Brr...

Okay, I'm pretty sure I ordered a nice sunny day for Memorial Day. I think I have the receipt around here somewhere...

Anyway. It started out pretty sunny (at around 7 in the morning, mind you), but turned overcast and gray equally quickly. This wouldn't have been so discouraging if I hadn't decided to bike to Queens this morning. I was aiming to take the Triborough bridge into Ward's Island and then across to Manhattan, which in theory would've been a very nice ride, indeed. Except, I forgot my map. So, I made a few wrong turns, ending up in the malodorous section of East Williamsburg (I'm sure this is where the bodies must be buried...) and then somehow, miraculously finding the Pulaski footbridge to cross into Queens. After that, I blindly circumnavigated across via Vernon Road all the way up into Astoria. I passed the legendary Queensbridge section of town -- made famous (or infamous) by sparring rappers KRS-ONE and Marley Marl in the late 1980s. Or at least, made famous to me due to the fact that I listened to rap songs like "South Bronx" wherein KRS-ONE derides Marl for being from Queensbridge. As far as I could tell, it was the cookie cutter NY project with a park down beneath the Queensboro Bridge. Not terribly remarkable or particularly derision worthy. Maybe it's a sissy project (or was back in the 1980s)... Anyway, I was expecting Astoria to be somewhat interesting, either architecture-wise or something. But it just reminded me of far off stretches of the west side of Chicago. Again, completely unremarkable. A lot of somewhat decay bound buildings and shops with signs that look like most other parts of the further out sections of Brooklyn. For my money, Greenpoint had better architecture and storefronts. Of course, I was getting a bit chilled at this point and so ended up looping back to what I had mistakenly thought was the Triborough Bridge. It was actually the footbridge to Roosevelt Island, NY's answer to planned communities. The bridge itself dead ends into a parking garage. How convenient! I'm not sure if this is the only way in or out of Roosevelt Island, but it's kind of spooky. The bridge itself looks like someone upchucked a vat of Pepto Bismol. There's something unnatural about pink bridges. I headed from there to the Queensboro Bridge. A fairly long steep incline greets the bicyclist until it levels out and finally drops you at about E.60th or so in Manhattan. I took another stab at the east side greenway -- it's much better below E. 45th or so, and headed home. So far, I can definitely say that the Brooklyn Bridge is not the best bridge to bike. It's wooden planked, highly trafficked and not terribly wide. All of the other bridges I've crossed seem to be very low traffic and sufficiently wide for that. I recommend using the Manhattan Bridge whenever possible if you have to cross into Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Heights interchange.

Procrastination...it's what's for dinner

Taken on a stroll through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden shortly after a torrential downpour dumped nearly 4 inches of water on my living room floor. The roses looked happier about this situation than I did.


Taken tonight about five minutes later than I wanted to. It's amazing how fast dusk turns to darkness. I'm sure that's a metaphor for life, too.

Glad to see that torture isn't the only thing we do well...

Apparently, we also specialize in intimidation and suppression of free speech!

In San Francisco, no less...

If I didn't believe our country was in a terrible state of affairs, I suppose this might confirm it.

Sigh. My only real hope is that whomever took the universe that I was living in 4 years ago will decide to bring it back and exchange it for this one. It's not much of a hope, I guess. If I had taken possession of that universe, I wouldn't want to exchange it, either.

They call this a greenway?

Okay, just a bone of contention. But, wait, first the backstory... (don't you wish all cinematic endeavors worked this way?) I sprained my foot a few months ago and as my encouraging and seemingly completely off his rocker doctor told me, "Oh, you'll be fine in 10 days." Well, 10 days passed. And then 10 more. And then 5 times that. And my foot is still not up to extreme...whatever it is that feet do to the extreme. Footing the bill. Whatever. Anyway, my doc sucks rocks. I'm going to get a new one. But, that's not really the back story, exactly. The back story is that I haven't been playing ultimate recently and I desperately didn't want to turn into some kind of large sloth like creature. So, I took up my favorite non-impact sport: biking. And I took it up with quite a bit of glee, actually, discovering that NYC is really friggin' big. I mean, enormous. I lived in San Francisco for a long time and biked through the streets there, but NYC makes it seem like some kind of isolated backwater. Which, in many ways, it is. So, with a great amount of enthusiasm, I began tracing down all of the various and sundry greenways in the city. I can now safely report on 3 of them after a trip today. In order of disappointment:

