perhaps these rapacious dogs can offer you a job

dude fatale

2007-09-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

as noted elsewhere, the search for employment is over for me.

the search for awesome, however, is just beginning.

back home plus steelers

2007-09-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

i'm back home. i left shuffleupagus at katherine's apartment in amsterdam, and i broke my glasses yesterday morning by stumbling around like a moron. more updates later, plus the url of my new blog (?!?!).

meanwhile, does anyone know where in boston the steelers/browns game is being shown? the network is cbs, which also has the rights to the pats/jets game in the same time slot, so basically i'm looking for someone with an incredible football cable package. so if you have an enormous package, please email me or call. i would love to get all up on that.

love,
tobias

out amsterdam spot

2007-09-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

now comfortably ensconced in amsterdam, girlfriend and i have been taking all manner of adorable photos, but unfortunately we do not have the means to upload them. so you can just sort of imagine what they look like in your head. one is of a kitty we found in a cafe! another is of us biking! you cannot be excited enough to see these. in pretty much all of them i should have used flash but didn't.

girlfriend will be living here for two years, studying at the vrije universiteijtgrachtentijnsdag, and it's hard not to be envious. to wit:

1. she only has class on fridays
2. canals are pretty

the class thing, i find hard to believe. she had three classes scheduled on monday, but one evaporated somehow, another turned into an "independent study" which apparently will be an all-email class, and a third is completely optional, as in, you only show up if you have questions for the teacher, which seems unlikely, if nothing is actually being taught. i mean what the hell.

teacher: welcome to class!

eight silent, strange minutes

teacher: so! does anyone have any questions?
student 1: uh
student 2:
student 1: what, um
student 2: yeah
student 1: yeah, what class is this, exactly?
teacher: that's a good question!

more silence; hyperventilating

but probably no hyperventilating, actually. that's the thing. the dutch have this incredible fuck-all attitude that elates me and terrifies me. i was used to thinking of northern europe in many ways as a homogeneous cultural block, with the german love of orderly systems and processes being a universal around the north and baltic seas. but it's not! again, de certeau is of use. a nation that has essentially been reclaimed from the sea, and which is under constant and unpredictable threat of flooding and general implosion, must necessarily be tactical in nature and tendencies. which is to say, the dutch are fully aware of the precariousness of things. the permeability of fortifications. the arrogance and folly of presupposing the immalleability of anything, especially anything manmade. this is why you will occasionally see someone transporting a king-size mattress via bicycle. my point is that the dutch have a remarkable country, and i sort of want to be a part of it.

also, watching the u.s. open, with dutch announcers, on a channel called "eurosport" makes me so incredibly happy. i can't explain why. the happiness is as genuine as any i've ever felt.

thanks to all of you who have requested drafts of godspeed, and if you haven't yet you're still welcome to do so. i'm thinking of having a big focus group when i get back to boston. pho pasteur. one of the big round tables. rich oily consomme all over your annotated copy. contact if interested.

aftermath

2007-08-30T05:49:00.000-07:00

novel complete; computer broken. the days have become strange. last night i spent two hours attempting to explain american football to my cheerful drummer roommate kristof. my spoken german has, if anything, regressed since i got here.

kristof: so! american football. what are the rules, what is the objective, &c.
me: IT HAvE nO feET!!
kristof: by this you must mean that the ball is not primarily propelled to and fro by the feet, and the name thus is humorously inappropriate. ha ha! well put.
me: uH.
kristof:
me: soMEtIMES a mamn muST kiCK baLL. i mEAn, HOweveR. is NEEDED.
kristof: "mamn?"
me: on tHE fourTh aTTempt, in a CLoseNESs of THE GOAL, threE poiNTS achivement.
kristof: i--i see.
me, gesturing animatedly: yoU have a mAmn. he is THE THROWER. theN is a ruNNer, a caTcher, in totAl 553 HUMANS.
kristof: five hundred and ninety three? i don't--that doesn't seem
me: SORRY WAS TYPO
kristof:

yes, this is correct. i am capable of the spoken typo. so typographically oriented has my language-paradigm become. i am no longer a novelist; i am novelism itself.

tonight, a big going-away party for me at the weinerei; tomorrow night, a birthday party for one of my roommates, to whom i have become quite attached. then, amsterdam with girlfriend. she claims to live near a bakery named "bread pirate." for me, this means one thing only: NEW AND INCREDIBLE BAND NAME. oder?

okay kristof needs to use his computer. bye.

and on the seventh day, he drank some things

2007-08-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

two more laptops later--jane's, happily, survived a four-day outburst of about ten thousand words, and is now in austria, recovering, and my good roommate christof's computer, being german, does not understand the novel enough to be terminally appalled by it--godspeed is done. the first draft. am i hammered right now? please do not be a fool, by which i mean, YESSSSR1GH.

being an insatiable slut for your time (specifically for the paltry few hours you are likely to spend reading fiction this year--YES PLEASE FEEL GUILTY YES), i will WITH X-TREME ALACRITY send you a copy if you want to read it. it's the first draft, so obviously, it will need improvement, but the whole thing is much more reader-friendly than holy spirit, and also more reader-ready in its first-draft state.

be forewarned: hopefully it is funny and lively and pretty well-paced (short chapters!!), but it is also about dark things, like drugs, incest, and an entire apartment filled with human waste. i guess this warning is mainly directed at members of my family: if this doesn't sound appetizing to you, then i am not hurt if you don't want to read it. it might be a thing you don't want to think about a family member writing, except of course for its impossible luminescent brilliance.

good. you know who to contact.

last night, in premature celebration, i acted as roadie/manager for my german roommates' minimalistic bluesy band at this funky little occult-ish middle-ages-revival bar deep in kreuzberg. there were twenty million candles, a lot of wrought-iron things, and a little trickling stream carved all along the center of the bar. as we waited for it to open, the beer was delivered by a balding long-haired guy wearing a kilt and no shoes. so that was pretty sick.

anyway, after mounting pressure from, er, me, i got to play a few of my own songs at the end, just bass and voice, eigene songs, and people actually liked it a lot, and i was really happy.

and then about eight beers later, i was at the polish border, and i was wearing a dress.

our hero, undaunted

2007-08-19T06:36:00.000-07:00

the tally now looks like this:

number of computers my novel has killed: two
number of friends still willing to let me use their computers: one

this would be my ex-blonde-haired canadian ex-roommate, jane. i am on jane's laptop right now. not that i did anything reckless with the other two laptops (the second belonged to girlfriend, and is now in a repair shop in amsterdam) (here also i am imagining putting the laptop on a vespa, then attaching the vespa to a bungee cord, then setting all of it on fire), but i am being super, super careful with this one. i am typing extra slowly. jane has moved it to the kitchen, and i have relocated all of the fluid-sources to the extreme other end of the kitchen. this includes the sink. we are not fucking around here. we are just going to sit down and finish this bleak, bright-hued, laugh-and-also-cry little joyride/painride of a conceptual novel whose chapters are actually written in the form of computer viruses. and then we are going to go to amsterdam to visit girlfriend, and we are going to chill out. (yes, i realize that this sounds sketchy. no, parents, i'm not going to smoke pot or do mushrooms. i was born a heroin man, and i'll die a heroin man.)

the writing is coming along. word count: 51173. that is a whole lot, in case you were wondering.

also, in the interest of double-jinxing it: i'm supposed to hear from the computer repair guys tomorrow. and i imagine they will say that the computer cannot be repaired by earthly means! ha ha, ha. please please oh jesus god please let my computer be reparable by earthly means.

well, i have to go kill off most of the auxiliary characters in a bus accident. bye!

your heretical words made jesus weep tears of blood and acid

2007-08-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

actually, it wasn't so much jesus who was disturbed by my current liebesarbeit, which of course is blindingly brilliant but also generally about drugs and incest—to the contrary, jesus can't get enough—but my poor little laptop, who conked out saturday. it was very, very sad. i tried to start it up about two dozen times, and to various degrees of success—sometimes i'd get the gray screen, sometimes the fan would turn on but then not stop, sometimes i'd just get this neuotic, unending "burmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm"—because inevitably the computer would search through its memory to make sure everything was okay, and then it would reach The Bathroom Scene, or The Passage With The Demon Gerbil, or whatever, and bam.

now it is in a repair shop. pray for it. meanwhile, girlfriend is in town, and i am writing on her laptop instead. it is already sending me mild but increasingly frequent electric shocks, which is a shame, because we're just getting to the part where the cannibals OW FUCKING CHILL OUT.

yesterday, in an ersatz-rw role, i researched two towns for let's go: wittenberg and meissen. in the absence of anything interesting for you to read, here are my auxiliary notes. this is a style i like to call: found-blog-entry.

WITTENBERG. 8/14 8:30am-10:30am. I’ll point out that both of these town intros have been in the book since the beginning of time (slash at least 2001), but there’s more important shit to take care of here. LG alumni are really the only people who care about that anyway.
COLLEGIENSTR. Because all but one of the places here are not on Collegienstr. but on its creepy extension Schlossstr., I thought I’d make some note of its existence.
LUTHERHAUS. 10am. Uh, alles in ordnung except that the name is wrong. I have no idea how that happened. it appears everywhere as the lutherhaus. also: so many goddamned elderly Midwestern tourists here. I was more in awe than anything else. I had to use the bathroom and it was a mob scene. Also very chatty.
SCHLOSSKIRCHE. 9:15am. The tower is being renovated, so I got all this info from the guy at the hostel next door. He says the hours are mad flexible but 10-12, 14-16 ausser montags is what his conjecture is. “certainly not more than 2 euros,” he said also, so I’ll just leave the prices as is. kirche hours I got from a little sign, and those never lie.
I remember the view being sumptuous. FROM SIX MOTHERFUCKING YEARS AGO. HOW DID I GET SO OLD.
JUGENDHERBERGE. 9:20am. It actually makes sense that this info is wrong, as the hostel used to be located in the schloss. no more, alas. now they have this big white building, and it’s definitely not as street. had a nice long chat with the harried youngish dude behind the desk about the tower (I forgot the word for “tower,” embarrassingly, and was like, “what are the opening hours for… uh, the biggest part… of the church… you go up the steps of it.” he gazed at me. “turm,” he said slowly, uncertainly. “turm”), opening hours, etc. prices changed, the key thing doesn’t really happen, reception hours are also different.
KARTOFFEL HAUS. 9:45am. they weren’t open, but the info from the menu and little sign confirmed everything here. except for the ceiling. this has actually been added since I rwed for lg, so I can’t say anything else about it. there are plenty of imbisse along collegienstr. if people need a cheaper choice, so this probably is fine to keep.
TRAINS. 10:30am. Leipzig is actually two trains every two hours, but both of those trains come at the same time. like, a train at 16.02, a train at 16.06, and then nothing until 18.02. that makes a whole fuckload of sense. anyway, every 2hr. should cover it. berlin is 21 euros with EC, 27 with ICE, but what budget traveler takes ICE? I DO. BECAUSE THEY’RE SO FAST. vroom!
TOURIST OFFICE. 9:30am. This is a very good tourist office, and most tourists who come to Wittenberg probably want to stop by—they definitely have the resources to direct you to whatever it is you’re interested in. 28 different walking tours (!!?!?), plus the audio tours, info on religious services in English, etc. I added the last one because I think the crowd that comes here generally would be intrigued be that, but take it out if you must. Note the change in hours. Also, the map comes in a pamphlet that is really donation-optional, but it’s fifty cents. I mean, come on. well, you can add “optional donation” if you want, but when it fucks up your line edit, don’t come crying to me.

8/14 2:30-4:30pm. Well, I sort of booked it through Meissen, the reason being, the Bahn failed me. I was in shock. I had a ten-minute layover in Leipzig, and in pretty much any other country I would have stopped the woman at the ticket counter and said, “Um, let’s give me at least a twenty-minute layover, because your weak-ass train system is not going to get me there on time. Holy shit, never mind, you’re Italian. Make that three hours. Actually, fuck it, I’ll walk.” But yeah, we pulled in right as my connection was leaving. So then I was all proud of myself because I had bought a Sachsen-Anhalt ticket for the day and was able to hop on this RE which was actually going to Meissen. But it was one of those dinky little guys that stops in every inbred-ass town in Eastern Germany, and then when we were three stops away, the driver got on the loudspeaker and was like, “Fuck it—it’s Ersatzverkehr time,” and everyone around me was like “HELL YEAHHHH.” So then we got on a bus, which dropped me off at the ass-end of Meissen and I had to run around and I got all sweaty.
PORZELLAN MANUFAKTUR. 2:45pm. This has a billion fake entrances, but they will only fool you if you are coming from the wrong direction, which no one will be. I didn’t take a look at anything, but I did verify that the Schauhall is misspelled (halle, bitches, it’s halle) and that the Schauwerkstatt needs a better translation. It said “demonstration workshop,” which you could call it, but I think it’s probably more like a show room. that said, I didn’t actually go inside. whatever you like, really. also the prices went up. and I added the area code to the phone number (which formerly appeared in the tourist office thingy, where it was wrong anyway).
ALBRECHTSBURG. 3:45pm. this is at the top of the city, and it is very picturesque and shit when beheld from below, but the walk up is through this obscene money-dripping typical german altstadtkapitalistic mayhem—definitely not narrow or romantic. they are cobblestoned, so maybe that’s what was meant. but after eighteen successive windows of cutesy-ass porcelain plates with fish on them, I want to kill myself. plus tapestries that no one would ever fucking need, the occasional generic Gaststaette, etc. the kind of thing your Midwestern aunt who has never been anywhere would really love. not that there's anything wrong with that.
once you get to the top, it’s actually more of the same—the top of the hill has a palace and a cathedral, yeah, but then they are surrounded by this district of more ridiculous money-fattened shops crammed with knick-knacks and fripperies, plus more Gaststaette where everyone is paying 8-12 euros for some generic schnitzel that tastes pretty good but not fucking 12 euros worth of good plus you can get it fucking anywhere.
I didn’t have time to go in either thing—this will become a theme for today--but the cathedral had this interesting little garden in what I guess you would call the ante-Hof. Overall I’m sure it’s worth the thumb. Why not? I used to be the germany editor. I know everything. Oh, but let’s definitely not give it the arbitrary proper noun “Albrechtsburg Castle and Cathedral.” Albrechtsburg refers either to the castle itself or to the general area. also everywhere I looked the cathedral was called the “Dom zu Meissen” and not the “Meissner Dom,” so I changed that.
TRAINS. 3:15pm. First, due to the surprise Ersatzverkehr, I was like, “so is there still service to Dresden? Becau” and then she was like, “NO THEY CLOSED THE LINE DOWN HA HA HA HA” and I was like “what” and she was like, “I’M JOKING, HA HA HA HA” and I was like “woman, I swear to god I will come over there and sweat on you if you do not answer my questions.”
TOURIST OFFICE. 3:30pm. Ran in there, spoke to no one, copied some stuff down. good to go.

kreuzberg photo tour

2007-08-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

obviously we as a society are getting closer to this, but what i want for my next computer is smell-reproducing technology. also a smell-camera. imagine a world in which websites smell like things. mine would smell horrible, today, because what i am mainly interested in communicating to you is that the front door of my apartment building frequently doesn't close completely, and we are right at an intersection traversed by thousands of people every night, if not tens of thousands, and at least 25% have to pee at any given time, and at least 4% of those have to do so urgently, like right now, and at least 10% of those have been ingenious enough to test our door to see what is going on with that. please, there's no need to do the math: at least one person peed in our stairwell last night.

other schenley high school graduates will identify with me completely when i say that this made me nostalgic.

here are some photos from kreuzberg, my old neighborhood, taken a few days ago; they might not mean much to you, but if you have any hope of eventually capitalizing on my inevitable fame and wealth, you had better check them out.

this building is why i will probably never make good on my promise to become an architect. how great is this building. it's like they hired a set designer from star wars, then gave him a partial lobotomy. one day i will live in one of those corner apartments, with a retinue of dutiful yet personable droids.

ah, hourglass statue on my street. every day i passed you on my way to the bahn and reflected anew on your "timeless"* message, marvelling at the wisdom and subtlety of its fucking twenty-foot-high vehicle. SOON YOU WILL DIE, you used to tell me. SOON YOU WILL DIE.

*HAR?!?!?!!!

my old street! this is not an especially interesting photo. there's a bench behind the super-gleamy car where i used to sleep after getting locked out of my apartment.

OMG SO ARTISTIC

berlin department of urban planning: first off—we love what you did with the Giant Bulbous Concrete Vaguely Star-Wars Apartment commission,
partially lobotomized architect: thanks!
berlin department of urban planning: —yeah, and so we'd like to give you another commission, but... well, how to put it.
partially lobotomized architect: please! don't spare my feelings!
berlin department of urban planning: we'd really like it if this time maybe you could replace the curvy bulbousness with some angles from this Random Angle Generator we have here.
partially lobotomized architect: [frowning]
berlin department of urban planning: we also think the coloring and fenestration could be much, much gayer.
partially lobotomized architect: now you're speaking my language!

i don't even get what this is supposed to do. i spent many an afternoon staring out my window, contemplating it. if it's a bridge, it's like: was there a railing shortage? or, halfway across the bridge, do you then get in the pipe? or is this actually just industrial infrastructure with some kind of festive adornment? like a mohawk? was someone paid to think of that? how can i get their job? kreuzberg is full of magic.

these are recycling bins. if this does not make you excited to recycle, i have no idea what will. each one is as big as a goddamn human being. how the fuck do you empty these? where does this insane level of demand for recycling even come from? the average berlin youth, that's where. he drinks three individual bottles of becks per night. then, on average, he eats a döner kebap and pees in 1.2 apartment stairwells.

*****

the writerly life is incredibly difficult. i'm at about 45000 words for godspeed, but most of them are "d'oh!" you have no idea what incredible range of evocation this word has.

city of gaud

2007-08-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

holy expletive, i love berlin.

[these, by the way, will be the last few posts at perhaps these rapacious dogs can offer you a job, a blog which has become obsolete. i have a job now. i have like twenty. i am the king of employment, and my royal iconography consists of a beaver gnawing on a W-2 form. it is time to leave behind this childish preoccupation with jobs and income and sundry and pass into a different realm: ROCKSYLVANIA. it will have its own blog. get ready for that, my excellent bitches.]

[also the beaver has a mohawk.]

this time, instead of kreuzberg, i am living in prenzlauer berg. as blonde-haired canadian ex-roommate jane said to me, "i think you will find prenzlberg slightly inferior to kreuzberg in most respects," and thus far she is right on the money. but i am still absurdly happy to be here. the pberg:xberg continuum is a short one. it's like saying, "this magical regenerating falafel sandwich, which comes with a free basket of dollars as well as a czech underwear model, will be somewhat less satisfactory to you than this other, similarly regenerating falafel sandwich, which is slightly larger and has a superior tahini dressing, and additionally the czech underwear model will teach you the meaning of true love."

what's that? you'd like a perfunctory, disorienting photo-tour of my apartment, you say? well you are seriously in luck.

this is where i sit for much of the day, writing novels, or occasionally witty blog entries, or more generally facebook messages urging people to come get hammered with me at any hour of the day. note the bottle of wine. it cost an incredible €1,49... and it doesn't even taste that bad. that is, the bottle itself doesn't taste awful. the wine tastes like vinegar, except somehow puce.

the room is very spacious. on that bookshelf are numerous seminal philosophy texts in german. i spent my mornings attempting to read them, then shrieking and running away.

here's the lovely view outside my many windows. look at the sky! in berlin, the sky is always grim. for whatever reason, i find this to be delightful. perhaps this is a sign that i have a grave serotonin deficiency. tra-la!!

i am right on a much-trafficked six-way intersection and next to the bahn. however, the noise actually isn't too bad. at least, it hasn't been since i used a ballpoint pen to puncture both of my eardrums.

here's the bathroom. i'm going to be honest with you: i have no fucking idea what is going on in there.

in conclusion, our kitchen is filled with insects.

(in real conclusion, my cell phone works now. let's hang out. this means you.)

the literary world, bracing

2007-07-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

preparations for the exodus continue. girlfriend is embarking this fall on a two-year program in the nederlands. there is folding, packing, the uncovering and wiping of abandoned dusty surfaces. emotional subtext. the weird light rootless quality of our young existences. muting the colors is the muggy heat.

i've mostly admitted to myself that the holy spirit of the times is unmarketable as a first novel; the pacing is too wobbly, the writing is too uneven and experimental, the plotting too murkily hinted at. too many chekhovian rifles unfired. the artist-as-anarchic-spurned-recluse is a paradigm i'm beginning to understand (although i didn't think that would happen with this book--i really thought i was working on a thing with mainstream prospects).

now i am looking ahead at novel #2. thus far, compared to holy spirit, it is stephen king. however, compared to stephen king, it is the egyptian book of the dead. it will be finished in six weeks, and then we'll see. you all can read it. mom and dad, you probably won't want to.

and failing the success of that, i already have a plan for my third novel. the pitch is this: the da vinci code, but for foodies.

seriously.

joga bonito

2007-07-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

i have a new favorite means of exercise. the old one was swimming, but the cambridge high school pool shut down, and infrastructure for swimming is hard to find. why this should be, i don’t know. pools are vital to the fabric of modernity. they provide the perfect way to stay in shape, especially if, like me, you are preparing for a world in which the world’s ocean levels have risen several dozen feet and the coastal metropolises of the world are completely underwater. who will be making fun of my speedo then? who will give a shit about my deficiencies at basketball? what woman shall spurn this skinny-legged, frog-footed physique, when mankind lives beneath the waves. i am the vengeful child of poseidon, AND EVERYONE FROM MY HIGH SCHOOL IS A LOOSER [sic].

anyway, now what i do, especially when kind of riled up, is grab a soccer ball, march over to the turféd field behind the high school, and take about 100 penalty kicks. this is better exercise than it sounds, mostly because

-> i have horrible aim.

so i have to go running after them, and sooner or later, that = exercise. power i have, to some degree—recall the improbable length and torque of these wiry limbs—but aim i am working on. thus, most of the balls go over the net, or to either side, or occasionally in the complete opposite direction. no observer has been able to explain this. also, my targets are the upper corners of the net, so i don’t really have to miss by much, but let’s be honest: i am missing by A LOT. and generally, if it goes into one corner, it means i was aiming for the other one. girlfriend and i had an enlightening practice session where she pulled up a chair next to the net and for about forty-five minutes, everything that left my foot went hurtling toward her head, including dribbling and attempting to punt the ball downfield.

this did not make her stoked.

in conclusion, exercise is the sickest. (147.5 hours til my flight.)

violent bear attack

2007-07-18T10:13:00.001-07:00

if you would like to read a provocative meditation on childhood, immigration, and above all, bears, today is the day to do it.

our lives on holiday

2007-07-14T19:06:00.001-07:00

these are heady times in the life of me. in two and a half weeks, i leave for berlin, city of my heart and soul, and my hopes and fears are manifold.

1. is the king of falafel still there?
2. and does he still do that thing where, every time he has to put together a falafel sandwich, he spends many long minutes clutching a pita and staring with absurd focus at the little tins of cucumbers and radishes, as if at a complete loss as to how falafel sandwiches are made—despite the fact that his very livelihood depends on it?
3.
4. what about babel falafel? those guys know what they're doing. i mean, the king's falafel is completely excellent, but at babel, you know what you're getting into.
5. goddamn.
6. also bärenland, the purveyors of gummi bears and also the little coffee-flavored and -paraphernalia-shaped gummis that have actual caffeine in them.
7.

8.

9. i guess i also hope to reunite with my many berlin friends, whose names escape me at this moment.

obviously, it's going to be sort of strange. i'm living with some germans i don't yet know at a very happening little intersection (eberswalder str., if you must know), and while i'm not expecting a total reprise of the lifestyle that i had two years ago in kreuzberg, that is definitely what part of me really, really wants. but, it is time to move on. as you may know but have probably forgotten, i am spending august in berlin primarily to finish my second novel. whereas the first novel was unconventionally paced and difficult to penetrate, this one is like a sleek, whistling bullet from some stylish italian-made narrative gun. the plot is simple, yet elegant:

somewhere in a famous french museum, a man is killed in some disgusting way. now, a dashing yet bookish professor of symbology must solve an ever-complexifying series of art-historical riddles... before he himself is killed horribly!!

every four pages there is a word search.

just kidding, it's about twincest as a metaphor for self-love. also, the horror of a world whose reserve of original, interesting ideas and things is finite and rapidly being depleted. basically, if you do not desire to read it, you are a fool.

these days, matt is taking some of the old teen plant recordings (all instrumental) and producing them with vocals, giving us a little demo with which to entice friends and industry people. here are a couple of them, if you're interested. i just created this myspace page fifteen minutes ago, which is why it has no friends. alas, myspace.com/teenplant was already taken.

then in september, it all happens. matt quit his day job last week. i'm scaling down to part-time for the fall (benefits-eligible!!!! YES). i think ramos bought his plane tickets. dave is looking for an apartment out here.

fear our desperation. fear our impossible talent. fear especially mike's teeth and flailing arms, because he does not like you.

movie roundup of happiness

2007-07-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

sorry i haven’t written in a while. i’ve been depressed. i’m still depressed today, but whatever. also worth noting: today, in addition to being depressed, i am angry. as far as i can tell, this anger has no cause at all, because i woke up with it. however, the day’s events have definitely given it a tremendous world-crushing gravitational mass of retroactive justification, so whatever. it was like several of my coworkers, acting in inexplicable concert, declared it International Day Of E-Mail Suggesting You Have Been Lackadaisical In Your Communication With Us And Also This E-Mail Has Approximately 30,000 People CCed On It.

if this does not strike you as world-crushing, perhaps you are not depressed.

the worst thing is, the emails are all lies lies lies. they are 100% calumny. i have built up a shimmering, sprawling golden city of credibility in the past few months, and this morning i have seen it spattered with pigeon shit. normally i love my job at monolithic educational publisher, just because it is so blissfully boring and droid-like, and also my boss does not call me at 10pm on a saturday and demand to know what i’m doing outside of work, and then there also isn’t the thing where i’m working to provide fawning, obsequious coverage of the fat, self-satisfied hyper-rich and in so doing, glorifying an appalling element of our society, and also the pay is double what i used to make. actually i guess i still love my job.

here’s the point: i responded to your goddamned email, coworker. i even sent you a spreadsheet. it was sleek and legible, and it represented the conversion of your spittle-encrusted half-truths and irrelevancies into a thing of beauty and sense. i can’t believe you didn’t read the spreadsheet. i also don’t understand why a person would use five different fonts in a single email, especially when three of them are larger than the entire screen.

um. here, read about these movies i saw recently. most of them have been out for a while. great.
paprika
director: satoshi kon
synopsis: a team of scientists has created a magical device, the “dc mini,” that causes a parade of refrigerators to march through tokyo every time a person puts it on their head. somehow, this is dangerous.
payoff: as you walk out of the theater, you get to loudly ask, “why didn’t they just start out with the normal-size dc? why’d they skip straight to the mini?” then, when someone responds to you, you can make a farting noise at them with your mouth. punk’d, you earnest dickheads. you just got punk’d.
helps alleviate depression? while visually stunning, this movie does not help alleviate depression.

the bourne identity
director: i forget
synopsis: finally, an action movie that wasn’t written by cretins. jason bourne fends off assassins in europe and makes out with his own sister. nice!
payoff: seriously, franka potente looks like matt damon’s sister. actually, let’s be honest: franka potente looks like matt damon’s brother. SNAP. relatedly, maybe i don’t want to go back to germany after all.
helps alleviate depression? somewhat.

the triplets of belleville
director: french
synopsis: ?!?!?!
payoff: the animation for this movie was terrific. however, the theme song has now been stuck in my head for three days, and it’s not even in a language i understand.
helps alleviate depression? i need a drink.

white men can’t jump
director: provocative
synopsis: woody harrelson is annoying, but rosie perez is probably more annoying.
payoff: EVERYONE IN THE 90s HAD AWFUL CLOTHES. jesus. i had somehow forgotten that back in high school, ALL CLOTHES WERE FLUORESCENT. what a nightmare.
helps alleviate depression? thank god people aren’t dressed like that anymore. thank god.

