What Did You Do Last Night?

When choosing from the many, many spooky and otherwise bizarre Halloween entertainment options in New York, I ended up at one last night that was rather unexpected. Yes, it was billed as "burlesque," but no, I was not expecting to see a transsexual woman (MTF)--with top, but not bottom, surgery--strip naked...wait. I'm going to slow my description down.
Before she stripped naked, she squatted, reached under her skirt and yanked a condom off her penis. She aimed it at the audience and squeeeezed out the "juice" and then WINGED it into the seats.
Next. She swigged some hooch, undressed, squatted again. Onto the whiskey bottle.
Now. She lifted the bottle of whiskey with her anus.
A sufficient amount of time passed for the audience to go utterly bananas.
And then. She took a big mouthful of drink and spewed it at the crowd.

Yeah.
Other than that, the show was actually above and beyond yo' mama's pasties and naughty nurse burlesque: a snaky, slithering, gold and red medusa-like vixen mesmerized me; a voluptuous and bleeding woman wielding a knife in body parts where I never want to see a knife touching honestly scared the crap out of me. Etc.

I'm immensely pleased to know, however, that the Lower East Side still rumbles with shows raunchy enough to rival Tijuana's, and is in-your-face enough that it doesn't care that dancing is still, technically, illegal in this city. That's right.

In remarkable contrast, I harshly condemn all the dressed-up pimps in store-bought cheaply made purple-pimp outfits. They are everywhere this year. And that's just pitiful.

Amuse Thyself

Go to google's homepage. Type in "failure" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky."

Enjoy.

Cars, Cops and Guys in Trucks

So Brooklyn. I feel like I just twirled myself around in your mouth and now you have spit me back out.

Lemme tell you what happened.

So the midget. For those of you who don’t know, she is my miserable tiny car. (Please buy it from me. Please? Fine.) Anyway. The front license plate disappeared off the midge a few weeks ago. I only discovered this weeks after the fact, apparently, when I came to my car, post-monsoons, only to move it because of crappy alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules. There it was—the orange sign of impending doom, the piece of nearly destroyed paper that makes me want to cry, die, lie, etc. A ticket. Fine. Fuckers.

I need to get to the DMV, which, as you know, if just not where you want to be when you are juggling school and various jobs and mental health or, just living.

So I get. Another. Fucking ticket.

Fine.

Today I fly out of the house to discuss the situation with a traffic cop I see from my fourth-floor window. She’s coming. I felt her coming. So I nab her before she nabs the midge. We talk. Or, she gives someone else a ticket, barely acknowledges me, and tells me to get to the precinct.

Fine.

Oh, but there’s no parking over there, so, “Take the bus,” she says to me.

Fuck no.

I get in the midge and park about a block from the precinct, which, pleasantly, has those lovely old-school green lamps on the outside, illuminating what I think is white marble, or at least limestone. Anyway. I seem to only have two dimes and a nickel, which, it seems, does not work in New York City parking meters these days. I’m asking a young woman in a bright green coat if she has a quarter when a guy shouts from a Hormel Ham truck—“You need a quawtah? I got a quawtah.”

We make the exchange. I plonk it in the meter, and I attempt to cross the street. That’s when the jerkoffs in a garbage truck nearly take my head off when, instead of slowing down, they insist on turning directly in front of me.

I make a graceful, dancerly “fuck you” gesture, with arm fully extended and finger erect.

“Dickheads!” I shout.

“Yeah! You tell ‘im!” shouts Hormel Ham truck guy.

That leaves me laughing and happy. I like guys in trucks when they are that encouraging.

I make my way between oversized “scary” Halloween figurines lining the steps and the hallway of the precinct, with skull masks for heads and purple cloth for “bodies,” and between “scary” humans also in the way, with mullets for hair and plaid shirts for “clothing,” and explain why I’m there to the beautiful African-American cop behind the high, dark-wood counter.

