Archive for April, 2008
Monday, April 28th, 2008
Earlier this week, I got caught between a pair of closing subway car doors. The doors immediately re-opened, so it wasn’t having the doors closed on me that was such a big issue. It was the reason why I got caught between the doors that ticked me off.The people who ride New York City’s L subway line between Union Square and Sixth Avenue have to be among the most inconsiderate in my little slice of the world. Now, when you ride the NYC subways virtually every workday, you will encounter all kinds of inconsiderate behavior - not making seats available for the elderly or for pregnant women, standing in the doorways on both sides of the car doors so that folks can neither exit nor enter the train easily, abusive language, physical violence. I once watched someone standing outside of the train reach inside the train like he was going to tap a friend on the shoulder, and instead grabbed onto one of the crossbars, and pulled himself onto the train, literally forcing people to move without so much as an “excuse me”.
The L train riders take inconsiderate to a whole new level. At Union Square, dozens of people exit the train from the door through which I want to enter. The last half dozen heading for the door appear to be wanting to exit the train, and instead they stop at the door’s threshold, positioning themselves as close to the door as possible so that they can be the first off the train at the next stop. Not only do those of us trying to enter the train extend the courtesy of waiting to board thinking these people are actually exiting, we are also then forced to push our way through these people to get onto the train before the doors close. This is exactly what I faced the other day when I wound up caught between the closing doors.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination when it comes to being considerate. I’m sure my computer bag takes up more space than necessary, and I’m the most impatient person when it comes to making sure I don’t miss my train home at night (if you don’t believe me, ask the person who stopped at the bottom of the stairs at Grand Central Wednesday night and blocked the path for everyone trying to get up the stairs.). At the same time, I know it takes very little effort to hold the door for someone, or make room for someone else to get on the train, or get the hell out of the way so that someone can get on or off the subway.
Perhaps they just all need a reminder of what being considerate means - either that, or I need to carry a big stick with me that I can use to push people out of my way. It wouldn’t be very considerate, but it would be effective.
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Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
I am reading the Dark Tower again. I found the first 4 books in their audio versions at the library last week and paid whopping $7 for them all, the library’s suggested donation price. I had been wanting to read them again but i didnt want to read them again. so this is nice, i get to experience them in a new medium.
Hillary won last night. I cared so little about the outcome that I actually only watched a few minutes of coverage last night. Hurray, the democratic primary has officially moved from curiously long into the regions of the grotesque. Congratulations you two.
i havent been thinking very blog worthy thoughts. Maybe they are live journal worthy but this isnt a live journal so im not going to expose any one who actually reads this to the inner works of myself. You should be glad for that because my inner workings are boring and silly.
Keep on Chooglin’
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Monday, April 14th, 2008
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothings replaced them, and they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
The only reason this is a problem for people is because he is right. If Barack Obama was not running for president and was instead a professor at Harvard releasing the findings of some sociological survey or even just an intelligent person with an idea, nobody would care about this. People would either a) dismiss it altogether which would only happen if b) anybody bothered to read it or pay attention in the first place.
He is not a professor however, he is running for president so commenting on the state of the people who inhabit the land he is hoping to govern is off limits. that makes perfect sense. I have always said that the quality that i most look for in a president is to sugar coat the truth so i dont have to think about what is wrong with my country. I want my president to only tell me good things and if there are no good things to tell i want him to make them up and when there only bad things going on in the world i want him to spin them and twist them and manipulate them in such away that they appear to be good. Just like we have now. I want a liar. i want someone to patronize me and pretend that i am stupid and i will gladly play along because it is my president who is asking. If you can relate to these thoughts then please leave this site and go back to sleep with your gun under your pillow where you’ll be safe from intelligent thought and reason.
What surprises me about this whole thing, is that what Barack said isnt even a new idea. it is widely accepted information. Arent there examples of this exact thing happening through out human history? When people get scared and frustrated and there arent easy answers they turn to things they can control and that have always been their for them. In America, as well as in every country to ever grace this planet, these things have always been religion, an intolerance for people that are different from them and eventually violence.
This isnt news, this is just how it works.
Do I wish he hadnt said it? Yes, but only because now he has to answer for it. Do i think he’s wrong? I most certainly do not. I have a bigger problem with Hillary Clinton and John McCain choosing to respond to this by pretending that people who are really struggling in Pennsylvania and in other abandoned industrial towns throughout the US feel just fine about their lot in life. they arent bitter. They’re happy.
No one is blaming them for being bitter so there is no need to get defensive John and Hill. Recognition of things like the state of the people in the nation you are hoping to govern is what the job of President is all about. Its called compassion and empathy. Maybe Barack’s biggest asset in this election is that he wasnt built in a generic politicians factory and come equiped with both of these abilities.
