From Sam Walker’s Fantasyland:
Rotisserie baseball may be the most ridiculous duplication of effort in the history of human affairs, but that’s hardly a concern. For the next four days our universe begins with Paul Abbott and ends with Alec Zumwalt.
It is Wednesday night, and I was going to write this tomorrow morning at work, until I realized that I absolutely abhor writing at work. The tripe I write for our magazine doesn’t count – I could do it in my sleep. I mean writing – stuff that you’d be proud to show your mother (hi mom!) or wife or girlfriend (hi everybody!) without the feeling of – what did I feel at the Chronicle? – complete and total existential dread. Life is good now, as long as I keep work and the real writing separate, which is why it’s good to have a job that doesn’t make me, when I see my computer at night, want to take a pickaxe to it in latent work frustration. Come to think of it, I don’t even own a pickaxe, as far as I know (there’s a shed out back, and God knows what’s in it).
With nothing else really to talk about, let’s have a short discussion of how what you’re reading – this – ends up on your computer screen. It goes a little something like this: after coming home from work, I will decide to write at times it appears that my roommate will not be home within the hour. These days, that’s pretty much all the time, so tonight I had the “luxury” of doing the necessary two loads of laundry before eating, showering and taking out the computer. The specifics may vary, but that’s pretty much the prelude. I will write in one of three places: on the living room table, facing the television; in my bed or on the sofa, as I am writing now. Once settled, I will attempt to come up with a topic but will usually end up writing about what happened to me today or what I’m thinking at the moment and go off on a tangent (see?). I will write nonstop for about 20 minutes and wrap it up in somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes. That’s when the real fun begins. That’s when I get to play with the flash-drive that’s on my keychain. When I first bought the drive it didn’t work with my computer, because it includes software that’s only readable on newer models, and this baby’s an old clunker. Sorry, lovable old clunker. A friend had to remove the software for me, but the drive still didn’t work, only this time it was a result of jamming the stupid thing into the USB jack like any sane person would plug anything into a USB jack. My flash drive must be inserted gently, and only into the bottom jack, and hee hee har har, isn’t that a hoot? I usually get it on the second try, and the thing lights up to tell me I’ve done a good job. Then we order dinner (just kidding).
When I’ve finally got the “green light,” which is actually orange, I drop the word file I’m using onto the icon for the drive. Sometimes the word file will be a single entry, sometimes several of them, but I’ll tag them all as UNEDITED so y’all can’t read the shit without my cleaning it up first – which I will do in the following day whenever I remember I have them, which could really happen at any point between 8:45 and 4:45, and maybe not at all, given my general spaciness when I’m in an office. Strangely, the more work I have to do, the more likely I am to remember. That’s the way I’ve always been: the more on my plate, the better I am at dividing up my time both while completing the project and when taking a break. An idle mind, plus the Internet, makes for a playful day for me where I can accomplish almost nothing except to work myself into a lather over the rosters of fake sports teams in my name and take breaks from this excitement by getting coffee or having instant chats with friends peppered across the city. The only thing I will both create and post at work are the Great and Funny Quotes you’ve doubtless seen by now – I say doubtless both because my readers are loyal and there is a great quote posted just above this entry. I read it on the way home from work today and knew it was a keeper. Why I’m reading a book devoted to someone competing in a ruthless fantasy baseball league is another question altogether, though it would seem to be happily akin to a priest reading the Bible, and despite my hazy knowledge of religion I am fairly sure this happens. In the book – not the Good one, the good one – there is an anecdote about a pastor in Arizona who routinely wins his fantasy baseball league because all the spring training umpires use his church, so I guess God does play games. But you know what? If there are two things I shouldn’t be talking about (and for completely different reasons), it’s religion and fantasy baseball, so it might be time for me to fall back on the third foundation of this country: taking pills. This has been an absurdly bad allergy season, and as my bedroom is virtually outdoors and my new office is caked in dust, I’ve been getting killed every day. Today was just about as bad as it gets, and after a long weekend-plus of staying up late – I had a 9 p.m. basketball game yesterday – I’m gonna pop a Benadryl Severe Allergy and let the antihistamines work their magic.