happy nationalism.

puppy rabbit: now with assassins

2007-06-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

new story on puppy rabbit a short fiction blog, this time about a lonely, lonely assassin. you'd be an idiot not to read it!

don't forget to come to our show tonight. 9pm sharp, harpers ferry.

graduation, pirates

2007-06-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

girlfriend and i took a three-day weekend; specifically, to go to pittsburgh; more specifically, to watch my little sister graduate from the family disadvantaged urban public school in a hockey arena. older sister went there, i went there, and now little sister has gone there, and all of us managed to do so without acquiring the gout. the speaker was a local politician named The Honorable Joseph Wheatley, and older sister, who works in city government, asserts that he is a good man. the speech, however, left much to be desired. here were his talking points:

1. welcome to the struggle.
2. you got to love yourself.

the first point, i have no problem with, especially because i was pretending that he meant "welcome to the struggle of the worker class against the tyrannical concentration of wealth that has become the hallmark of 21st-century american life." or, failing that, "welcome to the snuggle." welcome to the snuggle would be an incredible theme for a high school graduation speech. "class snuggle." "life and death snuggle." holy fuck, this is the greatest idea i have ever had.

anyway, it transpired that he was using the second point to mean, roughly, "don't do stupid things that are not in your interest, like committing a felony." if you examine this idea closely, you will conclude that it is somewhat different from "love yourself." it's like: adolescents can stand to love themselves way, way less. at least, the ones that are not clinically depressed and have slash marks on their arms. hmmm. well, whatever.

another speaker, who had an interesting trick of putting most of the microphone inside her mouth and then SHOUTING AT FULL VOLUME, went on at length about how she was on track not to graduate high school, was hanging out with the bad kids, had terrible grades, etc., and eventually turned it around and become some sort of successful and loud entrepreneur. kids like that are the ones who need our help, she seemed to be saying. but then she turned around and gave a $1k scholarship to the school's three valedictorians, all of whom were white and, somewhat conspicuously, not from any kind of disenfranchised background. example: one of them is my little sister, who is going to vassar and--to be perfectly frank--does not really need any financial help in doing so. it's great, yeah, but i still feel we should give it back. of course, every time i suggested that, my dad emitted a loud, bitter, barking laugh, and then counter-suggested that i owe him $148,000. ha. i'd like to see him try and claim that! i guess maybe if you harvested my organs you could come close. fuck, i hope dad isn't reading this.

sunday we also saw the pirates play in their new beautiful stadium, and incredibly, the pirates won. then today i had a very stressful day at work. also this short story i'm working on is taking longer than expected. also hurra kam rada has a gig at harpers ferry, thursday, 9pm SHARP. we're the opener's opener, which means that we have twenty-five minutes and the headlining act gets to pee on us during our set if they want. psych!!! we have about forty-five minutes.

i have no idea why we agreed to that.

hurra kam rada, harpers ferry, thursday, 9pm. we're opening with a nirvana cover. if you don't come, i hate you.

american childhood revisited

2007-06-10T17:31:00.000-07:00

i never learned how to drive. you probably already know this. grew up in the city, was too busy in high school, no motivation, cannot see in depth, etc. no idea how to drive a car. but recently, and for reasons i do not fully understand, girlfriend has become dissatisfied with this state of affairs.

girlfriend, gaily, one day last week, with a cunning glint in her eye that i have learned to mistrust: hey! let's tag along with matt to the burlington mall this weekend and get you some legos.

this of course was far too good to be true.

girlfriend: star wars legos. mmmm!

you're trying to kill me, i thought. i knew this day would come to pass. but i didn't know it would be this soon.

girlfriend, aggrieved: i'm not trying to kill you. what the fuck do you mean, you knew this day would come to pass.
me: HOLY SHIT YOU CAN READ MINDS.
girlfriend: YOU MOVE YOUR LIPS WHEN YOU THINK. WE HAVE THIS FUCKING CONVERSATION EVERY DAY. YOU MOVE YOUR LIPS WHEN YOU THINK, AND IT MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A MORON.

anyway, legos won the day, because star wars legos are the shit. but then it turns out there was a condition.

girlfriend, brightly: first we're gonna teach you how to drive for an hour!

holy hell. we had a parking lot that was mostly empty, but after our first few lurching circuits, an AAA truck pulled into a corner and just sat there watching us. i swear i am not making that up. anyway, i learned that you always accelerate coming out of turns, never ever hit the thingy, and another thing about parking that i forget. also, you're not allowed to chase the seagull, and had there been cars in the parking lot i would have hit at least forty.

so that made up, in tiny part, for the quintessential american teenagerhood that i missed by not living in the suburbs. so too did a lengthy stay at the mall, where in addition to legos we purchased some sort of woman-garment and tickets to a viewing of "ocean's 13," because few things delight girlfriend and me as much as a caper. also we went to cheesecake factory, so that girlfriend could have a strawberry lemonade costing an ungodly $4.25. there were free refills, but, i mean, jesus.

well, i have to go. there's a good short story coming up soon on puppy rabbit. it's about murderers!

scato-illogical

2007-06-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

me: oh! hello.
other guy: hello!
me: i was wondering if i could defecate on this thing that you’ve just been patiently scrubbing.
other guy: by all means! i’ll just go scrub this other thing and probably listen to you.

not to be unnecessarily disgusting, but what is the protocol for when you find a cleaning guy in the office bathroom? it’s not a private bathroom, it’s this big glossy airport-esque thing, and there was at least one other stall occupied. plus the cleaning guy, with a big cart and various supplies appended to it. he was cleaning the sink and humming merrily to himself. meanwhile, the toilets had all clearly just been cleaned.

so i had a dilemma. on the one hand, i could just turn and walk out. but that felt wrong to me. i felt that gesture was akin to denying the existence of the cleaning guy, when in fact his existence is often critical to my happiness and that of those around me. plus i didn’t want him to get the impression that i was thinking, “oh no! the cleaning guy cleans toilets all the time! i certainly don’t want to hang out around him. he probably has a kind of horrible fetish.”

so then i found myself in the position of, paradoxically, respecting the cleaning guy by using one of the toilets he had just cleaned, definitely within his earshot. obviously, that sucked. like the sensitive and discreet man i'm sure he is, he left at some point, but still. we all know he had no illusions about what i was doing in there. i feel very uncreative saying this, but what an awful job that must be. at least sisyphus didn’t have to listen as other people knocked his boulder back down the hill by defecating on it.

today: not the busiest day of work for me.

important enough to get its own blog entry

2007-06-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

jonathan safran foer. where do i begin. first of all, some context is important:

1. if you have a book deal, i hate you. this really cannot be overstated, when it comes to my opinions of authors. death mitigates this hatred somewhat—as hard as i sometimes try, it's tough to get all that mad at anthony trollope—but when we are talking about an author who is still alive, and especially alive and sort of young, the fact is that they have a book deal and i do not. for this, i would love to chew off their skin with my molars.

2. if your first book was about the holocaust, it's like: come on. how the fuck hard is it to write something poignant and emotionally fraught about the goddamned holocaust. i think there should be a moratorium, frankly. there's been a whole fuckload of fiction about the holocaust. why? because it's an incredibly compelling subject. if you had any balls at all you wouldn't need to write about it.

3. i can't believe you got to the bad-translation humor thing before i did, you schmuck. okay. so, obviously, it's immature and weird to lay claim to an idea in humor that is out there for anyone to use. fine. still, ask anyone who knew me prior to whenever your book came out. i was perfecting that way before your ukrainian ass-hat stole the shit out of my thunder and used it to write the bestselling novel that by all rights should have been written by me. it was mine. my novel. my recognition. my not-needing-to-have-another-job, jonathan safran whoer.

that's right. i went there. you cock.

anyway, Beer, i haven't read Extremely Long and Incredibly Gimmicky, and i thought Everything is Illuminated was very good. but the whole time i was reading it, i was like, "i could have totally written this ARGGGH." so that impeded my enjoyment somewhat. (addendum: the part of the book that was excerpts from the jewish Book of Whining: okay, maybe i couldn't have written that. that is because it sucked.)

it's hard out here for an aspiring non-linear novelist. especially when your ideas keep being retroactively had by other people.

also: hi daniel! it makes me happy to think that you're still in japan.

the english-language equivalent of how an email i sent to my future german flatmate was in all likelihood interpreted

2007-05-31T18:10:00.000-07:00

Dear most excellent and honourable Man-Friend--

I am aware, you are in possession of a Woman-Friend, its name is Jane. I too possess this Woman-Friend, and we have never been in sex. This is a joke!! But serious, for I have never violated her.

In every event, you have rooms, I will buy a room. She may be small and loud, I do not have needs. You will not need to give me to directions of a Gum-Candy-Bear-House, I am increbably [sic] knowledge of City-Bears. You will find me there every Day!, eating Coffee-Bear and Bear-Berry like a fat fuck. In additions, the Falafel-serving Iraqis of Berlin are known to me, and I shall un-troduce [sic] you to their Friendness. (Or Hate!!! You will remember, I am jerk-cultured.)

I am in Berlin for mainly to create a Roman. I will not give you details of it, okay you have made me convinced! (This is additionally a JOKE!) It is the story of an incest, also the mysteries of Magic-Disappearance-Children, a notion I have un-vented [sic]. Perhaps I shall tell you excerpts every evening, in the condition that you create a dinner. (Less of a Joke.)

Never speak me English. It is not question, it is an urgency.

Lust,
Jesse

strategies v. tactics

2007-05-21T17:58:00.000-07:00

boss: omg omg
me:
boss: we were supposed to post the beasley and cheeseman files to the adopter LAST FRIDAY. i've got the second-in-command of sales breathing down my neck, and we all look TERRIBLE right now. jesse.
me: marcia.
boss: i am counting on you here. can you coordinate with production to get the pre-final to RML before it reaches the field?
me:
boss: i need you to go into CTMS--i mean get the TIDs out of UOPS, or HEPM, or whatever--and i need you to fudge the class date.
me: uhhhh.
boss: i am trusting you on this one. fudge the class date. GO.
me:
boss:
me: borrr.
boss:
me: borgle.

the problem here is that you basically understand no less of the above than i did, and for that matter still do. a girl at work with some kind of absurdly specialized job resigned at the end of last week, and while in theory i was trained to replace her, in practice the everyday execution of her job is a thing that mystifies me more than pretty much anything i have ever encountered. here are things i understand way better than this job:

- quantum mechanics
- my dad's theory that there is a gang of web-savvy criminals out there who are hell-bent on stealing his specific identity, and also ruining the gutters of his house and teaching his graduate students that it is okay to write entire chapters of their dissertation the night before they are due
- futures markets
- the writings of michel de certeau

boss: jesse. when you get a moment, i'd love to brainstorm some strategies with you on how to streamline the perms-zero process with rights.
me:
boss: you know, just... some strategies for moving forward.
me: in the formulation of michel de certeau, marcia, the strategist marshals space against time, whereas the tactician marshals time against
boss: that's great.
me: [hissing]
boss: so some strategies for
me: WHAT THE TACTICIAN WINS, HE MAY NOT KEEP.

the specialization of this job specifically enables it to process a high volume of a certain kind of order at what is a non-leisurely rate of speed. that is what i learned today. perhaps tomorrow i shall learn how that is possible. also accomplished today: many emails, and disproportionate sweating. complicating things was the fact that we moved offices over the weekend, and so everyone in the company is completely a-dither. they are bad at tactical living, my coworkers. they rely on fortifications and inherited power. i will overthrow their stagnating system, and i will leave nothing in its place. this of course is if i am not swiftly fired.

girlfriend now works on the same floor as me. we hung out a lot. she tried to make me a "flavia mocha," which is not the incredible hard-core euphemism that it could be. it is a beverage that requires little chocolate packets that we do not, technically, at our new office, have.

which is to say: she failed.

boston marathon of international sandwiches: sam lagrassa's

2007-05-12T12:13:00.000-07:00

thought experiment time, bitches: imagine you are, let's say, a corgi. now imagine you have set up shop next to a whole bunch of kittens. these are perhaps the most frolicksome, purriest kittens you have ever seen in your life. the girl kittens have little pink bows, and one of the boy kittens is perched on top of a fire engine. he is swatting at a butterfly, for god's sake. now let us presume you put up a sign, referring to yourself, that says,

WORLD'S CUDDLIEST ANIMAL

i mean, no. no fucking way. what is your justification? is it hubris? perversity? a desperate marketing ploy? are you gambling that passersby will read the promise of something unfathomable in the astonishing temerity of your sign? is it a bluff, in other words? or is it a blind, ridiculous, almost solipsistic faith in your own coarse, short-haired, musty-smelling product?

these are the problematics introduced by sam lagrassa's world's #1 sandwiches, a largeish old-timey lunch counter two doors down from chacarero. every time girlfriend and i go to chacarero, we pass the facade of sam lagrassa's, which in its very title purports to have not only the best sandwiches in boston, but in the world. its logo depicts a sleepy-eyed, happy little bowler-hatted capitalist squeezing a sandwich comprised solely of:

1) meat
2) bread

from the very beginning, then, lagrassa is broadcasting his brazenness. surely the best sandwich in the entire goddamned world contains more than meat and bread. the pedigree is probably best classified as anglophone-atlantic/weird antique deli. the establishment's 39-year-old decor hopes to recall boston or dublin in the 19th century, but like any high-capitalist enterprise, its semiotics are fraudulent except where they connote an emotionless, mechanical greed.

the most important part: the most important part is that it is a lunch counter, meaning that one is guaranteed some kind of communal experience, even if it is probably with the sort of stripey-tied buzz-cutted brawny white men that seems to be boston's specialty, in the way that the frothing mastication and bodily dissolution of the ideals of human dignity are the specialty of the free-market economy.

i paid almost twelve dollars, and here's what i got:

wheat roll
admittedly, a fair amount of corned beef
mustard but only because i asked for it
about twelve or thirteen irish-style fries
half a pickle

i mean, it was kind of tasty, but in that greasy dehydrating pub-food way. which is to say, moderately good while eating it, and then afterwards you feel like some sort of grievous offense has been perpetrated against your organs. put another way: i willingly forewent the last few bites of sandwich. i left it on my plate, along with a post-it on which i had scrawled an arrow and the words, "INDICTMENT OF ADAM SMITH." next to that, i drew a crude ejaculating phallus, for emphasis.

it turns out you can get more stuff than beef and bread, but you have to pay extra for it, and fuck that. one of the alternatives to corned beef is a thing entitled "chipotle pastrami," which is to me the kind of portmanteau that emphasizes the worst about american mid-market eating, and if that insight caused you to smack your forehead and cry, "GOD THAT'S SO TRUE," then you are probably gonna LOVE a blog entry i have planned. it will be entitled, "t.g.i. DIE-days."

eating experience: you walk in and immediately you are in a very short line and a man is confronting you about what sandwich you want. he has a knife, and respects only profit.

"um," you say. "corned beef on wheat? i dunno."

clutching a tray, you are then shunted through a line, and your willpower betrays you when it is time to decline an order of fries. it confuses them greatly if you have brought your own beverage.

there are many tables, but you can also eat standing up in a weirdly spare little annex with mirrored walls. everywhere, chewing faces confront your gaze. you are listening to classic rock, and there is a 30% chance it is U2. your fingers glisten. they have become strange to you.

they are the fingers of the Other.

size and cost: the sandwich is moderately sized, but dense. it also costs $8. IT'S BEEF ON A GODDAMNED ROLL.

how i found it: probably satan.

in the mirrored halls of meat shall you know this: as you eat the sandwich, you are in turn being eaten. as your body processes it, the free market is in turn processing you. for your part, you are in discomfort. the lipids and the carbohydrates are struggling against your body's efforts to assimilate them. many of them are succeeding. they are lurking in your system. they are waiting for the opportunity to bring you to your knees. you can only hope to rebel as effectively.

viva el chacarero.

33% puppy rabbit expansion

2007-05-07T17:43:00.000-07:00

sandwich review coming soon, hopefully. meanwhile, please mack on this sandwich in prose form.

in other news, i have discovered my new favorite tv show. if you don't like it, you can find another one.

damn.

post-athletic world

2007-05-01T18:07:00.000-07:00

with my newfound lung capacity, i have made a practice of swimming again, twice a week, with girlfriend. i am much, much faster than girlfriend, whose technique is definitely aerobic but not so much designed for speed. nonetheless, i am a far cry from the me of yesteryear (yesteryear = 2000; good fuck, i am old), who would not hesitate to remind you that he was the co-captain and, weirdly, co-coach of his high school team, and had been for three years running. however, that person also had a terrible haircut and no blog, let alone four different hoodies, so i’m not saying i would trade places with him. also, despite what he would tell you, he had never had sex ever, nor would he for quite some time. eat it, you young lying piece of garbage.

[sidenote: if you and i have ever done any substantial drinking, first, god help you, but second, you are probably acquainted with A Story of Incredible Injustice Perpetrated by High School Referees. oh, man. remember that? remember when it took me an hour and a half to tell you that story? that was the abridged version. the real version has way more editorializing. i mean it was a fucking DRAG SUIT. it gave me NO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE WHATSOEVER. i feel my heart rate spiking just WRITING about this bullshit.]

[damn.]

anyway. seeing as i was last on a swim team almost seven years ago, this isn’t the first time i’ve resumed swimming after hiatus. but it’s the first time i’ve done so without any illusions as to what i’m trying to achieve. i used to enter the pool planning to do one of the complex and rigorous workouts from my high school days, then get upset when i couldn’t. back then, the point was to get back into competitive shape. in retrospect, obviously, this seems absurd. now, i don’t remotely care about being able to compete. my current goals are instead both much more attainable and much more satisfying:

- regain biggish muscles
- release endorphins, thereby justifying frequent loud remarks denoting self-satisfaction
- shame girlfriend

regarding the first: i am skinny enough that any muscles look big, so that’s not hard. regarding the second: this has always been the point of exercise. always. the health is an afterthought; the dumbly ecstatic feeling of superiority to all people is the goal. fact: if you exercise even moderately hard on a semiregular basis, you will afterwards be loud, joyous, and completely obnoxious to all around you. my workout now looks like this:

1. swim 20 laps at pace sufficient to shame girlfriend
2. sporadic laps of butterfly, interspersed among lengthy periods of stretching and wiping condensation from goggles

the only reason you do butterfly is to demonstrate that you are fucking nuts. nuts slash awesome. butterfly is the Empowerment Stroke. doing butterfly is like saying, “i am the jesus of this pool, and you had better not fucking get in my way.”

damn.

(days until berlin: 93.)

emancipation

2007-04-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

date
Apr 24, 2007 10:55 AM

subject
go go go go go go go go

mailed-by
gmail.com

hi jane--

the decision has been made. berlin it is. bring it. bring on the WG apartment, if that's still an option. bring it to me. august 1-august 31. the germans are hencewith invited to compose an email and send it to this guy: [points at self]

god, it'll be nice to be back. it'll probably be incredibly hot, come to think of it. hmmm. does the WG have A/C? i guess i don't really need that. you know what: fuck it. i don't even WANT A/C. i want HEATING. doesn't matter. just get me the fuck out of boston.

boston is a hole.

after a month in berlin, i will take a week to travel in some part of europe i've never seen. probably poland, possibly lithuania. that week will kick some ass. believe it. draw some shit, write a thing. la la la. befriend some people i probably wouldn't like if i spoke their language fluently. befriend a backpacker, possibly pour honey all over their clothing and flee silently into the night. serves you right, backpacker! shouldn't have talked to anyone on the train. stupid, stupid, stupid.

my to-do list is composed largely of foods and beer. falafel, gummi bears, a veritable fuckload of pilsener. is the weinerei still open? you'd better believe i'm going there fuck-near EVERY NIGHT. you can come too. it'll be on me!

today is kind of a slow day at work so far.

j

emails that it turns out literary agents do not respond to, vol. 1

2007-04-17T16:30:00.000-07:00

dear [literary agency]--

let us pretend that you are a temperamental, finicky vending maching that every now and again dispenses delicious sandwiches. me, i am a sandwich aficionado. i have inserted a quarter into the vending machine, and to help the analogy, i should note that i got the quarter from a nearby bucket of quarters with a sticker on it that says "INTERNET."

the sandwiches in the machine have not budged.

in this email, i am gently jiggling the machine a little bit to see if it is going to dispense a sandwich, or what.

(i have been waiting for much of my young life for a sandwich. i have heard they are exceptional.)

p.s. "sandwich" = "representation to publisher and entree to literary world"

p.p.s. non-metaphorical sandwiches are also terrific

boston marathon of international sandwiches: lu's sandwich shop

2007-04-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

today's sandwich (banh mi again) comes from lu's sandwich shop. literally located in a jewelry store, lu's certainly qualifies as a "hidden gem"!!! HARRR!!!!?!?

i'm sorry, that sucked. i regret doing that to you. i've been reading user-written food reviews online for about fifteen minutes now, and it's one of the worst literary experiences i've ever had. reviews are already a genre so fraught with cliches; introducing it to amateurs has resulted in a semi-apocalypse of unbearably canned (yet creatively awful) writing. "hidden gem" now googles out to nearly a million hits.

anyway, lu's really is wedged into the back of a jewelry store, which makes for an incredibly strange ambience. for example, there seems to be no room for a kitchen. where does the meat come from?, you might wonder. is it even legal to have a restaurant that seems to have no source of running water? however, in chinatown, one learns not to ask questions. the sandwich is $2.50, it's big, and by god, it tastes pretty good.

the signs are few and spartan: one explains that there are five variations on the same sandwich (cold cuts, chicken, beef, pork, tofu); another advertises various flavors of bubble tea (again, it is completely unclear where the ingredients for that could be stored); a third advertises a very tempting "buy 10, get one free" deal.

lu's is on the opposite side of the block from new saigon sandwich, and is definitely the runner-up of the two in many categories.

location: overlooking fetid alley
clientele: infrequent
can play music? no
person operating cash register is distinct from person making sandwich? no

but lu's is absolutely, one hundred percent the winner in one critical event:

food is cooked all the way before served to you? YES

the most important part: the most important part is that your chicken or beef sandwich will not have any raw purple gummy things in it. girlfriend and i have had chicken, beef, and pork banh mi, and while the pork one was a bit strange (drenched in a sickly sweet, peppery sauce, and kind of ground up like gefilte fish), they certainly did not make us want to throw up. the beef one i had today had moments of excellence, scattered among moments of perfectly tolerable mediocrity. lu's overdoes it, perhaps, with the pate/butter thing that is slathered onto the bread, and whatever they're doing with the pork is a mistake. it seems time-consuming, and lord knows it does not taste all that good. but the cilantro is crisp, the carrots are crunchy, and the bread—a flaky, airy paragon of a baguette—will make the girl/woman in your life go all knock-kneed and mumbly. women love carbohydrates. they can't help it.

eating experience: well, if you wanted to be a dick, you could eat your sandwich in the jewelry store and get crumbs all over everything. or you could just wander the streets of chinatown and eat your sandwich right out of the bag, just like two or three emaciated asian men we saw. you'll fit right in!

there will definitely be crumbs. prepare for that. is the sandwich dripping? it is? perhaps that is because YOU ORDERED THE PORK, you dithering cockweed. don't come crying to ME.

size and cost: $2.50 will buy you a good-sized lunch, but why stop there when you can get 11 for the price of 10?! think about it! that's $25—a plausible lunch price in many boston establishments—and it will allow you to put eight or nine homeless people forever in your debt as you make your merry way back home. one day, you shall call upon them to repay that debt.

and make no mistake: they shall repay it.

they shall fight for you. they shall die for you. they shall cut down your enemy's armies in the streets like corn in the fields, and they shall scream your name to the trembling heavens with their last bloodgurgling breath.

homeless people are awesome.

how i found it: just by wandering around chinatown. n.b.: you can find a lot of disturbing shit by doing that. but you can also find a mediocre-to-decent sandwich place in the back of a jewelry store! okay.

today actually was the boston marathon: can you imagine running in this?! ha ha! jesus.

lu's is blander than new saigon sandwich. sometimes, that is a good thing. 6.5.

in depth

2007-04-09T16:58:00.000-07:00

our family eye doctor, when i was a child, was a criminal. probably not the kind of criminal you are hoping for--she was not the interesting kind of eye doctor criminal who lures her prey into a perverse carnival funhouse, where they stumble their way through an ever-complexifying series of optical illusions, eventually falling into a pit containing the Tasmanian Retina Viper, who then feasts upon their retinas.

no, our eye doctor was a criminal in the sense that she was incredibly incompetent, and failed to notice for the first fourteen years of my life that i do not see out of my right eye and hence have no depth perception. she failed to ascertain this despite my otherwise inexplicably woeful track record in the sport of baseball, which i was fairly sure i liked playing except that (when batting) i had no idea when to swing at the ball and (when fielding) i kept getting injured via baseball-to-the-face.

me, in piping child's voice: i'm really not sure how people know when to swing.
dad, cheerfully: just keep your eye on the ball! by seeing it with your eyes, you will know when it is close enough to hit with the bat!!
me: okay!
ball, against fence of batting cage: clang!
[ten-second pause]
me: swing!!!
dad:
me:
dad: well! great job. that was a... that was a "fence-rule double." you hit a double! why don't you go field some grounders.

but fielding was even worse.

dad: here it comes!!
ball on bat: thwock!
me: [determined peering in direction of ball]
dad: er, you might want to
ball, suddenly: whomp in the face!!!
dad:
me: OW FUCK
dad: uh... please don't tell mom about this.
mom: I'M RIGHT HERE.
dad: ha ha! oh dear.
mom: WHY DO YOU KEEP ALLOWING HIM TO DO THIS TO HIMSELF.

long story short: 24 years into my life, i have finally acquired my first pair of glasses. nobody told me the world was so detailed! and having things that are clearly behind other things even when you're not moving your head! and... headachey! ow.

our show went well. i don't have pics yet. will soon.

boston marathon of international sandwiches: new saigon sandwich

2007-04-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

today we will examine one of several boston banh mi establishments: new saigon sandwich.

new saigon sandwich offers very, very inexpensive sandwiches assembled at frightening speed, and nevertheless the chinese mcdonald's three doors down the street seems to do a bustling trade. the mcdonald's is chinese by virtue of the chinese-character messages it displays in its windows, and also by its location on the fringe of chinatown. it is a mcdonald's by virtue of its menu of fats and poisons.

banh mi is a baguette sandwich endemic to vietnam, which is the home of one-quarter of my people. (dad? i think it's time the world knew the truth.) like so many international sandwiches, it features a variety of meats including "beef" and "chicken," generally in the grilled form. banh mi is made distinctive by a special sweet/peppery glaze-like concoction spooned hastily onto the bread; the concoction consists largely of fish sauce, that famous southeast asian condiment that smells, in the colorful words of Let's Go Vietnam 2005 researcher-writer danny koski-karell, like "sweaty butt." it smells totally loathsome. but it tastes great! listen carefully: it is the sound of your western paradigm chipping and shattering against the ancient contradictions of the East.

banh mi (pron. "bong me," and stop your giggling, you stoner twat) also contains strips of vegetal crunchy things, such as "daikon" (a pickled radish), cucumber, carrot, scallions, and onion. finally, there is a lot of cilantro, which is a problem if you are my present-day girlfriend, because to you cilantro tastes like soap. to me, it tastes like the leaves of the heaven-tree, so i'm all set.

the most important part: without a doubt, the most important part is that you can buy a biggish sandwich for $2.50, and it's not made out of oily probably-carcinogenic over-sugared and -salted post-cow product, festooned with desiccated quasi-lettuce and some horrible red-dyed en-fattened ooze, and you're not tempted into buying potato strips cooked in the fat of the wretched of this earth, plus some bullshit 8-cent drink that bumps your fucking meal up to $6.87, so when they tout how cheap their fucking macburger is, you can track down ray kroc's kids and, when they're not looking, windmill your elbows into their face and junk.

the sandwich is good, although not as delicious as some that i've had. the best banh mi is a thousand ephemeral things: flaky, chewy, crunchy, salty, sweet, full-flavored yet possessed of an indescribable lightness. i had a few like that in pittsburgh. incidentally, the pirates are 2-0 so far.