1. The East River greenway: heck, I don't even know exactly what the damn thing is called, but it shouldn't have the word "greenway" anywhere in its title. It could be called the "loose affiliation of open spaces not entirely dominated by automobiles, mostly, except for the part where it diverges onto the 4 lane mad taxi filled avenue." It's not a greenway! Where you can bike, uninterrupted by cars, there are no paths. It's just a promenade of sorts. And then, the promenade is filled with people walking dogs, meandering, or worse yet, sunbathing. What is the east side nyer's fascination with accelerating the aging process? And they sunbathe everywhere! I saw three people who had dragged out their chaise lawn plastic lounge chairs into the middle of a promenade (yes, on the faux greenway) to sit, nearly underneath an overpass leading to the Manhattan Bridge. And there are numerous benches here, too. I'm sure this sounds a bit like a screed -- actually, I found it exceptionally humorous and very telling about the general NY mindset: basically, we'll make it work. Whatever we want to do, we'll figure out a way to live our life the way we want to, environmental circumstances be damned. I actually quite respect and admire that tenacity. But enough about the average NY mindset. This greenway blows chunks. I'm taking Broadway the next time. At least I know I'll almost get killed by a taxi there, instead of having my inner ear jarred loose by cobblestone pavement (that looks great for a promenade, mind you. But isn't a greenway! Have I made my point yet?

2. The Ocean Avenue Greenway: What the hell? Yeah, okay, it's a "greenway" in the truest sense of the word. No cars can drive on it. But it's positioned in the most precarious of places -- in between a very active near-freeway that is Ocean Ave (or should be called Ocean Expressway or something) and the one way side streets that are also Ocean Ave. All running parallel. Okay, fine, no big deal. Except, cars going 35-50 are making panic right turns across the breaks in the greenway to go on Avenue X, Y, or Z, often not looking to see if the greenway bicyclist is actually crossing on their green light as well. To top that off, the greenway cyclist view of potential death is highly obscured by...well, by greenway greenery. And the pavement looks like some worm from the movie "Tremors" had lunch there. My advice: stick on the side streets -- better pavement, better sightlines, less chance of getting hit by a car. And, hey, either way you twist it, it's a great way to get out to coney island .

3. The West Side Greenway: I have to say, I'm impressed with this in comparison to everything else I've seen so far (but I'm not done, yet...). It marries a decent pavement with a streamlined route that is both safe and effective. I can get up to 104th in almost 30 minutes from the WTC, even on a pretty windy day. It does occasionally have to stray into promenade territory, but the promenades are paved evenly (instead of cobblestoned...who thought of that, anyway?) and are wide enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic (most of the time). It does jog off into an underpass at 125th and the famous Cotton Club, but it gives the side benefit of biking past the fabulous Fairway Market, which always smells like fresh baked bagels or pizza. Though, directly thereafter you'll be regaled with the odors of the NYC sewage system, as you take a slight detour through what appears to be off-limit governmental waste sites or something. Ah, the "only in NY" contrasts are lovely at times. I've yet to take it further than 181st, but my only real complaint is that it's often very difficult to get out of the greenway and into a city street that far north.

Phew. Anyway, I still like biking. And I like biking in NY, too. Maybe some day, I'll like biking into upstate NY, but we'll just have to see how my foot handles that. Coming soon: a detail of the bridges of NYC (way more exciting and sexy than "The Bridges of Madison County"...)

Storms and sushi

I like watching people making sushi. It's like watching someone paint.