The proprietor of barstoolsports.com, upon learning that the site was blocked by the City of Boston:
This is clearly a violation of the 5th Amendment or one of the amendments about free speech and all that shit.
Stripping bartenders, sleeping in the grass, rainy disco parties at the beach – it must be Memorial Day weekend! And let’s recap it, in numbers!
2 (number of celebrity sightings, Friday)
I woke up early Friday, still in pain from the night before, when our softball team went out for drinks. A friend was coming into the city from Atlanta, and as she does not know her way around the city very well, I was to meet her at the Port Authority despite my hangover (she offered to let me sleep in, but as I was already awake, I decided against it). I acquired a Dunkin Donuts Iced Coffee on the way to the train and sat all the way at the front, which put me off at 40th street for the 42nd Street station. I was walking on 41st Street when I saw Pete Milano, a friend from SpotCo., a company that handles many aspects of Broadway play advertising (a fellow softballer, he too was iced coffee-ing). This was celebrity sighting number one, the appetizer, as he was filming a Rent promo with Tamyra Gray of American Idol, season one. Now, I wouldn’t know Tamyra Gray if I used her as a toothpick – which I could have done, because she was the thinnest person I have ever seen – unless someone pointed her out to me, as Pete did, and I moved along quickly to my waiting friend at the Port Authority. Flash-forward: lunch has just been completed with said friend, and we are walking into Central Park via Columbus Circle, where we have just visited the Borders in the Time Warner Center. I got a free Nantucket Nectars pomegranate juice there – don’t ask me how. Anyhow, we’re waiting to cross the street when I see a platinum-blond, tube-topped woman with a stroller on my left, and it’s none other than Gwen Stefani with her once-famous husband and children. Now THAT’s a celebrity sighting. No doubt.
1 (number of birthday parties attended, Saturday)
I actually skipped a birthday party on Friday night because I was too tired to think. I was woken up late at night by some friends who were in our back yard, tending to Edgar, who had fallen asleep in the grass. I barely recovered in time for my friend Ryan’s birthday at Daisy May’s BBQ on the West Side. For our party of 10, we ordered two “Pork Butts,” which I learned is not in fact the rear end of the swine, but instead the shoulder (the actual butt? “Ham.”). After the festive feast – notable because the Red Sox were in the process of going 11.5 games up on the Yankees at the time. 11.5! – we went to the bar Circus, a free-popcorn-and-peanuts, cheap beer establishment that more than lived up to its name. To make a dreadfully – okay, extremely pleasantly – long story short, the bartender did a striptease, another bartender breathed fire off the bar, and Ryan and Ravi celebrated Ryan’s birthday by giving each other wrestling chops across the chest, a primitive, drunken act that is pretty much as entertaining as it gets. But I have said too much: you really had to be there.
7 or so (number of ribs eaten Sunday)
Sunday we had a barbecue in our backyard. I spent the first half of the day concerned that too many people were going to come, thereby lowering the number of delicious Casey-prepared ribs that each person would be allowed to enjoy, and the second half wondering if anyone was going to show up. In the end, we had just the right amount of food for everyone, and more than enough beer. Good times. Bonus good times for including our upstairs neighbors, with whom I wish to remain on good terms, and super crazy bonus Hellenic good times for learning that my only friend from Astoria is related to my next-door neighbors, a fact we learned when he showed up at their barbecue. As a child of a small, quiet town and of Mary Jo (who stressed good neighborly manners), I am always wary of making too much noise or generally riling my neighbors, but my inside source tells me they find Edgar and I to be “nice, quiet boys,” and even better, any knowing someone on the inside over there makes any possible problems that much easier to negotiate. I don’t mean to go on about it, but it makes me happy.