[note to girlfriend: don't read this next paragraph. just skip it. i am fairly sure reading it will make you want to throw up.]

new saigon sandwich is perfectly fine, but like many vietnamese purveyors of food they believe you will enjoy your meat undercooked, and while this would be advantageous for the portion of their clientele without any teeth, it is also sort of gross. girlfriend and i had chicken sandwiches once that were purple and gummy and made her almost throw up. the chicken was basically raw, and also it had a bunch of weird stringy shit on it. don't get me wrong—i recognize authenticity when i see it, and things do not get much more authentic than misshapen hunks of uncooked chicken breast and tendon that are supposed to go in your mouth—but to this day, she can't even think about that without getting nauseated and snappish. also, while i'm writing things that girlfriend is unlikely to read: i'm having an affair with like twenty different people right now. just wanted to brag!

word to the wise: go for the cold cuts or pork. the strips of pork they have are dry but tasty, and they have definitely been cooked sufficiently. not like the chicken. i mean, jesus.

eating experience: new saigon sandwich is a tiny little place and there's nowhere to eat, but if you have a five-minute walk back to work and a gigantic mouth, as i do, you will have no difficulty eating it en route. the benches of nearby boston common are also reasonable places to eat a sandwich.

banh mi is a clean-eating sandwich, which endears it to me, and there is no cheese, which makes me the happiest man in america. cheese is fine, sometimes. mostly, i hate it. on the chacarero, i understand that it needs to be there, but i will always view it as a necessary evil. let us not forget that cheese is basically decay. the bacteria that feed upon the dead. that's what you're putting in your mouth.

the baguette is crumbly, and you will probably get some crumbs on you, perhaps even in your hair. check yourself out in the mirror before you return to your desk. this is a good rule for life.

size and cost: a biggish sandwich costs you $2.50, so i always think, "maybe i should get two." always, always a source of regret. one sandwich is a perfectly good meal. two sandwiches are an idiotic undertaking. save one for later, maybe. or you could just be satisfied with paying $2.50 for a good meal and move on. just because you're not in pain doesn't mean you're not full, american. for once in your life, look past your bullshit constipated economist's obsession with maximizing value. it's a cheap, delicious sandwich. not everything is quantifiable.

how i found it: marie again. hi marie!

taxonomy: there are in the culinary world great foods and lesser foods, and there is a place for the great practitioners of the lesser foods, and there is as well a place for the lesser practitioners of the great foods. new saigon sandwich is fine but not terrific. i feel as though one can do better. there are rumors of great things in this city.

-----------___--_---------

my band is playing bill's bar tomorrow (thursday) night. opening act goes on at 10, we go on circa 11:30. come out and see us! best show yet. brand-new songs. buy me alcohol.

also: do you know of an apartment in berlin/warsaw/krakow/[european city] i can rent this august? just in august? for kind of cheap? explain.

why on earth do you have a stapler

2007-03-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

i was going to begin this one with a casual, "so girlfriend and i were watching bridget jones ii: revenge of the acutely embarrassing public incident on sunday," but then i would have had to punch myself in the junk, so first, please review these extenuating circumstances like the alacrity-demonstrating bitches i know you all to be.

during commercials, we switched to college basketball. unc! georgetown!! an OT thriller of historic proportions! i'm pretty sure georgetown won, and i'm pretty sure they were the team without Snaggletooth The Rangy White Guy. his teeth were incredibly snaggly.
i was watching it ironically. also to gather data for some almost unbearably witty-yet-insightful observations on How Men and Women Are Different.
hugh grant is the biggest pimp of all time. hugh grant is so fucking smooth, it's insane. whether he's doing his self-effacing mumbly dash-it-all,-what-an-enduring-ponce-i-seem-to-be schtick ("love actually") or his witty half-grinning smoothasaurus-rex keeps-saying-witty-things thingy ("bridget jones"), he is the fucking charmingest shit around. it's completely fucking bonkers. he is everything i aspire to be. sorry, dad. if you were more like hugh grant, i would be saying this about you. (p.s.: just kidding! um, while i'm addressing you, i gotta come out and say it: i love you and i need some more money. like, a lot more. let's just say this: the mob has just made their first appearance in the proverbial made-for-TV movie about my life i like to call, simply, "Debt.")

okay, so we were watching bridget jones. and there was something not quite right about it. and then it hit me.

"wait a minute," i said aloud.

so we waited for about a minute.

"bridget jones weighs like 280 pounds," i said. "and whenever she's stoked about something, she makes this scrunched-up face that is incredibly unattractive."

"um, yeah," responded girlfriend.

"like, a face i normally associate with sudden-onset incontinence," i said. "if that face were a person, it would be one of the lunchladies at my high school."

"yeah," said girlfriend, "because--"

"the surly one," i added. "that is not a compliment."

"but," said girlfriend, "you have to--"

"it looks like the face you would make if you had accidentally stapled your underwear to yourself," i said, because i was seriously on a roll. "like, stapled to your junk. because you have a tiny, tiny brain that is bumbling and cries a lot. why the fuck did anyone give you a stapler."

"wait--why the fuck does one have a stapler, or why the fuck do i have a stapler," said girlfriend, a sudden steely menace entering her voice.

"one!" i cried. "fuck. like, the indefinite third-person pronoun."

anyway, i had some trouble swallowing the absurd fantasy that bridget jones, objectively an okay-but-not-great-looking person and something of a moron, has both colin firth (stodgy, yes, but also the all-time Duke of Smouldervania) and hugh goddamned grant falling all over themselves to get with that. please. girlfriend says, "it's because she makes their lives interesting." i say: no WONDER this franchise is such a ginormous success. there are MILLIONS of women out there who would LOVE for this insane fantasy to be possible. good god. it's no wonder they lap this stuff right up. when, in fact, a man obviously doesn't need to be involved with a bumbling squinchy-mouthed pregnant-looking renee zellweger for his life to be interesting. he could instead make it his choice to live on a poisonous free-range spider farm. he could also attempt to go through life without using his elbows. bridget jones, don't be absurd.

then, of course, i realized that the inversion of the above--not-great-looking, kind-of-an-ass guy has attractive women falling all over him--is in fact the subject of every movie that guys are expected to watch.

and then i giggled.

*****

i don't know why our music video is not on ralphrocks.com. to that end, i have made many phone calls, and will make many more. meanwhile, we have a show at bill's bar a week from thursday (april 5). i have to go rehearse for it. okay bye.

music video

2007-03-22T17:21:00.001-07:00

this video here was my weekend. enjoy it. vote for it once it appears on ralphrocks.com, which it hasn't yet, which means ralphrocks.com is about fifteen minutes away from a barrage of unctuous yet vaguely hostile emails from this guy.

in other news, i've somehow created two british-style crosswords in the past week or so. i have about as much idea of how this happened as you do. nonetheless, if you like british-style crosswords, i'd be happy to send you mine. email me.

that's all i got. sandwich review upcoming soon.

boston marathon of international sandwiches: chacarero

2007-03-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

today we will examine the chacarero, a sandwich vended by actual chileans at a place called "chacarero" near park street.

[this is the first in a feature i've been meaning to start: Boston Marathon of International Sandwiches, which would be entries in which i eat a sandwich of foreign origin and then tell its mouthwatering story. also, how depressingly formulaic is this blog threatening to become right now? here's what i say to that: YESSSS. FORMULAS MAKE IT SO EASY TO WRITE. YES GOD YES. I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF DIRECTING AND PRODUCING A MUSIC VIDEO AND HAVE TIME TO WRITE THIS ONLY WHILE ON THE BUS.]

at any rate. when our spirits need fortifying--when it has been a long morning of grueling editorial work (girlfriend) and genial socializing with passersby (me) at [NAMELESS CORPORATE EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHER WHICH HAS ALREADY AWARDED ME A FREE IPOD SHUFFLE WHICH I HAVE NAMED "SHUFFLE-UPAGUS"]--girlfriend and i reward ourselves with a lunch of rare deliciousness. that lunch is the chacarero. then, after lunch, we indulge ourselves in a traditional chilean recreación. that recreación is furtively setting minesweeper records on people's computers while they are in a meeting or the bathroom. "who is the 'chilean sandwich-viper,' and how the hell did he complete 'expert' in under 80 seconds," is a common despairing refrain heard on the sixth floor.

the most important part: the key to the chacarero, first, is the bread. the chileans make their bread fresh every morning, or so goes the legend. it is a fluffy bread, with a buttery, insubstantial crust. all women love this bread. girlfriend gets a faraway, wet-eyed expression when we talk about that bread. my coworker "norlene" was also effusive about it. if you are wooing a woman, claim to be able to make this bread, and she will be like unto putty. putty that fucking adores carbohydrates.

okay. so then, they add some juicy, wholesome-looking slabs of chicken/steak (word to the wise: do not fuck around with "bbq" flavor--it's okay, but sort of distracting and overall not worth the extra 55 cents); then, slices of munster, a good inoffensive cheese; then, a creamy green jalapeno sauce, or habanero for men with cojones (spanish for "penises"). then, a slice or two of tomato. this, i believe, is the real key to the chacarero. fuck what i said about the bread. the tomato is unassuming and generic, but i don't see the other ingredients succeeding without it. i just don't. it adds this wet fleshiness that is so, so essential to the chacarero. in the bill simmons lexicon, the tomato is shane battier. it's the glue guy.

then, they put some salt and pepper on top of the tomato, and actually, that's probably even more important. suddenly, it's not a sandwich--it's a meal. on a plate that you also get to eat. the plate is the bread.

then--this is so fucking important--they put green beans on there. jesus! they steam the green beans, then just slap them on. and it's not a chacarero without green beans. girlfriend, who really, really loathes all vegetables--she will not eat fried rice, z.B., without first removing every single pea, and do not even talk to her about broccoli--she will actually take the time to rearrange the green beans so as to get some in every bite. she gets mad if they're not there. i guess you haven't been coping with this for almost eight months now, so just trust me: that is incredible.

also, if they feel like it, they put on these warm juicy sauteed red peppers, which are crazy good but whose omission you don't miss as much as you might think. finally, they push a dollop of avocado spread across the top part of the bread, and please do not think i am playing games with you when i say that actually that is the most important part. this is not a game.

remember that.

eating experience: this is a refreshingly un-drippy, self-contained sandwich, remarkably so given the general wetness of the ingredients. so that rocks. sandwich eating cleanliness, as you will come to know, is an enormous priority for me. chacarero has a surprisingly big eating area, and while it fills up between 12:30 and 2, girlfriend and i have always found a place to sit. if, however, you should be in boston around dinnertime, and get what girlfriend now simply calls "the craving," you are out of luck; chacarero closes at 4pm. chacarero is also closed on weekends. at these times, stay away from my girlfriend, because she tends to be in quite the mood.

size and cost: "small" is $6 and "large" is $7, so they don't appear to be cheap; then again, "small" will fill the hungiest of tummies (that's right--the hungiest of tummies), and "large" is always kind of a mistake. the eating is pleasant enough, but the digesting takes hours and is borderline incapacitating.

how i found it: fellow ex-02138er marie, who edits frommer's boston and has yet to steer a man wrong when it comes to ideas for lunch.

concluding imagery: when i die, i want my bloated purple tongue cut out of my head and transported to the pampas of chile, where it shall forever sample that thin, mystical country's delicious flavor-palette; provisions will be made in the will for chileans to periodically rub chacarero ingredients on aforementioned tongue. somewhere, imperceptibly adrift in the ether that surrounds us, my spirit will be incredibly stoked.

shameless vote-getting tactic

2007-03-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

um... so i entered the gather.com who-has-the-best-novel competition. if you vote for my novel, it may win the contest and consequently get published, and then i would personally kiss your face. there will be three rounds, corresponding to the first three chapters of each novel.

here's the url: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976925880

gather.com, you damnable laughing whore, you had better not break my heart.

thank you for your time.

stood up

2007-03-05T17:01:00.000-08:00

um... well, friday's show went great--enthusiastic crowd, a much crisper sound than last show thanks to the magic of tuning and soundchecking, and product in my hair that didn't make me look like a balding man or GOB from arrested development. a longer show, also. and there was standup. it was the first time i've done standup since the 10th grade, and, happily for my development as a person, it was much better. less happily for said development, it was also very depraved. i had wholesome bits prepared ("the thing with kids is, they're cute, yeah, but they are such GROSS EGOMANIACS"), but once on stage, i decided it was time to go for broke. i led with a thing on child predators. my notes for that one look like this:

being 10 years old = terrible
couldn't get a date
didn't even know what dating was (!!!)
had this awful haircut... BOWL HAIRCUT [circled]
literally, a bowl was put on my head, and then the hair was cut off
WHY did parents DO IT????
CHILD PREDATORS.
[crude drawing of child predator with speech bubble] "no way am i gonna take THAT one home!!! you gotta be kidding."
child predators like COIFFED HAIR... & RINGLETS which i did not have.
so no getting preyed upon, but also, no dates.
mixed bag. [circled]

har!! um, yeah. i followed up with a bit featuring the bill cosby voice, and then things were fine--the bill cosby voice, i have learned, is my ace in the hole with everyone except girlfriend--but now i'm regretting not continuing the child-predator bit:

child predators--the term comes from fox news
HUMOROUS TERM ALERT!!!
sounds like playground is creepily monitored by TYRANNOSAURS
"ROAR!!! HOWZABOUT WE GO BACK TO MY PLACE"
makes you realize how lucky we are.
we do NOT live in a world where tyrannosaurs prowl around the playground... lookin' for friends

that one would have killed. ha! yeah.

on the agenda this week: a high-concept music video (hurra kam rada: "the promised land"), and probably, an extremely low-concept music video (dinosaur power ballad, part three).

also, maybe, a story for puppy rabbit. we'll see. a lot on the plate.

jtown out.

dinosaur power ballad: mr. big

2007-02-26T15:49:00.001-08:00

this is pretty much the definitive youtube video. it is like a magical essence of some kind. please forward this to everyone you know.

HURRA KAM RADA HAS A GIG ON FRIDAY
IT IS ON FRIDAY AT THE ALL-ASIA CAFE
YOU SHOULD SHOW UP AROUND 10:30
I MIGHT DO AWKWARD STAND-UP COMEDY WHILE WE'RE SETTING UP

THE STORY FOR PUPPY RABBIT THIS MONTH MIGHT COME A LITTLE LATE

bolingbrook il

2007-02-21T15:30:00.000-08:00

bolingbrook, i think, is where my stalker lives. bolingbrook or some other comfortable chicago suburb. i am basing this on the IP address and ISP of a devoted reader who, since at least october, has been posting upsetting comments to superactionplant, generally about my girlfriend. i used to delete them, but now i've decided that they're actually kind of cute, in the way that it's cute when the cat sticks his head in the toilet and then starts licking the sides.

here are some of the things the stalker has said:

your girlfriend must have been beaten with the ugly stick growing up. this only means her personality is wonderful to makeup for her shortcomings. – "from one guy to another" 10/26/06
he will be too busy with his ugly girlfriend to hang out – "someone who used to be friends with jesse" 10/30/06
you should change your blog title from: an ex-expatriate and aspiring novelist/rock musician/cartoonist attempts to acquire "marketable skills," as well as "love" to its more suitable and current title of: shattered by the loneliness of acquiring fame through exploiting all potential talent sources, a young man discovers the satisfaction and distraction that settling for the convenience of reputed love can offer a desperate heart. – "Anonymous" 11/21/06
thank goodness you are taking katherine off the market, lord only knows she isn't attractive enough to get a real man. – "Anonymous" 12/04/06
Katherine's Cackling Skank Club of One known all over Boston for being a bed-hopping harlot with rumored crotch-rot who's also one inch away from official retardation. So suck that! – "Anonymous" 12/04/06
your video is about as flaming hot as your girlfriend's fire-crotch. this clip's target market is obviously unattractive, talentless, ivy league tools with little to no life direction. if that is the image dorito's is supporting, this competition has met its maker. – "Anonymous" 12/12/06
our hate opinions create a sense of inner giggle for you? well, your ass-face girlfriend makes anyone with a keen eyesight gag convulsively. – "Anonymous" 12/28/06
i love your blog. will you marry me? i will fully financially support you, but you may need to relocate to manhattan. i will even let you visit your boston girlfriend every other week. deal? – "katey bosshardt" 12/29/06
no financial limits, but out of curiosity, how much does your heart cost? even if we are married, i would only be renting it from your girlfriend and i am in the market to own. katherine, what's a jesse andrew's heart on the market for these days? – "katey" 12/29/06
These type of feel good entries are probably written by Katherine, so you don't get discouraged by the idea of supporting her, a house full of her children, and um, did we mention SUPPORTING HER already? – "Anonymous" 1/03/07
Dude, now I know you are definitely a fiction writer because your girlfriend is not cute. – "Anonymous" 2/20/07
don't complain! at least jesse is saving all the attractive girls for the rest of us – "Anonymous" 2/20/07
no, jealousy does not interfere with the standard quo. attractiveness is somewhat universal, but is it possible for someone to find a person obscurely attractive? yes. jesse's girlfriend may be special to him, but she is just average in the rest of the world's view, if even that. there is no shortage of pretty, smart and witty my darling, let alone okay looking, smart, and witty. not being overly critical, but opinions are anything but dishonest. – "Anonymous" 2/21/07

globally, i'd first like to append this: [sic]

the word "stalker" is misleading, in that it connotes more privacy-invading surveillance than i think our devoted friend is capable of (theories to follow shortly), but i'm using it because stalking is mad creepy, and the deposit of all of the above by the same person is also very, very creepy, if in a more pathos-inspiring way.

i think the stalker is:

female. largely because of the humorously ill-concealed jealousy this person has toward katherine, and also because no red-blooded male would ever tag his blog comment as "from one guy to another." this is a thing that a girl might think guys say, because they occasionally say this on tv, but in person we do not, unless we are cretins. then again, one could also use the above evidence to determine that our stalker might be a gay cretin. i guess i would be a fool not to consider that.

possibly a non-native english speaker. the alarmingly poor control of the english language suggests that the stalker may not have grown up speaking english. phrases like "standard quo," a meandering and unstable approach to sentence structure, and the construction of frankly bizarre concepts like "the loneliness of acquiring fame through exploiting all potential talent sources" all suggest not only a person who doesn't speak english well, they suggest a person whose brain is not wired in a way that supports the basic concepts of syntax or semantics, which is to say, a person with no native language. this idea makes me very, very sad, but i hesitate to rule it out. it dovetails, also, with this:

possibly a third- or fourth-grader. this one is self-explanatory and, to my thinking, completely plausible, except for the inexplicable extreme dislike of katherine. it's true that they pump a lot of kids full of drugs these days. perhaps one has become addled.

no one i know. more accurately: i hope the stalker is no one i know. i imagine the odds are against that, but it would be really depressing were it the case. in any event, i don't want to know. please don't bother telling me if you are/aren't.

anyway. congratulations, stalker! your dogged labors have been rewarded; you have now had your moment in the sun. i'm going to begin deleting your comments again. i devoutly hope this acknowledgment allows you to address your grotesque complement of issues and move on. that would make both of our lives more enjoyable.

*****

hurra kam rada has a gig at the all-asia a week from this friday. details to follow. i am even more bullish on my job in the wake of a bowling expedition held by the entire company with an open bar. an open bar! it surprised me as much as it surprised my companions to discover that, with bowling, i will not hesitate to hustle the shit out of you. even if you are my girlfriend.

especially if you are my girlfriend.

v.d. redux

2007-02-18T15:29:00.000-08:00

"they're not from boston," trumpeted a tiny fortyish woman. we were jammed into an antechamber about 4 feet by 4 feet. "they don't make 'em that tall in boston."

warning: this blog entry is long. on wednesday the 14th, girlfriend was babysitting, so we decided to have our romantic v.d. dinner (SNAP!!! BURRRN) this weekend instead.* saturday around noon: i am eating pancakes and playing web sudoku at the same time. "d'you think we should get reservations," proposes girlfriend. "naw, pretty-pretty," says i. sometimes i am so smooth it is completely disgusting.

around three, neurosis set in and i made a reservation. i figured 8pm would be fine. bear in mind that this is a smallish restaurant with no waiting area to speak of. also, while i like the restaurant, in truth it is not all that good, so i figured not many people would be there. during lunch on weekdays, it is the sleepiest place in the north end not called The Bed Factory. (EXTREME BURN!!!)

we showed up at 7:55pm and gave little thought to the forlorn assemblage of people huddled outside the restaurant. then i sauntered in and was quickly immobilized. not only were there no empty tables, they were also all jammed together such that there was only one artery that could accommodate human traffic, and i was in between two surly waitresses. the maitre d', whom girlfriend likened to a shorter, italianate patrick dempsey, hustled over to me. we ascertained that my reservation would have to wait another half hour. he had no recorded evidence of this reservation, but was slow to admit it. the moron sloppiness of his notebook, in other circumstances, would have amused me.

"it's a little pushed back because of the weather," he explained, and fool that i was, i nodded as though this made sense.

so we waited. outside. it was cold. first we went for a walk. then we befriended a few other would-be diners who had been there since 7:30. but for the pink in their cheeks, they had the stuporous, malevolent appearance of zombies. "he hasn't come out here and called any reservations for... for so long," stammered one of them.

then, quietly, we began to die.

at length, we realized that the teeny little faux-foyer was the place to wait--and that was where we encountered lucy, the tiny woman who decided that we were the most interesting shit around. she was there with her friend, bunion-foot (i forget the name of the friend, but she had a thick medical-looking boot on her foot, which she explained at about 100 decibels as the consequence of bunion-removal surgery--by the way, i am not embellishing any of this), and their silent, grimly smiling husbands.

lucy: you are so not from boston. where are you from.
girlfriend: i'm from california.
lucy: see!!! see, in california, they grow 'em taller. i told you. what about this one.
me: um, pittsburgh.
bunion: CACKLE.
lucy, to girlfriend: this one is just SO ADORABLE. i can't even STAND IT. i can't even--LOOK AT YOUR NOSE. you are just SO ADORABLE. AAAAAACCK. also your boyfriend, i guess.
(then, with resignation:) so where do you go to school.
me: well, we don't so much go to school anymore.
bunion:
me: this is to say, we have jobs.
bunion: i gotta tell you, you guys are just the cutest.
lucy: are you getting engaged?!!! ARE YOU ENGAGED YET
me, in the magical world of my own brain: HOLY FUCK. THIS SHIT HAS GONE HORRIBLY THE FUCK AWRY.
girlfriend: well, ah...
me: I am Hungere, Gape-tuthyd eatere of the Wyrld.
bunion: let me tell you something: ELOPE. don't go for that big wedding. save the money, buy a HOUSE.

please bear in mind that we are all in extreme proximity to one another.

lucy: absolutely. you absolutely gotta elope. where d'you kids live. tell me where you live. you guys are GONNA GET MARRIED.
girlfriend: i live in cambridge, he lives in arlington.
bunion: no no no. these kids--wrong neighborhood, wrong time. you are gonna get a condo on comm ave.
lucy: we got it all planned out.
bunion: you are gonna register at crate & barrel.
lucy: or williams-sonoma.
bunion: well, i don't know about williams-sonoma. i don't like that idea very much AT ALL.
lucy, resolute: crate & barrel OR williams-sonoma.
lucy's husband, without warning: how about ikea.

lucy and her newly de-bunioned friend had nothing but contempt for this suggestion.

me: but... ikea is good.
girlfriend: he likes the cinnamon rolls.
me: No man or Beaste shalle challeynge my Dominionne overe the Night.

it was around 9pm. things got more intense after they found out where we went to school.

lucy: harvard. we've been standing here, talking to HARVARD.
bunion, gravely: wouldn't you know it.
lucy: i am just... i don't know what to say. i really don't. (eyes gleaming, voice lowered:) you kids are gonna do something to save the world.
girlfriend:
me:
bunion: these kids went to harvard, and i can't even keep my boy out of walpole penitentiary. i'm KIDDING!!
lucy: you gotta save the world. just do something great, and SAVE THE WORLD.

this blog entry is already long enough, so i'll stop there. we can't really tell if the food was good. we got our table around 9:30. i ate so fast that it made my stummy hurt.

* (my v.d. gift turned out to be this: now that we work at the same place, we leave work together every day. wednesday i was held late, so i figured girlfriend had already left, which she hadn't, because she was waiting for me, and when i ascertained this over the phone she sounded disappointed/huffy, so i waited for an hour in the cold subway station. that was the gift. i was sitting on a little ledge when she got off the train. this got a BIG positive reaction out of her. she said it was "more wonderful than a hundred flowers," which was worrying but i've decided not to think about it. so that was a completely kick-ass gift, because it cost NOTHING AT ALL, was in fact atonement for a fuck-up, and wasn't even that onerous, as i had cannily brought the new yorker. i am trying to figure out how to swing this more often.)

*****

another week, another contest. now we're taking a shot at impressing the mysterious dark-banged paolo nutini and his friends, the adspeople of ralph lauren. we are out to impress them via a music video whose only stated requirement is to rock. it's for a fragrance called "Ralph Rocks." girlfriend thinks this is the most ridiculous thing she has ever heard, and she is an actual girl, so i feel silly. but so far the song is killer. like little black cat, it is in a sensibility that will hereby be known as "dude fatale."

it's like femme fatale, but with dudes.

i decided recently that i want team plant to be renamed "dude fatale," but this got a lukewarm reception from various coworkers/HKR hangers-on/HKR members. my other recent band-name idea, "the CEOs," was the favorite. please help me make this decision. recall that the other options on the table are "team plant" and "the hovercats."

besos y pesos. dude fatale out.

you and i are sharing a cultural event, we two

2007-02-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

our band was the featured band on a boston-area podcast, but first, an announcement: our website is seriously working this time click on any of these words come on click it. it's hkrtv.us-tastic! please visit the website now, before i have fully expended the energy/nimbleness of brain required to maintain an ethical boundary between the programmatics of this and those of the internet's many boner-enhancement medication vendors.

all right all right all right.

the podcast that Hurra Kam Rada is on is called Big Mike Skinny Matt Show, and it is distinct from the Acorns & Merlot podcast, which is the liebesarbeit of one of my little sister's friends. i have never met skinny matt or big mike, nor have any of the other band members. i believe Big Mike Skinny Matt Show features a boston-area band every week; regardless, this week it's us. to compound the already-daedal referentiality here, i will do a running diary of said podcast. in short, what follows is a blog entry chronicling a podcast featuring songs performed by my band. hopefully someone will one day write a song about it.

let us share this cultural event, you and i. (if you want to listen along, it's the episode called "Big Mike and Skinny Matt Love You." if you don't want to listen along, you will not miss a great deal.)