I don't have very much insight into the rest of today, though. It rained really hard. For some reason, most of that rain came in through my window. I needed a garbage can to catch all of the water. And towels. And I think I got most of it. Phew.

I also had this strange realization and I have it almost every time it happens to me. I find that whenever I hear myself discussing the weather with someone else, I immediately know that I have almost nothing to say to that person. Not only do I have nothing to say to them, I feel like they would rather I were anywhere but near them. It's sadly the only thing I have in common with them at that given point in time -- the fact that we're both alive and breathing air and subject to our environment. I may have other things in common with this person, but either they or I have chosen to lock up all of those doors, batten (is that a word?) our own personal emotional hatches and hide out inside ourselves until this hurricane of socializing passes by. The Perfect Interpersonal Storm, as it were. So, weather=death knell for conversation. It's hard for me to recover completely from bringing up the weather. I think I'll need to work on some other thing that everyone on the planet has in common so I can use that instead. Might be a good variation to work in.

This has nothing to do with sushi, though. I always order too much sushi because it looks so very good and sounds so very good when I order it. I have a feeling day old sushi isn't quite the same, though I don't know if I've ever actually had day old sushi.

I think Day Old Sushi would be a good name for a band, though.

Fiction: The Tent

Inside the tent he was certain there was something waiting for him. Not something that he wanted to find, necessarily, but something that he was bound to find. He could see the slow flicker of kerosene lamplight as it made shadow puppet stories across the walls. Anthropologists would've marveled at the likeness to the first cave drawings, in fact. He knew that this was trying to tell him something. But he sat there, motionless, the hotness on his face from dying embers of the campfire. He was sure it was the fire that had flushed his face to sunburn. Though when he rubbed his hands below his eyes, he was certain that he felt a dampness. He put his hands to his tongue to make sure, but he didn't need to test it.

He was amazed at the way sound traveled in the night this far away from anywhere. It was, as she had convinced him earlier in the day, the middle of nowhere. Like a black hole, but with trees. If he were to clap his hands together loudly, the sound would almost instantly be sucked off into some other dimension. No reverberations, and a crisp silence would rush in and cover him up. This silence, layered with crackling twigs, scuttling branches, the ticks of katydids and songs of night owls was all around them, thick as cottony pajamas. He was certain she was already asleep inside the tent, even with the lamplight betraying that activity. Dousing the fire with a squirt from a water bottle was enough to prepare him for the inevitable.

Cottony pajamas. Of course, he had forgotten his, so he stripped to underwear and slid inside the sleeping bag. There was a reason he wanted those on right now. The tickle of ice that crept along his back and sent bumps to his skin. It wasn't cold out, actually, but it was cold in. There was the gulf between he and she. They were hair's breadth apart, in some ways. They were oceans apart, others. She tussled, unconscious it seemed, stretching out her arms like a newborn, fingers twisting, grasping but getting nothing but air. And then relaxing, curling upon herself into a cocoon. He rolled over and closed his eyes, yearning for black inky voids to overtake his vision.

This is the thing. It's a long hallway, very high ceilings. Everything is canted. Like a funhouse mirror universe, you can't walk through the hallway the way you might want to. The floor twists with every step, the walls shake and reverberate. At the end of the hall, that's his apartment. He knows it is, but when he is inside it feels foreign, unwelcoming. An interrogation room in his mind. All white starched walls, suffocating air, so much air and nothing, absolutely nothing furnishing it. There is a chair in the middle that sits like an island buffeted by the twisting floorboards that he walks on. They are as concrete as gelatin and he grasps the chair for what he can. He climbs into it, feeling at last to have found some solace, a life preserver in the room of his own making. He is small in the chair, dwarfed by the walls, the ceiling, the legs of the chair. He wants to turn on the stereo, to play music so very loudly, but he is afraid that he will wake her up. He is in his dream, but still he is afraid of waking her up.