I love that about police stations. When the cops sit on high, making you feel short and small and in need more than you are. No, I do. I feel comforted when they deign to address my problem. Think what you will.

The pretty cop sends me to a side room in full view of the “gun locker,” which has a list of instructions pasted to it, like “Keep your hand OFF the trigger.” The actual lock on the gun locker is weaker looking than the Master lock I use for the gym. Anyway, I explain to the pretty lady that I only had one quarter to feed the meter, which gives me only half an hour for them to stop bickering about who is less busy and can fill out a report for me? In the meantime, I’m picturing local traffic cops nailing the midget because it a) doesn’t have a license plate and b) is at an expired meter.

She seems relatively concerned about my situation.

Then I do battle with a large woman with a stunningly hair-sprayed coif looped around the top of her head; it looks like brown, stiff ribbons, and it riffs off the bland brown lines of her trench coat. She was here first. Okay, you were. Sure. Maybe. Parking meter…parking meter…

I try to overhear what property she is reporting stolen. It happened at what I think is the only mall in Brooklyn. The young cop not in a uniform asks the woman if she knows the address of the mall. (Who knows the address of a mall?) Course she doesn’t.

All this happens while the woman making the report and I stand. Nobody offers either of us a seat, and there are none in the area. I’m noticing the clock on the wall is stuck at 8:45, even though it’s 11:38, and I’m examining the fake-looking gun on a nearby detective’s waist. It looks plastic. But it still makes me shudder.

Young cop takes my report.
Tells me to get myself to the DMV, cause no license plate? “That’s an easy one.”

Whatever. Can I face the DMV today after spending the morning at my local precinct?

Stay tuned. Or do something more interesting. At least, these are my choices.

[Technorati tags: Brooklyn, cars, cops]

A Dream, for the Dreamers' Sakes

The semester had started and I realized none of my textbooks I’d ordered had arrived. You know, a physics workbook, a sociology textbook, etc. (Classes, of course, I never actually took in college.) So I called the bookstore. Then I called the library. I called and called and numbers rang then dropped. I finally marched myself over to the library in a panic full of whoop-ass. You know, “Fuck—I need these books. Why don’t you people send them? Or answer your damn phones?”

I get to the library. I explain my situation, and a nice lady points me to another nice lady, who is passing by, and so happens to be 7 feet tall. And very beautiful. Medium-brown hair, cropped closely to her head. A light sea-blue comfy shirt. “Come with me,” she says.

We get in a little cart-like thing. And we take off.

The cart follows tracks through the depths of the library and shoots right out through some hidden door. We’re flying through fields like ones I remember in the south of England. Dipping hills and bare trees in the distance. Now there’s snow, and I realize she’s actually steering us because we’ve come off the tracks. I’m marveling at the length and beauty of the journey as we travel; “Wow, I wonder why the school doesn’t just sell the textbooks at the store like my old college did.”

Suddenly, we arrive.

The woman takes my hand and runs with me through New England-ish trees, thick and thin, branches everywhere, twirled into a near-jungle-like scene. She flings me into a house with a floor the color of her shirt, a light sea blue, and trim the color of cranberries. I explore, finding a small bed tucked up against one wall of the cottage (the journey is too far not to stay a while), and I see through the window both a raggedy wild turkey and what may have been a beaver? (I know. Fine.) There’s also a very dark golden retriever running around. A peaceful feeling washes over me, and I realize that maybe it’s not totally absurd to store textbooks at this place.

I Want Pre-Pressed People

“So for whatever reason, just knowing the president didn’t qualify her for the Supreme Court,” John Stewart is saying on “The Daily Show” just now, re Harriet Miers’ nomination, and subsequent debunking by, oh, everybody.

Just a little background noise for this blog entry. Yeah, just wondering, what makes someone qualified for anything special? For whatever great position you aspire them to click to? Can you ever know somebody’s “heart?” You think you do, but then they turn around and act as if they never knew yours. Or if they did, they no longer care. So be careful what you wish for, who you believe in, that’s the message I’m getting here, because someone out there is just ready, no, salivating to disappoint you. (Or, it seems, the message is stop trying to fit people to pre-formed molds. Nobody looks good cut like a Christmas cookie anyway, nu?)

