02.28
05:48pm: I believe people only get develop relationships that they desire. Except in extreme cases of emotional and physical abuse, humans seek out complements to fulfill their psychological needs. When you see someone being treated like shit by their SO, nine times out of ten this is happening because deep down, it fills a need in the lives of both participants. The aggressor is a sadist, and the victim really thinks they deserve no better. I know this because I am in such a relationship--and my abusive spouse is the New York Mets organization.
Many weeks ago, I took the money I'd "earned" over the winter by gambling on football and poured it into buying a ticket plan for the upcoming baseball season. This particular plan was modestly priced and included some pretty good games, including the home opener and Mets/Yankees game. Like many Mets fans, I've been heartened by the off-season moves and have foolishly started to Believe Again. (My mother, a fan since the team's inception, a woman who has seen too much pain on the diamond since then, remains a skeptic. "I can't make myself get hopeful again," she says.) So I purchased the tix online and waited for purchase confirmation. And waited. And waited some more. And continued to wait, while my credit card remained uncharged and my tickets undelivered. I called up the ticket office several times, but no one I spoke to could either confirm or deny my purchase. Everyone I spoke to said they were switching over to a new computer system, that it was taking a long time to log in the new orders by hand. I wondered what sense it made to install a computer system that required logging in anything by hand--what did they buy, Commodore 64s? Underwoods?--but I said nothing, because in this kind of relationship, you speak only when spoken to.
Then I found out that the particular plan I ordered had sold out. I didn't know if this meant my purchase failed, or was waiting to be entered, or came too late, or was eaten by wombats or what. The folks at the Mets ticket office, cheery but useless, told me to call back on Monday. Problem was, single-game tickets were set to go on sale early Sunday, and the games I really wanted would almost definitely sell out that morning. Even as I spoke to this person, there were people already on line at Shea, waiting for the zero hour. If I waited until the business week began, there was a good chance that there would be no tickets left to the games I really wanted to see.
Listen: I've gotten to Fugazi show hours before they started just so I could get crushed at the front of the stage. I've preordered video games months in advance. I've queued up through tiny bookstores to get novels signed. But I have never, ever, ever done something as Fan Insane as I did this weekend--I went Shea Stadium in the wee hours of Sunday to wait on line for tickets. I could have gone to one of the team's Clubhouse stores in Manhattan, but I figured that Shea would have a festive atmosphere. Plus, several members of the legendary '86 team were scheduled to be there. When I was a kid, my brothers and I watched the 86 highlight video ("A Year to Remember") at least once a day for two years. Hoping to get some autographs, I dragged along a copy of the 1986 World Series program that I snagged at a baseball card show when I was 10, stuffed myself into three layers of clothing, and chugged off to my fool's errand to Flushing Meadows.
When I arrived at 4:15 am, the line was already long, but deceptively so. A good chunk of the line's length was occupied by the Truly Insane who literally camped out, with pitched tents and portable heaters blasting. Some set fires to scraps of corrugated cardboard, while others preferred the boozy path to warmth. Cops were on hand, but they didn't bother policing the mildly illegal activities going on before their eyes. They had vans to sit in, and were smart enough to stay in them. Temps were in the mid-20s, with a hefty wind chill that I'm pretty sure was at least seven degrees colder.
Once similarly insane friends of mine arrived to preserve line space, I thought it would be wise to trade car time, one person napping in the relative warmth of Meatwad (my Oldsmobeast) so we could spread the pain a little bit thinner. But at 5:30, Mets security moved the line up and into Shea's hallways, which was probably an effort to avoid lawsuits as much as it was to alleviate fans' chilliness. Immediately the atmosphere changed from chilly solidarity to sauve qui peut. The faithful had to frantically abandon their base camps, grabbing only essentials like thermoses and girlfriends, and run into the stadium, hoping the crowd would honor their prior line position.
The inside of the stadium was cold, but much less windy. However, at this point Shea security turned into the Gestapo and ordered that anyone leaving the line to go their cars, get coffee, etc. who then attempted rejoin the line at their previous spot would meet with swift, brutal retribution. So there was nothing to do but stand around for the next three and a half hours, waiting patiently.
As a novice to this sort of thing, I always had a romantic notion of what dedicated fans did on lines like this--played poker, sang songs, got pleasantly drunk. None of these quaint fantasies came true. There was a very nice, very young man standing in front of us who hoped to get tickets for all of his friends for a Yankees game. (I told him, "Fuck your friends, man--you're the one who came out in the cold.") There was a man behind us who passed the time with a portable DVD player and the third season of Seinfeld. But no chanting, hooting, or sing-alongs at all. Everyone was too cold and nervous, and perhaps depressed by the dulling effect of Shea's innards. I've always defended Shea against its detractors, but after having spent several hours in its hallways, with their completely unobscured pipes and hastily erected chain link fences, I have to say that it is colossally ugly in many ways. Waiting inside of it for hours on end with silent strangers is kind of like going to the DMV, only not so joyful.
Ticket sales were set for 9am. I thought before then that some of the 86 Mets would show up, but no dice. The fans got nothing but tankards of very bad coffee and extremely cold donuts (the jelly donut I snagged possessed a frosted inside, almost like a popsicle). Things picked up once the line started moving shortly after nine. Now that the crowd finally thought the end was in sight, a few chants of LETS GO METS and YANKEES SUCK rang out, but most people had petrified vocal cords and achy joints. Darryl Stawberry and Gary Carter made brief appearances on their way to be interviewed by WFAN, but did not sign autographs. Only Sid Fernandez and Ron Darling did some fan time, and I got them to sign my World Series program--not bad, but certainly not worth the amount of time spent in line. We all agreed, however, that Ron Darling still has amazing hair.
The line moved slowly once tickets went on sale, and it wasn't until 10 that we got anywhere near our goal. By then we stood a few glorious feet away from Gate D, where we were set to exit and continue on our way to the ticket windows. Then, the line stopped moving completely--for 35 minutes. No one would tell us why. The security guys at the gate, though screamed at by hundreds of angry fans, stood as silent and motionless as beefeaters. The crowd turned on its heroes, impugning the names of the 86 Mets who were supposed to be there but dared not show their faces. (Gary Carter was a particular target, taunted with the names of the obscure catchers who replaced him. It was the first time I heard anyone say the name Mackey Sasser out loud in 15 years.) A rumor rippled down the line that the endless delay had something to do with computer problems in the ticket booths. Since I came to the stadium in the first place due to computer problems, you can imagine my delight at hearing this.
At 10:40 the line creaked forward once again. By this time I could barely walk, since my knees were cold and stiff, and I had lost the feeling in my toes hours ago. The blanket I'd carried for warmth was now an albatross around my neck, balled up in a mess, smelly and unwieldy. It was a thoroughly expendable item, but some dumb frugal part of my brain prevented me from abandoning it. Out in the sun, all my layers began to press on me. Pretty soon, I was just as overheated as I had been frozen, but taking anything off would have just given me more stuff to carry, so I pressed on, sweaty and delirious. The closer I got to the ticket windows, the more glorious my goal seemed. Valhalla itself!
Security sent me to one ticket line, where ahead of me waited the young kid sent on a mission (who had received periodic calls from his reasonably concerned mother) and a man in an orange sanitation-style jumpsuit, which he had gotten signed by Ron Darling. The boisterous man in the orange jumpsuit took a small eternity ordering his many many tickets, and telling the cashier exactly how he wished to pay for each one. Right at this time, another horrid rumor zipped through the crowd: there were only 40-something tickets left for Opening Day or any of the Yankees games. Looking down at the other nine windows, and figuring that each person would probably purchase eight seats (the limit), it seemed increasingly likely that my mad quest would end in defeat.