I bet you a million dollars that factory used to be in Pennsylvania but is now in Mexico or China.
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Saturday, April 12th, 2008
There have been many a night where, after a long, hard day, my wife Laurie has slid under the covers and declared to no one in particular, “Whoever invented beds was a genius.”I simply cannot argue that point - the recuperative powers of a good-night sleep are amazing, and inventions that can so greatly improve our lives just cannot be underestimated.
To each of us, there are a number of similar inventions that have become such integral parts of our lives that we may take them for granted. So, I’ve tried to think of a few that I treasure and at least one that drives me crazy (and I encourage you to share some of your favorites as well):
Self-adhesive stamps and envelopes - paying bills is one of those chores that is never fun, but I can take a little bit of pleasure out of the fact that I don’t have to lick stamps before affixing them to the payment envelopes anymore. When I can also just remove the paper strip from a self-adhesive envelope, I’m in hog heaven. I wonder how my taste buds have been impacted by the reduction in envelope and stamp licking I now enjoy. That might be worth an application for a federal study grant.
Personal grooming equipment - is there anything more repellent than seeing someone who has an overabundance of nose hair or ear hair or Andy Rooney eyebrows (that could be used for the nesting of small birds)? Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine, but I doubt it. Now, there are all manners of grooming equipment that we ourselves can use to remove that unsightly hair.
Brew pubs and sports bars - I know Laurie will never agree with this one, but you can almost never go wrong scheduling a night out at either a brew pub or a sports bar (and, if you can go to a place that combines the two together, you’ve achieved perfection). I admire the ability of a good brewmaster who can craft a tasty ale. To combine that pleasure with the sporting event of your fancy, and you’re approaching nirvana. Add some food and a few companions, and you’re talking about a great time for all.
We shouldn’t forget, though, that there are many evil geniuses among us as well. Case in point - the person who invented mail order catalogs. Do you remember when there were only one or two, and, as long as one was the Sears Christmas Wish Book, you were OK? These days, Laurie gets the equivalent of four or five Wish Books a month, and all they do is to encourage her to buy more stuff, or, worse yet, give her more ideas. Trust me, Laurie doesn’t need more ideas (or more stuff) - she’s already got a Tupperware container full of “ideas” she’s ripped out of catalogs and magazines.
I keep hoping one of Laurie’s ideas will become the next great invention, like her macaroni and cheese recipe. Now that’s genius!
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Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I saw Tim Russert speak at SCSU last night. hes a good story teller and seems like a good guy. he likes Bruce Springsteen and was voted Dad of the Year by some publication. To steal a line from Seinfeld, “I dont know how official any of these rankings are.” Not his fault. hes a good speaker and i enjoyed the evening.
I am planning on suing American Idol to get the 2 hours of my life back that i wasted watching Idol Gives Back. The air was thick with self congratulations in the Kodak Theatre the night they filmed that train wreck. Let me ask you a question, on a show that is supposed to be promoting great singing, how do you let one of the worst singers in the history of pop music, Miley Cyrus, sing two songs when one of the best singers in the history of pop music, Annie Lennox only gets to sing one? Not only that but Miley Cyrus got to peel paint off walls TWICE and this years candidates for President of the United States got bumped due to time constraints. it nice to know AI’s priorities are in the right place.
Thank god for Annie Lennox, Bono and Forest Whitaker. The rest of the celebrities that lent their precious time to the cause should take lessons on how to not patronize the people they are exploiting for their own gain. And yes Alicia Keyes we should talk more about kids in Africa with Aids then we do celebrity drama but maybe, just maybe, when you are visiting these places, take off your designer clothes and your jewelry that is probably worth more than these people have ever considered earning in a lifetime. And thank you so much famous people for lending your time and your perfectly sculpted faces to the cause. Hey Reese Witherspoon, i think you make 20 million dollars per movie dont you? Well then maybe along with your time while your down there in New Orleans earning compassion points with people who might go see your next piece of s#!t movie you write that school a check for a million dollars or so. Why is it that the people that are most fortunate in the world are just content to lend their time. Kids with Aids in Africa dont want your freaking time, the need, need, NEED your cash and you have plenty of it. They need you to actually care as Bono and Annie Lennox and Forest Whitaker actually do. they dont need you flaunting your dangley 100,000 karat gold earrings in their faces while you wonder how they manage to live.
American Idol if you are going to make a spectacle of yourself in an effort to get my money youre going to have to do better than Billy Crystal and Robin Williams making fools of themselves, B list celebrities telling me to give them my money and Miley Cyrus’s unholy shriek. She is a banshee!!!