"You're snoring."
He rolls over, blinks away the dream, barely. He still feels wobbly, on top of something that maybe he climbed too quickly to get to. A head rush, so he sees little tiny stars in his view. "I am?" he offers weakly as a retort.
"Yes. I couldn't sleep."
"I was dreaming about my apartment. I think I was dreaming about you, too."
She cocks her head to one side, leaning on her arm, the sound of the night flooding the tent through the open fly. Their voices sound staticky, like the words might stick to their clothes if they aren't careful to avoid getting too close. Too close with words, he thinks. That is the problem with staticky voices.
"Do tell."
"I wanted to play music really loudly. I had left my door open so that you could hear it, but I didn't want to wake you up, either."
She rolls back on her back. The top of the tent, like looking into a cathedral ceiling, the way the poles converge at the zenith. She could hear a mosquito trespassing. She didn't really want to hear him right now. She really felt much more adept at just guessing him. "It's a metaphor, isn't it?"
"What is?"
"The dream. You dream in metaphors."
"I do?"
"Yes, you do." She could feel her ire rise, her voice jumped up a bit, her throat constricting. She didn't want to do that, though, so she paused, feeling her blood course around again. Pump, pump, pump. The heartbeat she could feel in her forehead was hers alone. He was not in her blood, thankfully.

There is this pause. Like silence, like the flood of the night that comes over the tent, that seems to wash it away, pitch it fully out into the ocean of other possible silences that lap and wave out in the nighttime of the world. The tent, moored only by three stakes in the ground, moored only by two people clasped tight as padlocks on the floor of it all. The night silence sluices across the top, across the bottom, through the fly. It fills up the space in between, a dark brackish silence. And then, you're drowning in it. You can't breathe for the silence, it isn't deafening, it isn't quieting, it isn't suffocating. It just overtakes you until you become just another part of it. And it's all around the tent, it's leaking inside the tent. That is the pause. That is the pause that they hear between each other. She breaks the pause, the brackish watery feeling on her skin is too much to bear.

"This isn't necessarily a place I wanted to be."

He turns over, uncertain, dreams playing like unspooled film sliding through his fingers. Single images, glimpsed for seconds at a time. He could almost put it together into a story. Almost.

Quick, use this duct tape and a shovel...

...and this piece of lint...and...

News today: Al-qaida is poised "to strike U.S. hard."

Why should this be a newsflash? I kind of remember being around in 2001 when (if memory serves) they already DID this. Did anyone think that they "hit U.S. hard" and then decided they were done? Clearly, judging by the current administration's foreign policies, whatever message they had sent was well-received and we can all just go about our business. The truly dumbfounding nature of telling the American public that there is credible intelligence that something might happen is that I could've given up that kind of intelligence. And, hey, I'm a fairly credible source. I mean, something could happen anytime. That's the nature of existence. Things do happen. Some of them are horrific. Some of them aren't. Truly, though, the only reason to broadcast this kind of information to the general populace is to cya -- cover GWB's ass. So, when something does happen, he can say, "Well, I told you so." And then we can all say, "Oh, yeah, I guess he did." Well, guess what? 9/11 told us so. We're EMPLOYING this (yes, we pay him $250K a year or so...does anyone think he's earning it?) to STOP IT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN (among other things that he isn't doing. He's spent more time on vacation in the past 4 years than any president before him. Has he earned any of it?). Veiled threats and vague information is not protection. It's not security. It's insecurity. It's fear. And they've been trying to breed it so they can stay in power.

Fire the bastard.

