things i managed to involve myself in, mostly in a perpendicular sense, on my way to work this morning:
1. incredibly, horribly loud train brakes. see 1a. this was followed with a soupcon of incredibly loud truck brakes, and preceded by the incredibly loud re-shingling work (or whatever the fuck it is they’re doing) on the queensboro bridge. and i was also inadvertantly exposed to some fucked up looking kid’s heavy metal music on the train. and i accidentally elbowed a short woman on top of her skull while being bulldozed by egressing f train passengers. i apologized but i don’t think she was pleased. or conversant in the english language.
1a. Everything in new york is louder than it needs to be. what to do: i’m going to start a letter writing campaign. and by letter writing campaign, i mean i’m going to get the fuck out of this city at some point in the not that distant future.
2. to make up for the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s failure to not give me a headache this morning, there was a parked bus with a six-foot tall stuffed lion sitting in the driver’s seat right at the stop i get off at. the lion is dressed like a bus driver. i will get a camera and document this.
sports fashions of the weekend:
Penn State No. 12 Kerry Collins jersey
Guy wearing baseball jersey that just said “KLINGON” (w/matching baseball hat. he was also wearing cowboy boots. and huge diamond earrings. which could also have been Klingon themed on closer inspection. or not).
oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. so, that pretty much takes care of that problem right? we just get some dog-size stethoscopes and lab coats and smart-looking glasses and cancer is over right? at least they can forget about biopsies and whatnot. dogs can smell cancer. shit.
on the headphones at work:
international submarine band / safe at home
public enemy / it takes a nation of millions
this one maytag dryer claims that it has an infinite speed motor. that seems unlikely. i think what they mean is that this machine, in theory, thanks to analog controls, has an infinite number of speed settings, in that you can never find the exact same speed. but if they meant it has infinite speed, well then couldn’t the dryer spin at several times the speed of light and then expand to a mass near infinity and murder you and your whole family using both Skynet and the power of Metaphysics? isn’t the dryer probably thinking about doing that right now? Does anyone see how my fears might come true?
more on my beef with copywriters later. my current problem is with linsday lohan. she’s not a very good teenage sex symbol. because she’s not that good-looking, in any valuable sense, nor is she behaviorally suited to the role. which is why, in an ironic sense, she’s probably the best national teenage sex symbol ever. that and she’s not even really a good actress, which isn’t the point. i don’t know anything about capacity for singing and dancing. now, this is going to be slightly regressive (not in a misogynistic way, just in an all-around old-timey way). i’m more than happy to force my crypto-victorian sexual mores on you all, and i think you’ll be happy to have them, but this goes beyond simple posturing into the realm of national identity crisis. our sex symbols aren’t sexy.
to find what inspired my quiet rage here, refer, fine readers, to the current cover of GQ magazine featuring lindsay lohan. i’d put it here for your convenience but i think the ppl at work might think i was doing something unsavory, and i’m not sure that i wouldn’t (be doing something unsavory). anyway, before we start evaluating the evidence, i have the following things to say about this cover: one, it’s boring. you can’t do any better than a ripped A-shirt for sexy attire? don’t magazine photographers know how to be subversive anymore? can’t she be draped in meat and doll parts (been done before)? or wearing a muslim headscarf and holding a defaced picture of jacques chirac over her lap? is the lack of provocativity linday’s fault? sort of. she’s not provocative. she’ s attractive, in the way that any trim young woman in not very much clothing is attractive. judging from some scant research, the article in GQ about how’s she egg on the face of a hollywood system that prefers really skinny blonde chicks. that might be true, in that she’s a redhead, and probably weights more than 100 lbs. this is going to devolve into some sort of pseudeo-comparative analysis of which attributes i find more attractive. before that happens: lindsay lohan is sort of inevitable, if you examine industry trends. that doesn’t mean she can get away with a total lack of innovation. this is what brought down American car manufacturers. let’s not let it happen to our sex symbol industry either. not that anybody should be worried; the spice girls were the sex symbol equivalent of Le Car (a really skinny girl with bad teeth who wears track pants. that’s not sexy). but i don’t like this. britney spears was bad enough, with her neo-conservatism and weird inability, for a pop star who doesn’t have to write songs, to actually find good tracks. now we have to deal with lindsay lohan. this is bullshit. i want molly ringwald back. she never got a chance to show what she could do. she was a redhead with tastefully mangled teeth. when does her time come?
