just like a normal run. The thing is, though, the burrito I'd eaten for lunch was sort of, shall we say, propelling me along. So when, in the shower, I reached for my customary washcloth general, John Ass-cloth II (selected, like John Ass-cloth I, from an ignominious cardboard box in the back of the Yale merch place on that main street in New Haven), I knew there'd be some terror in the tumbleweeds. And there was. And I couldn't, shockingly enough, seem to get clean with the washcloth. So eventually I had to just sit down on the toilet and have what my co-workers refer to as an "assplosion," which took some time. But now I'm feeling good, and I'm making some pasta.

At The Enchilada today, I bought a bottle of that really good spicy habanero hot-sauce, El Yucateca, to keep at my desk for when I buy lunch there. That shit is hot, brah.

I ended up going to Sam's party, where this girl filled me in on what happens in season 2 of Carnivale. It's probably not coming out on DVD, right? I don't think so.

So I did paint on Sunday, and it took a real long time -- don't know how Mer managed to do the whole room (plus trim) in a single afternoon. I've still got the trim around the window left to do, which looks to be at least an hour and change if I use the primer. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow. Then Tombone called and he and I and some assorted others went to go see The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which was totally delightful -- sweet-natured, very funny, very accurate -- they certain captured the "virgin" mindset as I recall it having been a 21-year-old virgin. I was really really sore and stiff on Monday and this morning, but the room looks good. I accidentally broke the glass plate on this Picasso print that I kind of liked as I was rehanging it, but, you know, it happens. The problem is, it broke into two big sharp pieces, kind of too big to just throw away.

On Monday I went to go see Jaws at Bryant Park with my friend Karen from work. We picked up a couple of cheap bottles of wine and met her roommate and friends right smack in front of the screen where they'd secured like 10 square feet of precious blanket real estate and provided some crackers and cheeses. It was great; the weather was great, Bryant Park is just great, right in the middle of all those tall buildings. I'd forgotten how gory that movie is -- that kid on the raft basically explodes when "Jaws" gets him.

So it's been good.

The Nine Billion Names Of God

I had the scariest, most vivid dream last night! I dreamed that the world was ending, but it was happening in this gradual, awful way, such that I (and my dream-girlfriend) were stuck in a part of the world that hadn't yet been completely destroyed (I think it was Connecticut) and realized that something was terribly wrong but couldn't find out the details. In the dream I was frantically searching the Internet for information, and all the news sites were either unreachable or had posted "Technical Difficulties" messages. From the little news we'd been able to get, a good portion of the world / universe had dissolved into this white mist, and the dissolution was proceeding towards the Eastern seaboard of the USA. We'd already observed the effects of the "winding down" process where we were, in that "entropy had ceased to function" (this is how I phrased it in the dream, although now that I think of it, it doesn't make much sense). This meant that plants no longer grew, there was no wind, and human beings couldn't make any changes in their lives -- my dream-girlfriend had wanted to take this clerical job at the sheriff's office, but had to turn it down after the "entropy" phenomenon had taken effect. Additionally, my dream-self kept getting these mental flashes of what I identified in the dream as the Hindu god Shiva rising out of the ground and turning all the surrounding organic matter into this sort of particle slurry. Since I happened to be near the Yale campus, I ran over to visit my old Indian CS professor. to ask him what it meant, but he said he wasn't a Hindu and didn't know.

Also, to make matters worse, there was a mosquito in my room in real life, and it would whine in my ear every so often. I ended up sleeping with the sheet over my head, which was okay because it was such a nice night.

On the plus side, I did probably my best run ever around the Park last night, even though I've got this little cough thing.

Year Of Living... Grudely?!

When I was running Friday night around 8:00, I noticed an unusually strong police presence in the park. There was even a helicopter, criss-crossing the northern part of the park near that last killer hill, flying low enough to the ground that its searchlight could actually like... be on you. When I got to the Grand Army Plaza entrance, there were even more cars, including some unmarked black sedans with sirens on the dash that I'm pretty sure were detectives' cars. Anyway, a whole bunch of cops and cop-like people who poking around in some bushes near the head of the big meadow with flashlights and batons. I didn't see a body, but... you know.