1 (number of rainy beach bars visited)
After the barbecue on Sunday, the party transferred itself to the Long Island City Water Taxi bar, the ingenious little three-year-old spot that faces Manhattan on Queens’ southwesterly most shore. It’s really just a large outdoor area with truckloads of imported sand, where you are free to drink (from their bar) and enjoy the best views of Manhattan maybe anywhere. On Sunday, there was to be (and was in fact) a professionally-run dance party, Turntables on the East River, a relocated offshoot of Turntables on the Hudson series, one event of which I attended last year. And it would have been great, except for two things: 1) it was pouring when I arrived, and 2) I was not on heavy drugs, which seemed to be the necessary condition for enjoying the party despite the rain (as the music was quite good for a dance party). I spent some time under the canopy that was set up for the DJs and live drum players, but moved back outside when the rain let up. I may have even cut loose for about 20 minutes on the dance floor with some members of our troupe, and there may be photographic evidence of this, before going home at the early hour of 1 p.m.
0 (number of any things really done Monday)
On Memorial Day itself, I helped myself to a cup of coffee in the morning and proceeded to use that energy to sit on my butt. It was off-and-on cloudy by noon, which gave me enough time to watch the film I had Netflixed but had laying around for two weeks, The Queen, which was hard to gather the muster to watch but well worth the wait. I then cleaned up a little before briefly entertaining Casey (he wanted to use our backyard, picnic-style, for lunch) and then starting a book I’ve had sitting around for weeks. A nap followed, some television after that, but things have finally wound down. It’s probably just in time. The critical number from this week/weekend is the number of dollars I’ve spent on God Knows What, and it’s time to bring it back to Earth. To that end, I went to the grocery store earlier and replenished the supplies around here. I had to make room for it in the fridge around all the leftover beer. Which leads us to the final number…
1 (number of celebratory drinks for a great time had)
Apple juice. Yep, it’s like that.
On the Today show:
“All of us are human. We’ve never had a president who wasn’t human, we’re never going to have a president who isn’t.”
It’s been a long two weeks, as spring is finally here and with it has come the arrival of spring softball and basketball. I play in two softball leagues and the teams could not be any different. Team A has won both of its games by the “slaughter rule,” meaning we were up by at least 12 runs after five innings, while Team B has lost both by the same rule, the specifics of which I cannot recall (it’s a different league) but are, because of our amazing ineptness, fairly irrelevant.
I encountered more amazing ineptness at the Five Boro Bike Tour, an all-day cycling event that bills itself as a nice, family-fun way to see all five boroughs of the city, which is technically true, as you indeed make bikefall within the legal boundaries of each New York City borough. I’m just not sure about the “fun” part. I did the Bike Tour two years ago, and my friend Ravi and I easily finished the 42-mile course in about three hours (a relatively brisk but by no means Armstrong-ian pace) after waiting for an hour to begin the ride in Battery Park. In 2005, there were 28,000 riders. This year, there were 42,000 riders. There were several delays – two of which lasted an entire hour – and I was forced to walk my bike up the Queensboro Bridge, which is closed for the event, because of the congestion. Worse yet, one of my two riding partners hit a 12-year-old boy when the boy abruptly stopped to retrieve something that had fallen off his bike; my friend ran over the light, or screw, whatever, and had finished looking up from his back tire when he hit the kid, full-speed. Everyone was alright, but my friend’s bike was broken, though he gamely got it fixed further down the route and accompanied us to Staten Island, and enjoyed a beer with us on the ferry back to Manhattan as we learned that Roger Clemens would once again be pitching for the Yankees. I’ll always remember where I was – but not because of you, Roger.
I can also honestly say that I no longer hate my apartment. We had the first of what will most likely be several barbecues on our back porch on Saturday, and despite a small instance of making a fool of myself later in the evening, it was a smashing success. One of our best friends is from North Carolina and is an expert at Actual Barbecue. Another southern friend would not allow us to call our event a BBQ if we were just cooking burgers and hot dogs, and she was insistent that we use the term “grilling” to describe our festivities if we proceeded thusly. Well, we had our barbecue, and it was fantastic. We had music, great food and were able to continue the party going late into the evening because neither of our upstairs neighbors were home.