0:10 after some barbershoppy harmonies from not-us, our 60-second rocker "acorns & merlot stadium theme" kicks in. i'm guessing big mike and skinny matt were not informed that this is the theme song of a competing podcast. giggle! either our band needs a publicist, or maybe we have a really really devious one that i don't know about.
0:45 uuuunngh. let's put it this way: the "a" in "Kam" in "Hurra Kam Rada" is not pronounced as a schwa. the reason for that is, we didn't want our band's middle name to be homophonous with a word for semen. i guess that is not intuitive.
1:20 honeycomb? i guess there's an inside joke about honeycombs. and another about microwaved babies. i'm trying to be open-minded, but big mike sounds like a bit of a perv. actually, an enormous perv.
2:45 sound of baby laughing. ominous zapping noise.
4:30 well, now we're talking about gestation periods for a while. one would think there was nothing all that compelling to say about gestation periods, and one would be more or less correct.
5:55 big mike thinks if you gestate for long enough, you might get a magical third eye that can see the future. i'm trying to determine if we have any construably baby-themed songs. i'm really hoping we don't.
7:05 still talking about gestation.
8:05 "we've talked about this for far too long." naw.
8:15 said with great skepticism: "some women, when you talk about babies, it's romantic." yeah!! that's so true. girlfriend, i'm gonna make you listen to this at some point.
9:10 "my mother would absolutely let me back in that womb. i was great! imagine that. you get to hang out with big mike. 24 hours a day." a little bit later: "i just really like saying the word 'womb.'" i can't believe this is my generation's talk radio.
10:30 big mike loves candy corn, and feeds it to his girlfriend. meanwhile, it has now been 10 minutes since they've played a hurra kam rada song. i thought we were the musical guest!! wtf?!! i hate you, unsolicited and free advertisement for my band.
11:35 big mike is now speaking in falsetto. he is pretending to be "betty," skinny matt's hypothetical valentine's day date. also, i will posit here that if i were to become acquainted with big mike, the mean weight of my friends would jump at least five pounds. i am basing this on the sound of his voice.
12:00 bear in mind that i have over a thousand friends.
12:25 the implication is that betty has put a bouquet of flowers in her mouth, or possibly her, um... her love-box.
14:00 oh my god, i think big mike is a racist.
15:00 i've got to be honest: i'm playing sudoku right now.
15:30 YEAH HURRA KAM RADA YEAH. it's "aslept," our song where we sound vaguely like the dave matthews band.
16:45 DAMMIT DON'T FADE OUT BEFORE WE HIT THE BRIDGE. goddammit, now it just sounds like that song has only one chord progression. this is the worst completely unsolicited plug for our band that we have ever received. in other news, as i typed the preceding, literally nothing of substance was said.
18:15 addendum: apparently big mike likes to talk about anuses.
19:00 "butthole sexual deviant," is how mike classifies himself. "honeycomb" is another word he uses for his anus. that's truly awful. i can't believe our band is associated with this. i guess this is the ghastly price of fame.
20:20 we are listening to a song about mike's honeycomb. "don't cry, sweet comb; i'll gently wipe your tears." also, we learn that the honeycomb sings him to sleep, an image so horrible that i clawed wide, bloodweeping rivets into my head.
23:00 surreally, big mike has just taken a pretty cerebral jazz piano solo. it's also possible that this is a recording. um, there is also applause.
24:00 YEAH IT'S LITTLE BLACK CAT!!! YEAH. god, i sound like a pimp. WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE. WHY ARE YOU FADING OUT ALREADY.
24:40 YOU DOUCHEBAGS. THAT WAS LIKE THIRTY SECONDS. YOUR PIANO SOLO WAS FOUR MINUTES LONG. IT FELT LIKE MY ENTIRE LIFE.
27:00 sudoku.
28:00 well, it's over, and HELL YES. MORE LITTLE BLACK CAT. this rules. why is it already getting quiet.
28:10 I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE FADING OUT AGAIN IN ORDER TO TALK ABOUT YOUR HONEYCOMB. YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR HONEYCOMB SO MUCH. WHY. GOOD GOD, WHY.

awesome.

my first day at work was good. a man could get used to editorial mercenarying. pen-for-hire, no questions asked.

my name is cupid valentino

2007-02-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

special valentine’s day theme: i fucking hate buying condoms. if reading about this makes you uncomfortable, my bad, but honestly, it’s the worst thing in the world. i’m willing to do a lot for girlfriend—agreeing not to do “the bill cosby voice” when we’re in public, for example, and not lying about using conditioner—but i’m thinking about drawing the line at buying fucking condoms. here’s why: for some reason, it is necessary to buy condoms in public. (i realize that this is not true; however, i do not really have it enough together to buy condoms in advance. also, buying condoms online scares me, in the event that my name and address get shopped around and pretty soon our doorstep has publications like humpy johnson’s sexual-apparatus monthly on it.)

the larger problem is that grocery-shopping is necessarily a pretty intimate undertaking. unless you are buying the wholesomest shit around (produce and/or bread), whatever you put on the rubber conveyor belt makes you look like an ass. here’s what you are saying to the world, when you walk around with a giant thing of ground beef, a bottle of vinaigrette, and some milk: i intend to make a kind of “beef salad”! five of the same frozen dinner: i am in fucking love with “hearty man” lasagna dinner! now with five cheeses! anything plus toilet paper: i enjoy shitting many times a day!! please envision that!

there is no good way to buy condoms. you can buy condoms with a whole lot of other items, but then it looks like you’re just trying to sneak them by. you can buy them on their own, if you feel like broadcasting a gigantic “fuck you” to the concerned parents in the supermarket, because needless to say you will be standing behind one of them in line. this is originally how i was going to do it, but then girlfriend gave me a call.

“while you’re at shaws,” she said, “can you buy some bisquick?”

cool. condoms ‘n’ bisquick. that’s truly awesome. condoms & bisquick: i am a sex maniac who is crazy about pancakes! worse yet: i intend to use these at the same time!!

the thing was, i couldn’t even find the bisquick. i also couldn’t find the condoms. i had to ask a checkout girl, who had a bunch of freaky makeup on, to the point where she looked like a clown.

me: um, excuse me?
checkout girl, combatively: what?
me: well, um. i was wondering where the bisquick was.
checkout girl: aisle 7.
me: thank you! thanks, i’ll go... i’ll go check that out. is that near the condoms.
checkout girl: D’ORGH?!
me: FUCK I MEANT FLOUR. I MEANT FLOUR PRODUCTS. I HAVE TO GO.

there was no bisquick in aisle 7. there was other pancake mix, but girlfriend didn’t want other pancake mix. so i bought no pancake mix. i did, however, find condoms, after a lot of furtive reconnaissance in the ultra-feminine secret hygiene product aisle. then, at the checkout thing, i panicked, and threw a package of gum onto the rubber conveyor belt with the condoms. i don’t know why. i guess i was trying to distract the woman with an 8-year-old. the checkout girl, at any rate, was not distracted. in fact, she gave me a little wink.

a wink that i now realize meant: “you may be a sex maniac, but i applaud that you are at least a sex maniac who is doing something about his horrible breath.”

fuck.

in other news, i got a six-month gig as a hired gun for a local educational publisher. hurrah! more on that later, or actually, probably not, as the work will be satisfying but unremarkable. also, hope you enjoyed The Center of Siberia. also, add two more literary-agent rejections to the ongoing tally.

at least i am completely amazing in the sack.

new story on puppy rabbit

2007-02-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

read it and weep.

prognosis: sad

2007-02-03T08:40:00.001-08:00

currently finishing story #3 for Puppy Rabbit A Short-Fiction Blog. in the meantime, watch this now.
or go to youtube and forward it to all your friends. also, this is fun to hang out at.

the winter of our content

2007-01-31T18:44:00.000-08:00

omg omg omg omg. www.hkrtv.us may be functional by the time you click this.

i'm writing this, at any rate, as we put the finishing touches on it. rob is filmy-eyed and grimly focused on the task of "exporting to video," a term that i do not pretend to understand. matt is bounding around the house, moving expensive pieces of equipment hither and thither. micah is pacing like a father-to-be in a hospital hallway. holy christ, this has been a long time in coming.

i have seen the tv show, at this point, about a hundred times. that's like two entire days of my life. we watch the tv show a lot, around here. we can pretty much quote all of it verbatim at you. furthermore, when we are not watching the tv show, we are discussing how popular it will get, how fast. regarding our viral ceiling, so to speak, i have elected to be the Voice of Reason around the house of late. matt is the Voice of Worryingly High Expectations, and micah and rob are the Voices of Hoping Matt is Correct.

matt: i just gotta think that if this makes the front page of YouTube... one million hits. it's not out of the question.
me: ah. i mean, first of all, let's think about that premise
matt: no no no, it's like: would you not want to watch this? just watch the first thirty seconds. and you're telling me, you're some kid in high school, you don't want to be the one to tell all your friends? come on.
rob and micah, reverently: that would be SICK.
me: i just feel like viral media is such a fluky thing. i just don't want to, um
matt: [has desperate, hope-moistened eyes]
me:
matt:
me:
matt: [emits a single tear, which courses slowly to his chin, trembles for a beat, and falls]
me: let's go watch the tv show again!!!
rob and micah: YAYYYY

will we succeed? or will we become just another casualty of the unfathomable caprice of Web 2.0? our fate is in your hands. please also buy our "merch," once we have created it. the adventure is nigh. a thousand lusty huzzahs!

[against my better judgment, i'm becoming a celtics fan. micah sugar-daddied his way into my heart and girlfriend's by spotting us tickets to the celts-wizards game on sunday (a smooth-running nailbiter for two and a half periods, and then a grisly massacre for the remainder), and having seen that and the cavs game from earlier this year—and discovering that girlfriend's television seems to show most nba games most of the time—i'm hooked. the celtics are utterly abject this year (they've lost 12 in a row, probably 13 now), but that delonte west kid has so much heart—so much goddamned heart! he's killing himself out there—and then there's the goofy reflexive child's half-smile of gerald green, and the lumbering decided un-grace of "big" al jefferson, and the cartoonish dismay of doc rivers at pretty much all times, and um. actually, i just realized what it is: the celtics remind me of the pirates. a once-proud franchise, now comically inept. i'm not sure what the psychoanalytical implications here are, but i'm wary of exploring them.]

front-row seats

2007-01-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

"do you have plans for 7-10pm tonight," rob asked me on saturday, "and do you loathe more than all other things the sight of a full mouth of teeth." i did not have plans—girlfriend and i spend our saturday nights respectively knitting and composing blog entries, on opposite sides of the living room, every hour taking five quiet-voiced words or so to remark on if we think the water is yet a-bilin', or whether we reckon the basil plant on the back porch is a-dangered of coyotes (a 2-syllable word), and intermittently throughout the cat races in and bites some of our appendages and then he races out, because he has an actual documented brain problem—and also, as god is my witness, i hate to see a man's teeth in his face.

"that was more of a response than was really necessary," said rob, sounding unsure. at the time of the call i was purchasing cat food, as the specialty pet grocery is closer to my home than girlfriend's. i had been instructed to track down sources of "L-lysine." the pet grocer thought this was bullshit. i told her i was pretty sure poultry were about near chock-fulled of lysine, but we are looking for even more of it, and

"shut up," interjected rob. "just shut up." we then were silent, we two.

"i have an extra ticket to the bruins-senators game tonight," said rob. "front-row seats, right behind goal." i considered this. girlfriend reckoned us boys ought'n to amuse ourselves, as youth and joy are horrifically fleeting both.

i doubted i would come away with this impression, but hockey is a fantastically enjoyable game to watch—if you have front-row seats right behind goal. the extreme opposite of this is watching hockey on tv, where the camera shows a tiny amount of the rink at a time and you are expected to follow an object that, most of the time, is completely invisible. however, sitting right behind goal kicks extreme ass. here is why: somehow it is legal, within limits that were not described to me adequately, to skate at full-speed into a person if he is up against the wall. this is most likely to happen right behind the goal, and when it does, it is time to scream in terror and delight, and if it is your first time at a hockey game, also to scramble over your fellow hockey fans into the upper rows, because that shit (the wall) does not seem at all like it can withstand an enormous fucking dude with a giant wooden fucking murderer's stick flying into it as fast as he fucking can. jesus.

this happened hard enough, during a chippy and fraught second period, that the person slammed into fell to the ice, clutching his face, and did not get up, and then things took a turn for the horrible. he was a member of the visiting team, and as he lay there, the crowd's joyous roar did not abate, and in fact it morphed into an unintelligible high-pitched derisive jeer, a baying for the blood of this forlorn fallen man, crumpled against the glacial sheen. all around me, the bruins faithful screamed their abuse. a policeman with a mustache and a slouch stared fixedly into space. "officer!" i did not cry. "fucking arrest this shit! surely this is illegal." but it wasn't, presumably. later in the game, he admonished me for banging on the glass, a practice which does not get the attention of goalies anyway.

the show went pretty well. we sold out our tiny little venue and got people to dance. the costume change was also successful. on the other hand, at no point could it have been said that the band was, as musicians put it, in tune. room to grow, in other words. in our defense, there was no sound check. the photos are okay. our tv show may be done by the time of next blog.

i won $10 on the pats-colts game, and winning that bet actually made me feel warm inside.

free money

2007-01-19T08:43:00.000-08:00

psych. expensive money.
please don't point out how the comma is embarrassingly misplaced on the poster. i did not create this poster. what is important is the message. we have put together a very entertaining show, and it is time for you to pay us for that.

you can also buy the demo for $5!!! the demo does not suck.

p.s. abe, let me note here that the name of our demo was conceived of in my absence. weird similarities to your album name/cover concept are coincidental. needless to say, i am never going on five-day vacation again.

jaws was never my scene

2007-01-16T20:08:00.000-08:00

"if i don't have a goddamn cigarette, i am gonna hijack this plane," rasped the enormous human sitting next to me, into a cell phone, as we refueled on the denver tarmac. he had had four budweisers. it would have been a joy to take him down, but sadly, he was kidding. in his will to show us that he was very very unhappy with jetblue, however, he was deadly serious. this meant exhaling loudly and doing a drunken full-body shrug every time there was any kind of announcement, like, "folks, we're about to hit a little patch of turbulence"--because come on, turbulence? what the fuck?!!?! are we really supposed to believe that this "turbulence" is... a thing? a thing that often happens to planes? i will now laugh an unmanly weak-voiced cackle of scorn, because this is total bullshit. "folks, the cabin crew will be coming through shortly with an array of snacks." GOOD GOD, SIR. I AM APPALLED AT YOUR RIDICULOUS CHARADE OF "SNACKS." THEY ARE PROBABLY POISONED OR SOMETHING. ADDITIONALLY, [foul-smelling belch].

these were the things this man was attempting to convey to his fellow passengers, except that no one was willing to make eye contact with him. girlfriend and i held our conversations in german so that he would think we were foreign.

we got to drive girlfriend's grandma's lexus all around southern california, all the while playing the greatest hits of the beatles and queen. there were no other CDs. there was stevie wonder, but you would be surprised how many of stevie wonder's greatest hits are actually not all that great. the biggest story of our visit was how unbearably cold it was. it was, i would say, about 60˚ most of the time. in january. in the northern hemisphere.

"i really hope you have enough blankets," fretted girlfriend's mom, gazing nervously at a bed that was 95% concealed in blankets. "because it is cold."

"hey there!" strangers would call to girlfriend and me, as we strolled down the street. "pretty cold, no? ha ha ha! BRRRR."

"in boston, we call this exposed-testicles weather," i did not respond, nor did i elaborate, "because it is warm enough to expose your, um... you know."

we drove down to laguna beach, balboa beach, and corona del mar. i wandered into the icy, boundless pacific, and swiftly wandered back out of it. we saw frozen-banana signs (like from arrested development!!) on an island community awash in tanned, middle-aged specimens who were almost certainly unemployed (also like from arrested development!!!). quaint little beachside homes. it was cloudless and dry and there were weird giant trees that did not provide any shade at all. the zoning in southern california seems to be rigidly obeyed, and the zones are: Two-Story Residential, Strip Mall, Industrial/Terrifying, Restaurant. much more of southern california is zoned for Restaurant than i was prepared for. some entire towns are zoned for Restaurant, and we drove through all of them.

did you know that orange county has the highest vietnamese population outside of vietnam? this astonishing idea is something i made up, but katherine says it sounds "plausible." katherine's friend sameer drove us around little saigon one exciting night, and we sampled two different vietnamese baguette sandwiches. then we went home because we were sleepy. "that was pretty much what we did every night during high school," said katherine, except for the sandwiches, because they had vegetables in them and those strike her as gross. (travel guide: the superior sandwich came from banh mi che cali, pictured at right. suggested motto: over a trillion yakis sold. if you just laughed, let us simply say that you have failed the all-time definitive nerd test.)

we drove up to l.a., had moroccan mint tea with hunter maats and diner coffee with chris starr, went to universal studios. universal was great because it was tuesday--today--and there was no wait for any of the rides. this is the only way to experience a theme park. we'd walk past empty, gaping queue-overflow pens and do little dances of joy. however, this probably made me enjoy the rides less, so it was a tradeoff. you have more patience for ron howard repeatedly telling you how filming 'backdraft' taught him the true bravery of firefighters if you've been waiting in a line for two hours and most of your brain has been killed by the heat. under those circumstances, the backdraft ride makes total sense. otherwise, you're just sort of standing around watching things catch on fire for 90 seconds, and then you leave.

hunter is doing well. i had forgotten that he is my loudest friend. "JESSE, MON COEUR," he blared into the los angeles night. it was then that a gang of passersby called us collectively a faggot.

chris looks great. i had forgotten that he is gonna make it. i also forgot how "his brilliant blue eyes pierced into my very soul," a thing katherine just said, so i guess i'm back on the market. great.

kalifornien

2007-01-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

we're leaving today for a lengthy weekend in california. specifically, the OC. more specifically, the part of the OC that contains my girlfriend's parents' house. even more specifically, probably a room on the extreme other side of the house as that of girlfriend, like for example the garage. i have never embarked on a hang-with-the-parents-of-girlfriend weekend before, and my expectations for this one are far from high. in fact, they are low.

dad of girlfriend: so! jesse! what, again, is it exactly that you do?
me: [unintelligible]
dad of girlfriend: SPEAK UP, YOU FOOL. SPEAK UP THAT ALL MIGHT HEAR YOUR SHAME.
me: i'm currently "between jobs."
assembled relatives of girlfriend: [concerned murmuring]
dad of girlfriend: please! don't stop there!!
me: i also play bass for a synth-metal band that, uh... that used to be called "teen plant."
assembled relatives of girlfriend:
me: right now we're not sure what to rename it. we're thinking "meat plan."

(your enthusiasm for team plant, however, should not deter you from seeing me play with MY OTHER BAND, hurrakam rada, FRIDAY THE 19TH at all-asia cafe, ~10:30pm. we have reason to believe that the pilot for our public-access tv show will be done then as well. obviously, you will be invited to check this out online. the tv show is magical. repeated viewings will exponentially reward the vigilant audience member, especially if that audience member has the desire to locate rob's penis in the background of pretty much every skit. j/k! fuck.)

dad of girlfriend, later, in his study, lowering his voice: so. do tell me. what are your intentions with my daughter.
me: we're working pretty hard on getting her pregnant. we think we're close.
dad of girlfriend:
me: ha ha! psych!! no, honestly, we've never had sex, and um... we don't think we ever will. for extreme christian reasons.
dad of girlfriend:
me: we think christ is mad important. he would be the ultimate person to bone. for this reason, we both want to be a nun.
dad of girlfriend:
me: i mean, obviously not the same nun. i would be "sister mary jesse."
dad of girlfriend, interrupting: here. you will take this money, and in return, you will agree to never see my daughter's face again.
me: holy shit, this is a lot of money.

actually, i guess i have pretty substantial expectations for this weekend. i'm aiming for the high five figures. also, some "board shorts," which i currently do not have. apparently, they are pants that you can wear in the water, and everyone is okay with that. california! california!!! here we come. also i am excited for the fish tacos.

also, just driving around. drivin'. LA. never been to california before. the sidewalk with the handprints. gonna see it. in-n-out burger. gonna eat it. sunny weather in the middle of january. palms and pastels as far as the eye can see. california, you soul-free, absurd place, i could learn to love you.

for kicks

2007-01-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

please google "i haven't washed my hair." here, i'll do it for you.

i'm so proud.

get busy

2007-01-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

it was a nice little part of brookline. strollers, yuppie parents. we were there to pick up a bookshelf. the owner was skeptical that i was jesse, but she lacked the language ability to express this. halfway up the stairs,

she admitted: i thought jesse... a girl.
i reassured her: yeah, a lot of girls are named jesse.
she was not convinced: ohh.
i was compelled to continue: like the one whose email i hacked into in order to get to your house first and win sweet, sweet custody of this bookshelf. THE BOOKSHELF IS MINE ALL MINE.
but fortunately i did not and instead i was like: whole lotta girls. i went to kindergarten with three of them, and that sucked. mmmm. yup.

if i'm going to be spending a fair amount of time at home, my room needs an upgrade, and currently it is getting one. new bookshelf! the removal of clutter, which seems to have sheltered many families of spiders! or perhaps it was one giant inbred family of spiders. this would explain their lethargic blitheness as katherine ushered them out of the window, and i shrieked paroxysmically in the background. also katherine and i are going to bed bath and beyond to get something for clothes storage. we are good about splitting outings where we're in her comfort zone, and outings where we are in mine. they break down like this:

zone of girlfriend
bed bath and beyond
the gap (also, all clothing stores)
yarn store
veterinarian
house of small children we are expected to babysit
starbucks (also, all complicated-beverage vendors)
movie featuring hugh jackman

zone of me
celtics game we recently went to
some bars

the produce section of whole foods

i'd suggest we talk about this, but Relationship Talks are also located within zone of girlfriend. the celtics game, btw, was amazing. i have trained katherine to the point where, when her coworker remarked that
1) she had won a pair of free cavs-celtics tickets, as in, tickets to a game with lebron james (and wally szczerbiak!!!), and
2) she was not especially interested in going,
katherine jumped all over that opportunity. we had a blast. at the end of third quarter, lebron hit an 80-foot shot that was the most exciting thing i have ever witnessed in person. also, i'm guessing he has a normal-size head, but it looks completely tiny relative to the rest of him. katherine and i have discussed this, and lebron is one of her three Free Passes, which are people who you're allowed to commit adultery with if the opportunity somehow arises. hugh jackman is the second, and the third, irksomely enough, is my housemate micah. one of these days i'm going to kick his ass.

hurrakam rada has a gig at all-asia in central square, and you would be a fool not to come. by then we intend to have launched our website; at the very least, the show will be very high-energy and lots of fun. if you're in town friday, january 19th, our opening act (which i have never heard but is phenomenal) goes on at 9:30 and we'll take the stage about an hour later. you will want to be there from the beginning.

jville out.

24-hour parents

2007-01-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

2006 is dead, and what better use for its final hours than to have helped your girlfriend babysit two small children? overnight on a saturday night? also one of them still wears diapers but knows enough words to communicate that he is not okay with anyone changing them? or, for that matter, requesting that he not throw a billion foot-puncturing lite brite pegs across the room? the answer is that there are many better uses, but regardless, for 24 hours, we were parents.

"it's easier when they're your own kids," says katherine, but her certainty on that idea worries me. also worrying: the sense i get that this is some kind of oblique preamble to a thing that would involve me requiring a better-paying job, such as would pay for crib insurance, or whatever it is that parents spend their money on. very thin books, it would seem. extremely tiny clothing that the kids don't want to wear anyway. plus they're going to outgrow it in, what--three months?--meaning you're paying like $5/day to clothe your child, which strikes me as more expense than is justified. my children will strut nude and boldly about the house. the fines will cost less than the clothes.

we babysat. it was fine, really. katherine did all of the diaper-changing and in-the-night improbably-loud-weeping-child-comforting. i cooked eggs for breakfast and attempted to read "charlotte's web" to the older one before she requested that the book be read aloud by "literally anyone else."

new year's eve, i filmed a 15-minute gig at bill's bar by micah, matt, and micah's friend kweiku (sic, probably). later, micah schmoozed with lucky, the mascot for the boston celtics, and we hope to parlay this new contact into a half-time show but are more likely to parlay it into recurring conversations like

me: hey everybody! i still have no job. just a heads-up.
matt: hey micah, whatever happened to that guy? celtics guy? you talked him up at a bar? celtics mascot.
micah: yeah, i sent him an email... and he didn't write back... but i don't want to seem like i'm pressuring him, so
matt: yeah, that's probably--that's probably legit.
micah: i'm thinking i'll write him again in like a week, just a hey, what's up kinda email.
me: red alert!!! xbox.
[silence]
me: gonna go play some xbox.

finally, here's the as-promised short-fiction blog, which some of you have already discovered and non-enjoyed. currently includes one old story and one brand-new one. my not-binding goal: one story per month. moreover, to meet this goal, i may be publishing some very, very short fiction.

jtown out. also, boise st-oklahoma was an extremely satisfying game to watch. jared zabransky, the women of idaho crave you.

war on/during christmas

2006-12-26T13:23:00.000-08:00

apparently ethiopia and somalia are at war. i thought i had a pretty good handle on the various wars going on around the world, and it feels unpleasant and surreal to have that idea repudiated. this was what i wanted to know, reading the news on christmas morning: what other wars don't i know about? my nerves are shot.

somalia, currently governed by an upstart islamic fundamentalist regime, is backed by ethiopia's evil coastal twin eritrea; ethiopia, by the US. so i am implicated. we are all implicated. not even the discovery of a war zone with the humorous name of "balochistan" is making me feel better. the balochis are dying, for god's sake. they're dying the deaths of patriots. it's not fucking funny. are they not human, after all? if you prick them, do they not blog? jesus. (also check out this man's weirdly compelling blogger profile. favorite movie: v for vendetta. my new year's resolution: cease fucking with balochistan.)

globalsecurity.org has this helpful list of ongoing wars. most of them appear to be civil wars, but the US is probably supplying arms to all of them. so that's just great. as a friend has recently theorized, the period between christmas and new year's truly is the grundle of the year, or the Yearly Taint.

jobs i am applying for:

flight attendant, lufthansa
senior editor, st. kitts & nevis observer

not kidding at all. the job search begins anew. game on. please tell me if you are located in the boston/cambridge area and are willing to pay extreme money for tutoring of really any variety at all. bass lessons? i am awesome at bass. editing things to attain word count? i will teach you all about this. multivariable calculus? i [expletive] completely love calculus, and after we're done you will too. german? i will teach your punk ass some german. italian-chinese fusion cooking? i'm sure we can work something out. sudoku? please, please pay me to teach you sudoku. you don't even have to pay me a lot. i mean, whatever.

i also completed another short story recently, called "centraal," and now i'm considering starting a blog for short stories. would you read this at all? please comment and explain. feel free also to leave random hate-comments, as those cause me to giggle delightedly.

(toscanini's news: those of you who are not in the square, mike set up a little table outside harvard bookstore and has recently been giving away coffee, as in for free, while spreading the defiant message that he will be back. there is a god, in other words. merry christmas, my secular bitches. merry christmas.)

eugene mirman, david cross, toscanini's

2006-12-21T13:48:00.000-08:00

i'm old. i'm so old. you'd think i'd've learned my lesson: no going to shows on a weeknight. or maybe ever.

katherine: but tonight it's DAVID CROSS.

(sidenote: ticketmaster is very confused as to who david cross is. that is more the reaction i would have expected from my dad, who—in his defense—is not in the business of selling tickets online to a demographic of mostly college students and hipsters. it's like: ticketmaster? have you heard of arrested development? it's worse than the time when my mom got the PLO confused with the ELO, although to be fair, that was a concert i'll never forget.)

me: oh man!
katherine: plus a guy named--who is this? "eugene mirman."
me, reflexively: MAN OF THE SEA.

eugene mirman is a bug-eyed, basso-voiced comic who i last saw open for stella at the house of blues. imagine that rodney dangerfield and helena bonham carter had a child, and then make that child's nose somewhat larger, and you would have eugene mirman. here is part of his mystical oeuvre:

Humacorn - Eugene Mirman

eugene mirman and some fey, mincing redhead had put together a show called, irrelevantly, invite them up. it was at the paradise lounge and consisted of like twenty different comics. at the beginning this was great. a.d. miles had a funny thing about myspace, or his cat's penis, i forget. a girl near us was really excited about seeing him. jen kirkman observed humorously that friends with babies are annoying.

"ha ha!" i said at the time. "it's funny because it's true."
"," responded the many college students around us, because they have no idea what real life is like.

then things started to drag. again, we were confronted with the classic show-biz problem of Too Many Acts, Not Enough Chairs For People To Sit In So Their Backs and Legs Don't Start Hurting And They Don't Get Really Irritable. i shifted very suddenly from delighted/giggly to MINDLESSLY IRATE somewhere in the middle of john benjamin's set, which was second-to-last. john benjamin had what i could objectively gauge as a pretty funny act, mostly about how it was hard for him, a cerebral hipster thirtysomething, to identify with his own 3-year-old child, but because i was tired of standing up, his delivery completely enraged me.