On Sunday I went to go see Lee Papa's Year of Living Rudely, as part of the NYC Fringe Theater Festival. It was so gross and hot on the way there, but when I got out of the subway station, it was fucking pouring. I was totally soaked by the time I got to Dixon Place -- which turned out not to be air conditioned, which was actually pretty fortunate, considering. So, the show. It was okay. It wasn't great. Prof. Papa is not much of a monologuist, which is ironic considering he's a Drama Professor. He basically oversold every line, and he's got this weird fruity voice that sounds like he's trying to cover up a southern accent or something. On the plus side, some of the new material (the show was 50% stuff from the 'blog), especially the audience participation stuff, was pretty funny, and apparently there were supposed to be blow-up dolls and sex toys on stage with him, but the director said something about them being damaged / stolen, so. You know.

I'm gonna get flak for saying this, I know, but I do feel like I'm getting sick. At least I'm doing better than kitty.

Reading some David Eddings that I borrowed from Razor; I remember all my friends getting real into these books when we were in 8th grade. I'm finally leveling the playing field, by Aldur!

The Meat Circus

It is a fucking house of horrors up in this piece. I swear. Three things:

• My feet are bloody from at least two glass splinters I got this morning walking around the kitchen.
• About 15 minutes after feeding the cats, I noticed the kitten nosing around outside Mimi's designated litter box. I thought maybe he'd trapped a mouse or a bug or something, or that he'd gotten real excited about the smell of her piss, which he is wont to do. No. She'd fucking puked right outside her litter box, like an invalid or old person, and he was fucking eating it. And not just tasting it, he was eating all of it, licking it into the cracks in the hardwood. And there were little crystals of litter in it, and, you know, just... ugh. By the time I got a wad of paper towels to clean it up, he'd basically eaten all of it.

...and this one takes the cake:

• I thought the coffee I'd brewed yesterday tasted a bit funny, but I'm not really a pro with the coffee-maker, and I buy the cheap shit anyway, so I'd just kind of chalked it up to, you know, the hand of an angry God. Well, when I was dumping the filter and grounds out last night I chanced to look into the little filter-holder part of the machine, and what did I see? Glommed into the bottom were a few choice pieces of kibble that'd likely fallen in the day before during the affair of the champagne glass. I'd just put the filter and coffee in on top of them without looking and then brewed a 10-cup pot of Purina. Jesus.

The Strandman

Ugh, so it's Saturday evening and I have absofuckinglutely nothing lined up to do, though not for lack of trying. Chris is sleeping something off, Billy's characteristically unreachable, and I can't get ahold of any of my camp friends, neither. The Abyss and I had made informal plans to have a BBQ today (though it could still happen tomorrow) and I wanted to peep on The Aristocrats with T-Bone. It's not too late... something could still happen! I feel fussy and dehydrated. You guys know what I mean, right? Grrr. Maybe I'll go for a run.

Tom came over, I think it was Tuesday, and we watched Meet The Feebles, which he'd sold to me as "like The Muppet Show, man, but if all the Muppets were taking drugs and having sex and stuff." Well, it is sort of like that, but also really really awful.

Update: Yeah, so Tom came through and I went to go see The Aristocraps with a whole bunch of people at 11:00 on Saturday night. The movie was delightful -- I'd been worried that, having been produced by Penn Jillette, it'd be full of pedantic B.S., and it had a little of that, but for the most part it was a joy. Sarah Silverman is a naughty little minx. I would've stayed out later, but I've got this cough, you see, and...

I bought some new cotton sheets for my bed, since the flannel ones that Mer'd bought in college were just a tad bit too warm for year-round (not to mention pretty filthed, no matter how many times we washed 'em). I'm thinking I might also buy a new blanket to match.

Last night I went over to Bill's place and we all (Chris was there, too) sat around drinking and watching TV. It was nice. When I got home, though, I discovered that the kitties had knocked over a very nice champagn flute that was on one of the higher shelves in the cupboard as part of their never-ending quest for food. There was broken glass everywhere (think I got most of it, though I was still picking the odd shard out of my feet this morning), but they both seemed very contrite, which was kind of weird, so I didn't, you know, punish 'em or anything.

My stuff from Amazon came. The Op Ivy album is a bit tamer than I remember but a bit better, too. The Sandman book I bought was less interesting than I'd hoped but also significantly darker. It was also one of those books that didn't really benefit much from being colored; I wonder if there are some editions that are just black and white.

That Thing In The Wheelchair

On Friday I went to go see The Gaping Abyss over at Arlene's Grocery, a club that had foolishly turned down The Headliners when we sent them a demo tape several years ago on account of us not being popular enough. Sophie P. and her friend Connor were there, and so were a lot of lame friends of some of the non-principals in the band, all dancing pretentiously and obliviously right near the stage. It was a good show, though. The mean old lady taking money for the tickets kept pronouncing the name of the band as The Gaping Abbess, which kept making me think of the alternate name Alec and I had discussed a few weeks earlier. Anyway, after the show, I asked Razor if he wanted to eat some hamburgers in the park on Saturday, and he said they'd been invited up to Rhode Island to play a show for The Strines, who'd lost their original opening act to a break up (The Pink Slips had all given each other the pink slip). Did I want to tag along? You bet.