i apologize for the disorganized ranting. i feel self-conscious about writing at work. not that i should. right now i mostly feel like i want to leave and eat lunch a lot more than i want to come back to this again later and finish it. i leave it to others to flesh this shit out.
well, i don’t know if this is working. somebody tell me if it’s working. i had bangladeshi food for lunch. it wasn’t that great, i have to be honest. i also went ot the post office, which was also not that great. but i;m going to absentee the shit out of some ballots in the semi-near future. democracy in action.
“As a neuropsychologist, I always get irritated when Hollywood movies depict someone being hit in the head, falling down, then shaking their head and all is fine. That isn’t how it works, and the Red Baron’s case shows those long-lasting effects.”
why these people, who presumably have been educated at great expense to the state of missouri, are worried about whether or not a guy who died 90 years ago was already suffering from brain damage at the time of his death, is beyond my grasp. not that i don’t think what they did is awesome. on such a pointless note, i am going to start keeping a journal of the jerseys i see on the streets of NY.
tuesday, sept 20 AD 2004
Washington Square, 1845h
Atlanta Hawks No. 42 Theo Ratliff
Record store clerk, 1900h
Cleveland Browns No. 2 Tim Couch
4 platform, 1915h
Atlanta Hawks No. 44 Alan Henderson
i bought headphones for $2 at a store near the office. i also purchased the worst falafel i’ve ever had for not much more, as well as some mediocre pastry. this morning i saw a house that appeared to have a child-size robot statue garden, featuring a small version of the robot from Rocky IV, a Power Rangers doll, and another slightly smaller, chrome child robot. and yesterday i bought a novelty t-shirt, for the first time since i was 12 and i bought a metallica t-shirt. it’s green and it has some sort of inscrutable picture of steve marriott playing a guitar. and then it says “STEVE MARRIOTT” in bubble font. ah, i’m dumb.
I am told by our meme engineer that this bitch has taken wing. if you are looking at 1984produkts.com/civilwarroundtable, and seeing weird white and greeny things, then we have taken wing. leave comments with your opinions which will not be considered. i woke up at 6:25 antemeridian and exercised this morning. someone please mail me a copy of Last Train to Memphis, i don’t really have time to track one down on my own. I read the entire NY Times this morning (editor’s note: you read most of the first two sections and sort of skimmed the rest) and I don’t think i need to do that anymore. i got a cup of coffee for 50 cents at a bodega. there were screaming children on the train. now i will enter information about appliances into a computer until my soul starts leaking out of my eyes. 15 minutes down, 8 h 45m remaining, minus 1h for lunch. i’ll be going to a bagel shop today. daunte culpepper is a bitch. i went 4 for 16 in my NFL picks league this week. i say this only so that i might mention that my picks team is called Citizen Kanell. the Browns are playing the Giants this week so it’s going to be on TV: i mention this only in reference to the two year anniversary of the dwyane rudd helmet toss/still being in college and working on the maroon and the one year anniversary of the one year anniversary.
POSTSCRIPT: I think Moacir has managed to work things so that the damage I have done to my own blog has been undone. I am just learning how to use WordPress so this shit will start to look less crappy in its own time. As for right now, enjoy earthtones and as always, I am a bear/do not fight me.
NOW i understand why everyone is calling roger federer Mr. Perfect. for some reason, living in NY has convinced me that there’s a small Christ-like professional tennis fan inside me waiting to escape and find new purchase on life outside my hardened blue-collar mentality. take wing, dear soul and let your cherished love lift you.
prepare for trouble. i’m switching to WordPress and this blog might be broken for a while. ONE MOMENT.