Finally, Jumpsuit Man finished his purchase. But as the young man in front of me made his swift purchase, Jumpsuit Man stood slightly to the side and counted his haul. He believed the cashier had shorted him one ticket for one of the games, and he beseeched me to square away his purchase before I completed mine. After seven hours of waiting, disappointment, and pain, I could be thwarted by a cashier's incompetence and another man's stubbornness. Someone else might have told the guy to go fuck off, but I am not assertive even under the best conditions, and I possessed no more strength to resist. I waved him forward and thought for sure that my meekness had doomed me, as it has my whole life.
But then, oh heavenly hosannahs! Jumpsuit Man discovered his initial discovery was false. He had all the tickets he needed and stepped aside. With all the physical and emotional ups and downs of this ordeal, I barely had enough power left in my batteries to unsheathe my credit card from my wallet. For all I knew, mere seconds separated me from an ignominious end.
In the end, I achieved victory, but a Pyrrhic one at that. For my dedication to this sadistic franchise, I was awarded four extremely crappy seats to both the home opener and a Yankees game. The tickets were much, much worse than the ones I should have gotten with the plan I ordered. And today, I have a brutal cold sitting on the top of my head. But I can't complain, because deep down, I must want this abuse. Anyone who calls him/herself a Mets fan must be not only willing, but absolutely delighted to have their chain yanked to and fro at all times. All I ask in return is another championship in my lifetime. That, and for George Steinbrenner to once again feel the stinging pain of a day when the Mets are no longer the red-headed stepchild of the New York sports world.
Postscript: While composing this long ode to not-joy, I finally got in touch with someone at the Mets ticket office who was finally able to confirm my ticket plan order. This, while good news, also means that all the pain of yesterday was completely unnecessary. But at least I got a horrible cold out of it.
02.23
04:58pm: This weekend, I went to Las Vegas for a friend's wedding, and spent the rest of my days in Sin City wandering amongst the elaborate monuments to Consumption. I was completely inclined to hate the city and scoff at all it stood for, but I came away with a strange kind of respect for the whole spectacle. 'Over the top' does not do Vegas justice--from where Vegas sits, The Top can only be seen as a whisper of a speck. Everything is HUGE BIG MORE. Endless buffets. Eight hundred blackjack tables in twelve square feet of space. Laser lights shooting into the heavens and giving the middle finger to God. It's just so much that even the most jaded person must concede defeat and gawk at it all like a wide-eyed toddler.
When you walk into a casino, you are assaulted with the humming Ohm of a million slot machines, chanting at middle C. The more I think about this, the more amazing it is. Think about when you ride the subway, and the closing doors signals in adjacent cars are slightly out of tune with one another. It's quite jarring, no? Imagine how awful it would be if a couple hundred slot machines each blasted its own note--the noise would be unbearable. But no, everywhere you go in Vegas, the slot machines play the same note. I wonder if there are slot machine tuners in Vegas, guys who go to the different casinos and make sure all of the machines stay in sync, clanging their innards with little hammers.
Different cities have different character. In many cases, this is due to geographic locale and immigration patterns, but I think age has something to do with it as well. The older the city, the more jaded and set in its ways (New York, Boston). Younger cities are like adolescents: they have growing pains, mood swings, and are constantly trying to change themselves. Vegas is definitely a teenage city. It seems alternately embarrassed and proud of its heritage. It keeps glomming onto neighboring land with little thought for its future. And it wants to be loved so desperately that it tries to be all things to all people. That's why in one short seven-mile stretch of land, you have an Egyptian pyramid, a fake medieval castle, an ersatz New York City, a high-class art gallery/casino, a sad indoor circus, and a fake Paris, joined at the hip with helicopter rides, Grand Canyon bus tours, and newspaper dispensers jammed full of the filthiest magazines you've ever seen--for free.
I didn't venture far enough away from The Strip to really judge LV.* But near as I can tell, it's a city that doesn't entirely know what the hell it is yet, which is part of what makes it so weird and exciting. Even though the Vegas Hunter S. Thompson (RIP) explored 30 years ago was a very different one, you can't imagine him writing about anywhere else. It's the grossest example of Big Gulp America, where the worst big thing is always better than the best small thing.
Unfortunately, our trip was marred by bad health and banking issues. Regarding the former, both the lady and I were varying degrees of sick last week, she much worse than I. I thought that the desert air would provide a curative for our sickly eastern lungs, but it rained the entire time were in Vegas. Both of us left town in worse shape than when we arrived, despite drinking almost no alcohol for the whole trip. Today at work, everyone assumed that my poor state of health was due to unnameable debauchery, and when I try to assure them that it's nothing so glamorous, they refuse to believe me. They prefer the untruth.
As for the latter, our bank decided to use President's Day weekend to perform telebanking service maintenance, which left the both of us without the means of getting more cash from an ATM machine. I didn't discover this until late on Sunday, when I had only a hundred bucks left in my wallet, and knew that cabs to and from the airport would eat at least half of those funds. As a result, I wasn't able to accomplish my only gambling goal for the trip, which was to place one sports bet with ridiculous odds. I had hoped to play some baseball futures, which were available in many of the casinos' sports books--who will win the World Series, who will steal the most bases, etc. These seemed much wiser and winnable propositions than blowing 50 bucks at the slots or the poker table, since I know a lot more about baseball than I do about Texas Hold 'em. Plus, the odds on some viable candidates in many of the categories were tantalizingly long--f'rinstance, 70 to 1 for Carlos Zambrano to throw the most strikeouts, a still-young pitcher poised for a breakout year, IMHO. But thanks to Greenpoint Bank, I shall never know what coulda been.
* The one exception was our last night in town, when we sampled two of the local gay bars with the aid of friends. Both of them were located in strip malls, and somewhat dead in the wake of a holiday weekend. But it was an interesting experience to sample nonetheless--I never expected to see David Allen Coe in a gay bar jukebox.
02.19
04:48pm: Yesterday, I came home from work to find a box filled with ten copies of Excelsior, You Fathead, a biography of Jean Shepherd whose publication I was instrumental in fomenting. I brought the project to the attention of Applause Books, my former employer--by a stroke of luckitude, the CEO listened rabidly to Shep as a teenager, and still had fond memories of him. I did a lot of research, including a trip a Boston to the WGBH studios, where I watched a bunch of old specials Shep made for that PBS station. For a short while, I was going to co-write the book, but that fell through. Still, I have a lot of time and emotion invested in the project. Right now, it is the only published book that features my name prominently (except this one). In fact, there are several references to my name in the footnotes and the index. I've been indexed! I've made it!
All I have to say is that the book looks amazing. When I worked for Applause, the quality of the books varied greatly--they could come out great or they could come out like complete shite. It was/is a small house, with not as many resources to draw on as, say, Random House has, so I feared that the book might wind up looking like a bunch of fortune cookies taped together. But no, the design is fantastic, absolutely perfect for the subject and totally classy. I am very impressed, and happy.
So when the book hits the shelves (not sure release date, but my guess is this Tuesday), check it on out. I'm not saying run out and buy it, but if you see it at the store, pick it up and look it over. It's worth at least a peek. Shep was an amazing, fascinating character. He inspired tons of people whose fame grew to dwarf his own--John Cassavetes, Andy Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Harry Shearer, and hundreds of others. He talked about 'his life' in his stories constantly, but he was never consistent (or clear) about whether he was really telling stories about himself, embellishing them, or simply making them up. Every time he was asked, he gave a different answer. The 'real' Shep is frustratingly elusive, but this book is probably as close as you'll ever get to someone who took most of his 'real' life to the grave.
02.18
05:23pm: I have gone off the Dork Deep End and decided that I would like to start a fantasy baseball league. This depends in part on my ability to recruit fellow Dorks to join me. I need at least eight teams (not necessarily eight people), and can accept as many as 20. Not sure which outlet I will choose--I'm debating between the big three of ESPN, MLB, and the Sporting News, all of which have very similar fantasy rules, costs, etc. If you're interested in completely ceding your grasp on reality, email me at jesgrewth@yahoo.com, and let me know what you're looking for in a league (auction vs. draft, live draft vs. auto, Kirk vs. Picard, and so on).