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Book recommendation: I just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, her 745-page biography of Lincoln and his cabinet. If you’re into that type of book, it is certainly worth the time. There’s so much in there that I wouldn’t want to ruin for any potential reader, so I won’t discuss it, but I will say that I actually cried when Lincoln was assassinated – and, amazingly, I knew this beforehand. The book is that powerful.
By Paul Theroux, in a New Yorker article about the (completely insane) former dictator of Turkmenistan:
Turkmenbashi’s acolytes had recently pronounced him the “national prophet,” a harmless enough conceit if you’re a civilian, but a pathological, if not fatal, one in a despot. Turkmenbashi had written a sort of national Bible, called “Ruhnama” (“Book of the Soul”), and he regarded himself as an accomplished writer—a clear sign of madness in anyone.
I don’t think I’m a “clean” person. I don’t “clean up” so much as I move things to less offensive parts of my room. My room basically rotates on a 6- or 7-month cycle of stop motion pictures, with increasing numbers of things moving slowly or drastically around the room in every frame. Culminating the cycle, I will throw much of it out, and the process will repeat itself.
I think this is because I am very good at coming up with excuses to do other things than clean. I will read, think about exercising, exercise, study baseball statistics and, worst of all, cook before I start sweeping or mopping. Even then, it’s rare the I give the apartment a good enough cleaning that I actually feel my work is done; usually, I resign myself to the fact that I’m never going to be done, and fail to convince myself to clean more often. Even tonight, I considered doing the remaining dishes – about 7 of them – before writing this, but put it off until the morning (they’ll just pile up after breakfast, anyway).
I think I have always been fairly insecure about my general cleaning habits, but I think I’m getting better. For instance, I’ll always clean up all but the smallest messes. A drop or two of orange juice never killed anyone. I will do the recyclables on something vaguely resembling the recyclables pick-up schedule. My proudest personal accomplishment, though, is becoming the guy who throws away all the newspaper circulars from my front step. This position that comes with exactly zero gratitude, and I’m a little sore about it, but I’m not about to give up my crown to any of my neighbors. I worked too hard to get it.
I think my general state of cleanliness goes back to my childhood, when my two brothers and I would tear up the house while waiting for my mother, and her dinner-creating powers, to return from her job as the town librarian. Over time, new things would pile up, get dirty and move around the house, until mom finally decided to go ballistic. At this point, us boys would mope around and tidy up, heads low, as mom raced from task to task, screaming at us. When the maelstrom was over, that meant the cleaning was about to come to an end. Sometimes the fights were bad; other times we made an immediate joke out if it. There’s one involving my mother, a hotel room window and a rubber Koosh ball that has had us in stitches that was deemed “an instant classic” over sodas about 10 minutes after it happened.
I think this is why I feel like I am never done cleaning. I used to have someone tell me when I was done. Now, I have to figure it out myself. I mean, I’m not a complete imbecile: I know when a floor is clean and the windows are washed. It’s just that there are some people who could literally clean forever (A fact I have learned by watching movies where people do cocaine, and infomercials), and I have to accept the fact that I am not one of them.
I switched my blog hosting over to WordPress from TypePad, which saved me about $70. I didn’t have much need for the services TypePad offered. I am sorry if your comments got deleted, I appreciate them. Starting tomorrow, I’ll have some new, more current posts. Thanks for reading. B
I hate my new apartment with every fiber of my being. I detest this place to a degree that is hard to fathom. If I could live in a small room with one nice window in a nice place, I would prefer it to his horrible wreck of a living space. I hate this place.
My new apartment gets almost no ambient light except for in the early mornings, when I am allergic to ambient light. In the late afternoon, two windowpanes worth of waning sun filter through my roommate’s room, but that’s about it. The kitchen is almost entirely dark even during the highest of high noons, and the living room is depressingly quarter-lit by windows that look upon our narrow driveway, which is bordered by the neighboring house. There is also a motion-sensor light near the side doorway that goes on and off throughout the evening without any cause. I hate this place.