Sure. The evening is a difficult one.

Events, unfortunately, only unfold once. But I take comfort in knowing that there’s never just one chance for anything—even the big things.

Even Harriet Miers gets to “retake” her Senate-requested questionnaire. Stewart says, “Apparently getting onto the Supreme Court is like taking high school Spanish.”

I’m hoping that nothing ever really gets more advanced than that. High school Spanish just takes some studying. Then again, I took Latin. And French. So maybe it’s extraordinarily hard and we’re all doomed…

(The Rock is now on “The Daily Show.” Holy crap, is it weird that I think The Rock is attractive? It is, in my head.)

Big Brother is Watching. No, Really This Time

“It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.”

Read the rest in the Washington Post, here.

Workplace Hazards Beyond Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

“I got showered in blood,” J said to me on the phone earlier tonight.

He had been sitting at a desk, working at a computer in his hospital. At 11:20 a.m. the blood bank made a delivery. A nearby nurse handled a bag of the stuff. The bag, it seems, was faulty.

Suddenly, J hears, “Oh my god oh, my god,” and turned just in time to see a red shower of liquid burst forth like “water from a hose” over his white hospital coat, his pants and his shoes.

What, you ask, did the man do in such a horrifying situation?

He rolled. His. Eyes.

And then he said, “Please tell me that blood was clean.”

People Are Bananas

Hahahaha. Just got this email from a Friend Who Shall Remain Anonymous, about an exchange he had with a coworker:

Freak: "You don't know how lucky you are that you don't have to go to a gynecologist. Count your blessings."

Friend: "I will add that to my list of blessings to count."

Freak: "Yeah, well you should. And you have a long list of blessings."

“I have a compass on my button.”

Benito the Mouselini has a cousin. A big one. I purchased steel wool to close up the scary hole behind the bathtub. I can imagine Benito Grande wiggling his way up the walls to reach his soft little nose out his usual hole, only to have it scratched off like lamb through a meat grinder. [Heh. That one’s for you, V.]

But this is from the girl who caught her last mouse and released it in Prospect Park. So my vision of BG’s nose make me very, very anxious. Anyway.

The big guy came out to look around this morning as I was sitting in my living room, gulping down my first coffee of the day. He wiggled his way out the bathroom and ran straight to the front door, only to waggle his tail and turn the hell back around and go back down his hole. Can you hear the echo of my yelling: “Go, BG! Out the door! There’s a wide world out there!”

Yeah. So my TV is on because I’ve come across a guy who I think is my cousin hosting a show. No, like, really my cousin. He spells his last name differently, but he bears a striking resemblance to my father’s side, although I think he’s on my mother’s side, and I always thought he was a well-known chef, but this is a travel show, or maybe he’s a doctor, but I’m curious nonetheless. I should probably just put in a call to one of the parentals, but who needs that on a Monday.

(“If anybody tells me to get lost, I don’t have to worry cause I have a compass on my button,” my cousin is saying.)

I also do not need the chip in a cavity I have discovered this morning. So THAT’S what I tasted all crunchy last night. Ew. Fuck.

Oh, the midget got a ticket. Because my front license plate has disappeared. Sometime last week. Not that I would know, cause I never drive it. Anyone want a Saturn?

Fuck.

Crack Rats Thrive in New York, Too

I know you don’t give to the dude with the duffel bag of “sandwiches” for the hungry people on the trains. You know you don’t. Crack sandwiches are probably what they are, anyway…

One in four children in New York City needs food assistance to avoid going hungry.

Then there are the countless elderly and single mothers who need food help. This week is hunger-awareness week in the city, and I want to encourage anyone who feels like they can part with $25 to give it to these people: Food Bank for New York City, and they’ll get food to the people who need it.