If you believe this endeavor might interest you but you have only a marginal knowledge of baseball, fear not. I would prefer to play with people who will not take it completely seriously. I would prefer people who realize that fantasy sports are ultimately on the same plane as Dungeons and Dragons. If you take a tour of any major fantasy sports Web site, you will notice a geeky tone reminiscent of the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons--the superior air of people who truly believe they've found the one and only leisure activity worth pursuing. The only real difference between fantasy sports and role playing games is one of milieu. Even though fantasy sports rely on "real" results (the performance of players in actual games), they still take those players and thrust them into imaginary worlds. Like the old Marvel comic WHAT IF? What if Spider-Man fought alongside Doc Ock? What if Mystique had Wolverine's claws?. Except in fantasy sports the questions are more like What if Manny Ramirez was in the same lineup as Carlos Beltran? As long as you recommend the fundamentally ridiculoid nature of this, I welcome and salute you.
I plan on having two teams myself--one I will try to hone into a fierce sporting machine, and one into which I will draft all of the absolute worst everyday players I can think of. Not the ones who might get injured, or go nuts and throw a chair into the stands. I mean the guys who are mentally and physically stable, who go out and play all 162 games, and still blow. This is almost as much of a challenge as fielding a great team--it's easy to pinpoint mediocre players at thin positions (2B, catcher), but it's very hard to locate a truly awful outfielder. Terrible relief pitchers are a dime a dozen; terrible starters less plentiful.
Let me paint a metaphor that you male types out there might understand. If you ever had a lot of GI Joes, and you had a vehicle that could fit a lot of GI Joes in it, I imagine you remember the impulse to load every single figure you had inside, placing them very carefully onto the little pegs that could hold their feet in place. And once you had done this, you were gripped with the almost unbearable urge to hurl this troop-filled vehicle down the stairs, or off the back porch, or just rev it up and send it colliding into a sidewalk curb or a railroad tie. If you understand what I'm speaking of here, you have come one step closer to understanding my soul.
Prior to my recent sports-related urges, I have resisted role playing in all its forms. I was a dork, sure, but I was more of a cultural/literary dork, and I tried to shy away from ostentatiously dorky things. Anything to do with sci-fi, I ran from it screaming. The one exception was my cousin's brief affair with D&D. He got very serious about it for a while, and tried to bring us into this world. Me and my brothers gave it a stab, but we couldn't take it too seriously. We kept wanting to kill orcs in ridiculously elaborate ways, so he would have to concoct similarly arcane rolls of the dice to comply with our wishes. We also had a fierce desire to buy impractical items for our imaginary requests, like live poultry--we weren't yet skilled enough to buy something called a War Beast, so I insisted on having a War Chicken. The game broke down after our twelfth attempt to kill an orc by shoving a torch up his ass--which succeeded, through a roll of the dice. We realized that inflicting pyro-sodomy on an imaginary creature, though hysterical, was not an effective use of time that could be otherwise devoted to breaking things in real life.
02.11
04:55pm: The NY papers need a daily demon. Things being what they are in this city, the fourth estate is usually provided with ample examples from which to pick--baby killers, serial rapists, lead-footed aristocratic PR hacks, and so on. Today's demon is brought to you by the Yankees, courtesy of Jason Giambi. The papers have placed his quote-unquote apology on the scales and found it wanting. The usually lucid Mike Lupica is given to fits of self righteousness in today's Daily News while the Post is, well, Post. I haven't seen the dailies so mad about someone since at least yesterday.
The columnists' biggest gripe is that Giambi never admitted steroid use in yesterday's press conference, and only apologized for generalized sins--letting down the team and his fans. But the fact is, the only reason the info about Giambi has come out is because someone leaked secret grand jury testimony to the press. No one's supposed to talk about secret grand jury testimony--not the judge, not the lawyers, not the witnesses, not anyone. A grand jury looks at testimony and decides whether or not to indict someone. So the leaked info not only ruined Giambi's reputation (unfairly or not), but it also probably ruined an official investigation, and the asswipes at BALCO will almost definitely get off scot free. For all intents and purposes, Giambi can not talk about his testimony without risking criminal charges.
I don't want to advocate a "he just caught" defense, just like so many apologists do for Richard Nixon. But I definitely think we're giving Giambi his spiritual depantsing because he's the only person who's come close to admitting that he did steroids. I'm not aware of anyone in any major sport--even people who got nabbed on doping offenses--who ever admitted they took steroids or other performance enhancing substances. In the rare instances when perpetrators are caught red-handed, they always, ALWAYS insist that they didn't know what they were taking. If you think an athlete, who relies on his body for his livelihood, doesn't know what he's putting into his body, you are mad, wonderful fool.
I also don't think we'd be having this public outcry--at least not in New York--if Giambi remained the All Star Giambi of old. His crappy performance last season makes him expendable; that's why the Yanks did everything they could to void his contract in the off-season (of course, if they had gotten anywhere with that bid, I'm sure the players' union would've gone twelve kinds of apeshit). And if he returns to form and stays healthy this year, you won't hear a whisper about it--except in fans' taunts when the Bombers play on the road. Meanwhile, other players whose steroid use has been all but proven--eg, Garry Sheffield, Barry Bonds--get a free pass because they've been able to spike up and remain superstars. In retirement, Mark McGwire remains beloved, despite having used substances that are now banned.
I think our notions of what constitutes cheating evolves. A hundred years ago, some people still considered fielding gloves a form of cheating. Spitballs and scuffed balls were as acceptable a part of a pitcher's arsenal as the curveball. So was sliding spikes-up into a second baseman, or holding a runner's belt loop to keep him from beating out a throw. With so many people willing to get plastic surgery nowadays, with so many people taking mood-altering drugs as a matter of course, how long will it be before 'performance enhancing drugs' join the mainstream? Not long, says I. I predict in thirty years' time, or less, this controversy will look as quaint as a banned-in-Boston booklist from the 1950s.
02.10
12:03pm: Yesterday, I received the most heartfelt, sincere apology for any wrong done to me ever--and it came from the Post Office.
One of the items in my mailbox yesterday was an envelope from the US Postal Service. It had a clear window, showing the label of a Netflix slip addressed to me. On the back of the envelope, there was a written an apology of such heartwrenching earnestness that it could bring a stone to tears. It all but sang "Danny Boy" to me. The extent of the apology was so deep and masochistic that it reminded me (for your dorks out there) of that Monty Python sketch wherein the sad proprietors of a restaurant do almost medieval penance for a slightly dirty fork. ("To me, it's like a mountain, a vast bowl of pus."). "We realize your mail is important to you," the Postal Service told me, "and we sincerely regret any inconvenience this mis-postage may have caused you." They were so sorry they were making up words. It was the kind of plea a peasant might make to a lord to spare the head of his pig-stealing son.
After I dried my weeping eyes, I realized that I wasn't expecting a new Netflix delivery yet; I had only sent back a movie that very morning. I opened the afflicted package and discovered that, behind my torn address label, there was a DVD sleeve containing a copy of Troy. I assure you this film was not in my queue. My guess is, a Netflix envelope I sent back earlier this week must have gotten torn off and mixed up with someone else's damaged Netflix goods. So not only did I receive a humble penance intended for someone else, but I also received a free copy of a movie I have no intention of watching. Considering the Post Office's hairshirt approach to mistakes, I almost guilted myself into watching it. But damn, that thing's two and a half hours long--the combined power of twelve bachlorette parties couldn't endure Brad Pitt's oily torso, iron kilt, and triple-lutz death stab for such a duration.
Anyone want a slightly used copy of Troy?
