Funeral to Funeral

We were a twenty five car procession circling around Kenmore New York with a police escort, and suddenly we faced a different twenty five car funeral procession on the other side of the street.

at the luncheon afterwards, my cousin mark told me he knew the woman who had died. her name was mary. she was his age, not his mother's.

sisters

soccer taco saves the day

i've spent a lot of time lately hating on Red Hook, but i'm just being stupid. it's not red hook's fault that i refuse to get a job, that i haven't finished my book (okay, it could have something to do with it, considering all the social distractions innate in the neighborhood), or that i get involved in relationships designed ot not work out. nor is it red hook's fault that when i had to move i took the path of least resistance, instead of making an intelligent decision.

i looked at what i hope will be my new apartment today and the landlady seemed like a normal person. that made me feel better. that and soccer taco.


there are great people everywhere here. who cares if it's a small town and i'm a local. i wanted to be a local, now i am.

last night i worked at the hope and anchor diner, where i used to work and the kerioke was nutty and awful, but i walked up to the pioneer and my old friend Megan who moved off to go to grad school and sometimes that's enough, right?

every thing doesn't have to be monumental. it can just be.

it's windy in new york

i hate waiting for the b61 almost as much as i hate riding it.

pleasant surprises

it's good when you go see your friends band (art, reading, comedy, etc) and you're expecting it to suck because their myspace page sucks. hurray for myspace actually sucking and being a horrible way to communicate with people and real live shows being good.

what's up with people not knowing anything about themselves these days and just saying, it's on my myspace page?

what i'm not reading

With respect to the fact that most of the books about teenagers i was reading were written by people my age (all references in the jessica darling books were to john hughes movies and other niagra falls areas)i tried to read shut the door but it's terrible. which makes me feel better and worse. you want the sixteen year old to have written a good book, but she didn't even if she did get it published. it reads like bad melodrama and none of the characters are well realized. in the end, it's just boring and obvious, but that's maybe because it's something like i might have written at that age, although i wouldn't have known the stuff. it wasn't in the books i read and i wasn't picking up boys at the mall.


The talked about it book of the fall, as told to me by Moriah Cleveland and the New York Times, is Special Topics in Calamity Physics and i'm not sure that i'm buying it, either. i'm on page 75 and still annoyed at her tick of annotating everything. it's a joke, clearly, relating the the narrator's academic father, but we don't need annotations everytime someone references a book or a movie. we know them, and getting the reference is half of the joy of reading that stuff. (i once tried to read the recognitions using the annotations and realized i was ruining it for myself. sure, i needed a bible and a dictionary, but check check checking everything out was ruining the actual story of the story. See Infinite Jest.) i think somewhere in there is one of those really lovely and fun books, like the Secret History, but she's making me work so hard to read it, i read Paul LaFarge's diatribe on Dungeons and Dragons in The Believer instead. Lately, due mostly to a conversation with Andres Debuffet in between back to back director's cuts of the Lord of the Rings movies, when he explained being a comic who performed all the time but didn't get paid was like starting off as a wizard in D&D instead of a warrior (or whatever the jocks in D&D are): through experience points the wizard ends up a whole hell of a lot more powerful in the end. I'm not sure that it's working of him or any of the other comics (or unemployed fiction writers, for that matter) that i know. But it did reevaluation my appreciation for D&D. Like my father's appreciation for spectator sports, "You don't know how it's going to end, it hasn't been decided for you." That’s what got me into watching sports: not the athlecticism or the physical challenge, but the story: this guy wants to beat that guy because that guy used to beat him. Or whatever. D&D is all about story. It’s just an adventure tale for boys (usually the kind that I like, who like novels and art and movies about dragons) the way playing house or dolls or dress-up is for girls. Sure, as a kid, maturing away from that stuff too slowly, we tried to distance ourselves from it, but now I realize my need to anthropomorphize everything, the way I feel I’m hurting my broken down Specialized Rock Hopper by trading it in for a road bike, has only to do with seeing stories in everything, even inanimate objects.

rocktober

all of that summer bliss, reading teen novels and writing pithy little bits about them ended with a sad reality check:

i had to move in with roommates.
not just a roommate, but two. (plus the, as there always is in the roommate situation, everpresent totally annoying boyfriend who is in the house so much that i never come home therefore giving him by possesion is 9/10 of the law more right to the place than me the rent payer) this has all but stopped both of my reading and my writing and turned me into a base alcoholic. not just due to my misery and my o'neilish tendencies, but because bars are the only place one can go to hide until 3 am when the roommates have gone to sleep.

this should change this week, when i move into the world's most depressing one window studio. but a one window studio of my very own is still safer than any attic in a dorm room.