~

In other news, I work lately near a place called “F. Rathaus & Sons.”
I do not know what they do.
But what a name.
You can just stick with the homonym, “rat house,” or, you can go with the possibly more exciting, “frat house.”

The Monsoon Has Left the Building

I realized again last night how much I hate England.

My bed, it seems, was beginning to feel like a dog’s wet nose. 'Tis the rain. And England, unfortunately, often feels like a dog’s wet nose.

New York is bright and dry today. This world is one iota more comfortable.

~

Vivienne Westwood seemed to have psychically killed a German dog. See Miss Adventure’s adventures [La Dotta, etc.], and no fears—she left the maggots out of her story this time.

Warning: A Dream, a Morbidish One

A woman, an elderly one, set herself on fire in my dreams. She sat down in front of some kind of courthouse--it was white and neoclassical, with the steps and the columns--and lit herself aflame. We who came upon the scene fell to our knees and screamed and cried, and eventually I could not bring my eyes to look.

She didn’t die though. When the flames petered out on her back, someone near me said, “Looks like it didn’t take this time.”

I wonder now if she was protesting something, the war, or some other politics, or if she was just wanting to die in a public way.

I also, in the dream, wondered if she could describe to me the feeling of having your body burned from the outside in, but I knew that kind of question had to wait.

Crack Squirrels!

Crack-addicted squirrels.

That’s what I’m telling you.

For extra-added amusement, see Gawker’s bizarro image of whatever that is.

Forgive Me, Bl-ggers

In trying to determine when Yom Kippur is this year (this week), I ended up at a site called “jewfaq.” Heh.

(The best thing about this site is that it hyperlinks “G-d.”

G-d is just a click away…)

My basic understanding of the holiday has always been like this description on the site: “The name "Yom Kippur" means "Day of Atonement," and that pretty much explains what the holiday is. It is a day set aside to "afflict the soul," to atone for the sins of the past year.”

Yet it seems my plan of atonement towards anyone other than “G-d” this year gets snagged by jewfaq’s further explanation:

“Yom Kippur atones only for sins between man and G-d, not for sins against another person. To atone for sins against another person, you must first seek reconciliation with that person, righting the wrongs you committed against them if possible. That must all be done before Yom Kippur.”

Well, it turns out the holiday is at sundown on Wednesday, so it is, technically, still before Yom Kippur.

Allora.

I hearby seek reconciliation with anyone I have committed wrongs against, which surely includes you, my blogables. I have knowingly written crap and asked you to set your eyes on it. I have knowingly spewed from my foggy brain words that are not worthy of eyes. I have used too many adverbs, too many code words, and too much cynicism, by some accounts. Can you forgive me?

I seek atonement. Believe me, I could use it.

The Sun in Its Jewel Case (1937)

Yves Tanguy
The Sun in Its Jewel Case (Le Soleil dans son écrin), 1937
Oil on canvas, 115.4 x 88.1 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection

A deeply interesting painting I had the pleasure of spending many hours staring at. I especially remember the day a tourist swiped the surface with her wet umbrella, causing a drip of its gray paint to run...

Beanix

To put that last post in perspective, consider it in contrast to the other image that is stuck in my head lately: A beagle, perched like royalty, at the top of a red plastic slide. I saw this posturing on my way from the subway past a doggie-gym/store near Houston St. I paused to goggle at the scrunched up bunches of pugs in the windows, but soon realized that the most fascinating view in the doggie/gym store was actually this beagle. She was so poised, so much a phoenix above the plastic gymboree and sleeping dogs. What ashes she rose from, I’m really not sure. But I liked that she was in no rush to get down from her peak, and certainly had little interest in going down the human-constructed slide. No, this beagle just wanted to sit. Not think. Not slide. Just be.

Not so much like a phoenix, no.
But I'm done with analogies for the evening. I leave you with images.