Canceling Cable

TV is a necessary evil in my life. I work with it on a daily basis, so generally it's a good idea to have it lying around...just in case. At least, that's what I initially thought. But, after having it around "just in case" for a couple of months, I've come to the disturbing conclusion that despite there being oodles and oodles of television, I just don't have (sigh) the attention span for it. I think I've found that having that many television stations has deteriorated my ability to focus on any one task, like, say, watching an entire program. Not only that, the only thing I end up watching is stuff I've already seen before. I tend to get my headlines from the internet, so I have no need for the gruesome depictions of depraved modern day life and colonialism that it offers. And so far, I haven't seen anything on a tv screen this year that outstripped the inventiveness or ingenuity from things like The Triplets of Belleville or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- two things that I wouldn't have had the opportunity to see on my cable box for maybe a year into the future. It's not a great way to stay on the cutting edge of my profession actually. My co-worker has argued that I should have it for HBO. I have to admit that the shows on that particular station are very well crafted. And I'm totally uninterested. I guess it comes down to a choice: (a la Shawshank Redemption) get busy watching, or get busy doing. I think I've finally decided that doing beats watching. Maybe it's just that coming out of hibernation feeling that spring/summer brings, too.

TV, like any addictive substance, needs to be contained and handled. I'm struck, though, by the perhaps genetic similarity that I may have to my brother. He doesn't own a television for this reason. If a television is present in the room, he will become transfixed by it, unable to tear himself away. I believe the choice to not own a tv is as much driven by this known inability to hold sway over the addictive substance as anything else. And though my addiction may be less formidable, I can feel it bubbling over in the cauldron of my veins. And I'd rather take that energy and have something to show for it, other than a deep indentation in my sofa.

The Runaround

========

That doesn't really have anything to do with anything.

But, this does. It's not something that you may really feel very strongly about, but it just happens to be in my face right now, so I can't help it. I'm working on a program about identity theft and, as such, I'm perhaps uniquely sensitive to the subject. Not so much in the "how do I keep people from taking my identity and stealing all of my financial geegaws" sense of things, but more in the "why are so many financial institutions so invested in selling protection from this to consumers?" In the program I'm working on, the presenter makes an interesting point in that the only people who can really control identity theft are the companies that are responsible for issuing the credit in the first place. And those same companies turn around and sell the ability to protect us from what is -- in essence -- their own craven greed or blunt incompetence. Either way, it seems, actually kind of criminal. It's like you're giving these companies your trust and they're basically in the business of betraying it and then selling it back to you as some kind of competitive advantage over other companies in the same business. Want fraud protection? Sign here! When, in reality, what they ought to say is, "Want real fraud protection? Don't give anything to us, we'll just handle it carelessly, or better yet, sell it to some borderline psychopath who will impersonate you and buy a lot of hummel figurines for his shrine to Orgatz, God of the Unholy Spork Festival. Or something. I think I kinda got lost in the ramble again. I do have to watch out for that.

I'm also working on a program about gay marriage. That's far more emboldening in the whole "human spirit" kind of thing. If I balance the programs properly, I'll be equally paranoid and uplifted. Which may not be a good mixture at any rate.

I really, really feel strongly, though, that the word "geegaw" needs to make a serious comeback. I'm hoping that someone will work it into street slang or something. Maybe I could get a tv show on MTV called Pimp My Geegaw.*

*Note to unfamiliar viewers: I don't actually watch MTV, so I'm mostly making statements on the basis of hearsay, conjecture, and promotional trailers.

Condo Mania

So, I learn today that my building is goin' condo. I'm not sure how I feel about it, until I read the fine print of just how much they've set the purchase price for. If I were drinking a fine, cold beverage, it would've been spit out across the room. Despite the ridiculous cost they're estimating, I also notice in the fine print that they've mis-estimated where I'm living. They have it listed as a studio! I'm quite certain I have a bedroom, here. Really. I think I slept in it last night, in fact. Does this mean that if someone were to buy my apartment, that I would be able to remain on in the bedroom that doesn't exist? Or, rather, does that mean that every night I step into a parallel dimension, like a wardrobe to narnia when I sleep.

Well, that would definitely explain some of the dreams that I've been having.