"OH MY GOD," i was close to yelling. "STOP YOUR SELF-SATISFIED MUMBLING, YOU NAVEL-GAZING BUTT-DORK." later: "NO ONE CARES ABOUT THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO YOU."

david cross was pretty good, at least. he had a thing about how your dog doesn't really love you, and if you have a dog, it's not actually that great. this was right up my alley, yet all i wanted to do was sit down. also, for every minute we were there, it was one less minute we would get to sleep. consequently, it was hard for me to pay attention. david cross used the word "cum" far, far more than the other comics. but his heart didn't seem to be in it. i give him a 6.

toscanini's in the square closed last week for good. i was addicted to their vietnamese coffee for a while, and then i gave it up, mostly because i identify it strongly with cigarettes. their signs were always creatively capitalized and punctuated, and their staff was a ragtag tattooed bunch of dreamers whom i came to know closely and well, at least to the degree that i could class them along the lines of Gives Me Coffee For Free and Makes Me Pay For The Damnn Coffee Even Though I'm Obviously In Here All The Time. now they are scattered to the winds. goodbye, mike! goodbye, extremely mellow black girl whose name i never learned! farewell, The Young One! i bid you well, french guy who was always hungover yet eager to describe his conquests to me. adieu, tall intense guy who always played the postal service. so long, ill-advised-facial-hair approx.-17-year-old.

you are all my children.

interstice

2006-12-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

i'm putting together my portfolio for grad school in architecture. i have no idea what they want. i've drawn a great number of crude cartoons in my day, plus a confusing, ill-organized, and politically tone-deaf poster for a college play, but i feel weird submitting them to admissions people. "this is who i am!" i'd be saying. "i am a person who is in favor of college republicans being raped by pandas! or whatever the blobby thing is!" the worst part is, you can't even tell they're being raped except for the speech bubble that says "OW, RAPE" or "THIS PANDA IS RAPING THE CRAP OUT OF ME."

luckily, i've spent a lot of time pretentiously gadding about europe, pens and paper in hand. but it's equally strange to submit the pictures created that way, too--in some ways, they actually are who i am, since i really just drew them for me. but now they must earn their keep. lazy, lazy drawings.

these are a few of the many i did in san sebastian. san sebastian was an experimental place for me. a good number of the drawings i did there were highly abstract. i intend to share none of those drawings with you, because they are mad embarrassing.

i swung through andalucia for a week before leaving spain for berlin. note the "authentic" spanish spelling of city names! this, because i am a tool. it's "seville," ass. if someone referred to "the barber of sevilla," you would make a point of later stepping on their foot really hard, or putting mucus in their drink.

susie and i went to dresden for a weekend. maybe you remember that, if you're a devotee of this blog. god help you.

two pictures from bavaria, a trip i went on right before leaving germany, just over a year ago. i wasn't in a very draw-y mood back then. it was more a mood along the lines of, "the future is a thundering, resounding void, and i am entering it." it's not hard to identify with that these days.

(maybe you already know this: i'm leaving 02138 magazine at the beginning of january 2007, aka in two weeks. amicable breakup! a decision rationally arrived at by both sides! two mature entities headed in separate but mutually respectful directions! i have learned that saying this causes the lawyers to cease tasering my steaming flesh. OW FUCK)

doritos commercial-ganza

2006-12-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

the doritos ad contest barrels its inexorable way forward. "Doritos! Doritos!!! (Beatbox v. Megasynth) is in a respectable 7th place with 179 effete little heart votes. this would be 7th out of 1076 videos. we at hurrakam rada have not purchased any champagne yet, but morale is high. here, as if you were at all invested in this, is a detailed examination of the other videos:

"Magic Microwave"
somewhere in a dorm room, there exists a microwave that converts all it touches into doritos. a tousle-haired youth throws most of his clothing into the microwave, then excitedly runs to tell his roommates--who, in a delicious subversion of expectations, have already discovered this microwave's magical abilities. they are half-naked. in the background: a sprawling pile of doritos bags. comfortably ensconced in first place, this video has 605 votes. and with good reason--did i mention that those roommates were HALF-NAKED?! i did? good, because when you see that, it is funny. also, a note: most items of clothing cost more than a bag of doritos. additionally, doritos are not difficult to locate or purchase. more on this below.

"ULTIMATE CHIP FIGHTING!"
i'd like to be positive, but there are a lot of conceptual difficulties here. the premise is that "Nacho Cheese" and "Salty's" are having a boxing match; the blurb below describes "Salty's" as "the bland, not so appealing chip." so essentially we've created a fictional, straw-man chip. this is just distracting. the winner of the fight, moreover, gets to take on "Cool Ranch," which is another kind of dorito; who is supposed to win that one? "Nacho Cheese" is listed at 6'1", 2800 oz., 27 years old; where, exactly, do these numbers come from? they seem arbitrary. one thing is for certain: this commercial is not making me hungry.

"The Poker Championship"
again, we confront the fallacious idea that resounds throughout the competition: at a veritable infinity of locations in the united states, you can buy a package of hundreds of doritos for less than $5. this commercial proposes that a single dorito is worth a giant stack of poker chips presumably worth thousands of dollars. then the broadcaster eats it. i mean, we already have a sense of his unprofessionalism--he's been rummaging through a bag and munching loudly for the past ten seconds. does he really have to get on all fours and climb onto the table to eat a single chip? he does? great.

"Flavor Therapy"
the second entrant in the top four to claim "burbank" as a home, DavidsOne has put together a well-shot and well-acted commercial with a premise i don't recall seeing anywhere: you can't just eat one dorito! that would be seriously frustrating! doritos are just that good. oh wait, that idea is the centerpiece of an entire advertising campaign for Lay's, a maker of salted chips. i liked this commercial a lot, other than that.

"Doritos Party All The Time"
guys, you had me in the palms of your hands. one camera angle, no cuts? spectacular. mindless, ill-acted excitement aimed at a single bag of doritos sitting on the couch? good god, yes. college-age person in the background arrhythmically humping the air? i am like putty in your masterly mocking-of-traditional-advertising hands. but then you break the self-conscious low-budget homemade spell. you smack me about the face with that heinous commercial-ass doritos logo over black. you pen the adman's sneering hipster tag: "Yeah, They're That Extreme"? i give that choice a D. D for Death. die. i thought i knew you.

"What would you do?"
in the #6 spot with 181 votes, this may well be the most awful video of all time. another doritos commercial submission, another gang of college students going to wacky lengths to obtain doritos. these lengths being, running in a herd through the urban landscape and then driving to a convenience store. the questions are almost too obvious to pose. why do you not make any attempt to stockpile doritos, college students? surely you see these outages coming! surely they happen all the time! i guess the situation would be more dire if it wasn't extremely easy to obtain and eat more doritos, as your commercial adequately shows. so why did you choose this storyline for your commercial again? oh yeah, that's right--because you are a cretin.

"Doritos! Doritos!!! (Beatbox v. Megasynth)"
okay, so one: a cappella sucks. two: the subtitle reminds me of the supreme court. three: the editing is highly disorienting. fou--wait a minute! this is OUR video. fuck. um... never mind. [this joke is premised on the idea that i don't know how to use the delete key.]

"Siesta De Los Nachos"
this commercial is awash in mystery. despite the different entrant name--ChrissOne--the actors and creators appear to be the same as in DavidsOne. also, Siesta De Los Nachos is obviously the superior commercial, yet it has fewer votes. how did they do that underwater shot? and what did they use to create that noise at the end where the overweight guy punches his friend's arm? it sounds like someone throwing a five-pound ketchup packet against a wall. the moral here is: "your friends, inevitably, will turn on you and eat your delicious food." this commercial is excellent.

beatboxing flavordroid

2006-12-04T19:21:00.000-08:00

so doritos has an ad spot for the super bowl, and rather than pay some generic, avaricious ad agency to do it for gross sums of money, they're inviting camera-wielding stoner amateurs from around the world to do it for free via a contest.

obviously, we made an entry for this contest. it is entitled: "Doritos! Doritos!!! (Beatbox v. Megasynth)" here's another link to it. vote for this entry right now. it is embarrassing that i am resorting to these votegetting tactics, no? ha ha! if you value my friendship at all you will register and vote five different times.

actually, i'm not embarrassed at all. our ad is amazing. matt and micah are so stoked about the doritos. also, in several shots, rob, dressed vaguely like mario the nintendo plumber. the best part is that the narrative of the ad is completely unspecific to doritos. that could be any product in their hands. doritos!!!

my involvement was this: i staggered home around 10pm sunday night after a typical family weekend of eating, lying around in a stupor, and talking about when the next meal was expected to occur, and my housemates were in quite the tizzy. somewhere on a distant floor, drums boomed. the dining room was floodlit and most of the furniture had been pushed to one side.

"doritos commercial," said matt. "no time to explain."

"we need you to stand in the window clutching this bag of doritos," instructed micah, "and, when the time is right, sing 'Doritos!!! DORITOS.'"

"over-enunciate," said rob. "also, you should have a beaming, wall-eyed smile."

my tum-a-lum felt unwell, and i had to take the GREs the next morning, but damned if i wasn't going to give my all to a 30-second amateur commercial about doritos that my weird cohabitants had spent the entire day filming. indeed, that is the oath on the andrews family seal. thus, at around midnight, when the filming was over and a fatigued group of housemates stared bleary-eyed at the hour or so of uncut film to be edited, i raised my voice.

"gentlemen, i may be of some use to you," were my words, and as they looked on in joyous wonder, i accidentally barfed on micah's computer.

psych. instead i edited the entire thing. the problem, of course, was that the uncut footage was an embarrassment of riches. many, many wonderful directing choices found themselves on the virtual cutting floor: a complicated piece of choreography called "the weave," for example, and about 52 minutes of rob humping a doritos bag. other shots that made it in go sort of unexplicated; z.B., the shot where all three guys crunch right on the beat is filmed not only in a hillel, but directly in front of an ark with the torah in it. it would have been nice to point this context out in the doritos commercial itself, but i guess that's what dvd extras are for. when this gets converted into a dvd. anyway, i was up with the guys until 3am editing film, and you can bet your buttocks that all our hard work is about to pay off.

i also wrote the blurb about the beatboxing flavordroid and his archrival/best friend, MegaTaste O'Syntherson.

much more video stuff to come when we launch our hurrakam rada site. in the meantime, i encourage you to watch our advertisement over and over again. the levity is infectious! DORITOS. EAT.

oh, and the GRE? bitches, please. i own that steez...y.

revenge of the unsolicited music video critique

2006-11-30T18:53:00.000-08:00

bitches, i'm tha best m*****f**king blogger around. this blog is the m******ucking $hit. this blog is where tha dopest insights are located. other wack bloggers try 2 front like they know how to blog. i will not hesitate to kill their punk @$$. also this blog makes innovative use of boldface.

you would pretty quickly get tired of reading a blog entry that was about how great it was, or at least i would, which is why i don't pay much attention to rap. but the hip-hop landscape has gotten so weird recently that it's difficult to ignore. i am thinking specifically of a video by "Brooke," who I believe--correct me if i'm wrong--is the daughter of Hulk Hogan. i saw this on jetblue, incidentally, and let's take this moment to consider that jetblue is the shit. i do not ask much of an airline:

1) cheap flights from boston to pittsburgh
2) delicious cookie
3) a tv with surprisingly good reception embedded in the back of the seat in front of me
4) airplane must always be on time
5) preferably there is no one in the seat next to me, unless this person is the cookie monster, or my girlfriend
6) flight attendants must have excellent hearing; i do not like shouting "I WOULD LIKE A COOKIE PLEASE" in the company of strangers, nor does anyone
7) there is a televised football game at the time of the flight
8) and it is the steelers
9) also the steelers are winning
10) and not instead, say, getting stomped on by a team with a bird name

let's just say that jetblue got some of these right. i was watching mtv, anyway, and wedged among a killers paean to high-energy depression, a loudly earnest u2/green day collaboration that i think was supposed to raise money for hurricane katrina, and justin timberlake bringing sexy back via the ugliest lingerie on a woman that i have ever seen, i got to see "about us," by brooke feat. paul wall. paul wall is probably the ugliest man in hip-hop. i've occasionally used the word "homeless" euphemistically, as in "that movie was so bad, if it was a person, that person would be homeless, and also its face would be made out of boogers," but paul wall legitimately looks like a homeless man. especially his dental work. here's a picture. how does he even brush those? answer: he doesn't. his breath must be atrocious. just imagining it is making me get throw-up taste in the back of my throat.

brooke, for her part, has the kind of well-oiled, generically affronted-sounding hip-hop soprano that makes you feel dirty just listening to it. not sexy-dirty, mind you. dirty like, "i woke up this morning on a sidewalk and some of my pores were oozing a yellowish thing." the video itself features brooke having a spirited dance-off against girls who have talked shit on her, or something similarly mindless. shades of west side story. pop culture is a train wreck.

as for the killers et al.: i just want to make sure. rock 'n' roll is officially premised in depression at this point, yes? i'm not saying this is a bad thing, i'm just curious if there are any rock bands left who are dealing in a currency other than alienation/rejection/generic serotonin-imbalance atmospherics. it's fine if there aren't. inquiring minds, you know.

thxgiving was so great, we're doing it again this weekend with the entire extended family on my mom's side. plus katherine. it'll be just like meet the parents!, except that the prolific awkwardness will not be humorous to anyone. for those of you who are tired of hearing about katherine on the blog, 1) suck it, but 2) our relationship almost certainly will not survive this weekend. for those of you who are katherine: i'm so sorry. what we had was really good. i'm so, so sorry.

kids

2006-11-20T08:14:00.000-08:00

nice to see people are commenting again, and especially calling me on the inexcusable gayness of having a girlfriend. i don’t have a whole lot to say, sadly. pulling all sorts of wacky hours at the magazine; missed the harvard-yale game, etc. but it will be mad worth it. issue #2 is so good, it will threaten the integrity of your pants. that is, if pants destruction is a measure of “good,” but if you don’t inhabit that moral universe, you are a fool.

i got to babysit a five-year-old and an 11-year-old the other night, and that was an eye-opener. it’s been years since i babysat, and even longer since i’ve read a 64-page richard scarry book cover-to-cover. out loud. to an adorable but squirmy five-year-old girl who wanted to take the time to find “Goldbug” on every single page. and probably longer still since i beat someone at magic, the card game. um... yeah.

i was a dorky, dorky little kid in middle school, and when i wasn’t refining my origami chops or reading up on tolkien, i was collecting magic cards. the worst part of this was, i was completely awful at the game. it was really pathetic. so when the 11-year-old scampered upstairs to get two decks for us to play with, i was resigning myself to defeat. also, presciently, no small amount of weirdly legalistic discussion of the rules.

11-year-old, examining his card: ha ha. yes!! ha ha ha ha. oh, that’s really good.
me: sounds like you have a good card there!
11yo: oh, you’ll see. you’ll find out soon enough. hmm, i think i’ll just... tap these four mana... and... ALL OF YOUR CREATURES ARE DEAD.
me, reading with interest: “sends up to two target enchantments to the graveyard.”
11yo: yesss.
me: well, i’m pretty to new to all this, but i don’t believe this card applies to “creatures.”
11yo, with awkward false assurance: no, it does. no, those are enchanted creatures.
me: no they’re not. anyway an “enchanted creature” is a creature with an enchantment on it, so even then no one gets killed.
11yo, clumsily attempting to save face: no, it’s—oh wait. oh, that says “enchantments?” sorry, i misread it.
me: it’s cool.
11yo:
me: is your turn over yet? because i cannot wait to lay the smack down with this “rampaging berserker.”

oh man. it was awesome. i believe defeating an 11-year-old, at his own game, on the carpet of his dad’s office on the third floor, is one of the sweetest victories a person can know. although technically i didn’t defeat him; he was down to his last 4 life points when his dad called, i went downstairs for a glass of water, and upon my return, he was very casually packing up both decks, like nothing happened. like he didn’t get his punk ass beat.

jtown out.

p.s. one magic card collection for sale, while i’m at it. embarrassingly extensive. will ship from pittsburgh this weekend. make me an offer.

joanna newsom's opening act must die

2006-11-15T19:30:00.000-08:00

last night katherine and i went to see joanna newsom, whose first album (plus ted leo, plus the strokes) was my weird, weird soundtrack in san sebastián. joanna newsom is sort of an acquired taste--she has a voice that sounds like a sixty-year-old woman, somehow, never hit puberty--but her songs are very well-crafted, and her lyrics are pretty smart. this was the first show i've gotten to see since nate and jen took me to see regina spektor in new york, who like joanna newsom has a distinctive voice and performs in the postmodern revival of a set of seriously non-pop formats: folk, cabaret, anguished death-keening. both also had opening acts and then waited appallingly long to follow them, which grumpified the shit out of us.

it didn't help joanna newsom that her opening act was, frankly, wretched. at first it was a guy with a wimpy, wimpy michael-stipe-in-want-of-a-cookie voice and some half-hearted acoustic guitarwork. then he was joined by three other wimpy people and they played some monotonous depressed quasi-folk-rock thing at about 20bpm. the worst part was, every now and then they'd briefly bring the volume WAY UP and rock out in a reasonably awesome way. this was so you knew they were capable of being good. they wanted to make clear that being depressing and whiny was a choice. great call, guys.

also, the lyrics were just awful. there is a certain kind of ear for lyrics that has trouble distinguishing between the poetic and the pretentious, and whoever wrote the lyrics for this band had at least two of those ears. possibly more. the words we could make out were complete garbage. i forget all of them, happily. here is their myspace page, in case you're eager to reduce your aggregate happiness level without being exposed to anything profound or musically interesting.

so. we sat through an hour of that, the lights came up, and we all chilled out for a while. in strict demographic terms, i felt that we fit in. a lot of hipster-wear, a lot of people who looked about our age. however, their patterns of interaction were noticeably awkward. also, none of them seemed to be experiencing consternation that this concert would keep them up too late.

and at length, it dawned on me: these are not young awesome professionals. these are college students.

i was aghast. we were completely surrounded by college students. good god, i felt old. we may have fit in, but they had completely different priorities than we did. specifically, we had the priority of not falling asleep in our seats, as well as the priority of ducking out before there was an encore. in our defense, the show ended after 11pm.

joanna newsom, if you're reading this: i'm sorry. you sounded great, your harpwork is some of the best i've ever heard, and the songs from your second album are interesting, to the extent that i was paying attention to them. it's just that after 90 minutes of sitting in the absurdly tiny hellish little seats of the somerville theater, i am uncomfortable and sleepy, and you haven't even started yet. i would have gladly paid the same amount for your show without the opening act. also, it was strange that your backing band was the following:

guy with three different bass drums
guy with accordion and theremin
guy with banjo
girl with glockenspiel who played it for about fifteen seconds during the final song, and that was it
guy with "bulgarian lute"

not making any of this up. the band sounded okay, at least, unlike regina proktor's band, which is almost certainly the worst thing ever to happen to her. or me. i don't even want to talk about it.

in conclusion, live shows are a terrible idea.

use this word: VAVE

2006-11-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

stayed up last night, watched the good news roll in. the onslaught of work today—issue #2 is going to be crazy fine, but this is translating to another magically batshit-crazy close—was mitigated by more awesome news during the day. rumsfeld goes down! we got montana! i’m not even a democrat, is the thing. i’m a democrat to the same extent that i’m a pittsburgh steeler. i just think it’s great when they win.

surely you operate by this principle also. having a political allegiance is like having a sports allegiance. this is karl rove’s fault, but whatever. what is important is that your team wins, and little else. the other team might be comprised of better people (or not, in the case of baltimore/the GOP), but their problem is, they suck. i had exactly the same reaction the day after the democrats’ victory as i do when the steelers win: a powerful, near-unaccountable general feeling of well-being, a tendency to linger jackal-like over the descriptions and statistics of the carnage wrought upon the other team, as recorded online in formulaic AP releases, an inclination to stride around the halls of my workplace, grinning like a cretin, and make whooping noises at this or that cowering intern. i’m not thinking things like, now maybe we’ll get socialized medicine! or, now perhaps we shall see implemented the jesse-doesn’t-have-to-get-a-job tax!!! the new democrats we have are way too moderate to support any policies that i’d get excited about; otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten elected in a country whose latter-day conventional values i find increasingly horrible. no, i am thinking:

WE WON.
WE WON AND YOU DID NOT IF YOU ARE A REPUBLICAN.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
YOU HAVE WON MANY, MANY TIMES RECENTLY, BUT TODAY YOU ARE THE LOSER. HA HA HA. OH MAN.
YOU SUCK.
WE LOSE A LOT. BUT YESTERDAY THAT WAS NOT THE CASE. YOU ARE A LOSER TODAY. THIS IS BECAUSE YOU SUCK.
YOU SUCK SO BAD, IT’S INSANE.
HA. HA HA HA.
ALSO YOUR MOM SUCKS.
THE LOOK ON YOUR FACE IS SAD. THE LOOK ON MY FACE IS HAPPY. THERE IS A CAUSALITY HERE THAT I HOPE TO DEMONSTRATE. YOUR SADNESS ELATES ME.
HA HA HA SNORT.
SNORRTTTT.
I MADE A SNORTING NOISE AT YOU.

obviously this is an odious way of thinking about it, but it’s the truth. look at it this way: the steelers are 2-6 so far this season. i don’t have much else in my life in the way of vicarious arbitrary victory-enjoyment, a thing which i have come to require and an idea which i find useful enough that i shall acronymize it: VAVE. hopefully this term will not go the way of “yappie.” remember when i coined that? that was great! i’ma bring that back, come to think of it.

for the existence of VAVE, i blame: america.

katherine and i finished the sunday crossword together. it was the most romantic thing i’d ever been a part of. pretty quickly, she did not let me use the pen, because "[my] handwriting is atrocious." relationships are about compromise.

in other news, the title of this blog may become relevant again pretty soon.

product placement

2006-10-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

even the awesomest of rock bands can’t rock all day, or even for the entirety of the time when they are not at work, or sleeping, or waiting for the keyboardist to get off the phone with his mom already. rocking is hard work, and sometimes we need to take a break. and when we do this, it means riding matt’s diminutive yellow honda scooter in circles around the johnny’s foodmaster parking lot at about 8 or 9mph in the darkness of the arlington night, to the consternation of the occasional passerby. rock band!!!

matt got this scooter to more efficiently traverse the desert of the burning man festival, but its natural habitat is the parking lot. already, mike’s october visit has come to be defined—to me, at least—by the many happy moments we have spent peering over the fence, hunching our shoulders in our jackets against the chill, silently watching a determined band member negotiate the gradient of the north curve without using the brake, which is loud as shit.

matt: here he comes!
dave: he is not using the brake.
matt: christ, he’s smooth.
me: and his cigarette is still lit!!!
the three of us, in chorus: YES.

i met katherine’s parents on sunday, which event was complicated by an injury i had sustained earlier that day while playing driveway football, another thing rock bands are known to do. basically, i had juked matt near-senseless and had him beat for an easy score, when mike made a serious tactical error: trying to get the ball to me via throwing. terrified, i batted the ball away and then fell down. driveways are hard and gravelly, so as a consequence my right buttock and arm got sort of fucked up, and when dinnertime came around i was still walking funny and couldn’t adjust the angles of my elbow or wrist without shrieking. i was very self-conscious about this.

mom of katherine: jesse! it’s so good to meet you.
me: I’M sure not walking funny!
mom of katherine:
me: because i DON’T have a sore buttock!
dad of katherine: it’s a pleasure.
me, earsplittingly: AAACK

in my defense, he was shaking my hand.

this is unrelated, but if you know about any good architecture master’s programs, please holla at this.

not-that-innocent, not-that-abroad-anymore

2006-10-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

i’m writing this on an airplane. i was going to work on a piece for 02138, or some other ongoing writing project, but Lego Star Wars reared its cute, violent head some
hours ago and i haven’t looked back since. darth vader manages to be adorable yet formidable, with a sick jump-attack move. all incarnations of natalie portman are bad at jumping. like, insanely bad. the blasters make noises like squirrel torture. this game is excellent.

here’s a naive question: if you have five security checkpoints in an airport, and each is no more rigorous than the last one, um, what’s going on there? aren’t you always going to catch your evildoers at the most stringent one, and then the others are just a waste of everyone’s time? here’s what i want: one security checkpoint, and there i wanted to be subjected to a brief but invasive full-body probe, and after that i want to be left alone for the rest of my airport experience. i don’t think this is an absurd request. only one person should get to peer skeptically at my passport and ask why it is furry. “it’s just pocket-dirt,” i have said five times already today, and i am losing my patience.

our last days in ireland were fun, but without the breathtaking your-ass-is-being-kicked wonderment of the aran islands. one day i will live there in seclusion, venturing back to the mainland only when i crave nachos.

we saw the cliffs of moher:

and believe this, bitches: shit got extremely subversive.

yeah!!! fuck you, authority. i did not attempt to disobey this sign, however:

there are a lot of great signs in ireland. here was one we found in galway and doolin:

what does this even mean? “drive your car off a cliff,” that’s what. even if you don’t read an imperative into it, it’s still, “sometimes cars drive off the cliff.” no stigma or warning is attached to this narrative. ireland, you need to cut this relativist bullshit out before i smack you upside the head.

in doolin, we heard some trad, and also we stayed at a hostel whose owner had an accent that he must have been making up. he sounded completely ridiculous. there was a late-middle-aged canadian couple chillaxing in the common room, and he kept asking them things like, “d’ye play the golf.”

“we—we do play the golf,” admitted the wife, grinning, enchanted by this magical display of quaintness. the hostel owner was also a very pungent human being. katherine characterized him thus: “he smells like he’s been wearing the same wool sweater for three days with nothing under it.” this is not an exaggeration, at all.

we spent our final day in ennis, the City That Tried To Ruin Our Entire Vacation. all in all, our vacation had been remarkably hassle-free. then ennis happened. the only hostel in town was undergoing renovations, and after trudging all across town, we were forced to settle on an expensive B&B. it was awful. i mean, the bed was soft and the breakfast was extensive and delicious, but i felt like a tool. believe this: i am mad street. just because i felt coerced into wearing a nice-looking sweater for breakfast does not mean i will hesitate in any way to cap you, should that become necessary. one of the conditions for me capping you: not having any skim milk for these cornflakes. i swear to god, this “fresh milk” shit is not right. it is not right.

extreme props to the ireland tourism board, in the end, for providing the following for our view from the airport.

unreal. a rainbow? are you kidding me, ireland? this vacation was outstanding. i have no regrets.

they call it ireland for a reason, pt i

2006-10-09T04:53:00.000-07:00

“oh ha ha ha!” i may have sneered at you, condescendingly, when you struggled to convince me that ireland was a very, very green-colored country. “oh i’m sure it is,” i probably said, winking broadly at bystanders real or imaginary to indicate that i was a worldly person who had already visited many green parts of the world, like frick park, or any number of suburban yards. but oh man, am i sorry about being a dick like that. most of ireland is this unhealthy shade of radioactive green that hurts your eyes—none of these photos will do it justice—and now everything mysterious about ireland makes total sense to me. the charmingly inventive diction? the widespread embrace of alcoholism? the practice of “hurling”? the color green has driven this coutnry insane. everything is illuminated, to quote a prominent douchebag, and it is illuminated with a throbbing, violent green luminescence.

ireland is green because it rains every single day. here was our bus back from the airport:
however, it rains in fits and starts, and never all that hard, so katherine and i have gotten to do lots of edifying things.

these goddamned muffins were so fucking great. we did other things in dublin but i don’t remember them at all. the muffin had banana and chocolate chip in it. it was like an orgasm in your mouth, except without the, um, you know. and with chocolate. katherine: “i wish... i had more... of those.” me: “drool.” katherine: “yeah, drool.” we’re sort of incoherent on this subject right now and would like to move on.

apparently this man was the chancellor of trinity university. this guy! just look at him. he looks like a perv. we didn’t bother looking up his name and maybe he wasn’t the chancellor, but one thing is clear: if i don’t credit katherine for pointing out this pervy, pervy man, she will probably hit me.

as we strolled down the liffey on our way to the bus station, dublin was invaded by pirates.

beautiful, beautiful galway. aoife lives here, and unbeknownst to her, now we do too. specifically in her crawl space. it is damp and ill-lit and i fear we are running out of oxygen. also, katherine claims there are spiders, and if the persistent biting is any indication, she is correct.