I don’t really understand my new, and let me make this clear, adopted (in a very hostile sense), neighborhood, which is called the upper east side. let’s paint a scene together, of a guy walking around for to kill the hour in between the end of the fifth seinfeld rerun of the evening and kickoff for monday night football. (the game turned out to be much more boring than seinfeld i had seen nine times before. i blame al michaels, whose late-career heel makeover into a republican gambling addict paleo-conservative is sort of stunning, as well as john madden. no matter how much john madden knows about football, he knows the inverse amount about expressing ideas effectively in the english language.)
anyway, adjust your weltanschauung for a late-evening stroll along the sidewalks of a swell-intensive sector of NYC. my immediate observations:
everyone is walking a puppy. this cannot be normal. if dogs were perennial, i might understand, but these dogs won’t be puppies in 3-6 months. will everyone be walking young adult dogs at that point? my paranoid side says that either a lot of those garbage bags on the sidewalk are filled with discarded puppies, or these dogs are on some Gattaca shit. they’re being scientifically altered, with saws and shit, to resemble jude law, or as the case may be, permanently remain puppies. it’s a sick goddamn world these people live in.
before i leave, i had one more potshot to take at new yorkers, which is that the one thing, if you asked them what one thing do you, generic new yorker, have in spades? that one thing, when you asked them that, would be style, or class, is my guess. i would posit that this is actually the opposite of the truth. jesus christ. i need to take five here.
as i think it was with moving to chicago, i didn’t really realize what i had gotten myself into until the first sunday of the NFL season. when i moved to chicago, i realized that 1) i would be watching the Bears every Sunday with limited exceptions. This was pretty bad, then conditions 1a-b (non-bears games are “of local interest”) was introduced. this meant, understandably, i saw much more of the vikings, packers and lions than i cared to. this also, not understandably, meant that i would see the colts, kansas city and denver all the goddamn time on the AFC channel. i have nothing personal against peyton manning and i even sort of like tony dungy (i still say he looks like phil lynott). but when i say i have nothing personal against peyton manning, what i meant was i hope he has a shitty life and i never want to see his goddamn team fucking play again. again, this is not personal. i just don’t want to see the colts anymore. i apologize for this jeff. anyway, enjoy the below edutainment before reading my ultimate conclusions, which are inevitably a letdown.
EXHIBIT A
Phil Lynott
Tony Dungy
anyway, before i dissipate my rhetorical energies entirely into photo montages, i arrived in chicago with a new lease on football watching life, because i was in the central time zone. which meant the awkward 60-120 minutes in between waking up and the actual beginning of the game were nullified. at worse, you woke up at 10:30, got food, preferably from salonica, went home, and had to watch no more than 20 minutes of jimmy johnson and terry bradshaw. what’s the upshot? who gives a shit is the upshot. i was walking crosstown and i saw the CBS NFL pregame show being broadcast. i could have throw rocks at boomer esiason, dan marino or shannon sharpe. there aren’t enough rocks in the goddamn universe, that’s what i’m thinking. ULTIMATE CONCLUSION ABOUT WATCHING NFL IN TRI-STATE AREA:
1a. It’s entirely possible that many Sundays will consist only of a Jets game followed by a Giants game or vice versa. This is massively unfortunate, if the blackout rules are the same as in chicago, which is that the opposite channel can’t air a game competing with the local team game except on special occasions.
1b. I missed the eastern time zone, in my own way. I’m leaving now.
*: I actually overheard a woman, who wasn’t wearing a monocle or court of versailles-ish dandy garb (or other outward indications of cartoonish wealth), SCREAMING this into a cell phone. and all i could think of, based on her intonation, was her pregnant friend, very pregnant, doing breathing exercises and just stuffing her face with nine different kinds of caviar. i sort of wanted to follow the woman with the phone and write down what else she said, but then i saw a really floppy basset hound taking a crap into a steam grate and i got distracted. new yorkers are pretty much the worst video ever. i don’t understand where their sense of superiority over Long Islanders and New Jerseyites comes from, because they’re all the fucking same. It’s like trying to claim that Austrian is a separate language from German.
also, there are these posters for ESPN deportes where vlad guerrero is talking on the phone, standing at second base while Michael Young looks on confused. i want one of these posters but they’re all glued to the wall. god damn you.