02.09
03:45pm: Love is: Getting up before 9 on a Sunday so you can attend an engaged couples register-athon at Crate and Barrel with your intended.
I will say this for the folks at Crate and Barrel--they made the event relatively painless for the men in attendance. Basically, they handed each couple a pricing gun and told them to run around the store like drunken sailors with a thing for china patterns. Breakfast beverages were proffered, as were bagels and waffles. My biggest fear going into the event was that it would take the form of some sort of seminar, or--god help me--something involving audience participation. At that hour on a Sunday, I would have ripped off the face of anyone who tried to make me do anything other than stare blankly at vases--and no jury would dare convict me, brother.
One slightly annoying aspect of the event was the music blasting throughout the store--High Octane Love Songs. Not sexy love songs, or classy old love songs, but the overwrought symphonies of neediness that pass for love songs nowadays. Usually they're in the modern R n' B vein*, with a melisma on every note (see, when you arpeggiate everything, that means you got SOUL!). Now and then, you might hear some terrible quote-unquote rock band slog their way through a ballad (see: all of Aerosmith's Diane Warren-penned cash cows). Regardless of the genre, the High Octane Love Song contains a ridiculous litany of what the singer will do to express his/her undying love. BABY I WOULD EAT A MOUNTAIN FOR YOU! It doesn't matter that you never asked that maniac to eat a mountain for you--he's gonna do it cuz he's an idiot gripped by something he thinks is love, but which is actually a lot closer to OCD. It sounds romantic in a song; in real life, you'd call up a lawyer and get that restraining order drafted ASAP.
I think you can trace the ends of millions of relationships back to love songs like these. People actually believe in them, and when you have people believe literally in something intended metaphorically, it causes big trouble (see: all religions). They paint a universe in which love solves everything, in which the love of two people cocoons them in a world apart from the rest of the universe where nothing bad will ever happen. As a result, when bad things do happen, either inside or outside a relationship, many people can't handle it. Wasn't their "love," however they define it, supposed to keep them immune from the Big Bad World? When that proves to be untrue, they figure their love mustn't be true, so off they go to greener pastures.
And then there are those "love songs" that are really just flailing psychiatric cases, expressing the need for validation through the attention of others, or a masochistic willingness to be shit on just to be in someone's presence. Prime example: "This Old Heart of Mine". Classic Motown love song, right? WRONG. It's a sad, co-dependent cry for help. "If you leave me a thousand times/I'll take you back a thousand more"--wow, a spineless, needy man with no self respect. What a catch, eh ladies?
* A comedian I saw last night said that "r n b is like emo for fat black ladies, but instead of singing about politics and world and stuff, they're just sad about their man."
02.08
04:52pm: I invested ten dollars in two boxes for an office Super Bowl pool. One of these boxes yielded the correct halftime score, which earned me a cool C-note. Everyone around the office congratulated me, to a sickening extent. Yesterday, I couldn't turn a corner without someone slapping me on the back. The two times I won the weekly NFL pool, all I got was a grudging handing over of the dough from the guy who ran it. That contest requires a modicum of skill, in terms of guessing who will beat spreads and so on, whereas the Super Bowl contest was blind luck--literally, since none of the boxes had corresponding scores when I signed up; you just picked an empty slot and hoped for a good outcome.
A lot of people resent actual achievement, at least by people they know. Dumb luck is more our speed, simply being at the right place at the right time for no discernible reason. That's because it's reassuring. Not everyone can excel, but everyone could potentially win the lottery. Good fortune falling right into your lap is much more appealing than actually having to work for something. It is every American's dream to fall ass-backwards into a gold-lined mansion full of money, and never have to lift a finger again. That's why so many of them are practicing by being globulant, immobile snack inhalers now.
02.04
04:52pm: The humor of the NY Times is dry and efficient, like a well prepared martini, or a saltine. It's the same kind of humor employed in New Yorker cartoons, where nothing really funny happens, just one rich WASP complaining to another about radicchio or pinot noir. But today, I must applaud their description of the "trans fat-loaded pre-Super Bowl programming". This wry sentiment was prompted by the revelation that Super Bowl Sunday--known in the snack industry as The Day that Corn Built--will feature 10.5 hours of pre-game hoopla. If that doesn't sound so fantastic, consider this: that's like 21 episodes of According to Jim played back to back. *shudder*
I believe once upon a time that the Super Bowl was an honest expression of a certain kind of American sports nuttiness--in the way that soccer hooligans exemplify a European brand of insanity. Last weekend, I spent a criminal amount of time watching Super Bowl highlight movies on ESPN Classic, and it's easy to see that once upon a time, this was an event that attracted hardcore fans of the two teams. Not that the Super Bowl was ever some pure event done for the sake of Sport, but it was not the gross spectacle that it is now. These days, tickets are impossible to get, because they're basically doled out by the commissioner's office to corporate cronies and rich pals. Only a tiny fraction of the tickets go to the respective teams' ticket holders. And an even smaller fraction goes to the host city, which has to put up with a bunch of rich assholes' bullshit for a week. Hosting the Super Bowl would be like welcoming a herd of wild marauding elephants into your town for a weekend--they won't leave anything good behind, trust me.
My problem with the Super Bowl--other than the fact that rarely is it a good game to watch--is that it's just too huge, like some lumbering beast that plops in your living room and won't move for three weeks. It spends an enormous time and energy on things that no one really gives a shit about, like the endless pre-game programming, the halftime show, etc. When you have something as huge as the Super Bowl, do you need something to pump you up for it, like Blue Angels flying in formation over the stadium and Paul McCartney ascending from a football-shaped spaceship?
The size of an event has a direct relationship with that event's potential to suck. The higher the expectation, the more likely those expectations can not be fulfilled. I think even for the fans of the teams involved, the Super Bowl isn't fun anymore. It's just a nakedly crass empty space to fill with commercials, aimed at everyone but satisfying no one.
02.02
04:52pm: A posting at X-Entertainment.com has put me in a giddy and nostalgic mood. The posting in question is actually going on two years old, but the subject it covers brought back many teary emotions. It discusses a kid who won a Master of the Universe Design a New Character contest, and got royally hosed when Mattell never released the action figure as promised. This posting so excited the site's many readers that they went a-hunting to the elusive creator of Fearless Photog, elaborating his legend to almost god-like proportions.
I was in the habit of joining toy-and-cartoon-related contests when I was a kid. I imagine many kids were, and I imagine they all felt the same way I did: The only thing required to win the contest was to enter it. This fallacy was believed even more strongly when the contest involved any sort of talent, skill, or enthusiasm. You could accept that your number might not come up in the Atari Send in a UPC Symbol and Win a Crappy T-Shirt Contest. But surely, SURELY the judges of the Draw a Bitchin' Picture of Snake Eyes Contest would recognize your Mozart-esque artistic precociousness, and your fierce brand loyalty to the GI Joe line of action figures. A child cannot conceive of 10 million other kids who love the same thing as him--he only knows the other six kids he hangs out with. One in six--I likes them odds! Everybody knows I'm the best drawer in art class. Sure, that kid Tim can do a real good Spider Man, but that's all he can do. I got diversity!