“take the picture take the picture TAKE THE PICTURE NOW IT’S THE BUTTON ON THE TOP IT IS ALWAYS THAT BUTTON ARRRGGGH MY HANDS ARE COLD AND WET AND I AM ABOUT TO FALL”

the horse had already heard this one.

aughnanure castle. the name is gaelic for “gross, a nanure.” the meaning of “nanure” is anybody’s guess. this was part of one of aughnanure’s guard walls. unaccountably, i didn’t take any pictures of the castle itself. but check out this awesome guard wall tower! okay, let’s move on. this castle also had a moat, which was murky and black and thad trees dipping their branches mournfully into it , but there are no pictures of that either. i swear i am not making this castle up. why does this sound so defensive? here’s their website. seriously, this is 100% for real.

we had to get up mad early to catch the ferry to inis meáin (or inishmaan, if you want to spell it like the MURDEROUS IMPERIALIST BRITISH, YOU SWINE), but it was worth it. inishmaan, one of the aran isles (“quietness without loneliness,” to quote Let’s Go, which is generally a bad idea), is completely wonderful. it’s a tiny little island—we saw all of it within about fifteen minutes—and it has this discomfitingly desolate and windswept feel to it. it’s all fields and rocks and houses burning peat. also, no one we met on the island was anything approaching the idea of “socialized.” the guy who rented us our bikes was the most awkward person in the entire world, and in a uniquely creepy, sinister way. katherine: “well, he had a cute cat,”
...but that does not excuse him. he felt obligated to make conversation with me, so we had a conversation like this:

bike rental man: so whar ye freacht.
me: uhh.
katherine: [immediately runs away to play with the cat]
bike rental man: WHAR YE FREARGHT.
me, feigning levity: ha ha ha ha ha! well. that’s an excellent point.
bike rental man: ye’ve geacht guid weachther KILL snarl.
me: “kill,” indeed! why, just the other day
bike rental man: SNARRRRRRRCHT.
the weather wasn’t great, but it was the sort of island where it would have seemed odd if it had been.

we wandered around the cliffs for a while. they drop sheer into the sea, from really breathtaking heights. here is a picture of me experiencing the revelation that this would be an AMAZING place to film part or all of a music video.

i have no idea who this person is, but i like this picture a lot. if you are the person in this picture: um, hi! i guess it's creepy that i photographed you without your knowledge or consent. :)?

sometimes it was like: damn.

the island was covered with walls, and apparently they’re a (if not the) distinguishing characteristic of the aran islands: walls all over the place. crude stone walls. katherine: “they have to have some place to put all those rocks.” this has to be true, because they can’t be there to keep the animals from escaping. where are the animals going to escape to? it’s an island. then again, these people are completely insane.

bernie worrell is my copilot

2006-09-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

in its modest little bid for stardom—or, more realistically, a bid to Get Some Of The Guys In A Context Wherein They’d Be Somewhat More Likely To Be Getting Some And Then Maybe They Would Complain Less—hurrakam rada, the band comprised of 5-6 guys in our house, now has a myspace page. on this page you currently can hear us playing:

- one of my songs, on which it is actually me doing the lead vocals
- a song that some of the other guys wrote, on which we seem to have convinced dave matthews to do lead vocals
- a song that was not, technically, written or performed by hurrakam rada, but we think our drummer is guest-drumming on it

here is a fun game for you to play: guess which is which! guess wrong and i will terminate our friendship, or if necessary our status of being related to each other. it’s not that i don’t like the other songs, it’s just that, i mean, come on. (also, i really, really hate the other songs. i don’t even have the will to throw a “psych” to the other members of hurrakam rada if they’re reading this. each day, i am one day more dead than the last.)

anyway, the directors of this band hope to put a new song online every week, or failing that, nude pictures of rob’s girlfriend, so either way it’s probably worth checking out.

this myspace page has already been the source of some contention (admittedly, most of it the consequence of me identifying that this band lacked a diva, and laboring to get on that) when earlier it had:

- a logo that was not based on a photograph of me
- none of my songs
- the classification “jazz/funk/rock,” which in my opinion made us sound like that band from high school that kept doing jazz arrangements of “billie jean” and “i am the walrus,” which by the way sounds much more tenable in the abstract than it actually is
- blog entries and photographs produced by a dedicated team of dirty, dirty hippies

well, i haven’t taken care of the last one, but the first three are in the bag. so that's good.

travel arrangements: i’m in new york next week tuesday and wednesday; katherine and i are in ireland the week after from thursday to thursday. are you in either of these places? i might be able to slot you in. contact my secretary, which is to say, me talking in a high-pitched voice and pretending to have the name “wilmadette.”

katherine and i are having a heck of a time planning this trip. “ooh!” katherine will squeal delightedly, paging through Let’s Go Ireland. “bogs!” apparently ireland is chock-full of bogs. also a thing called “craic.”

great.

i'm federal agent jack bauer

2006-09-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

first of all, birthdays: terrific call. it’s the day you got born! here, have these presents. do whatever you want. free pass! take a nap on the boss’s sofa, eat the last cookie, announce your disproportionate glee in doing so. today is the day you get to do that. on all other days, we would look at you as though you were kind of strange, but today is your very special day, you special, special human.

katherine and i went to pho republique for dinner. pho republique is located in sort of grungy environs, and it functions as this secret hipster gathering place, hidden in a generic semi-depressed urban landscape. the food is expensive, the ceilings are high, and the lights are low. there are a shitload of tapestries. if the country of vietnam was fragrant, spacious, inhabited solely by yuppie hipsters, and had more candles than was necessary, i imagine it would be a lot like pho republique.

the tuna sashimi avocado egg rolls caused me to moan, sort of loudly. conversation at the next table died. katherine eyed me askance.

“please don’t make that noise ever again,” she said.

“in the context of food, at least,” i suggested... suggestively.

“in any context,” she said.

after a bottle of wine, we were a little looser.

“you and i,” i said, “once this craziness is all over, we are gonna go on vacation.” we were running an hour late; there had been a minor blow-up at the magazine.

“we are going to get a goddamned cottage,” she said, “in some quaint little goddamned town in ireland. i am gonna quit my job, and you are gonna support us.”

“that sounds fucking great,” i exulted. we were sort of shouting.

“we will eat black bread and stew!” cried katherine, incomparable blue eyes alight. “we will eat black bread and stew from morn til night.”

“we will drink beer that tastes like moss!” i yelled. “gallons of it! and in the mornings, we will feel thick-bodied and grotesque.”

so we were pretty fired up about that.

after that we had drinks at cambridge common. i made sure everyone was aware that the TV was showing a pirates game, and the pirates were winning. thomas bechtold bought me a “dirty martini,” which i was hoping would be more euphemistic than it actually was. i watched longingly as brian fairley enjoyed what appeared to be the most delicious cigarette of all time. those coworkers who were not entangled in some kind of severe indexing mayhem at the magazine—which is to say, two of them—appeared later in the evening and drained their beverages rapidly, with a sort of joyless efficiency. my housemates did not come to cambridge common, because they were having their own party. this party had a keg. i was pretty pissed off about that, but all told it turned out to be much cleaner and quieter than i was prepared to expect. in fact, the lights were out and the music was off when katherine and i approached the house down the walk, swaying a little; idiotically, it was a complete surprise when suddenly the hall light went on and about three dozen people commenced melodically yelling “happy birthday” at me. i panicked and, as is my tendency, began retching with fear. katherine explained to a concerned audience that we were “just pretty good friends” and she “only wanted to make sure he got home safely, and now he has, so... peace out.”

the girls from stanford called around 2:30am to wish me a happy birthday. i was already asleep, as i am old now. nonetheless: jessie, megan, sasha, and sari: shout-out. you will always be my dearest bitches.

post-script: 02138’s premier issue closed yesterday. katherine and i bought plane tickets today on birthday money (EXTREME SHOUT-OUT TO MY LOVING PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS; WORD). we’re going to ireland in early october. katherine wants to stipulate in advance that i don’t get to do my “irish” voice when we’re there, but i hope to demonstrate that she is wrong.

thurp

2006-09-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

there is something way too demoralizing about having the hiccups. i mean more demoralizing than is really called for. i mean the semi-violent, body-displacing kind that, if it’s been kind of a fetid pukewagon of a day, kick in around 3pm, and then around 6pm or so you try the holding-your-breath thing for about the fortieth time, and somehow it works. and then around 8pm a new and discombobulating development in your day occurs and you go outside to give a brief, feeble yodel of frustration, and this dislodges a fresh round of hiccups, and your body is convulsed anew. around 9:30pm, improbably, drinking a cup of water upside-down seems to quell the hiccups; however, in the process of futilely sprinting after a bus, they begin yet again.

and now, at the bus stop, as you gradually become accompanied by strangers, you are The Loudly Hiccuping Guy in Public. every three to ten seconds, your body jolts worryingly and, if your mouth is open, you make this sound: HURK. you do not make it quietly, either. each new arrival to the bus station HURP eyes you with worry, or distaste, or HURKKH both. all you wanted URP was bed, maybe some ice cream, THURPK maybe the sympathetic ear of a friend HURK for a pleasant fifteen-minute kvetch. instead THURD you are jerking and shuddering around on the seat as though it HURP were electrified THURP godDAMMIT WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME

the final days of the twenty-fourth year of my life have been somewhat trying. tomorrow i plan to drink, and drink heavily. thereafter i will vomit flame upon the faces of the unrighteous, or perhaps just into a toilet, to the delight of any number of amateur-photographer friends.

i hope you will join me.

saturday dad phonetime

2006-09-10T16:49:00.001-07:00

me: so this new kid—so pittsburgh has a new mayor?

dad: he’s going to be eaten alive.

me: it was in the times! it was on the front page! he’s 26 years old, and he’s the mayor of pittsburgh. that’s just crazy.

dad, happily: they are going to eat his flesh.

me: well, go steelers, i guess. heck of a game.

dad: can you imagine if lena were mayor?

me: lena is older than thi

dad: do not let her hear you say that.

me:

dad: anyway, she’d be terrified.

me: i think they’d be terrified. i mean, it’s lena.

dad:

me: also, she’s 27—it’s not like

dad: actually, they would be terrified! both sides would be terrified of each other. nothing would get done. oh, man.

me: giggle.

dad: you may be curious to hear a joke about bananas i discovered on the internet.

me:

dad: it concerns the replacement of a particularly nettlesome light bulb.

me: i have to get back to work.

i have to be at work a lot. this is nothing new. ramos has delayed his mighty and terrible visit to boston by two weeks or so. the gods of arist-karma have offset this by an amazing piece of news from one of my operatives—a card-carrying affiliate of the Committee To Get Jesse’s Book Published, which in a couple of years will be like single-digit Soviet Communist Party membership, which is to say those of you without it are exponentially more likely to die horribly—anyway, he has managed to get an influential person in the publishing community to read a chapter of my novel, and he claims that she “really loved it,” and is going to assist in getting me an agent. you ask: is she his mom? the answer: frankly, yes. you ask: is “publishing community” here synonymous with “housewives’ book-club community of suburban boston”? the answer: i have yet to look into this, and am growing more and more afraid to do so.

here’s the thing: you have five days to get me a birthday present. i will email you my address if necessary. german gummi candy would be ideal. the real shit, mind you. none of this haribo garbage. give me bärenland or give me death.

the adventure false-starts

2006-09-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

joe, matt, rob, micah, and i have arranged to meet john, a curly-headed dart-eyed smoker with a nervous tic of a laugh, so that we can be in the emergenza band competition. note how these are different guys from last blog entry. this is for a different band consisting simply of everyone who lives in our house. the band is called, somehow, “Hurra-Cam Rada.” no, i don’t know what that means, nor does anyone else. good so far? great.

we are at the middle east; the other guys are drinking tea, and i am eating falafel and desperately trying to suppress loud and unfavorable comparison to that of [INSERT ANY OF LIKE TEN BERLIN FALAFELERIES]. at length, john finds us, drags a chair to our table, and emits a sales pitch that he has definitely given many dozens of times (nine bands play 25min. apiece per show; the audience votes for the bands they like; the top vote-getters move on to the next round at a bigger venue; the bands are expected to sell tickets to their fan base in order to increase their vote count). when he is done, we tentatively pester him with inanities.

rob: so this is a... i want to say

john: it’s not a popularity contest.

rob: no! no, of course not.

[an uneasy silence.]

joe: although actually it does sort of

rob: yup. yup.

john: i prefer to call it a “promotional” contest.

some of us: ha! ha, ha. well.

matt, shrewdly: can we use a projector?

john: i... normally bands don't, er

me: IN BERLIN, AT THE FUCKING KING OF FALAFEL, THE GODdamn... uh. it’s just that they had... nevermind sorry.

micah: i hear we have to pay? to be in the contest?

john: yes. yes, you do. we attempt to offset that by giving you guitar strings and bass strings

matt: but could we bring a projector if we wanted... sick visuals?!?!??

rob: YEAH

me: GREEN FOOD COLORING AND A HANDFUCK OF ICEBERG LETTUCE. THAT IS NOT A MEAL. YOU WANT ME TO SPEND FIVE DOLLARS ON FALAFEL, YOU GOTTA GIVE ME MORE THAN THAT.

joe: “handful.”

me: WHAT’D I SAY.

joe: i think you said

john: you said “handfuck.”

me: ALL I’M SAYING IS IT TASTES LIKE ASS.

so we were told we were looking at the 12:30am slot on a thursday (november 9—that omnipresent date in german history!, as if you care). bands, john had explained at the beginning, get random slots between 9:30 and 12:30 on thursdays, fridays, and saturdays, so it was weird that somehow there was just one slot left and it was a shitty one. our demeanor must have been like, “that sucks,” because then john eyed us cannily, and told us that if we somehow scheduled another meeting with him, he would have better slots for us. so we’re doing that and not asking questions, if we even decide to take this on. rob brought up the worrisome notion of “merch.”

“you gotta have a table for merch,” confirmed john swiftly.

this is so fucking sordid.

i got the cookies

2006-09-03T13:03:00.000-07:00

ohmanohmanohman. this month is going to be huge. if you don’t like blog entries about how much my band kicks ass—entries, further, that inevitably lack any kind of empirical justification at all, except for that one time in berlin octavian the transylvanian made us a fan site—september is not going to be a great superactionmonth for you. (if i was some kind of wry douchebag, i would propose to wake you up when september ends... and i guess i totally am. fuck, sorry.)

first of all, “huge” mike ramos is coming to town in a few days, and he’s staying with us for like three and a half weeks. ideally we convince him to drop whatever he’s doing, long-term and move to boston, but we’ll settle for half a dozen ENORMOUS GUITAR SOLOS. this is to say: between now and october first, we intend to record an album of songs we all have written. you will come to know these names:

“huge” mike ramos: lead guitar

matt “hovermatt” o’malley: keys, also sometimes guitar if he feels like he’s “in the zone”

“fucking completely crazy” dave: drums

lumpy: drums and banjo if he’s still coming, which i forget

the four/five of us are... HOVERCAT. or maybe we are TEEN PLANT. it could also be that we are PUPPY RABBIT AND HIS/ITS PIRATES OF SOUL. or a name that someone who isn’t me thought of. we have no name, and we’re still not sure what we sound like, or who is the lead singer, if anyone. we do know this: the band will rock extremely hard, and the lyrics will be about as dumb as we can make them without causing substantial permanent damage to our own brains. for example, please take note of the chorus for “little black cat,” a song that we sort of have to do because it permits matt to use the talking heads/funkadelic bernie worrell keyboard sound in a SOLO THAT COULD EASILY GO ON FOR LIKE AN HOUR WHEN WE PLAY IT LIVE. this is how the chorus goes:

i am just a man who plays and sings / and i’m not that into those kinky things / yeah i don’t wear bracelets or magic rings... / AND I DON’T DRINK THE BLOOD OF NO QUEENS AND KINGS (?!?!?!!!)

a lot of our lyrics are like that. the chorus for “anchorhouse” involves satan, and there isn’t much more to “why’d you have to wake me up” than the words in the title. (if you are a record executive: PSYCH!)

during this month, our television show may also air. it’s completely unclear!! great.

during this month too, the magazine i work for probably will manufacture its FIRST ISSUE EVER, in which i have a whole bunch of bylines, or would if i weren’t on the masthead and so it’s probably not at all clear what i wrote, which is fine, because we are a TEAM, and much of what i have written has been extensively edited anyway. like the piece on the glamorous art-collecting gad-abouts? or the one on flamboyant piano-playing wonder-men? those were originally about obscure indie bands that i don’t even like.

during this month, i will also become 24 years old, which is fine, i guess. here’s my birthday resolution; if i do not have a published novel by the time i turn 25, i will at least have written another one. soon i shall have a whole entire bunch of unpublished novels, and their richly evoked, achingly real characters shall be my only company as i slowly age and wait for death.

oh, mom: i got the cookies. they’re really good, i ate all of them.

how like a journalism is a mandolin

2006-08-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

micah beheld me this morning with regret and envy. we were on our way to work. micah was wearing a shirt with buttons and collar and, i think, a tie. i was wearing my TEAM PLAN hoodie, sunglasses despite heavy cloud cover, and a vaguely military-looking hat i got from H+M. i was wearing the hat backwards. also i had on that hipster-supreme vespa t-shirt that is perhaps too small even to be worn ironically.

“i wish i could dress like that to work,” observed micah, visibly downcast.

journalism is just plain great. i should add that i was on my way to phone-interview a director at a major international public health organization, an interview which went almost mind-assassinatingly smoothly. warning: the absurdity of this is difficult to grasp in its entirety. the phone is a massively underrated thing. if you can modulate your voice to sound confident and vaguely radio personality-like, and then tell people you’re “with” a “magazine”—a magazine, mind you, that doesn’t even exist yet—you can talk to pretty much whomever you want. just ask for the media relations office! or better yet, don't! jobs do not get much easier than this, friends. and you can be dressed like a trendy fourteen-year-old; no one will be the wiser for it. you can be more or less naked. repeat after me: “hi, i’m with [series of five digits] magazine.” just purr it right into the phone. you are a honey-tongued sex god, and on this day you require a sacrifice. “i’m trying to reach, i don’t know, bono. is bono there?” yes! yes! cast your ridiculous inhibitions aside. “oh man, i can see my own wang.” my point is this: hubris will be the end of you.

greg from work and i plan to buy an actual vespa. greg claims, perversely yet conveniently, to have always wanted just to own a vespa without ever riding it, whereas i want nothing more than to zoom around on one at high speeds in the unforgiving boston traffic, ideally when the roads are slick and wet and otherwise favorable to zooming. how will we acquire this mystical apparatus? where will we get the money to pay for it? i’m afraid i can’t tell you the answer, but if you are worried it involves embezzlement, your fears are 95% justified. if you think i am writing this to double-psych out the company lawyers who read my blog, also, you are more correct than not-correct.

i am still trying to arrange a journey to uzbekistan (or possibly kyrgyzstan) this winter. this would totally be for journalism. journalism is the sickest!!! all that remains is for me to discover that journalism somehow necessitates snowboarding, and i will be the happiest guy in all of yappiedom.

it would also be great if someone were to do my laundry. surely someone reading this is compelled to do my laundry. you there! you reading this! do it.

...please.

a starr is borne

2006-08-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

ooh! ooh! i have a terrific title for a chapter of Memoirs of a Guy! specifically the one in which chris starr and i get hammered and go on this perilous moonlit cliffside rockclimb and then toward the top he suddenly lost his footing and fell down part of the hill, through sheer luck alone hitting an outward-jutting clump of earth that blocked him from falling into the sea and almost certainly perishing (!!!). and so then we clutched and grasped at the dew-wet hillside, constantly fighting to offset our slipping against the muddy wet, and waited, tense and tired, for the sun to rise, and i kept him from falling asleep by smacking him about the calves and ankles because we were worried that he had sustained a concussion, and once the fingers of the sun had reached over the ocean to touch our faces and we could see shit again i heroically took both of us back down the hill, talking him down to safety, leading us back through the undergrowth to town, carrying him and myself on little more than force of will, because we were also fucking hungry and generally sore from the climbing and falling and not-sleeping. fuck, my title for this chapter is totally sweet. you'll never guess what it is.

a magazine launch is, i think, generally a pretty crazed sort of affair, but ours has to be breaking some records. it’s coming together—i saw my bart wealthington interview designed and it looks really wonderful—but not without considerable hysteria. we assistant editors at 02138 are turgid with talent and potential, but we are also very young, and prone to fucking up. also, every now and then the boss will run into my office and be like: “jesse! i need you to track down the contact information and pizza preference for ALL OF THE EMPLOYEES OF GOLDMAN SACHS and also you must figure out their median age and height.”

but now i know that when this happens, you’re just supposed to find an intern, or, if none are readily available, you march out of the building and appropriate a new one. the streets are littered with potential new interns. tip from the top: if your new intern’s previous job was distributing the boston herald for free, it is safe to say that he does not know a blessed thing about excel, nor is he that eager to learn. if you found your intern shrieking at oncoming traffic and covered with dirt, i recommend that you take your intern hunt elsewhere—this is a safe indicator that 02138 got to him first. dear david’s parents: we are really sorry about that.

finally, sometimes it’s like, holy goddamn. i had no idea homestar runner made a megaman knockoff. and it’s completely brilliant. the music is spot-on, the cut scenes are as compelling as anything oliver stone has ever done, and the game itself is frustrating and i’m bad at it. once i have free time, i am going to be playing this game a lot. that sound you hear in the background is my boss laughing maniacally and uncontrollably.

my brain is a smoldering ruin

2006-08-23T21:03:00.000-07:00

oh to be young again. my evenings this week are at let’s go, proofing at 90c/page, and every now and then i have a run-in in the hallway with one or another absurdly fresh-faced little person, and when i introduce myself, sometimes the response is: “oh! you’re jesse the proofer!” slyly smiling, sort of mock-mocking. the mysterious person with the appalling all-caps handwriting. the one who writes long pedantic explanations of why this hyphenation is faulty; the one who is kind of a fascist about the correct use of “literally.” in situations like these i would like to say, “why yes! i am the proofer! ha ha! for three godforsaken years i WAS let’s go, you cocky little shit.” but this would be something of a non sequitur, and disproportionately angry.

the anger comes probably from nicotine withdrawal, probably also from lack of sleep. my days are at 02138, where guldang if we don’t have us a magazine a-comin’ down the pipe. it’s going to be fucking great! oh man. no seriously. this paragraph would evoke more to you if you were with me in person to see my bleary eyes; the one, half-shut; my right unseeing eye. or hear my barely modulated voice, a-gravelly with fatigue.

at let’s go they were blasting disney tunes. under the sea, the pocahontas song, that other one from mulan. good god, i remember when i was young and innocent and these songs were indescribably great. it is sort of astonishing that i did not turn out to be a raging gaylord. honestly, i loved the hell out of those songs. they had this marvelous accessible narrative quality, and when that shit got stuck in your head, it stayed there for years. now i hear them and cannot but think: “GAY. oh man these songs are the GAYEST.” i’m not saying that you can’t be gay and hate these songs, but i honestly don’t think any grown straight man could get into them. maybe i’m wrong? dad, i’m hoping you don’t go there.

eventually journey came on. i’m not even sure, at this point, whether i’ve transcended irony in my joyful consumption of journey. i feel like this is a tired question by now. journey 100% ROCKS THE HOUSE.

my interview went great. i learned a little about art and a lot about how to make an unwilling interview subject agree to be photographed, many times, by a really loud camera. at first i thought it was a joke camera, to be honest, because it was just ridiculously loud. “just talk to the reporter,” said our photographer (who had brought his 8-year-old child along, as well as two buxom assistants) to the subject, bart wealthington.

me: so, how about this piece here on the

camera: KACHONK. KACHONK. KACHONK. KACHONK

bart wealthington: WHAT?

camera: WHIRRRRRRRRRRRR CHONK

me: OW SHIT THAT’S GOING OFF RIGHT IN MY EAR

camera: WHIRRRRRRRR. WHIRRRRRRRGH. HIWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR HURGGGGGH

[long pause]

me: OW FUCK.

photographer’s eight-year-old child: THAT WAS FUCKING LOUD.

expect something perhaps more emotionally stable this weekend. the governor hovercat sketch may go up on youtube at any time also.

"someone with real talent" would never self-identify as such unless they were a gigantic boxchew

2006-08-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

hours since quitting smoking: 676

...which is not completely fair–i had a relapse today–but it was just a two-smoke relapse, and afterwards i threw the rest of the pack away, and good god, what do you want from me. i'm an ex-smoker now, for serious. there are plenty of benefits i wouldn't want to give up. the ability to sprint futilely after a bus for blocks, for example. the resurgence of small horrible mouth pains i used to get as a kid. an expanded palette of emotional distress. an enhanced richness of smell-experience on the T, and for that matter in other contexts of profound human odor. the shrieking. dear blighted christ, the hysterical full-eyed death-shrieking.

um, yeah. filming on saturday went really well. we were in boston common and wearing ridiculous clothing. robbie convinced some unwitting person to allow us to commandeer a swan boat, which features prominently in our delightful little short. i did a lot of full-speed running to and fro while holding a gigantic tripod above my head and muttering "excuse me" and "i have to go film this thing," which of course freaked a lot of people out. i don't want to give too much away because pretty soon you'll get to see the finished product on youtube, but let's put it this way: if you dislike things that are hilarious, for the love of god, do not watch this short. also, i've begun editing the governor hovercat short, and it's... it's so beautiful. some really affecting mise en scène. a kind of brooding anti-narrative that owes much to antonioni. matt steals the show as Congressman Raptor. the camera in many cases seems to have been operated by a team of infants.

life at the magazine is stressful, as the entire thing seems to have been due like last week and most of it (trans. "the part i was/am responsible for") hasn't been written yet, but hey. i'm told this is the price of working for a magazine. also, the meager pay and the fact that our accounting department inexplicably decided to switch our free unlimited coffee from peet's to dunkin donuts.

smooth, accounting department. real smooth. WAIT I DIDN'T MEAN THAT PLEASE DON'T STEEPLY REDUCE MY SALARY FUCK

tomorrow, i travel to an undisclosed location in boston to interview an extremely wealthy and powerful art collector in his luxurious home. it promises to be an adventure! i hate adventures.

me: so. do you have "dogs playing poker?"

"bart wealthington": no.

me: i mean, the original.

"bart wealthington": no, i don't have that one. were you going to ask about

me: hey. how come this table has little naked children on it?

"bart wealthington": you mean the cherubs?

me: yeah. isn't that kind of...

voice in my head: don't say "gay." even if you only mean it pejoratively. also don't say "retarded." DO NOT SUGGEST THAT THE TABLE IS GAY OR RETARDED.