Got to Sarah J's house (the rectory up at St. Mary's) around 2:30 and we left for Newport in the church van at around 4:00. Sarah's dad is a dead ringer for Father Damien, FYI. On the way we stopped at a Fairway and bought a whole bunch of cold cuts and bread and sandwich-makings and made delicious and filling sandwiches in the van. It took about three and half hours to get up to Newport and another 15 just driving around to find the club, which turned out to literally be in an alley behind a fish restaurant. After dropping the shit off, we walked around Newport for a while looking for a place to eat. It turns out that Newport is a real shitty little town and you can't find goddamn food anywhere! The only stuff we found in our price range was a sushi place that proudly advertised that they'd make you sushi without any raw fish (presumably because "you" think that's icky) and a panini sandwich place that was filled with nauseating smoke.

It was around this time that I found out that the Abyss wasn't gonna go on until 10:30. Bill had originally thought they'd go on at 9:00, and since the band was planning on staying over in a hotel room, I'd planned to go back that evening on an Amtrak train so that I'd be able to feed the cats that night and the next morning, and, you know, have a day to get things done on Sunday. I'd bought the ticket and everything. Ultimately it ended up that the ticket was refundable, and I couldn't get in touch with a car service to take me to Kingston anyway, so, like I said to Bill, I decided to stop being a neurotic creep (for at least a few hours) and just hang out, kitties be damned. So I stuck around, and it was fun, even though practically no one came (despite a puff-piece about The Strines that they'd put in the local paper days before).

Near the beginning of The Strines' set, this guy in a motorized wheelchair came into the club and started 'dancing' by turning his wheelchair around on the dance floor and sort of puttering around in time to the music. I don't know what his particular affliction was, but aside from being wheelchair-bound, he also had these skinny little T-Rex arms that weren't good for too much except clicking little buttons in his chair. I think we were all glad he was enjoying himself, but his appearance was a bit off-putting. Mario correctly observed that it added a Lynchian element to the atmosphere. After The Strines finished up, everyone headed outside for a smoke and the guy in the wheelchair came out and was telling The Strines and the guys in Abyss that he liked the show, and he even ended up offering a cigarette to Billy.

Well, Billy and the wheelchair guy (whose name turned out to be Bob) got to talking, and it turned out that one thing they had in common was that they both wished they'd smoked some weed before the show. Billy said he'd called his guy but that he hadn't been able to score in time before getting in the van, and that he wished he could've rolled a joint or two. "Fuck that," said Bob. "I'd like to smoke a blunt up in that piece."

"I bet you would," said Billy, and began exhorting him to describe further scenarios, much like one would do, say, with a girl who might be persuaded to disrobe with enough coaxing.

"Next time I fly," said Bob, "I should smoke a blunt on the plane -- fill the whole cabin with smoke!"

"Yeah," continued Bill, his imagination firing on all four cylinders, "but only the passengers in first class get to smoke it. Everyone else just gets a contact high!" On that note, they went off to a little cul-de-sac and rolled and smoked a joint. Or maybe Billy just sucked him off. At any rate, after some fretting about where to stay, an Amherst guy who is now a Brown guy offered his house. On the way there, perhaps as a reaction to me and Billy making noise about wanting to get back to NYC, Chris started going off about how he didn't even care, he was goin' to the beach in Providence the next day. I took that as a hint that I wasn't going to get to call the shots, so I'd need to make my own plans. I also hit him a few times, but only because he was screaming the lyrics to Big Shot into my ear.

Yes, yes, you had to be a big shot, didn't you
You had to prove it to the crowd
You had to be a big shot, didn't you
All your friends were so knocked out
You had to have the last word, last night
You're so much fun to be around
You had to have the front page, bold type
You had to be a big shot last night

Mario snored, predictably. I woke up at six (having gone to bed at three) and called a car service to get to the train station, then hopped the 7:20 to Penn Station. And the kitties. were. okay.

Finished Forever, which had a weak middle but an okay last 100 pages; also finished Leisure Suit Larry for the PS2, which was delightful -- raunchy and funny. I popped a few boners, I'm not gonna lie. M-Biddy came through with a couple of books, in addition to the t-shirt: The Pirates and The Mouse and The Collected Letters of George Orwell. Sick.