Entering a contest was no small feat for me, though. These contests tended to be announced in special magazines, like Voltron Enthusiast or Nintendo Afficionado, which I did not have the disposable income to invest in. Sometimes I'd get to read an old issue at a friend's house or a doctor's office, but by that point the deadline would have already passed, mocking my poverty. The same went for toy-related cereals, which were both high priced and tended to have volatile shelf lives comparable to those weird elements at the bottom of the periodic table. By the time my mom cracked and agreed to buy a grossly overpriced box of C-3POs, it could no longer be found. On the rare occasions when I had access to the materials, I would go all out, whipping out the Really Good Markers, the ones I made sure my younger brothers didn't even know about, and work on my entry for days. I was determined that I would submit a work of art so daring and brilliant that not only would I capture the crown of Best Kid Drawing of Castle Grayskull, but I would dazzle the contest committee so much that I would be asked to run every single toy company in America.*
I'd look to see when the contest ended, supposing that on that very day, a winner would be crowned. The date was inevitably three months away, if not longer, which seemed so far away that I thought the earth would shrivel up and die by then. Sometimes, I'd mark my wall calendar with that day, so I wouldn't forget. But of course I did, and when six months had passed and I saw CONTEST written on an arbitrary day, I'd have no idea what it referred to. Eventually, the contest winner would be announced, and whenever I saw the victorious entry, I would go apeshit. Not because I lost, but because it was vastly inferior (said I) to the winner's feeble work. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT CRAP?! MY STUFF WAS A MILLION TIMES BETTER! HE CAN'T EVEN COLOR IN THE LINES! That kid musta known somebody, I thought, constructing conspiracy theories at age nine.
That sense of injustice and outrage came back to me when I saw the winning entry cited above. The idea is really really dumb. FEARLESS PHOTOG! WITH HEART POUNDING F-STOP SETTINGS! STAND BACK, OR HE'LL GIVE YOU RED EYE! And while the drawing might look impressive, it's clearly a re-do by the Mattell art department. Plus, the kid was in eighth grade. What the shit? That's way too old to be into He-Man, sorry. Now, I was a refried dork at that age too, but even I transferred that dorkiness into age-appropriate dork items. So maybe I can salve myself with the thought that this contest winner had a horrible junior high experience.
I work at a company that produces more than one magazine aimed at kids, which all hold contests similar to the ones that captivated me as a child. I often see boxes of the responses laying in abandoned cubes, waiting for a legally requisite time when they can be discarded. As a child, I figured that these contests were judged by regal kingmakers, locked away in bejeweled chambers, deciding monumental things. Now I know they're actually judged by overworked interns, or whoever's the lowest on the totem pole, usually just before they go to lunch. Another myth down the proverbial toilet.
*I have a comedy bit idea wherein a struggle toy company, through some wacky circumstances, is taken over by a board of ambitious children. Who better to tell us what kids want than kids themselves? they say. There is a musical montage of the kids working with adults on plans, reviewing computer graphics, drinking juice boxes. They finally produce the Ultimate Kids Toy--which fails horribly. In the end, the company goes bust and the kids wind up sleeping on the street. I like the idea of former executive children sleeping in cardboard boxes.
12:05pm: At virtually the last minute yesterday, I was told there was one week left of OfficeOps live radio. I got this news around 3 pm, which may seem like ample time to prepare for a one-hour radio show at 7. But I'm not a stop-on-a-dime kinda guy. I'm more like a freight train--I need at least five miles to come to a complete stop. If you want me to go out and have drinks after work, you better let me know three weeks in advance. Not because I have so many conflicting obligations, but because doing things at the spur of the moment really unnerves me. Can't tell you why, but that's just the way I is. Some people throw a suitcase together and jet off to Scotland for the weekend. Me, I need a week's worth of lead time to plan a trip to Key Food.
But yesterday I decided, screw it, perhaps being more spontaneous would be good for my soul. So I went home, tossed a bunch of records in a plastic bag, and drove to Bushwick. Normally, I program a playlist via iTunes and burn two discs to switch between, but I thought I'd try to wing it like normal DJs do. This turned out to be a colossal mistake, mostly due to my ineptitude in using the station's turntable.
I almost never played vinyl during my shows, but because I'm a genius, I thought bringing in a whole lot of records would be a good idea for my last show. Turntables are testy machines, as I'm sure you know. The one I was saddled with insisted it had FAST START TECHNOLOGY, but it definitely overstated its prowess. Whenever I positioned the tone arm in the right spot and pressed START, the turntable was slow to get up to normal speed, and it sounded like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. After a few pathetic attempts, I tried starting the record and placing the needle by hand. But dropping the needle on the right spot is a skill for which my caffeine-addled hands are not suited. Whenever I thought I'd just about placed the needle correctly, my hand would jerk violently to the right, and I'd get the last 15 seconds of the previous song. It's a good thing I'm not a surgeon.
This failure leached into the rest of the program. Although I rarely prepare my remarks, last night I was pathetically unready to speak to the masses. I hemmed and hawed on the subject of not being very good at throwing things together at the last minute--spontaneously proving my stuttering statements true. In short, it was the worst show I ever did, even worse than my first few fumbling attempts, and it made me question if I really have the skills to perform in any medium. I've contemplated getting back into the whole comedy thing, with an improv class last year and toying with stand-up material. Last night made me think the only way I'm gonna stand in front of an audience again is if the crowd is a firing squad.
My sincere apologies to anyone who might have listened in. It really sucked and I shouldn't have tried to do something so totally new to me on my last show. Your money shall be refunded forthwith.
01.31
12:29pm: I saw something on TV this weekend that made me rethink the path I have chosen for my life. Because I was upstate at my mom's house and had less than jackshit to do, I wound up watching a criminal amount of TV. Just two days of miserable, rotten sloth, when moving your legs two inches to let someone else sit on the couch is considered a grueling chore. Most of my viewing was restricted to Super Bowl highlight films on ESPN Classic (manly!) and home makeover shows (manliness undone!)*, and it was the latter of the two that cause my existential questioning.
There was nothing particularly poignant about the episode I saw of HELP! I HATE MY LIFE AND I THINK REMODELING MY KITCHEN WILL FILL THE HOLE IN MY SOUL! It was a typical episode of the genre: couple wants kitchen redone, fey men remodel kitchen while couple gets spa treatment that will only serve to make their workaday lives seem even more unbearable in comparison, couple returns home to see new kitchen, wife gasps and cries, husband pretends he gives a shit about interior decorating. But at the very end of the episode, they showed a promo for an upcoming installment of COULD YOU PLEASE DESTROY MY HOUSE AND TELL ME I'M PRETTY? A man in a hardhat swung a sledgehammer to a kitchen cabinet--with food items still in it. BAM! Mrs. Dash and uncooked spaghetti spilled all over a soon-to-be demolished stove. It was totally unnecessary and hysterical. They could not wait until the foodstuffs had been removed from the kitchen--remodeling was too high stakes to consider saving the produce in the name of frugality and common sense. The cabinet was leveled with the brutally cold efficiency of a commando. "We have 72 hours to build your new dream kitchen. Anything you leave in here as of 0300 hours will be exterminated with extreme prejudice. Anything on the periphery can and will be considered expendable."
This deeply touched the eight-year-old within me. As a young man, I had a long, abiding love of destruction of all kinds--usually with some kind of purpose, ie to get back at people, but if I could I find no rationale, breaking shit was its own reason. It never occurred to me that there might be a future in it. If I had known when I was younger that all my education would get me was a steady, boring job with marginal health benefits, that instead I could destroy people's houses on national TV for a living, well fuck, I woulda dropped out in eighth grade and gone into demolition.
I have many reasons for hating the home remodeling show trend, which I may tackle in another more heady entry. But one thing I love about them is spotting the Horrible Decision. In every single episode of every single show, from YOU AND YOUR WHOLE FAT FAMILY FUCK UP YOUR FAT NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE to PAIGE DAVIS IS A HORSE-FACE MANIAC, the remodelers without fail do something monumentally retarded. I don't mean the fake dramas they construct to simulate tension, like, "Oh no, the tile cutter really doesn't like the electrician!" or "Oh no, we didn't order enough paving stones!" No, what I mean is they do something which sounds like a good idea but will inevitably drive the recipients blind with rage.