The Big Gaping Hole

I went for a bike ride this morning (you have to love the west side highway bike path in New York City, especially the part where it jumps out onto the street for a bit, right by the historic Cotton Club and passes in front of the Fairway Market, which smells of freshly baked bagels and pizza and then jumps back against Riverside Park and smells immediately like a sewage treatment plant). On the way back home, I got stuck coming crosstown in front of the site of the World Trade Center towers. I had been by the site many times before, but I guess never on a weekend. And I was amazed. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people lined every inch of viewable space around the enormous crater where the towers once stood. I passed by a group of young women, strapping on rollerblades, hanging over their bicycles. I could overhear a snippet of their conversation, and they were talking about someone that they had known who had worked there. I navigated up the street to hear the vendor at one of the small food shops next to the site bellow, "If you're ready for lunch, we're ready for you!" I had two contrary thoughts simultaneously -- the first, that only in America would we commercialize our tragedies and the second, that leaving this space empty for the future generations would've been the greatest and most sensible tribute to those that died there. But, of course not. We're going to build some ridiculously large structure to cover up the past because it'd be terrible to remember something in this, the country of historical ADD.

I guess that's not as profound as it felt when I biked through there.

Vermin!

I just think "vermin" is a terribly underused word. I mean, really, wouldn't you like to call most of the people who have somehow loused up this fine planet of ours, "vermin?" It sure describes them perfectly. And then, I think, they should wear pointy little vermin ears so that they'd be more easily identified. If you take a good close look at pictures of our current "president*," you'll notice that he has little pointy vermin ears.

I just thought it ought to be noted for public record.

That said, if you make a nice muffin and then freeze it, you can thaw it out slowly and it will taste almost as good as the day after you made it.

Another item that just needs to be noted for public record.

Vermin and muffins, two great tastes that taste great together.




*not legally and properly elected.

It's not killing me, but it's not making me happy.

This was the phrase that I came up with to describe a situation today. In fact, the entire day could be summed up this way. See, I was in New Mexico to shoot a television show. And things weren't going exactly right. So, someone asked me how it was going -- and normally that's when you say "fine" or "okay" or "not so good" or whatever. But, things were in that murky gray territory where you're not quite fine, but your not in bad shape. So, I said, "Well, it's not killing me, but it's not making me happy, either." And my coworkers decided that this should be our new company motto.

Oh, and some other things happened today, too, but I must admit that I can't wait to get back home.

Beware of Fire Ants

Apparently, Google creates ads in the upper part of the page related to words I put in this box. Or something like that. Like, if I constantly refer to MILKSHAKES and the wonder of EGG CREAMS and possibly the insidious nature of PUMPKIN STEW and MOLASSES OATMEAL SANDALS. Well, that should be an interesting advertising campaign, indeed.

Of course, I could just be drawing the wrong pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin conclusions about this blog thing. Or maybe milkshake milkshake milkshake milkshake not.

I suppose we shall see.

Today, in New Mexico -- I walked very close to a huge fire ant nest. They tend to swarm a lot. It's actually kind of disturbing because it reminds me of capitalism. Or, more figuratively, the Bush administration. Actually, it doesn't remind me at all about them. But I'm in one of the "red" states (thus, the preponderance of "fire ants"), and even the handful of people I talk to seem to be against his policies. What group in this country does a policy of blind spending and utter and complete disregard for human rights cater to? Beverly Hills dentists?

I bet you were wondering how any of this aligns with fire ants. Well, it doesn't. Sometimes, blogs are just that way. Tough.

New Mexico Rantings

Okay, so I'm in New Mexico and I learn, to my chagrin, the following interesting and possibly amusing factoids:
1. New Mexico (Albuquerque, I believe) is the DWI capital of the world. I'm unclear as to whether that means number of stops or number of fatalities. I was told fatalities.
2. Occasionally, a snake will fall out of a tree and land on you. If it's a bull snake, don't worry. They're friendly. Watch out for the rattlers, though.
3. The gift basket people here will not try to sell you the more expensive basket, even if you ask for it by name. In fact, they will attempt to dissuade you from parting with your extra $5.
4. Also, possums. They fall out of trees. Watch out for them, too.

That's all the interesting tidbits that I learned today about New Mexico. That, and sopapillas are truly a wonderful, fattening thing. I will not need to eat for the next 3 days.