badlands

We were gobbling up miles like ephedrine tablets. When the sun came up we found ourselves in the Badlands, foggy and green. To the north a flock of sheep stood motionless, like a cemetery right there in the middle of nothing.

We stopped for breakfast. I don't remember anything about the waiter except that he would look at me and then he would blink and when his eyes came open again they'd be looking at Eric. Words cannot describe how unsettling it was to watch him do this.

We ate up and drove on.

windsor, wisconsin

Hard floors and white sheets
Linen curtains and a ceiling fan
murmuring on low

She lies on her stomach with
sweat pooling slowly in the small of her back,
brow knotted,
while I fix something simple at the stove

more crap

so i've been meaning to rant for some time now about how unbelievably furious i get when people misuse the word "actually". as in: you play them some awesome song that no one could possibly dislike and they say "that's really good actually!"

but then some upstart blogger beat me to it. so anyway i'm going to shit out a couple of other word-use phenomena that've been making me increasingly angry before someone beats me to it:

(1) "Random"-- i don't feel like fully exploring how badly most people my age butcher the meaning of random. I'll just say this: those 25 Random Things i read About You on Facebook last January were NOT random. pretty much the exact opposite actually.

(2) "Literally"-- So I guess it's become vogue to point out/make fun when people misuse "literally". As in, "I literally shit a brick" or whatever. But like, isn't this just hyperbole? And really clever hyperbole at that?

I read something recently (Slate?) about how this use of "literally" bothers people, but no one ever cares when people use "really" in exactly the same way. As in, "the UVa baseball team really fucked the dog last night". No one is like, "really? they REALLY fucked the dog last night??" But it's the same shit.

It's the same shit.

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.