Case in point: In one episode of Sunday's 17-hour block of YOUR KITCHEN IS UGLY AND STUPID AND SO ARE YOU, the remodelers installed a little nook for the couple's children in a far corner of kitchen, with a little bench for the kids to sit on and Dr. Seuss books. That sounds precious, and the mother appreciated that now she could keep an eye on the kids while she cooks. But in my mind, I flashed forward to six months from now, when the lush carpeting of the bench is encrusted with jelly and spaghetti sauce and smells like a wet sack of armpits. The mother realizes that the kitchen used to be the one place in her house where she could escape her horrible screaming brats. Now they're in there all the time, crying and banging on metal pots, and she is seriously contemplating beating them with a meat tenderizer. Meanwhile, her fat husband sits in the living room, watching The Game in his unremodeled living room, feet up on the table, not a care in the world.
* I admit that I copped the parenthetical aside from the convention pioneered at Todd Levin's blog, Tremble.com. I've been doing it for months now, uncredited, and I felt the time had come to unburden myself of this enormous guilt weighing on my conscience. I feel much better now, thank you.
01.26
12:27pm: Last night was the ambush end of Holy Goddamn! for the foreseeable future. I had heard rumors to this effect, but there was no official word until two minutes before I went on the air. The OfficeOps space is going to be revamped and largely repurposed in the coming months, with much of the space sadly being converted into apartments. The radio station may survive the change, but it won't resume for a few months at least. In the meantime, they're going to loop all of their old shows, mine included. So you can tune in at random times and try and catch HGD, but I can guarantee nothing. In the meantime, I am exploring other options to continue my radio presence, which I shan't comment on until I know some more. I really enjoy doing it, and I think I have an obligation to all three of my fans to continue the show in some form. Stay tuned.
Last night, I got a decent night's sleep for the first time in several weeks. This is my cycle: I go a month or more barely sleeping, then one day my body rebels and I go to bed before midnight, and the resulting REM overload is like an acid trip. On these occasions, my dreams are extremely weird, but vivid and articulated. They have strange plots and subplots, reoccurring characters, motifs, and set design. Normally, I don't care to share my dreams because I don't place significance in them as many people do. Also, I retain traumatic memories of an ex who used to tell me every single one of her completely nonsensical, go-nowhere dreams. She would go on at such lengths that I would literally cover my ears and beg her to stop. She did not understand that dreams generally only make sense when they are being dreamed, and make even less sense when imparted in waking speech.
But I found last night's hyperreal dreams entertaining, so at the risk of annoying all and sundry, I offer the following glimpses of my sick sleeping mind:
* In abstract terms I am told, thanks to family history, I am all but guaranteed to get cancer. I ask what I can do to prevent this outcome, and they tell me to eat well and get lots of exercise. So I start to jog. I am running in an enormous supermarket--in size and breadth, it resembles a Stew Leonard's, but in decor looks a lot more like the filthy Shop Rite I spent acres of hours in when I was a kid. This locale seems counterintuitive to both anti-cancer directives I've been given, but I am unable to stop running.
* I am in some sort of video game competition, a la The Wizard. The games all seem to be early Nintendo, and I seem to have regressed back to pre-adolescence (not a far jump, really), although this is fluid--at times I appear much older. I sit in the audience, awaiting my turn, which I am continually told will be soon. It soon becomes apparent that the contestants get on the stage and, in a brusque pantomime, act out video game actions rather than play them. I will be Mega Man. I am given a super soaker to simulate his arm cannon. My stomach sinks. I have no desire to play Mega Man--or any other video game character--on a large stage. When I am called up, there are a bajillion other people on the stage and they all sing some big production number. I think to myself, This is probably the gayest thing that has ever happened.
01.25
04:54pm: Recently, my company was bought out by a rival sports publishing company. This made put me in nail-biting mode for quite some time, but now it seems my position is somewhat secure. One good thing about this new company is that they make both the programs and the yearbooks for almost all of the MLB teams, so it offers me a chance to ramp up my baseball nerddom.
So today I received an introductory email from someone I will be working with from the Glorious New Regime. They forwarded me a list of the teams whose projects we will be heading. And there, right at the top of the list, sticking right out at me like sore middle finger, was the Atlanta Braves. As a Mets fan--and also a lover of all that is decent and holy in this world--I despise the Braves with the passion of a million white hot suns. Those sorry sons of bitches finish first in the NL East every year--and do nothing else. Now, if the Mets got beat out by a truly great team, one that consistently won or made it to the World Series (eg, the Yankees), I could just shrug my shoulders and say, oh well. But it's much more galling to get beaten by a team that chokes in the playoffs every damn year, a team who can't even sell out its own stadium during the playoffs anymore because they've pissed off the local populace so much with their chokitude.
The last two years, though the Mets were miserable, I felt stupidly proud to have my name in their programs. Now, I'm gonna have it in the yearbook of Satan's Official Team*. I am not happy.
* I must note that this implication is resented--by Satan, that is.
04:19pm: Other than the sub-zero wind chill and the fortresses of snow piled everywhere, I thought last night would be a fantastic time to kickstart my moribund running regime. I strapped on my snow boots, Black Flag hoodie, thermal gloves, and a winter hat I got for Xmas that's one size too small for my enormous head. I decided to run down West Street, because it is dark and creepy and that's the kind of mood I was in. West Street is the street that runs parallel to the East River in Greenpoint. It is full of old factories and warehouses, and some photogenic abandoned industry. If you've seen anything filmed on location in New York, where the hero skulks through a bleak urban landscape, then it's probably been shot under the rusting overpass that straddles West Street, and the spooky, vacant complex attached thereto.
Jogging in the snow is a lot like jogging on the beach--lots of resistance, and you need to lift your legs a lot higher than normal. For a long stretch, I was the only soul around. One poor man ventured into the cold to walk his dog, but he was the exception. The street was well lit but vacant, and it made everything look hyperreal, like a painting that's so realistic it creeps you out. When I passed through Greenpoint Avenue, I saw that the plows hadn't even bothered to venture down that far; they just pushed all of the neighborhood's snow into one messy pile and left it there. There's only a tiny bit of street left between West Street and land belonging to a Parks Dept. transmission tower (why the Parks Dept. needs such a thing I do not know), but it was the land that the DOT forgot. A lot of the buildings at the very end of the street are wooden, old as dirt, and it made me think they were lawless saloons of the Wild West, full of poker games and dancing girls, abandoned by the well-plowed streets of polite society.
The sidewalks underneath the creepy abandoned factory were surprisingly well cleared. Maybe because so many TV shows get filmed over there--or maybe the street's Other Big Business paid for the service (I'll give you a hint--it's a popular spot for cars to idle). Two youngish looking people, not dressed very warmly, slumped against one of the buildings. I almost landed on their feet with one of my vaults (running on this kind of terrain is closer to jumping). I couldn't tell if they were homeless, or just coming down from some fantastic chemical amusement aid.
West Street ends when it hits Quay Street, which turns away from the river and goes back to Franklin Street and the rest of Greenpoint. As I got closer to Quay Street, I started to hear a sick sounding alarm. Its clang was slowed down--you could hear each articulated pound of the hammer against the bell. Perhaps the cold had retarded its usual pace. When I rounded the corner, I was sure something weird was going on. In addition to the frozen clang, I heard gushing water. The sidewalk grew suspiciously slushy. At one garage exit, there was an enormous black pool of dirty snow-water, one that was clearly being fed into from somewhere. I looked up and saw a waterfall cascading down the face of a rollgate. The water poured curiously out from the top of the garage--maybe a sprinkler system gone awry, or a water pipe burst. It flowed down the garage door and into the awaiting pool, swirling with melted snow, rock salt, gravel, and motor oil.
I hopped a snowbank and continued my run on the other side of the street. I then proceeded up Franklin Street, back where I came from, on a more populated but much less interesting route.