"bart wealthington": um, you're saying that out loud. just so you know.

me, brightly trying to change subject: i'll have you know i was an art history major at retarded! i mean, retardvard. FUCK I MEAN HARVARD.

photographer, strangely transfixed: that table is so retarded.

no, i'm sure the interview will go fine. i will wear a shirt. i will wear pants. i will come armed with many probing questions and a boatload o' charm.

oh man, i am going to fuck this up so bad.

the sacred power of icons

2006-08-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

i am converting to catholicism. thank you, post-gazette. pittsburgh? god i miss you.

hilarious entry TK regarding TOMORROW'S ALL-DAY FILMING EXTRAVAGANZA. in the meantime, i am looking into flights to uzbekistan. if ever i should complain about my job to you, be hereby encouraged to smack my face.

clean, sort of

2006-08-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

hours since quitting smoking: 530

work has been off-the-wall nuts (our first issue is going to be amazing, as soon as we figure out what we're going to write for it), but that's no excuse, is it.

abe: you can't just put up old comic strips and call it a blog entry. that's totally pathetic.

rick: i thought i knew you.

yeah yeah yeah. to be honest, maybe you don't, old friend. things have changed. am i doing laundry even as i type this? as a matter of fact, yeah. do i wash my hair pretty much every day now? um, hell yes, my fellow bitches. do i now have a goddamned health insurance card that i recently and notably took to a doctor's appointment and employed in acquiring like twenty different and upsettingly necessary medications, which i now gulp down twice a day, after six months of apparently not being covered by our company's insurance provider because someone did not submit my completed insurance application papers and then i moved to arlington so i thought maybe they sent my card to the old address but no big deal because all i need to do is call up and get the number if an emergency happens and also i was afraid to go back there because that's where "pete best" lives and maybe he has since discovered this blog and would pummel me vigorously should we ever meet again ... ? the answer is, i forget how this question started and don't feel like rereading it.

to sum: apparently i've been in sore need of multiple kinds of antibiotics for several months. but all's well that ends well! this, to be sure, won't.

no honestly, i've become much better-groomed and more pleasant generally since quitting smoking. this is probably best illustrated by my little sister's visit to boston, which took place last weekend. i walked into bartley's, where she was having lunch with her friends, and she literally did not recognize me. like, at all.

"hi, eve," i said. she gaped at me, her eyes narrow and searching. i regarded her.

"eve?" i said uncertainly. i had sort of forgotten what she looked like.

"who are you," she mumbled doubtfully, in semi-familiar girlish tones.

"my name's jesse," i explained, "and i have a sister named eve." there was a silence. "who i think you are," i added.

it's worth pointing out that we both had new and stylish haircuts. anyway, things got better from there. sunday, eve and i walked around downtown boston. she bought sunglasses that made her look like an insect; i bought a belt. we wandered the streets of chinatown, where they were having a big weird festival. we shopped for dinner at a chinese grocery and then, yappily, whole foods. subsequently, i cooked dinner for a number of people. the food was all right. i've made better. eve and guests claimed they liked it and then left significant portions uneaten. eve and i traded impersonations of our health teacher from high school. i had some wine and at one point slept briefly on the couch. eve sent many, many texts to an ex-boyfriend who, it turns out, has since impregnated some hapless new inamorata. there, but for the grace of god, goes my little sister. obviously i did a shitload of loud fretting about this.

the next morning, which was monday, we had to get her to the bus station on time; there was a lot of anxious speed-walking through subway stations, nervous carping at the slowness and arbitrariness of american public transport, a bleary-eyed purchase of orange juice and a plain bagel with nothing on it which cost four goddamned dollars, and of course an arrival time that was embarrassingly early.

i'm... i'm becoming my father.

mrs. smith?

2006-08-01T18:40:00.000-07:00

"it's been obvious to us for some time now that your son timmy has a gamboling problem."

that's kind of all i got. work is intense and i don't have a lot of time to blog. maybe that will change tomorrow! in the meantime, imagine for yourself the delightfully frolicksome and fictional timmy invoked by above non sequitur. oh, plus jeremy scanned in about 100 sock full of quarters strips for our amazing new facebook group. like these ones.

lesbian kitties: too cute for boots.

now you're cooking with the chronically depressed!

2006-07-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

hours since quitting smoking: 245

somewhere along the line, i became the guy who cooks things. i have honestly about four things that i can make, but all of them are elaborate and, if we are feeling lucky or hammered, delicious. exhibit a: this miraculous linguine puttanesca i made for dinner earlier today, which incorporated ingredients that strike some people as horrible (anchovies, capers) and yet result in ineffable savory wonderment. exhibit b: tofu and eggplant in this complex asian black bean/garlic/soy/jalapeno sauce, which was such that for a week after eating it, nothing else really tasted like anything. it was severe.

cooking is so easy it hurts—literally.

if it’s a starch or grain, all you have to do is boil it until it is edible. it’s that simple! you have to thank whoever used trial and error to figure this one out. set it on fire until edible? not going to work. bash it with a rock for an entire day? that also sucks. so here’s something to be kind of stoked about, especially if you haven’t had a cigarette in a really long time and good god, you’re so alone. just boil some lentils until they are edible! ha ha! surely we are having some fun now! hopefully your housemates have hidden all of the knives.

if you make it with fat, sugar, and salt, it will taste great. this was just an unbelievable breakthrough discovery for me. normal eggs = whatever. eggs + butter, sugar, and salt = holy god, put it inside my tummy. literally anything is improved by this triumvirate of things. don’t ask questions.

do not fuck around with “braising” or other words you do not understand. here’s why most people don’t cook—there are like a million verbs that honestly just mean “cook.” you’ve been asked to “broil” a hamburger? here is what is involved: hamburger, flame, some sort of intervening metal lattice or plane. that’s all you need. don’t look back. an uppity guest expects you to “pan-sear” a thing of chicken? this means you should cook it in a pan. note how i said “thing” of chicken, also: is it a breast? a thigh? some other part that i don’t know about? it doesn’t matter. here’s the thing: no one will notice after the third bottle of wine has been opened.

take way longer to cook things than people are expecting. this should be obvious—you want to starve your guests, because then when they finally do get served, it’ll be all they can do not to throw up in gratitude, and they won’t notice that your alfredo has particles of dirt in it, because—look. nowhere on the package of mushrooms did it say you have to wash them.

be mysterious about your use of seasonings. i can’t stress this enough: never measure out the seasonings. just throw them in in arbitrary quantities. this is so much cooler than the nerdy cook who is painstakingly putting cumin into a tablespoon. dinner guests see you and are like, “holy crap!,” and “what sort of supernatural alchemy is being wrought here?! shit,” and also “surely, behind this facade of arbitrary spice-adding, there is some terrifically complex master plan that i cannot even begin to fathom.” here’s the thing: most spices are great. just put them in and get wacky. if it starts to taste weird, refer to the sugar-salt-fat trifecta of glory. you are golden, friend.

get my mom to send you recipes, and then follow them assiduously. ummm... this is really the only rule that one technically has to follow.

in response to recent comments:

"carlos": i just got the allen carr quit-smoking book, so we'll see how that works/helps. seeing asa i have gone OVER TEN DAYS without smoking. also, i've decided that italy is good at food, even if their soccer team makes me want to set fire to all of the north end's cars and garbage cans.

"ex-pat": FUCK YEAH

"mom": i only swear because i love you.

now, if you'll excuse me, i have to go track down the knives.

direct to video

2006-07-24T17:06:00.000-07:00

hours since quitting smoking for real: 147

oh man. maybe you remember that one time i was in film? helping grace do illegal things on subways? credited as producer, which, let’s face it, that’s ridiculous? because producing was basically like:

1. ferrying things about while whining

2. gauging the best moment to ask for a cigarette break

3. “set design,” e.g., stapling festive-colored paper to the wall

4. making suggestions that i now recognize as inane but at the time seemed compelling, like duct-taping a camera to a hat and then making someone wear the hat and then also getting this person to wear roller blades and hang on to a piece of rope extending from the trunk of a car and then drive the car onto the freeway: OH MAN THAT WOULD BE SWEET

you may also remember that other time i was in film, again for grace, this time in a lead role. also absurd, needless to say, because i did not have any idea how to act, and suddenly grace was making me do it in public, in front of many hundreds of skeptical germans. (it didn’t help that most of the time, it was just the two of us—her with a videocamera, me behaving self-consciously and pretentiously in front of its unblinking gaze—and while she knew exactly what she was doing, the whole thing looked like we were making an irritatingly elaborate tourist video. grace, if we collaborate in the future, i have to ask that we roll considerably deeper than that.)

so with all that experience, i went into directing yesterday’s shoot (for our public access tv show) with no small trepidation. but it turns out that filming is completely awesome if you’re in charge of it. i got to bark orders at people all day. i got to yell things like, “CAMERA! SOUND! ACT—WHERE THE FUCK IS CAMERA TWO. MICAH PUT THAT SHIT DOWN RIGHT NOW.” and most of the time, he would. i got to push a camera in katherine’s face and say things like, “okay, sad. sad. you’re really sad. you are anguished. you are married to an ANIMAL and sometimes THIS IS WHAT katherine? less hair. hair out of the face. all right you are SAD. give me more movement. give me DISTRESS. DIS-TRESS as in the hair is in your face again, and it needs to not be there. ha ha! like tresses of hair, you know, and no seriously, you are VERY VERY SAD okay okay that’s great!!! YES okay that’s too sad.” i got to aim a camera out of the back of matt’s car and force matt to chase the car while pretending to be Congressman Raptor, which, honestly, is the greatest joy any filmmaker may ever know.

anyway, we now have enough footage for a feature-length film, and the skit’s only supposed to be three minutes long, but hey. we’ll take care of that in “post,” i think. matt is sort of in charge of that, although i plan to hover over his shoulder and demand that he explain things to me. directing is awesome. i’m thinking about quitting my day job. (NOTE TO BOSSES AND DAD: I LOVE MY DAY JOB. IT IS GREAT. MY FAVORITE PART IS THE HEALTH INSURANCE. ALSO I LIKE THAT YOU LET ME WEAR T-SHIRTS.)

p.s. (and this is so i get a bunch of comments again) to the comments person from last time: nice Ph.D.! why don’t you shove it up your FESTERING BOXHOLE.

no seriously, i think queen is great too.

how we live now

2006-07-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

i am starting a new class of person: the young awesome professional. yappies, if you want. whatever. young awesome professionals do not give much of a shit about what you call them. in fact, fuck you. (?!?!!)

this is how young awesome professionals live: on saturday mornings, we wake up frazzle-headed and disoriented on a friend’s couch. we seriously need a shave, and we are wearing form-fitting stretch jeans and that racing-stripe vespa jacket that strangers keep complimenting. the look could be classified as “magical hipster realism.” we are on this friend’s couch because:

1. the friend’s living room is air-conditioned, and our room back home is not, and

2. last night we got—all apologies, parents—completely wrecked, more in the vicinity of friend’s couch than of home

(specifically, we got wrecked last night because yesterday was Salary Review, which gave me a number of reasons to drink—the salary itself, but also the relief in learning that Salary Review had not, as I had been fearing, caused the salary to go down in size. also, it was friday. also, the agony of not smoking—94hr. and counting—is somewhat easier to bear when you have drunk an entire bottle of a wine called “frontera” and are busy demonstrating to appreciative friends how good you are at GeoSense.)

the friend, if we are lucky, and young awesome professionals generally are, is making eggs and toast and has also burned us a CD of “one way ticket to hell... AND BACK.” brief digression: THE DARKNESS IS FUCKTASTIC. if you don’t like the darkness, i no longer want you in my life. it’s worth noting here that this entry makes much more sense if you’re reading it while listening to “english country garden,” “is it just me?,” or “knockers.” go put one of those on and then start reading again at the top. yeah! isn't that much better? it's fucking great, is what it is.

grimy and nicotine-deprived, we put on our shiny over-sized retro headphones, slip on the awesomest jacket in the world, and strut into toscanini’s, which it goes without saying is a punky independent coffeeshop. we don’t even have to order. the kid at the counter looks apologetic and says, “um, we don’t have sweetened condensed milk today.”

“dammit,” we say. here is what the darkness is screaming into our ears:

I JUST LOVE WHAT YOU’VE DONE WITH YOUR HAIR / OH YEAH

“it might taste similar with vanilla syrup,” says the kid, and makes an iced vietnamese coffee with vanilla syrup, which is to say, he takes some iced coffee, pours vanilla syrup in it, and then we’re all set.

“you’re all set,” says the kid, and then we give each other a spontaneous and completely extreme high-five.

then we young awesome professionals wander over to the bus station, drinking an absurdly saccharine yet somehow bad-ass beverage, generally feeling gritty and wanting a shower but also totally sick in a stubbly, heroin-chic kind of way, and the darkness is wailing into our ears, and goddamn if everyone we see doesn’t kinda wanna be us a little.

then we pull out our computer on the bus and write about ourselves until we get home.

the swiss return to cultural relevance

2006-07-19T08:48:00.001-07:00

and how.

omg, so cool.

i quit, part deux

2006-07-16T11:51:00.000-07:00

we got company t-shirts. i wear mine in public sometimes.

bus driver: 02138?! isn’t that in mattapan?
me: no, it’s in cambridge.
bus driver: hold up. 02138 is in mattapan, because... i live in 02137, and uh... aw man.
me: i’m... pretty sure it’s in cambridge.
bus driver: now 02136... (expectant silence)
me, expectantly: what?
bus driver, suddenly worried: huh?!
me, in terror: HELP

maybe there was some subtext that i was missing here. i think the takeaway, though, is that the less you smoke, the more confusing and upsetting your world is.

we’ve now gotten smoking down to a days-on, days-off regimen, which may be worse than quitting itself. i don’t know. i’ve realized why smoking is cool, at least. this had always struck me as mysterious. there is nothing intrinsically cool about a person setting a small, evil-smelling object on fire and then breathing through it. i guess blowing smoke out of your own head could be seen as cool, but presumably ever since the industrial revolution one would associate this more with being a car, or factory, than some kind of magical shaman.

anyway, this revelation hit me on a day (thursday) which was to be a non-smoking day and then ended up, er, not. i was having trouble writing pieces for the magazine. the day before, laboring under nicotine deprivation, i had modified an interview transcription such that it made no sense at all, and so thursday morning an editor walked in and politely asked if i could take another shot at it, and this brought me close to both violent rage and tears. so then i snuck out and, um, self-medicated, and while my first smoke brought on a strong fit of weepy self-loathing, after the second i was feeling surprisingly clear-eyed and even-keeled. (and subsequently marched back in and completed about a week’s worth of work with a quantity of good-humored aplomb best classified as “gigantic fuckload.”)

because the #1 benefit of smoking is that it keeps you pinned to your emotional equilibrium at all times. sadly, and predictably, it’s the drug in it that’s the best part. things don’t upset you or depress you or excite you as much. smoking makes you extremely cool, in that you’re not an excitable gibbering mess anymore. the stereotype of the angry, embittered smoker describes a person who—far from smoking too much—is not smoking nearly enough.

nonetheless, it’s time to quit. just saying. if i burst into tears in your vicinity anytime soon, you’ll know why.

strangers without candy

2006-07-12T15:59:00.000-07:00

liebe andrea—

no, i am forced to report, nabokov does not seem to get chicks excited in the way that kundera does. although i should add that my sample size is not high. should the government or some other institution be interested in funding more systematic research, i will draft up whatever proposal they find stimulating, because i am a whore. some people are whores for attention. me, i am a whore for money.

nabokov did, i should say, get the attention of one guy who was sitting next to me on the bus yesterday. for about twenty minutes he had been rocking back and forth, forcefully and in the manner of the demented; at length he leaned awkwardly into my field of view and said, “good book?” his eyes were clear and wide. his lips formed a bashful reflexive grin.

trying to be nice but distant, i showed him the cover, smiled politely, and said, “nabokov.” he continued to grin. his face was taut with a strange embarrassed empathy.

right—i’m not reading lolita, i’m reading Ada, or Ardor, but nonetheless there are some rather graphic bits, and i was about thirty seconds away from one and so when i hit it i realized why this guy, presumably looking over my shoulder, was moved to say something. oh my god, i thought. he thinks i’m reading a dirty book on the bus. then, it hit me: holy fuck, i thought, i am reading a dirty book on the bus. dammit, nabokov!

lots of run-ins (runs-in?) with strangers recently. a guy, black, maybe 40, stopped me on my way into the harvard square t stop. i had seen him in the T maybe 3 or 4 times before, and he had always given me this quizzical look and waved.

“do i know you?” i asked him.

“i see you like everywhere!” he rejoined. “i would like to make friends with you.”

“uh,” i said. then: “so i don’t know you? right?”

“you can get to know me right now,” said he, and honestly, how can you turn that down.

so we went for coffee. it was weird. he paid. we talked. he is a PhD student at harvard from trinidad. he went to columbia as an undergrad. he likes to party and thinks it’s a shame that i tend to stay at home evenings. he wanted to get dinner with me, which i vetoed. he wanted to get drinks later and “start a real friendship.” that, too, i vetoed.

i am like a weird-person magnet.

oafs 1, nabokov 0

2006-07-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

i am trying to read nabokov, but it is difficult to concentrate, as there are in my vicinity two voluble oafs—who at this very moment are confiding loudly to each other that they have a friend who has a laptop, shit, you can just use that right on the bus--and so i might as well blog instead. great.

in what marginal spare time we all have, we at the house are planning to write a show for arlington public access television. i dashed off a couple of sketches for this, one featuring an interview with two british electrocrunk DJs and one featuring “governor hovercat,” a human being who acts like a monkey at all times and yet has won elected office. micah wrote a sketch in which a guy dribbles a basketball down the street, demonstrating improbably sweet moves, and then his mom gives him some Sunny D. clearly, this show will be sick.

now the oafs are discussing how long it takes to get to different places via the bus. they are surreally excited about this conversation. there are energetic hand gestures, and one of them keeps getting up and getting back down.

governor hovercat may or may not have a mortal enemy named “congressman raptor,” the speaker of the state house of representatives, whose politics are far to the right of the governor’s. congressman raptor opposes the estate tax. congressman raptor is always cross-eyed, and it is hard for him to walk or move his head without screeching in bloodthirsty rage.

the oafs have fallen silent.

hopefully, our show will one day be on the internet, and you will be able to see it. in the meantime, here is a taste of what it will be like:

me: EEEEK EEEEEEK EEEK EEEEEEK
matt: RRAAAAHHHH!!! RRRRRRRRRAAAAGGRRARRRRRH.
me: REEEEKK ANGCK ANGCK ANGCK

it’s gonna be GREAT. rick, what’s this about my blog being censored in china?

also, while italy may have won the world cup, zinedine zidane wins the awesomeness award forever. sha-BAM!!! oh god, so good.

italy must die

2006-07-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

assorted:

1. what the fuck, italy? what thoughts are you thinking in that sweaty mulleted head, behind that contorted, grimacing face of yours, as you fawn and moan on the ground like a child?
2. italy, behold: the replay shows that you began falling and screaming and clutching your face before michael ballack even fucking touched you. so, we have two choices here: either you are improbably and appallingly ill-coordinated, or you are a lying faking sack of shit.
3. oh for the love of--GET UP. GET OFF THE GROUND. YOU ARE NOT IN PAIN. I WOULD LOVE FOR YOU TO BE IN EXTREME PAIN, BUT YOU ARE NOT.
4. surely this yellow card is against italy. for excessive being-of-an-asshole.
5. because if it was against germany, then i would have to go to boston's quaint and adorable and predominantly italian north end, where i would then GO ON A MURDEROUS FUCKING RAMPAGE, and surely god does not want this to happen.
6. [strangled animal noises]

here. this was a stage in the game where this italian fucknose came running across the field, as ballack caught a pass, and leaped over him, screwing up his face in flagrantly affected pain, as though he had somehow been tackled by the air or some shit. fucking look at this. at the same time he is hitting michael ballack in the neck. fuckshit.

(here is a juncture at which i could talk about the hilarious joke that is the italian economy, or their tourism/transportation infrastructure, as well as the fact that since the renaissance they have produced nothing of cultural relevance that is not edible or a shirt. here, too, i could muse icily on the dark and fatal Otherhood that Italy has historically and culturally represented to the Germans. for example in thomas mann, he--oh, forget it.)

it's probably best that i don't watch futbol on a regular basis, because july 4 took a lot out of me. it was almost worse than the super bowl, and the super bowl was in many ways the most stressful day of my entire life. anyway, ITALY SUCKS, and i have a number of hopes for tomorrow's final, all of which involve violence and some of which involve pasta.

rah rah independence day. we watched the fireworks from the roof of quincy house, which was okay. boston loves fireworks. i feel a little queasier about loving my country after spending last night watching ali g videos, especially those with bruno, the gay austrian. you've probably seen them already, but if not:

at daytona beach interviewing a college wrestling team

interviewing an arkansas pastor who specializes in converting gay people

in alabama, "the gayest part of america"

i hadn't seen anything with bruno it before--omg, so funny, yes, but completely wrenching stuff at the same time. really unbelievable. it's hard not to come away with the impression that red-state america is teeming with repressed, hostile would-be gays. it's the only explanation that makes sense to me. i see a guy blustering and shouting about how he's not gay, fuck you, faggot, and i see a wounded soul doing a pretty bad acting job. it's almost enough to make one gay out of offended sympathy. bruno, i think it's okay to be fabulous.

blocked

2006-07-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

trying to add to current hilarious novel "memoirs of a guy." can't. i have no idea how to continue from where i last stopped, and all i've been able to add is:

I forget where I was going with this.

On the next page: A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE!!!

it makes me happy that you all take commute reading as seriously as i do. i'll add that john lecarre, while my favorite author, is also not a great choice, because to people unfamiliar with him he looks like just another cheap spy novelist, and then you're lumped in with the guy sitting next to you reading DEAN KOONTZ IN GIANT LETTERS.

while procrastinating, i found this great compendium of maybe-unintentional comic book erotica by means of maud newton, who is becoming my favorite blog in the world.

another way of procrastinating:
hello bavarian mountain village! i remember visiting you. let's check out that lake there in the distance.
ah yes, the hintersee. i walked all the way around you. the leaves hadn't yet fallen. the hills were auburn. i had a few days between me and boston. i was impersonating an artist.

and what's this? ah yes!, i forgot that i had been surrounded by unbelievable fucking majestic-ass beauty.

google earth, right now, is being what you might call an enabler.

milan kundera is my wingman

2006-06-29T17:05:00.000-07:00

america has problems. if these problems were a t-shirt, that shirt would be xxxl. the same could be said if america itself was a t-shirt. i would not be writing about this if it weren’t true.

this point tends to get driven home in the context of public transportation, which in boston (and, as i recall, pittsburgh) is something of a natural habitat for the comically/depressingly obese. about fifteen minutes ago, i was looking on in horror as an improbably spheroid woman dropped a dollar bill on the ground and was unable to pick it up. she was about twenty feet away from me. her head inclining toward it, her arms splaying close to parallel to the horizontal, she waddled in its direction and managed to toe it a couple of times, but in neither instance did this do any observable good. pretty quickly, she realized the folly of her actions, abandoned them, and lurched into the bus.

the grossness was compounded when a guy next to me, who was shaped more like a pear, bounded to his feet, strode over, picked up the dollar bill—the bus door is still open, mind you, and the woman is still clambering up the steps—and then, clutching his prize, walked right back to where he had been sitting, grinning and flushing an awkward mottled red at the shame of his own venality.

guy: somebody had to take it.

the trade from berlin to boston—specifically from the bahn to the T—has been pretty one-sided. if the bahn were a woman, she would be beautiful, kind-hearted, ever-present, even sweet-smelling. if the T were a woman, she would be a hamster. the T is awesome at running trains less frequently than normal during rush hour, and also for being flustered whenever there is any kind of weather, as if rain is not a recurring thing in boston. “OH MY GOD,” it is not difficult to imagine T officials screaming in bewilderment, peering out of the window and discovering that water is literally falling out of the sky onto things. "HOW COULD A MERCIFUL GOD ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN." the T has the memory of a goldfish. when there is snow, just forget about it.

certain classes of people ride the T. the poor, definitely. foreigners in higher proportions than natives. students. yuppies, too, but this is a less sleek species of yuppie; less likely to wear a suit, more likely to be a hipster. the upper middle class: decidedly not.

are there hot chicks? yes, against all odds. have i kept track, on my commute, of what type of reading material attracts their attention? by god, i have. the new yorker works okay, but the payoff is generally in the form of respectful glances from women in suits. the gulag archipelago is a poor choice no matter how prominent you make the cover. ian mcewan generates fewer looks of interest, but you can tell that they come from girls who get it. milan kundera, finally, is a goldmine. in the past couple of days i have gotten more impressed looks from cute girls than i care to tally. have i capitalized on this in any way? no, because as you may know, i am somewhat of a puss.

addendum: typing things into your laptop does not arouse girls’ interest at all. for example: this girl sitting more or less across from me right now. she is paying no attention to the fact that i, a random if above-average-looking guy on the bus, am actually typing things into my magical glowing thought-appliance. she will regret it upon the advent of my fame. i will ignore her like an insect. an inconsequential, loathsome, blonde insect.

these thoughts are the only joy that sustains me.

warning: pirates are awesome

2006-06-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

i swear before the merciless christ himself that the fields of block island are mauve. they are a muted gray-green, butterscotch, and above all mauve. i was guiding my dad’s bike noisily through the heather and grass, skipping and shuddering over the stone-studded dirt trails, those circumscribing the rolling hills and those running parallel to the cliffs descending sheer and ragged along wind-hewn channels to the sun-bleached rocky shore below, and i had an interior monologue along the lines of

the sailors say brandy! she’s a fine girl! what a goo-o-o-ood wife she would be! but my life, my love and my la-a-a-a-ady! is the se-e-ea!! doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. (repeat 400x)

and

meow meow meow meow bike bike bike bike meow OMG ARE YOU SERIOUS.

THIS IS COCKSHIT RIDICULOUS. FUCK. THAT IS NOT A GODDAMNED SHIPWRECK RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMNED OCEAN. HOLY FUCK.

THAT IS SO COOL. I HAVE TO GO THE BATHROOM BECAUSE THAT IS SO COOL. FUCK.

block island in june tends to be shrouded in fog and mystery. this can be less awesome if your family stayed up last night watching “king kong,” which mostly takes place on a scary-ass mist-enshrouded island with enormous fucking insects from hell, but it’s still completely awesome.

the beaches are mostly deserted. this, too, is unfathomably sweet.

i made it for 100 hours without smoking, and overall it was very pleasant. it was fun to hang out with the family, and the food, of course, was sublime. i met my two young cousins, and they are record-settlingly cute. the four-year-old, kent, is the World Champion of Baffling Conversational Free-Association, although he also has this thing where he periodicallly emits deafening shrieks. the ten-month-old, noel, has a constantly furrowed brow, which on a ten-month-old is just about the most adorable thing in the world. no matter what you say to him, he looks skeptical. ex: “noel, string theory posits that our 3+1-dimensional perception of the world is inadequate, and we may in fact be operating in a space of between five and eleven dimensions.” and noel will look at you like: playa, dont u even front.

then last night, after returning to boston, i broke down in front of locke-ober. i was nervous because we were about to eat at this incredibly posh place, and my hair looked like i was wearing some sort of john travolta wig. also, the weekly dig had posted something mean about me earlier that day, and i was worried i would get fired. so i had a smoke.

but: dinner was great, no one fired me, i had a huge amount of wine, and the menu was some of the funniest shit i have ever seen. one of the dishes came with “pile of pea tendrils.” another thing was called “london’s chicken bang bang,” which our waiter said was “akin to a chicken popsicle, but much more sophisticated.” then he glared at me, because i was tittering uncontrollably. also, there were no prices on this menu, which would have been terrifying if it wasn’t on the owner.

also, i would like to take this moment to remind you that i saw this:

pirates are so sick.

today is the first day of the rest of your life

2006-06-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

i just had my last cigarette. i was walking from kaplan in central to utrecht art supplies. the air was hot and oppressive. the cigarette was unsatisfying. i think this is how you’re supposed to quit. i have no idea what i’m doing. perhaps i will go buy some gum, or if they sell it at Arlington Convenience, happiness.

today is also the beginning of Family Vacation, which I’m attending until Wednesday, at which point our magazine’s owner will lavish a delicious dinner on us, the Awesomest Editorial Team In All Of Zip Code 02114. which is different from 02138. the more people hear about us, the more i’m not sure if our magazine’s name makes any sense. but what else are we going to call it? i like “Smarm Quarterly,” or perhaps just “Nepotist.” another alternative, which i’ve already suggested, is “HarvRad: The Magazine.” if harvard is misspelled, presumably we can’t get sued. right? i can’t believe no one will take this suggestion seriously.

anyway, we’re dining at locke ober, which is apparently the brahminest restaurant in all of boston, so that’s really exciting. will we embarrass the shit out of everyone involved? will i even wear pants? stay tuned. i would be an idiot NOT to blog incriminatingly about this and consequently lose my job. and i do this for YOU, c. 35 readers per day.

meanwhile, vacation should be fun and relaxing. i plan to eat scallops. i plan to eat them more or less constantly, to be honest, because i remember from last time i quit that when you stop smoking, you become hungrier than the hungriest of hippos.

keep checking our magazine’s website! we have a bunch of blogs on there, and those get updated with some frequency. while you’re at it, get me a book deal. oh WAIT—i already have one.*

SHABAM, BITCHES. j-town out.

