Not Quite Blogworthy, Part Three

Ironies:

• Liking Peyton Manning more since he won the Super Bowl

• Everybody loves robots, but everybody hates the Fox NFL robot

• Hate karaoke, love singing in Rock Band (not sure this is irony)

• I love watching TV more than anything in the world, but I hate TVs in taxicabs. I've got nothing better to do when I'm in a cab, but I still fly into a blind rage every time the TV comes on.

Really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Not Quite Blogworthy, Part Two

I was too big of a pussy to have a rebellious streak. The one thing I can remember doing was lighting a fire in a metal trashcan in my basement as a fourteen year old. It quickly set off the fire alarm upstairs and the last thing I remember about it was crying to my parents.

I was burning pages out of an old Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Weeks earlier I had cut out all the pages with models on them and thrown the rest of the magazine away. One day I came home and decided I couldn't bear the risk of embarrassment if someone found the pictures so I decided to burn them.

I didn't want to do it outside for fear of torching the whole neighborhood like my brother almost did with some fireworks a few years earlier. Eventually I decided the Donald Duck wastebasket in my bedroom was safe enough because it was metal, but I also brought a bucket of water down from the garage just in case. Then I lit a match.

So anyway I'm on the white couch upstairs with my mom and my stepdad and I'm crying. But the thing is I didn't actually want to cry; the whole thing was kind of a charade. After the alarm went off and I knew I'd be in trouble, I calculated that crying would make my parents think something Serious or Important had just happened and I'd be better off in the long run if I were shown some compassion instead of being punished for almost burning down their fucking house.

And I guess it worked. I'm sure I got some nominal punishment, but I don't remember it. What I do remember was Mom asking if I was burning something important and that she would show me how to use the shredder in her office if I needed to get rid of anything sensitive. But I just lied and said I wasn't burning anything in particular, that I just wanted to see what it looked like.

Apparently I was more afraid of being exposed as a masturbator than I was of my parents thinking I was one of those dead-eyed pale kids who light shit on fire for no reason.

Not Quite Blogworthy, Part One

[NB: Here's the first of a few entries I worked on recently but eventually gave up on. The lack of blogworthiness should be readily apparent.]

So you know that part in The Omnivore's Dilemma where he tries being a vegetarian for a while, and the first objection he has is how awkward it is to attend a dinner party because either you tell the hosts ahead of time and you feel guilty about making them go out of their way to make you something special or you don't tell them ahead of time and then THEY feel guilty because you don't eat anything all night?

Fine. But remember all this comes from a guy who advocates eating locally- and organically-produced food. Which anyone with an asshole can tell you is way harder for the average host to accommodate than a simple fucking pasta salad.

Seriously:

what's the point of having a blog if you don't use it to pass along links like this?

Scenes from a kitchen

Step 1. One time we decided to cook something that called for sauteed mushrooms. I took them out of the fridge and wiped them off with a paper towel while she peeled some garlic on the coffee table. She looked up as I started slicing.

"Uh, did you wash those?"

"Nah," I replied. "I was reading where you're not supposed to wash mushrooms before you cook them. They act like sponges and soak up the water, so when you cook them they end up steaming instead of sauteing and you lose most of the flavor. You're supposed to brush them off instead."

"Umm, well, mushrooms are dirty. You definitely need to wash them off first."

"Yeah, I was skeptical too. But you can look it up. The heat from the stove will kill any germs."

She walked into my tiny kitchen and looked at the cutting board. "You at least need to rinse them."

"We can rinse them if you want, but then we'd have to wait for them to dry." I looked at her and smiled. "I promise it's okay if we don't wash them."

"I don't fucking care, David. I don't care what you read." She swept the mushrooms into a colander and dropped it in the sink. "We're not making dinner without washing the mushrooms."
____

Step 2. Another time I asked her to hand me the salt. Instead of my usual box of coarse kosher Morton's, she passed me a small plastic container. The lid said 'SEA SALT' in her unmistakable handwriting.

"What?" I teased. "My salt isn't good enough for you?"

"Um, no. I had this at the old apartment. I didn't feel like packing it when I moved, so I thought I'd leave it with you. Jesus."
____

Step 3. A few weeks later we made a salad while we waited on our pizza. She told me to peel a cucumber while she chopped tomatoes.

Right as I was finishing up, she let out a sigh. "Oh Dave. You didn't need to peel the whole thing. We don't need that much."

I laid the cucumber naked on the counter.

"You know what's funny? I thought about only peeling half of it. But then I realized there was an equal chance I'd be wrong about that too. So I figured, you know, fuck it. I'll just do the whole thing."
___

Step 4. Combine mushrooms, cucumber and salt in a small apartment. Add bitterroot.

Serves two people right.

it's two things

I went for a walk in the East Village last night around 2:00am. It's always fun to walk sober around a neighborhood full of dive bars that late on a Saturday. Hordes of drunken dudes in jeans and black shoes, hysterical women in patent heels screaming into cell phones, couples hovering on the corner waving frantically for a cab, shivering: they make for some pretty great people watching. A visibly drunk driver careened through an intersection, blasting his horn the entire way. A Latina in a red dress crawled along the ground, searching for something tiny, while a cop aimed his flashlight at the sidewalk and chatted with her boyfriend.

Last night reminded me of a walk I took a couple of years ago, soon after I moved to New York. I wrote this email to a friend on January 6, 2007:

It was 72 degrees in New York City this afternoon. I woke up late, watched Tech upset Duke, then went for a walk, south, towards Tompkins Square Park.

The park has two enclosed areas called dog runs, where dogs can shoot the breeze without wearing a leash. One is for big dogs, over 30 pounds, and the other is for little ones. In the little run, I watched one dog fuck another dog while one of the owners took pictures on his camera phone. The photographer was wearing shorts.