01.24
12:37pm: When the weather gets really bad, that's when the stupid really shine. I mean the rock stupid, the kind who, in a purely Darwinian universe, would have died from eating poison berries before the age of 16. These kind of people conserve some of their stupidity, can it in mason jars, store it in the cellar, just so they can uncork it at times such as these. News radio was filled with acres of car wrecks this morning. Seven car pileups on the Grand Central. Three hundred tractor trailers jack-knifed on the Jersey Turnpike. I don't know what kind of maniacs drive to work in New York City under ideal conditions, but unless your job actually involves vehicular use, or unless missing work today meant no medicine for your ailing grandmother, LEAVE THE GODDAMN CAR AT HOME.
Then again, it's not as if public transpo was doing a bang up job today, either. All the trains and buses were delayed until next Tuesday. The MTA has a way of taking your already crappy morning commute and multiplying its shit factor by a power of twelve. Bus delays make sense to me--they can barely move when it's 75 and sunny--but I don't understand weather-related train delays. Most of the subways are underground, and the ones that are outdoors, one would assume, were designed to take harsh lashings from Mother Nature. Of course, the youngest parts of the system date back to the Spanish American War, so I guess snow is not good for the hamster running around in the wheel that powers the MTA's main command center.
On these kinds of days, people shove their way onto the bus or train like it's the last helicopter outta Saigon. There's always at least four or five tiny women in front of you who threaten to attack like cornered rats if you even think about stepping on the vehicle one millisecond before they do. (There is an indirect correlation between a person's size and the obnoxiousness with which they ride the buses/trains--I have rarely seen a very tall person who takes up more space than he should, but watch out for four-foot-three shrews from Jackson Heights.) I have never understood the maniacal need to get where you're going. The wake of a snowstorm hands us all a golden opportunity to miss work. Everyone knows the roads and the trains are all fucked up. You will be completely believed if you stroll in a half-hour late and say you had train trouble. Why push your way into a jam-packed F train, just so you can smell someone's musty jacket armpit for three hours and still get to work late?
Hoping to avoid this as much as possible, I tried to ford the Pulaski Bridge as I do most mornings. I don't know what kind of idiots they had shovel the walkway, but if I were the MTA, I'd sell them back to whatever zoo they came from. There was only a tiny path going through two enormous piles of snow, roughly the width of a Ritz cracker. And in many spots, there was no path at all, just a trail tramped down by the angry feet of those who passed before me. These unshoveled sections were also the steepest part of the bridge's assent, by the way. And when I finally reached the 7 train entrance (with the aid of a St. Bernard), it appeared that the steps had been shoveled with a lint brush. I rappelled down the lowest side of the stairs, holding onto the railing for dear life. I was tempted to try and walk down without holding on, maybe inviting some injury that I could sue the MTA for. But then I decided, since I just cheated death with my Head Denting last week, it would best not to taunt the Reaper again.
My most/least favorite part of snowstorms is the TV news coverage thereof. Three or four B-level reporters (the expendable ones) are posted to various locations around the tri-state area, because you wouldn't believe it's snowing like crazy just by looking out your window--you have to have the TV tell you it's true. Their reports are usually more digressive ways of saying I'M STANDING IN A BLIZZARD AND I'M FREEZING MY SACK OFF. BACK TO YOU. They interview some Local Idiot who says something brilliant like, "Just trying to keep warm," or, "This is crazy, yo!" and show future heart attack victims shoveling their driveways. Then they show footage of the Local Supermarket, where the checkout lines snake three miles deep, people buying enough food to hole up in their house for three nuclear winters and five shovels, because obviously the one you bought last year must have passed its expiration date by now. Then they cut back to the studio, where the anchors give you some blizzard advice that even retards would find condescending. DON'T GO OUTSIDE SHIRTLESS. DON'T PUT ROAD SALT ON YOUR FOOD. IF YOU MUST EAT SNOW, BOIL IT FIRST.
It is the job of the news to make every minor inconvenience seem like an apocalyptic crisis. But it can't be cost effective to send out reporters just to stand in the snow and report a 500 word piece on how it's really really cold. Maybe it's a form of hazing--every new reporter has to report on one tornado or tropical storm before he can be called a man. As hazing goes, I guess it's better than having to pass a sweet potato with your buttcheeks. In New York, the king of the pointless, sadistic remote was Ti-Hua Chang, who used to be the local NBC affiliate's whipping boy. He apparently did a fair share of investigative journalism, and hosted a talk show on channel 5. But NBC-4 must have hated him with an undying passion, because every time there was a natural disaster, they sent him straight into the eye of the hurricane. When Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island, they had him up in a helicopter for--no shit--18 hours straight, just so the man could look down on the fiery oil slick in the ocean and report back every hour to say, "Nope, no survivors yet." Chang just signed on with CBS-2, and I wish him luck. That man has been through a small slice of hell.
01.21
05:15pm: This week's Holy Goddamn! has been posted to the interweb. Look upon my works and tremble.
With work on my novel finally winding down, I've been wondering what I should direct my literary talents toward next. For whatever reason, I keep thinking of comedy "bits" (as they say in the biz). I have no idea why I keep going to comedy, other than it's something I haven't really sat down and written in a really long time. Also, I'm feeling monumentally depressed lately, so this is naturally a good time to write comedy (irony!).
Here's what I've come up with so far, concept wise:
(1) A Philistine comedian in the mold of an ethnic stand-up, who berates his white audience, supports stereotypes of his own race, and denigrates others. I mean Philistine as in the ancient Biblical tribe. The piece would contain many references to Hittites and Hammurabi.
(2) A super black-ops commando team made up completely of people who grew up with horrible modern-y names, like Dakota. The pain of their names has hardened their souls. "SOCOM Team: Alpha Patrol, led by Captain Skyler McManus..."
(3) A man trying to shop around a Broadway musical based on the music of 70s one-hit wonders Orleans ("Still the One!"). He won the rights to their music at a church penny social, and he is completely, naively optimistic about the chances of success for his project.
My favorite comedic ideas are ones that make no one but me laugh. And the more that people resist, or hate, my idea, the funnier I think it is. Case in point: Back in my college days, writing for NYU's humor magazine, I came up with an idea for an article: a look back at a 1970s proto-reality show, "Celebrity Foreclosures." The concept of the show was that every week, a famous person would foreclose on a house, come along with the marshals to seize property, and so. It was sort of like "The Gong Show" meets "Cops". This made me laugh so damn hard in the pitch meeting, but other than a friend of mine who had similar comedic sensibilities, no one else thought it was funny--especially the EIC, who pronounced it the stupidest, most dead end idea ever. Undeterred, I wrote a draft, giving the show a ridiculously dark host with a checkered past. It was by far the most over the top thing I ever wrote up to that point. I was not permitted to read it at the meeting, and it died on the vine. But now all I have to do is think Celebrity Foreclosures and I bust out laughing.
This may be related to my own aphorism that failure is a million times funnier than success. I've never seen a standup do a routine about his satisfying marriage and stable, rewarding job. I think I continue to find this idea amusing not so much due to the idea itself, but because it will never, ever work, and no one but me will ever think it's funny. That in itself makes it COMEDIC GOLD!
01.18
10:55am: This past Saturday, I busted my head with an iron. No, this was not a domestic dispute (my lady prefers the classic rolling pin offense*) and I was not in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Because I'm very very smart, I keep my iron on a high shelf in my closet, along with the few articles of clothing I own that require ironing. While trying to put something else away in the closet, I knocked the iron off of its perch and onto my head. I heard it more than I felt it--I did not hear a cartoonish clang, unfortunately; it was more of a dull thud--but I knew right away that my wound was gushing. The blood came quickly, and it poured over my glasses and arms, just like a horror movie. The lady convinced me to go to the emergency room and get stitches, which turned out to be much more painful than the actual injury. That's because they didn't give me stitches--they punched staples in my head (no, really), which I'm told is often done for taut skin like the kind stretched over your skull. But all in all, it was a relatively painless experience--aside from the puffy white bandage they put on the injury, which made it look like I'd taped a maxipad to my head.