Also another tip to celebrities using poor people to try and get into heaven: all the sun glasses around the neck and tucked into the neck of your t-shirt look does for you is tell people that you dont really want to be there and you are going to run away screaming the first chance you get.
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Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
I was trying to find ways to kill time today because for whatever reason and trust me im not complaining, its is dead at work. reading for me is the most efficient killer of time but thinking it would be busy as usual i neglected to bring a book. So i started reading through the New Yorker’s archives of recently published short stories. I read a John Updike first which was very John Updike-ish. I read one by Jeffrey Eugenides (the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) I read one by Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn and one of my favorite books, The Fortress of Solitude). I read one by Richard Ford and one by Salman Rushdie and one by Alice Munro and one by recent Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz. I was not overly impressed by any of them and i will get to why in a second.
The New Yorker must be going through some kind of TC Boyle phase because in the last 6 months they have published three of his stories. I am big TC Boyle fan in the way that i am a big Grateful dead fan. I like the idea of TC Boyle. I like his zaniness and he is obviously a good writer, but sometimes he can be too zany and most of the time he can be too long winded. he is also a little self indulgent for my taste but i do enjoy that piece of hair that he has that he always lets droop over his face. Anyway, I like the guy, i have enjoyed his stories in the past and i enjoyed the two i read today as well: Ash Monday and The Lie. Both very funny but with tons of heart, hes always been good at writing characters with a soul which is nice.
God, i am really taking forever to make this point.
My point is that the reason i liked the TC Boyle short stories and why wasnt crazy about any of the other ones i read today was because sometimes the TC Boyle’s got out of control. as you were reading it you could tell he let his mind wander a little bit and in goes a clever aside or a witty piece of dialogue or the whole mood of the story shifts to make it not only lighter and give it more of that heart stuff i was talking about it also makes them both instantly more readable. I am not a short story fan. I appreciate the genre and i especially appreciate all the work that goes into writing one but i have never been a shorty story “guy” for the specific reason that to write a good short story you have to have more control over your emotions and your language than i could ever dream of having but also more than i consistently enjoy reading. I go through phases, Like the New Yorker with the Boyles but i cannot sit down on a regular basis and chew through a series of short stories. the reason being that whole control thing. there doesnt seem to be enough space for the imagination to really take flight and do something crazy you didnt expect. You need to do your business and then get out! Thats why i find people who write fantastic short stories like EA Poe (I like how that looks, im going to start doing that to my name) and Jimmy Joyce so fascinating. they are able to let their imaginations take off while still keeping the story and the plot and the idea under control.
You know what else is a good way to kill time while you’re supposed to be working?
Writing for your blog.
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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
My thoughts are all over the place today…
The new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record came out today. Its called Dig Lazarus Dig!!! Its not a concept record but several of the songs revolve around the premise of God raising Lazarus from the grave against his will, only to find himself a homeless junky tooling around the streets of New York City. It is amazing in every way.
There Will be Blood came out today on DVD. I find it highly amusing that this movie and the Nick Cave record came out on the same day. they are both superior works of art that try their hardest to be unlovable and difficult but are ultimately better for it. The whole point of the ending to There Will be Blood is that Daniel is finally satisfied and it is so perfect that it comes at the expense of leaving critics and the audience unsatisfied. Personally, I cannot wait to see it again.
Everyone called out today except for me and two other people and it feels like the end of the world. The phone will not stop ringing and nobody wants anything that i can actually give them. they all want some kind of magical special treatment that they dont deserve and are not entitled to and it is my great privilege to give them this news. I have been screamed at today, swore at, called useless and i might be mistaken but i pretty sure i was challenged to a fight. I would love to fight that guy today, its just too bad he is in another state. if he happens to read this i will be taking my break around 3, im in Connecticut, if you have the ability to get here by 3 i am going to rip your head off.
Mike and the mad Dog yesterday were debating whether or not Dick Vitale deserved to be in the Basketball Hall of Fame. They were both leaning towards answering the question No, but neither of them seemed willing to come out and say it. I will say that they are wrong. he totally deserves to be in the hall of fame soley because no one, NO ONE, loves basketball more than Dickie V and for that reason alone he should be in the hall of fame. He has been on Mike and Mike (the ESPN morning guys) every morning since Friday and he has ended every conversation in tears thanking everyone under the sun for giving him the opportunity to do what he does and for putting him in the hall of fame. Its all about the love of the game.
I think one thing the war has done for us is re-written the definition of the word ’success.’ before the word success meant ” the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors.” our new definition probably reads something like this, “The semi-favorable but ultimately the same persistence down an inevitable road to failure.” I think its clear that our government has no real interest in stopping this war, pulling our troops out , or even acknowledging that the only way their surge can be deemed a success is that it put more of our soldiers in a position to die. So according to the new definition the surge/ war in iraq is a success. Hopefully, George, John, and their minions of death wont re-write the definition of victory to mean “The death toll in Iraq has reached 140,00 today.”