*by this i mean something more along the lines of, “my german tutoring student bought me the ‘2006 novel and short story writer’s market’ book which has listings of like a million literary agents and publishers and i am currently assembling a respectful query letter and a bunch of self-addressed stamped envelopes and please god just let one of them pan out please oh beloved god i’m so alone and abandoned so alone also i got a starbucks card so thanks for that”

this vacation cannot come soon enough

2006-06-14T16:46:00.000-07:00

here’s a question that some harvard-educated friend should be able to answer. which preceded which, historically: the 40-hour work week or the at-all-times-you-must-work schedule? my guess is that the former came about in the 20th century, whereas the latter was pioneered by cavemen. the cavemen did not really have a choice; if they did not spend all of their time hunting and running away from mastodons, they would die. in the 20th century, things were not quite as dire. all right! question answered.

furthermore, it is obvious to everyone that 40 hours/week is completely sweet compared with as-many-hours-as-possible/week. which is why no one in their right mind would go from working part of the time to working as much as they possibly can. it should be the other way around. i mean, right? haven’t we evolved to the extent where we do not have to work all the time? wasn’t that the whole point? please stop me if i am saying crazy and stupid things.

the thing is, i don’t have it bad at all compared with a lot of people i know. for example, my boss, who is always working. or anyone in finance. they work like 80-hour weeks. which is completely crazy. why, in an industrialized country with a decent education system (at least, one that’s good for well educating the children of the well-educated) (also here i am talking about the u.s., if you were curious), is it considered not unusual for the high-status jobs to greedily consume a person’s entire life? like law jobs, medicine jobs, finance jobs, media jobs. it’s completely fucking bonkers. frankly, where competition is involved, it feels like cheating—you shouldn’t have to resort to working longer hours to be better than the other firms/magazines/websites/etc. i’m admittedly a gigantic euroslut, but ask a german—or better yet, good god, a spaniard—whether one should work all the time, or whether it is good to relax, have time for a meal with friends or family, play music or paint pictures, or whatever the fuck. if this sounds like a loaded question, that’s because it is.

perhaps you are saying, “jesse, spain and germany have low economic growth or whatever. america has an awesome economy because we work really hard all the time.” allow me to rebut by rephrasing my previous question—which is more important, the economy or humans? THE ANSWER IS HUMANS. HUMANS ARE MORE IMPORTANT. without humans, one cannot have a sophisticated economy, except perhaps by means of dolphins.

i’m not even sure what point i’m making anymore. btw, the new york observer trafficked in some ill-written snark today about our magazine, and then gawker picked it up.

and that's all i have to say about that, because the company lawyer knows about my blog. hi, gary! let's talk about a raise, seriously.

OMG OMG OMG

2006-06-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

the 02138 website is live.

including my snarky new professional blog.

hot damn.

life imitates [thing that is wack]

2006-06-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

holy bloodstained jesuses. the past seven days have been completely fucking bonkers.

thursday, in what should have been a premeditated, tactical thing and wasn't, i found myself asking my boss if i could talk with him privately, after an amiable meeting spent discussing the website (maybe it will launch tomorrow! perhaps on friday! oh ha ha ha! it is impossible not to be enamoured of the whimsical caprice of the internet! please excuse me while i rub my face in something that is on fire), and he grinned and said sure. within moments i found myself babbling like an idiot about how i needed a 50% raise in order to live, or uh... or else. for those of you who are good at math, this raise would crack the five-figure mark by exactly zero dollars. but strictly in terms of proportions, it's a wacky demand.

anyway, i made some strategically meek observations regarding my two other part-time jobs, plus occasional time-eating freelance work, and proposed that i was frustrated at the magazine because i hadn't been "giving my all," due to the exhaustion of what cumulatively approaches a 70-hour work week, and also i was wearing a pair of pants that looked like it had been smeared in sort of dirty peanut butter and then exposed briefly to hungry and enormous dogs. this was to emphasize my poverty. it's worth noting that at least two other coworkers live at home and are sort of astounded that i do not.

we agreed to discuss this further on friday; in the interim, i resolved to spend all waking hours freaking out about how i was going to lose my job. friday, i got to meet with two bosses and was told, rightfully, that they can't increase pay on a schedule other than the one they've set (salary review will be in mid-july), and that it can't be concordant with anything other than performance (an oblique reference to the week i did no magazine work and instead attempted to create a startup in my office that sold the office supplies of abovementioned coworkers).

i see this as a success in that i was not fired.

saturday and sunday were spent working for kaplan and reviewing a short story by a student i'm tutoring in chicago. also, as i recall, there was data-entering. also, i had to write a few little mini-pieces for the magazine that i didn't get around to during the week. also, i got another rejection email from a publisher. that was pretty sweet.

"does mcsweeneys recommend any other independent publishers in particular?" i responded, or something equally benign.

"you gotta try 'em all, right?" said this person, whom i do not envy for his job. so that accounted for a good few hours of bleak in-direction-of-computer-screen-with-eyes-unfocused staring, and the occasional half-choked sob.

monday, things took a turn for the awesome, when i interviewed thomas lauderdale of pink martini, a band i like. it was my first interview as a reporter ever, which is to say: thomas lauderdale popped my interview cherry. this is funnier if you are familiar with the wonderful and eclectic presence that is him. you don't get to see the finished interview until the magazine comes out in september, but in the meantime, excerpts from the unedited transcript are too wonderful not to share with you. i transcribed this myself, also, specifically with a cassette-player-and-foot-pedal device that is older than any living human and stolen from the atlantic monthly's office.

check out how dominating this interview was:

j that’s very cool so yeah just to get this started off i was wondering if you could please describe pink martini for us in a couple of layman-friendly sentences.

t right i mean it’s sort of you need an urban travelogue gets inspiration from, uh, afro-cuban, um... em... eh... japanese film noir

j mm-hmm mm-hmm

t all in sort of like an... huh. i’m just making it up.

j we can move on too if you like

t can we move on and get back to that

another amazing excerpt:

j yeah sure i was wondering if there was a good story behind the name

t uh, no.

j no, there is not.

t one night and sort of [unintelligible] uh it was actually the most fabulous name that i could think of at the time.

j it is uh it's pretty fabulous.

t i like it, actually.

most of the interview went really well, but i don't get to show you those parts, so there we are. also, on monday it was decided that i'm going to try to hunt down rivers cuomo--rivers goddamned cuomo--for a feature-length piece in the november issue. how sick is that?! it's extremely fucking sick, is the short answer. the long answer involves me playing air guitar and singing all of "buddy holly."

then, finally, there's what happened yesterday. but that's its own blog entry. for tomorrow, or friday, if tomorrow i feel like sleeping.

that's right. this is what suspense tastes like, my chickens. this is the quicksilver bloodsweet taste of suspense. i will destroy you.

oh, and finally, extreme props to all of us for surpassing the 30,000-hit mark at the bottom of the page. rick, i owe it all to you. you can't possibly let this moment go by without some sort of acknowledgment.

oh, plus it's still possible to see this story i wrote that is kind of okay.

resolute in the face of failure, plus, a short story that will definitely change your life

2006-05-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

if you are a company, or project, or other thing, and you need a guy who will work until he falls down in exhaustion/needing-of-a-nap, i can be that guy. those of you who know me, know this. this was true back when adams house won the 2003 pie-eating championship; it was truer still at summer camp when they needed someone to hunt the elusive snipe for twenty miles. and it was never truer than at let’s go, where joel once told me i couldn’t possibly stay at the office and play slime volleyball all night long. (he wasn’t laughing when, upon his return to work the next day, i took three sets from him in a row, and then started eye-bleeding on his shirt.)

nonetheless, after taking some time off last week to record music with the band, and then showing up at work this morning after a three-day weekend, i had a WHOLE BUNCH OF WORK TO DO, and this was extremely stressful to me. a lot of writing, a lot of editing, a lot of coordinating, a great ungodly amount of emailing. and so today has been something of a lapse in the gradually-wean-self-off-smoking plan. nonetheless, i’m standing by my quit date/week: june 17/17-23. seven days, one new england island, a bunch of family members, and near-constant compulsive eating brought on by nicotine withdrawal. expurgiation, ablution, absolution, redemption. hot DA-A-A-AMN!!!

in the meantime, margot and other friends have this online writer’s community sort of venture that i’ve been allowed to join; they publish a different story every two weeks, and then give comments and feedback and so forth. and these next two weeks are my turn:

click here for one-way ticket to awesome

in truth, it’s a weird one and i’m not sure if it’s any good. hope you like it. i wrote it a while ago.

future stories and comments will appear here.

so far some of the stories have been really good. leslie wrote one that is better than mine.

but she probably is not in a totally sick band.

acupuncture

2006-05-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

has one of your loved ones recently become distant and irritable? has he/she suffered a stark decrease in the ability to focus? is this person nervously chewing everything in sight, like a somehow non-adorably wayward puppy? has he/she become unaccountably violent? is everything you say to this person met with sullenness and apathy? or, sometimes, crazy disproportionate/eerily unfocused anger? like even something totally innocuous? like "i'm making dinner and i was wondering if you wanted some?" and then suddenly this person starts shrieking about how they don't want dinner? and if they wanted some they would have asked? and you fucking presumptuous-ass, um, ASS...face... should mind your own business?! and what the shit are you looking at, other housemate?! i will bury you?!?! i will bury you all with my... FISTS!! of FIST-RAGE!! and [falls down]

this is pretty horrible, no? well, perhaps this person is trying to quit smoking, and you should just chill out. i am now on the quit-by-family-vacation three-step plan, which is this:

1. gradually wean self off cigarettes in months prior to family vacation (late june; i forget exactly when and don't feel like looking it up)
2. freak out two weeks before family vacation and smoke ALL THE TIME and it feels GREAT OH GOD
3. become locked in attic with doughnuts for extent of family vacation; emerge "clean," if covered in bruises and weighing in excess of 300 lbs

so that's the plan. i can do this. i am in the latter stages of step 1, in that i now go most of the day without smoking, and then during the evening i quietly reward myself with OH MY GOD THAT IS GOOD. OH SWEET JESUS.

then it is time for bed! or perhaps a few hours of twitching nervously in front of the computer! either way, awesome.

easing the burn somewhat is the work we're doing with recordings done in this, our beautiful sound studio:
let's go through that door! also, the rest of the basement is kind of nasty.
we have a BUNCH of microphones. we also have "atmosphere," in the form of a red glowing spherical light fixture hanging from the ceiling. how did it get there? whose idea was it? no one seems to know. these are but a few of the mysteries of our magical, magical basement.
that's my bass setup. that is not my shoe. we think the shoes are breeding, because there are twenty or so lying around that no one seems to own.

well, i have to go do some work, because i am POOR.

themes pursuant to an all-man household

2006-05-23T16:46:00.000-07:00

i didn’t hear anything from the street, but when i got inside, i heard a muffled thumping; i set down my laptop, removed my classy dress shoes (our magazine’s owner’s second-in-command came for a visit—normally for work i just attach cardboard to my feet, via twine), and ventured down to the basement; i walked through a door that seemed to have been spraypainted its cheerful/semi-deranged carotid shade of red by children with profound attention-span problems; i beheld my housemates. this was two days ago. the sound studio was finished: walls, roof, door, carpet, padding, cracks caulked, plaster painted, the works. my housemates were thumping away on a variety of hand-drums. never have i been so close to so much dumb animal bliss.

my dad will be the first to tell you: most guys LOVE drums. we love to bang on shit, and we love to do it for a LONG-ASS TIME. among other things, it means we don’t have to talk, or form coherent thoughts, things which many guys are generally not great at. if you try to talk to us while we are drumming, we will just kinda stare. some of us will attempt to play along and frown considerately, to demonstrate that we’re listening to you, but behind that frown we are thinking,

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP

anyway, the studio is awesome. we can be creating gigantic tidal waves of sound at 4am, with the bass all the way up and the drums played with totally sweet aggression, and on the street it only sounds like someone in our house has the radio on, and not particularly loud. when there’s traffic you have to strain to hear us. our neighbors may complain about our lack of curtains, or the time i got drunk and wandered our backyard in the nude for an entire Sunday afternoon, but they can’t complain about noise. which is sick!! i feel like i’m jinxing this, so maybe i should shut up.

mike ramos, our mega-awesome guitarist, is in town until Thursday, and we’ve been learning each other’s songs and playing a lot of basketball. here are photos in which i am the one not wearing a shirt (i am so RIPPED!!!).
matt, of course, is sick at basketball. he draws comparisons to tim duncan, circa 2003. our drumming roommate micah is also very good, with an elegant layup and murderous accuracy from beyond the arc.
mike himself is reminiscent of a latter-day elton brand, with a brimming toolkit of low-post moves. rob is also good.
me, i am like animal from the muppets, if you were to put him on the court; fuck only knows what he’s doing there, or whether he has any kind of basketball-related objective in mind, but one thing is clear: get too close, and horrible things will happen. probably someone will get elbowed, and in the confusion it may even happen that someone will get elbowed by himself.
i have only one shot that i can actually make, and it’s a twisting kind of 15- to 18-foot jumper that tends to make defenders giggle aloud, because i have a tendency to jump like a girl.
but 60% of the time, it goes in.

things kind of literally fall apart

2006-05-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

dear mom--

you wrote breezily that you just heard of the deluge here in boston, and you were wondering if i was all right.

last night, a housemate registered the timid complaint that there seemed to be a leak in his room. geoff and joe came upstairs, which is where i live, to see what that shit was all about. geoff gingerly palpated a swollen-looking part of the ceiling in the hallway. then this happened.

fuck, we said. we resolved to take care of it in the morning. we were agreed that we had little idea of what "taking care of it" would entail.

around 6am, i was awoken by a crashing sound from right outside my door.

on the brighter side, this makes the house much, much easier to market to yuppies.

"tra-la! it's so--rustic! durgh!!! we are l'retarded."

complicating the issue, of course, is the fact that we rely on the building manager to fix these sorts of things, and this is the very building manager who is unlikely to be a fan of our having seven people in the house, when the legal limit on non-blood-relations is somewhat closer to four.

what wacky tricks do we have up our sleeves? what won't we do to keep from getting evicted?! will mark and i have to get married?!? will micah be forced to impersonate a piece of furniture for an entire afternoon??? will rob voluntarily become a homeless person?!???*

tune in in approximately three to seven days to find out!!!

*the answer to this last question is that he kind of already has.

p.s. rick, "emo" is not a noun.

like two twins cleaving together

2006-05-09T18:19:00.000-07:00

i guess i wasn't paying attention--among the distractions of 02138 magazine, whose website we are now redesigning, and kaplan, and more on kaplan later, and over-the-phone german tutoring now for a student recommended to me via hunter maats, and learning french, and leaving home early and getting home late most days--well, the long and short of it is, we now have seven people living in our house. all guys, all early 20s, and five us are musicians. if this sounds completely horrible to you, i hasten to assure you that it is not. the camaraderie is first-rate, and there's less aggregate sock odor than one might expect. it's true that at most hours of the day someone is banging on some kind of makeshift percussion item, and a 7:1 human:kitchen ratio is not ideal, plus there's just generally more stuff all over the place including the once-relaxing living room, now an improvised hangar for futons and amplifiers, and someone was going to buy cleaning supplies last weekend but we're not clear on who that was and so they weren't bought and the states of the bathrooms and kitchen worsen by the day, and in truth it is a rare minute that goes by that isn't punctuated by the distant thunderclap of a resounding belch, in some remote corner of the house, like some kind of really gross war drum--actually, wait a minute! this all is completely horrible. please get me the fuck out of here.

whatever, i'm at work a lot of the time anyway. after much drama at work, it's been decided that our website needs a complete overhaul, and there was a general consensus that where seasoned website-designing professionals have failed, raw, turgid, unrefined talent shall succeed.

in other words, i spent today compiling a list of things people disliked about the site and then using adobe photoshop to create a new site that maybe we would like better. and we did like it better! it doesn't function, per se, and most of these intriguing, magical articles do not technically "exist," but visually it is all that and a bag of chips.

just try and tell me you wouldn't click to read more.

the nostalgia train continues its serpentine, endless passage through my dreams and days. i dream about berlin a lot, plus camilla called me about a week ago. it was predictably surreal. i pulled out my cell phone and lapsed into german, terrifying all those around me.

"it was like you became a completely different person," marvelled lindsey. "a person i... i feared with all my heart."

so that was fucked up.

we were going to talk for longer later that day, before aoife's show at 8, but she ended up calling back too late and i didn't pick up and she left a forlorn, drawn-out message that i checked during intermission. it was difficult to listen to. i sent her a long and emotional email and haven't gotten a response. i thought i'd moved on from her and i still think i have. i'm not sure why i feel so invested in her response.

well, i have to go work on my new hilarious book. it's raining and dreary outside and i had cereal for dinner because i don't feel like cooking and also my buttocks are sore from sitting around tensely, which is what i do most of the time, and additionally i'm grumpy because i have this stomach thingy from cutting back on smoking which i don't want to describe because trust me it's unpleasant.

this book is going to be a laugh riot.

north enders

2006-05-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

construction worker, indicating other seated, grinning construction worker, to stooped tiny elderly woman: he'll give you a piggyback ride if you want it. you just gotta ask him nicely.
elderly woman, blurting: oh!!

chuck the door guy of our building, indicating closed elevator doors: she took the elevator up to the second floor. didn't even take the stairs.
me: hmmm.
chuck: in twenty years her ass is gonna be THIS BIG.

we had about four or five days of spring, and now today it's summer. everyone is more talkative. yesterday people were still wearing pants and coats. today, bare arms; low-cut little tops; small little half-pants; grown women attempting to wear jeans over a bathing suit; low socks and sunglasses; old guys in beach chairs in the parking lot behind our building. i am wearing a block island t-shirt that is older than my little sister, plus cargo shorts; i am the only person at the office enforcing our lack of dress code, but it's always lonely at the top.

with the addition of a sweet german-and-writing-tutoring gig, courtesy of hunter maats, plus those sweet kaplan dollars nosing their way into my bank account, my income is now less paralyzingly low, and i made my first major investment yesterday: a book that claims to teach you french. it would be much more helpful if the book could pronounce things out loud. i foresee a lot of two- and three-hour conversations with matt, my mom, and probably aoife, like last night's:

me: un, deux, trois, quatre... uh.
matt: cinq.
me: "sonk."
matt: no, it's like "sank."
me: "sahnk."
matt: try this: aehnnnhhnh.
me: ohnnnhonnng
matt: aennnhnnhh
me: onnhh--wait, what about aehnnnnnhnnnnhnnnggg
matt: aennnhnnhh. aennnhnnhennnhhaennnhnnhh.
me: aannnggaeenngggghhhhnnnaeeggnaeggnnaeegggghhh
NNNAAaeennahhennnhhaeggnh
matt: that's almost, you've almost
me: aeenngh.
matt: "sank."
me: "sonk."
matt, doubtfully: you're pretty close.

i hope soon to be fluent. then, we shall pursue l'amour with, shall we say, l'avidite. que'st-ce que vous faites!!! we haven't gotten to verbs yet.

oh, also, as soon as our website goes live (WARNING: may not happen in your lifetime), you'll get to see what i've been doing in lieu of blogging for y'all: i've been blogging for 02138 instead. if you like snarky entries about harvard grads, you are going to LOVE the archives we've been building up. if not, then at least we have that in common.

que'st que JE faites.

walpurgisnacht

2006-04-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

OMG, so many adventures to share with you. all of them related to the obligatory post-modern sense of not belonging; the fracturing of identity; the bittersweet motif of potential unrealized. sweet!

first, about a week ago, a rug caught on fire across the street from our apartment.

it was garbage night, and the people across the street had put out, among other things, an old and apparently flammable rug. i was asleep when it caught on fire, which was around midnight. i was awoken by a jubilant cry.

"fire!" trumpeted matt. "fire across the street!! WHOA."

groggily, i went to the window, snapped a couple of pictures, and wondered idly if we should do anything about it. matt was similarly minded. "that's totally sick," he mused, adding, "maybe we should get out of here." i was worried that this meant he was responsible for it, but it turned out he was just worried something might explode. this made me even more worried. flammable garbage is one thing--i'm comfortable saying we've all put gasoline-soaked items out on the sidewalk for the trash guys, in moments of absent-mindedness--but when your neighbors are putting out things that are likely to explode and destroy your home, then you should start getting upset. also, did matt know something i didn't? thankfully, it turns out he's just neurotic about explosions.

another adventure was at the middle east, where we've started taking a ragtag bluegrass three-part-harmony act to the monday-night open-mike. the music was well-received; i got to sing "michelle" as salaciously as it is conceivable to sing it, while perched awkwardly on a stool, because i kind of forgot to bring a strap, and also geoff had a mandolin, which in some circles enhances one's street cred. but the evening's highlight was us meeting King James.

King James is an enormous, kind of foul-tempered-looking homeless guy with an arm in a sling, who appeared early and demanded to be part of the open-mike; he was given the ninth and final slot by Roger The Depressive Open-Mike Host, who made no effort to conceal his hope that King James would somehow leave or fall asleep before he got to go onstage. also complicating things: King James wanted to sing some otis redding, but he had no backing band. in lovable "bohemian" (euphemistic for "homeless") fashion, he didn't seem particularly aware of the need to resolve that. fortunately for him, he tripped over the instruments next to our table, then stopped, turned, and bathed us in his sour, beer-pickled gaze.

specifically, he was staring right at me, and i wasn't sure how to respond. "sorry about that," i said, shining my most winning smile at him, and ineffectually rearranged the instruments. this did not mollify him, though. he kept staring. it is worth stressing that this guy was fucking gigantic, and also that his awareness of language as a vehicle of ideas and conventions seemed to come and go at lazy intervals, like the tide, or my willingness to change my socks.

so after a while i resigned myself to the notion that he was probably going to beat the shit out of me at some indistinct point in the future, and tried to return to conversation at the table, as he stood and continued glowering. and then, matt broke the impasse.

"so are you going on later?" he chirruped, and these turned out to be magic words.

before we knew it, matt and geoff and some other guy who played bass (you may be assured that i wasn't upset about it being him, and not me) were the King James Backing Band, and we stayed there pretty late, and they sang some otis redding, and it was very, um, "real." we were hoping that King James would turn out to be unbelievably good at singing, but he had more enthusiasm than talent; regardless, it became a very magical evening, made even more otherworldly when King James, too, began dissolving into the ether.

taking non-blurry pictures is the hardest thing in the entire world.

finally, last night matt got me on the list to a masquerade-themed party. this, he promised, was going to be thrown and attended by a lot of the people in the boston burners scene--attendees of the burning man festival--and because i'm probably going to cover burning man for 02138 magazine, i thought it would make sense to go. it also sounded like a lot of fun. matt got completely decked out, with a top hat, cane, spotless white gloves, and awesome british-military-type jacket. for my part, i wore pants.

this party was unreal. a great deal of thought had gone into its planning and details; this is by most accounts a hallmark of burning man culture. many lavishly decorated rooms, a dance floor in a barn with surprisingly good electronica, a school bus that people could hang out in, a firepit, some good impromptu music performances. however, if any or all of the previous communicate "probably some people there were on drugs" to you, you would be correct. in addition to the previous, the party also featured people saying the dumbest hippie shit you have ever heard in your life.

(note to parents: i was not on drugs, nor do i do drugs. note to friends: psych!!! no, double psych.) (note to matt's parents: matt also does not do drugs, and in fact if you even offer him a little wine with dinner he will smack you upside your head.)

there seemed to be three kinds of people: reasonably smart, artistically-minded, articulate people; techy/gothy d&d long-unwashed-black-hair kind of kids; and braindead hippie drug-zombies. i had a great time at this party, but it's safe to say that most of my pleasure was ironic. we were watching someone twirl around ropes whose ends were on fire, for example, and i overheard some wonderfully stereotype-affirming garbage from people near me.

"this is cosmic," said some woman. "this is more cosmic than you and me." remarkably, this did not make her friend start laughing hysterically.

"SPELL YOUR NAME," i yelled to the fire-twirling guy, but no one seemed to think that was funny.

another guy, who identified himself as "lemon" and was, i'd say, a svelte, face-painted 45 or so, tried to come up with a rhyme, and had embarrassing difficulty with it. "i like to smoke dope," he informed the room i was in. then he smiled to himself and swayed back and forth, and tried several times, unsuccesfully, to turn it into a couplet. eventually he came up with: "it gives us good hope." if they ran commercials of him, i promise you american marijuana use would plummet. i can think of no more eloquent argument against drug use.

on a sidenote, i tried to contribute in as helpful a way possible, but in the end irony came swelling to the fore. "YEAH!!" i said, and started beatboxing. "lemon" looked at me with a mixture of hope and confusion. "that was ILL," i told him. "you gotta spit mad RHYME." then someone told me i was being a jerk.

in fact, this was the biggest takeaway--it was above all an atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance, in which you were safe to release into the world whatever under-formulated ideas you were capable of mouth-hemorrhaging--except that they were not tolerant of me being intolerant. which seemed like barest hypocrisy, to me.

some other girl had her face elaborately painted--like one of the ethnic evil elephant-riding guys in lord of the rings--and she came over and stared at me from about the nine-inch range. "what's happening, " i said. it turned out, though, that she preferred to conduct conversation more via staring than via english. "you come here often?" i persisted, gamely.

that's when she started to trace imaginary designs in the air. also there was humming.

"i have to go stand over there," i said, and did.

the creation of spiritual taxi studios, part i

2006-04-20T15:44:00.000-07:00

we've decided to call our practice-and-recording-studio-in-the-basement project "spiritual taxi studios," for reasons that i swore to our housemates i would not divulge. we've become deeply spiritual, in a hermetic, thoreauian way, and our brotherhood is based in no small part on a sublime secret mythology (and attendant iconography) whose origins must necessarily remain mysterious to the outside world, and in no way are related to japanese anime that one of us found online and thinks is COMPLETELY SWEET.

when i woke up saturday morning around 9am, construction had already begun.

i was pretty psyched about that, needless to say. still, there was much work to be done before eventide.

and rob had no idea how to use this hammer.

also, mark had to go to work. "ha ha!" he remarked cheerily, on his way out. "there's no way you guys aren't going to fuck this up real bad."

hey! it's one of the Village People! and he's here to help us out by posing in front of things and looking sultry and sweaty! ha ha! seriously, one of us should tell him that we aren't--WAIT FUCK. THAT'S ME. WHAT IN THE FUCK AM I DOING. I CAN'T BELIEVE I LOOK LIKE THAT.

fortunately, we had the help of bill. bill is a 64-year-old vintage bostonian contractor, and i hope no one will misinterpret when i submit that he was an ANIMAL. he was highly affable, eager to teach us things, and above all, unwilling to let me use the power-saw. he moved with the speed of a jaguar, and so efforts to photograph him were mostly in vain. nonetheless, it is largely thanks to him that by sunset, we had built this thing of majesty:

this thing of majesty that does not photograph particularly well.

but it sure as heck keeps the sound in. that is, once we add a ceiling and doors and another layer of drywall on the interior and probably some concrete around the sides where the floor is uneven.

dammit.

in conclusion,

all i'm saying is, if i was an eligible, attractive young woman, with either some kind of large inheritance or an income that could comfortably support two people, and i met a guy who lived in that, i would do everything in my power to at least hook up with him.

that's really all i'm saying.