The injury definitely could have been a lot worse. The iron just glanced my head, and though the cut was deep it wasn't very wide, and didn't come close to denting my skull. But the whole experience still was pretty scary, because my brain is pretty much all I have going for me. I ain't gonna win any beauty contests, I've got no money, I've got no connections, and I'm not gonna get drafted by any major sports league.** I'm not really a people person, and I don't have the kind of networking acumen to weasel my way into better situations. If I hope to make it in this world (ie, not die in a gutter), I know it's going to have to be via some intellectual endeavor. And to think that it could have been undone simply because, for all of my book smarts, I'm dumb enough to put an iron on high shelf in a heavy traffic area.
This also reminded me how tenuous my grip on mental stability is in the first place. Between the two sides of my family, my genes have a lotta bad history: depression, alcoholism, Alzheimer's, plus a bunch of other generalized tendencies that aren't brain-friendly. It's scary to think that you could live your life as sober, industrious, and reliable as possible and still be taken down by a latent chain of amino acids that suddenly kick in and make you a paralyzed, babbling idiot. If I go down that path, I hope it happens all at once. Nothing could be more terrifying than slowly losing your mind--and realizing it.
* I kid the domestic violence. No, I just fell down a flight of stairs. No really, everything's okay at home.
** I was mildly depressed to discover that Carlos Beltran, the newest Met and six-year vet in centerfield, is a mere four months older than me.
01.13
11:19am: I was going to post this week's illustrious chapter of Holy Goddamn!, but for some curious reason, my recording came out super dense and peaked--not quite to point of unlistenability, but certainly past the point of annoyance. So unless I receive a great hue and cry, I'm going to refrain from putting up MP3s. Speak now or forever hold your pieces.
In today NY Times, the always astute Maureen Dowd points out the current romantic trend: Men Want Their Mommy. Or rather, men want women who will care for them in a parental fashion, while also being hump-able.
Dowd's opinion piece has a definite upper-class bent to it--men marrying their "secretaries" is constantly invoked--but other than that, I think she's pretty much on the money. Never before have men in general been less "manly" then they are now. I don't mean that in the sense of chopping down trees and dragging their woman back to the cave. I mean it more in the pure adult sense of the world. Consumerist culture demands a prolonged, unending adolescence, one in which self-denial is unheard of. No one is more nakedly selfish than a child, who has little responsibility and gives no thought to the non-immediate future. This is the mentality that drives the shaky buy-now-pay-later structure on which our economy now rests. You can look at the massive credit card debt strewn about our nation and see a parental proxy--an authority who freely hands out cash for your every whim. And what could be more childish than wanting your mom to take care of you for the rest of your life?
I don't truly believe that men are more inherently childish than women. But there is definitely a difference in how the media appeals to the genders. Women have a lot of magazines/TV shows/books telling them GO! DO! ACHIEVE! CONQUER! Things aimed squarely at men, however, say things like OGLE! DRINK! EAT! CONSUME! One is told they can do anything, the other is told they can have anything. One would think that this would create a world in which women's ability would trump men's bloated complacency. But since our economy rests not on achievement and initiative, but consumption, it seems that men are still able to backhandedly control the world of the marketplace and, according to Dowd, the marriage altar.
I also think many men still have "post-feminist shock", ie, they still don't know how to act in a world they don't necessarily control by the simple virtue of being male. So they seek the safe womb of their childhood, surrounded by toys, cared for by a loving woman who will never question their needs. But I also think that this affects men more the higher you rise on the economic food chain. The lower you go, the less likely it is that women earn much money at all, and the more likely it is that people fit into traditional gender roles. So while Dowd's assessment is true for the folk she may know in DC and Manhattan, I have serious doubts it's true in the Bronx or the Appalachians.
This will be on the blue book final.
01.05
11:54am: Last night's Holy Goddamn!--the first in almost a month--has been posted. It features a survey of some of the better boots I downloaded in the last year. Enjoy.
Friends of mine over in LiveJournal have been having something of a back-and-forth over feminism, the use of the word 'patriarchy,' and other heady stuff. It was initially inspired by a long quiz which challenged the (male) participant to gauge his level of complicity in the perpetuation of female oppression. At the end, where the quiz explained what one's score meant, it read in part, "All men need to work on issues of patriarchy, but..." And that's essentially what started the heated debate. So because I love throwing gasoline on a burning fire, let me add my own two cents.
Implied in such a statement as "All men need to work on issues of patriarchy..." is the belief that the state of being male is what makes a person oppressive, rather than the societal mores that all of us live under. At the same time, most feminists of this stripe would argue that a woman is not born with inherently female characteristics (other than the obvious), that she does not have to do traditionally female things, that she is free to forge her own path in life unshackled by the chains of society's expectations. In truth, I don't think you can have one criterion for one gender and a different one for the other. Either both sexes are free to modify their behavior and ways of thinking, or they're both slaves to genetics. Or, they're both a mix of the two, which is the most likely answer.
Our society evolved as a male-dominated one--at first, I imagine, as a protection against some primordial threat (real or imagined), then perpetuated as tradition and as a way to keep the established power structure intact. Like any tradition, it can (and is) being challenged, abandoned, or torn down completely. But what I hope the folks doing the remodeling job realize is that it's not having a penis that corrupts a person, but having power. I can't believe that if society had evolved in the reverse, with women dominating in every sphere, we would live in a world of sunshine and lollipops. We would still have greed and hate and all the other things that cause oppression and inequality, because there's no such thing as benevolent domination. Even if society was completely egalitarian along gender lines, it probably would have found a way to give one type of person advantages that other types did not. I don't think it's in human nature to function under complete, total equality. Someone or something will always have a little bit less, someone else a little bit more.
Ultimately, I think a lot of these types of arguments don't so much deplore the abuse of power as they plead for a slice of the pie--which is essentially a call to end one kind of oppression so it can be replaced with a whole new kind. The truly radical thing would be to deny power completely, to work for some kind of society in which domination of any kind is neither necessary nor desired. Knowing humankind and the history thereof, however, I ain't gonna hold my breath.
01.03
10:23am: I spent the New Year's holiday partying in the Poconos, where my cousins and some school chums had rented a coupla houses for the long weekend. At some point in the evening, they hung up a banner on which the revelers were encouraged to sign their names for posterity. Feeling cheeky (and drunk), I signed it several times as various celebs from the previous year. But my favorite was this one:
FUCK 2005
--Baby New Year 2004
Does anyone else feel a little gypped, now that we're in the 21st century? It seems like after the excitement/fear of Y2K, and getting used to writing 200- on all our checks, no new year sounds really 'new'. How do you top THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND? If anything, each successive year seems even more lame, like the sixth crappy direct-to-video sequel to a once mighty movie franchise. I can't help but feel that 2005 is the chronological equivalent of JAWS 8--QUINT GOES TO AFRICA.
I've noticed that, once New Year's eve rolls around, the year about to end suddenly becomes THE WORST YEAR EVER. It's a lot like how a show such as, say, Different Strokes stays on the air for eight thousand seasons, and its stars are big celebs and they're all rich, but once the show is cancelled, everyone suddenly hates it and everyone associated with it with a fiery, undying passion. There is no one so maligned as someone who was once famous--and no year is so hated as the one you just suffered through. I can't believe how many people I heard in the last week say, "I'll be glad to kiss this fuckin' year goodbye." Though I don't entirely understand such negative thinking, I'm not immune this impulse, either. Even though I had a lot of really fantastic things happen to me this year (which I shan't recount here for modesty's sake, and for fear of inspiring a swell of jealous rage amongst my loyal readers), when New Year's rolled around, the only memory of 2004 I kept coming back to was this: Staying up until 3 in the morning on November 2, the day after my grandfather died, and watching Ohio go to Bush, and desperately begging for sleep so I could stop thinking about either of these catastrophes.
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