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Monday, April 7th, 2008
Note - I have 770 AM on my radio for Imus. Occasionally i switch over during Mike and The Mad Dog commercial breaks to infuriate myself, which is my most favorite way to be.
People should have to pass some kind of standardized reasoning test before we let them vote. This is the reason that America is suffering because people like Rush Limbaugh belittle you into thinking that he doesnt like you and the only way you can get him to like you is to agree with him. But why would anyone care if a fat drug pusher like Rush Limbaugh likes them? Because of all the things that are ruining America the most contagious and dangerous is the people of this country’s over powering need for people to like them. people cant think or speak freely because they are afraid that someone might not like what they think and say, So they float through existence trying to destroy any hint of an opinion or abstract thought before it infiltrates their brains thus making them agreeable to all people and useless to me, and the rest of society that finds this quality in people repulsive, at the exact same time. to all the people who worry about people not liking them, guess what? I dont like you. Please feel free to email and attempt to win back my affection. Im sure my disgust with you will keep you up nights. Maybe you can use that time to think about your station in life and how you can improve it. The first way i would suggest: read a book. The second?
STOP LISTENING TO RUSH LIMBAUGH!!!
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Monday, April 7th, 2008
Saturday was a good day.
I got up early like i always do. I got dressed, put on some jeans and a tshirt and scooped up our laundry to bring it down to the basement where our ‘laundry facilities’ are located. I wasnt expecting it to be so perfectly nice out, if i didnt say it out loud as i sometimes do when im alone, i definitely said to myself in my head, “Holy smokes, it is a nice day out today.” Not only was it nice, it was much too nice to be wearing jeans, so for the first time this year i put on some shorts, dug my trusty pair of sandals out of the wasteland that is the back seat of my car, im not sure why they were there, and went about my saturday morning ritual of cleaning my house.
I dont go crazy when i clean, i have a cat so vacuuming is very important. Along with that i like to clean out the sink, run the dishwasher, wipe down the counter tops, this makes me feel like a i work in a diner which is nice. I sometimes clean the toilet because even if you cant see it, the toilet is a dirty place. We rarely clean the shower, i think this might be a character flaw or a genetic defect. It just never occurs to me that this is something that really needs to be done although i can see everyday that it does. If this makes me a bad person then so be it. I aint cleanin’ no shower.
It was so nice on Saturday I opened a bunch of windows and let fresh air and street noise circulate through the apartment. My cat, Buddy, the ultimate cat, descended from a long line of jungle kings, enjoyed a few hours pining for the freedom of the outdoors laying in the open window sill.
Now, i finish vacuuming, so its time to get to work on putting the kitchen back together and for something like this, you have got to have some music but, what music to play, whats the perfect record to relax and enlighten and to heighten the experience of scraping old lasagna from a Pyrex pan and scrubbing questionable stains and materials off my kitchen counter? Some people think the key to good weekend light manual labor background music is to find something nice and light, something you dont have to pay attention to too much. It literally sits in the background so at some point while youre doing whatever it is youre doing you will forget that the music is on. It will become part of the background noise and will take its place with the sound of the water running, the traffic outside and, if you live in an apartment, the sounds of your neighbors letting their red headed 6 year old systematically destroy their house one mysterious “just fell of the bunk beds” THUD at a time. I am of a different school of thought when choosing tunes for this very tricky time of the day. I prefer something really weird, something that i wouldnt normally listen to if i had to pay full attention to it. My normal selection for a nice day house cleaning session would be from my pals The Penguin Cafe Orchestra. they are by far my favorite psychedelic, new age, ambient island lounge folk band and their first three records are very charming indeed. However on this particular Saturday i was in the mood for something a little different so i sifted through my vinyl collection and finally decided on David Byrne’s ‘The Knee Plays.’ This fit the bill perfectly. Its weird, the whole record is full of marches comprised of synth horns and there’s is no singing just David Byrne spoken word. Awesome. It was laid back and just the perfect piece of music to keep me interested even when i was realy paying attention and it never once configured it’s sounds to the general cacophony of life.
Then…band practice. Oh glorious band practice. Our practice space is in West Haven. It is located inconveniently in the back of a warehouse in a cinder block room we rent from a guy that rents it from someone else. it was so nice out we propped the door open, had a few beers, and played music for 4 hours. Thats what i call relaxing friends.
Later that night Nicolette and I watched Frasier for a while, ate some food, flipped back and forth between baseball games and the Final Four. After, she studied and i continued reading The Iceman Cometh. I went to bed around 11 i think, early maybe but sometimes friends, its just time to go to bed.
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