As I meandered through the park, the wind shifted and I smelled a pine tree 20 feet away. Two twentysomething girls walked by and one of them said "what I'd like to do is stick it up his little punk rock butt."

I went over to Avenue C, aka Avenida Loisaida, and continued south, warm. As I crossed 5th street, two boys, probably 10 years old, overtook me. As they passed, one of them said "he's a asshole."

"Yeah," the other agreed. "A real ASS hole."

Down in the Lower East Side, I ate a bagel and read your text message. Moments later I heard two kids yelling from their 4th story window at a third kid down on the street. They were trying to convince him to go down some stairs into a bodega's underground storage room. In the alley across the street, an ancient woman carefully hung laundry over the railing of her wrought iron balcony.

So I went home, made some penne a la vodka, and watched football all night on my 99 foot TV.

Simpleton Fails Yet Again To Think Before He Acts

My law firm sometimes serves free breakfast on Fridays, from 8 to 10:00 am. These meals generate more enthusiasm than you might expect. It's usually just orange juice and doughy bagels and single servings of Kellogg's cereal, but free shit is free shit, and by 10:00 the cafeteria is pretty well cleaned out.

One Friday I got to work late and got in the elevator around 9:55. On the way to my floor, the elevator stopped at the cafeteria and picked up a woman carrying a plate of food.

We smiled and said hello to each other. Then, gesturing towards her plate, I said: "Is there anything left down there?"

What I'd meant to ask was whether it was worth it to go downstairs and get some breakfast or if everything was already gone. But for SOME reason this poor woman thought I was calling her out for taking too much food. A quick glance at her face confirmed that she totally mortified.

She got off at the next floor, and I awkwardly stepped into the doorway of the elevator to hold it open. "I'm sorry," I stammered. She turned and looked at me impatiently. "I just meant...is there, you know, am I too late to go down and get some breakfast?" I tried laughing a little. "I didn't mean to suggest, you know, that you were umm. I mean..."

This wasn't helping. I stepped backwards into the elevator. "I really didn't mean it like that!" I yelped, desperately, as the doors drew shut.

I can not feel what to say

After I graduated college, some buddies and I took a road trip around the country, and I decided to keep a journal along the way. Another thing I did along the way was leave all my luggage in a parking lot in Albuquerque NM, where it was forthrightly stolen by local jerks. Strangely, though, my journal contains no mention of this incident. When I look at it these days, I'm struck by how absurd it is that I never included-- among all the incredibly boring shit-- an account of how I lost something so important.

I'm only mentioning this because I wondered today how I would feel in a few years if I looked back at this blog and realized I never wrote anything about the passing of David Foster Wallace.

So, reluctantly:

I feel sure Wallace has had a greater impact on my life than any other person I've never actually met. When I was in college, my brother sent me a used copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Wallace's first essay collection. I don't really know why he did it. I was never a reader growing up: I'm embarrassed to say I could count on one hand the number of books I'd ever read for pleasure. But I read it all, very slowly, the summer before my senior year, and I've been reading ever since. I'm not sure how I'd look at the world, what I'd talk about at cocktail parties, what my sense of humor would be like, even who many of my friends would be, if Jack never sent me that book.

(At the very least, I feel sure, certain blogs would not exist.)

Of course I read Wallace's other stuff too. There are boatloads of moving Wallace obituaries scattered all over the web, many of which mention-- with due praise-- his most well-known works: A Supposedly Fun Thing..., Infinite Jest, the Roger Federer piece for the New York Times, the McCain piece for Rolling Stone. Since I don't have anything else to add to the growing chorus of loving memories and tributes out there, I thought I'd put in a plug for some of Wallace's less famous, though no less brilliant, contributions.

• The story "Everything is Green" from Girl with Curious Hair. I think this is usually written off for what it probably was: a grad student coming to grips with Raymond Carver. But it's also one of the most evocative things I've ever read. Plus it's only 2 pages long and you can read it here for free.
  
• The intro to his pop math book, Everything and More. Intelligence, articulation, wit and humility in spades. In a non-fiction "booklet" about infinity, no less.
  
• "Octet", from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. What seems at first like a lame ploy ends up being a fascinating insight into the craft of fiction writing.
  
• The part near the end of his first novel, The Broom of the System, where one of the characters tells the main character about how he used to visit his grandmother in the nursing home every Sunday when he was little. Besides the punch-bowl scene near the end of Nabokov's Pnin, probably my favorite moment in all of literature.
  

Go read David Foster Wallace. He will make your life better.

garfield minus garfield

Again thanks to my brother, here's another modified comic strip that qualifies as the funniest thing I've seen in a long fucking time.


And as long as you're here, go ahead and take another gander at the Nietzsche Family Circus.

a commercial to hate

Here's a new commercial to hate, as well as a compelling reason to dust off the ol' boycott of things I'd never buy anyway:



This commercial represents a bold shift in the faux-masculine marketing strategy that initially prompted my boycott. Rather than use crude stereotypes and homophobia to sell traditionally male products (like beer and fast food), the Mike's guys are betting these same tools can be used to sell something no male I know has ever purchased. My hunch is that market research found no demographic interested in buying an overly sweet, fruit-flavored malt beverage, so their last-ditch effort to turn things around was simply to tell people that Mike's Hard Lemonade is manly, then hope no one notices that the underlying product has always been about the wussiest thing on earth.

The optimist in me hopes this commercial represents nothing more than the death knell sounding on a really shitty product, rather than the beginning of another depressing cycle of commercials trafficking in tired gender clichés.

The optimist in me is small.