The kitchen always smells vaguely of the Indian food oft cooked by the previously tenants and the natural gas that the owners assure me is not leaking from the stove. The overhead lighting, which we largely ignore, is horrible fluorescent light in every room. There is an ancient air conditioner in our living room, and our shower is the worst shower in the history of man. In fact, the shower needs its own paragraph.
Words cannot accurately describe the inadequacy of this shower, but you can rest assured that if I were to bring this laptop into the shower with me to attempt such a feat, the laptop would likely survive the showerhead’s light-fog attempt at soaking the showerer. We have nothing in terms of water pressure, and what does come out is lukewarm, at best. Our water heater is so old that it cannot keep hot water hot; your best bet is to take a shower 30 minutes after the previous shower has ended. Of course, I get up earlier than my roommate, so I do not have this luxury in the mornings and have taken to enjoying my showers in the evening. Nevermind that I hate this; humans are adaptable by nature, and I WILL have the best shower possible. Doesn’t mean that I’ll like it, though.
The kitchen is rather large and presents a nice cooking area, but the kitchen itself looks old and shabby. It probably has not been overhauled in 40 years. The entire apartment reminds me of my grandmother’s house, which is just depressing. At least at my grandmother’s house I don’t have to cook for myself, pay for the outrageous gas heating bills and have the company of my grandparents. Here I do cook for myself, do pay astronomical heating bills, and am usually alone but occasionally with the company of my completely oblivious roommate, who could live at the South Pole as long as he could watch porn DVDs. He’s really a wonderful fellow, but I don’t think he hates this place as much as I do. Then again, it would be difficult.
Maybe I hate this place because I spent a good deal of time and effort making it livable, and there is a large amount of time and effort left to exert on that front and I have no intention of exerting it. I am, it appears, done. I would be much happier with a slightly increased standard of living around here, but I find it very hard to muster the energy it takes to fix this place up. Perhaps a good cleaning is in order; that usually gets me feeling better about things. But I love to do a good cleaning when the sun is out, flying through the windows and energizing me on a weekend morning. That won’t happen here. Every second I spent in here is like being in a movie theater – lifeless, stale, dark – only there’s no movie playing to get my spirits up.
So as it is, I’ve devised ways to keep my spirits up. I’ve gotten drunk, which isn’t unique to this apartment but it’s helped. I’ve cooked quite a bit, which is good for my bottom line, but I spend the saved money in my budget on things that I say I’ve “earned” by putting up with my own apartment, like new clothes or fancy meals (for me, a fancy meal costs more than $10). I’ve started writing a lot more, which is unquestionably good, but the nature of the writing (diary-style) isn’t conducive to publication, because who cares about me but me? I’ve started reading a lot more, but that’s more of a function of living near the end of the subway line and getting a seat on the train every morning – which, as an externality, is unquestionably the best thing about my new living space. That and the back “yard,” which is really mostly cement and is good for having large numbers of people over, but I get skittish when I’m hosting company, especially in such close quarters to my neighbors as I am now. We are bordered by an elderly Italian/Yugoslavian couple to the left – as in, they are from the region in Italy that has been taken by, and re-taken from Yugoslavia – a younger set of grandparents to the left, and two flower-children type women above us, who seem to be slightly older. They have twice politely cited us for loud noise-making, and my roommate horrified one of their buttoned-down guests on Saturday by inviting her into smoke-and-beer filled house. The living room table, on which I am now typing, was apparently so filled with party detritus that it would have been impossible for her to even set her keys upon it, led my roommate to begin a self-preserving rant about how were actually upstanding young professionals and that her friends had nothing to worry about, we weren’t always like this. She was likely not convinced, I am told.
My room is spacious but colder than the rest of the apartment, and I learned yesterday that there’s a crack in my windowsill that allows water run the length of the bamboo window shades I stupidly bought for $40 each and drip onto the windowsill where my phone usually rests. My room also features a back door that goes straight into the backyard, and due to the possibility that some enterprising individuals use this portal for ungranted access to my room, the landlords have conveniently installed a removable 2×4 across the door frame to prevent the door from opening in such a case.