Rising From the Ashes

fenice

Thinking about the ashes of La Fenice, Venice's burned operahouse: the Phoenix.

phoenix:
1. bird in Egyptian mythology that lived in the desert for 500 years and then consumed itself by fire, later to rise renewed from its ashes.
2. A person or thing of unsurpassed excellence or beauty; a paragon.

Thinking that perhaps renewal requires transformation, as Michael Lewis suggests
in his NYT mag article this week about going home to New Orleans. It's true that nothing can remain static--we are organic, we do thrive and decay, at the very least. Been reading John Berendt's new book about the fire that destroyed La Fenice, which was legend when I arrived in that city in 1999. It's basically ridiculous--the name and the means of destruction--but sometimes ridiculousity leads to blam-bang lessons over the head that don't get through any other way.

One year in Venice and five years since, I am hoping that this latest incarnation will lead to the never-realized project I've had in my head related to that city. Or to any other project in my head not-yet realized. Or to sprouting the wings of a bird, even one that does not fly.

Maybe just the word "phoenix" is worth meditating on. Or "fenice."

Ph, ph, ph, f, fffffffft.

The Cobble Hobble: It's a New Dance Step

I’m really liking the word “cobble” today. It conjures up little old men and shoes, bricks, putting things together, and rhymes with “hobble.”

Cobbling together jobs, friends, brain cells. It’s a daily process of amalgamation these days. I remember wistfully when none of that seemed so necessarily step-by-step. This is probably why I haven’t been blogging. Too much cobbling. One can’t always do both.

Aha! “All Things Considered” is running a piece on the lack of mental health workers for Iraqis, which vaguely ties into my thesis. A woman sobs in a barren hospital room. There are 20 psychiatrists in Baghdad, which has 6 million inhabitants. Sometimes it just seems like a matter of distribution of resources—who has, who doesn’t. Some people need to cobble more than others by necessity. Mental health just screws with that concept anyway…trying to piece together a life when one struggles with one’s sanity is just terrible. And so common.

Onward.

New York in the Night, A Little Bit

It’s not even 1 a.m. and I have been attempting to sleep. But I can’t sleep. That is because my neighbor, the one who comes and goes at all times of day at night, for, at most, 20 minutes at a time (tell me what he does for a living—any ideas besides a drug dealer? Anyone?), has begun to play video games, as of tonight. And not just any video games, apparently, but the kind that have eerie sounds and lapse into silences broken by rat-a-splat gunfire. I considered banging on the wall, but realized that I’ve lived here for five years now and never, ever banged on the wall. It seems a bad precedent to set now.

So I thought I’d get up and write to you.

I thought I’d tell you about the air, which is cold, but just damp enough to make me feel sweaty.

And I thought I’d tell you that I saw a skinned lamb, stiff and legs-up in a red, plastic shopping cart being wheeled across a sidewalk on Atlantic Avenue the other night. It might as well have been Lebanon. In fact, I believe that was my out-loud response: “Are we in LEBANON?”

[And please, this is not morbid. Just putrid.]

Until Then, Then

A new rule for myself, first stated here, now, is never get up to write something and then begin reading articles online. It is inevitable that I will lose the gossamer threads of thought that connected ideas into words to become writing.

Crap.

It had something to do with the first spotting of the giant squid (even a small one, at 26 feet long), the ability to envision a blob of whale blubber as a sea monster, the gall of writing with no forethought and the inevitability of dying from a disease like Alzheimer’s or heart disease versus being hit by a car or falling through a manhole.

Forty percent of us will die from Alzheimer’s, says an op-ed piece in the Times today. That disease takes eight to 12 years of decline. So almost half of us are hurtling toward jelly brains and blabbery mouths. See? Tie in the whale blubber and the adventures of imagining giant squid and we’re almost there—at the point of conception my head was at a few minutes back, before I plopped down in front of the TV and started reading articles online. In the background, some whoever comedian on television is saying a doctor once told him this:

“You’re not dying from this disease, you’re living with this disease.

Until you die from this disease.”

~

[P.S. J has observantly pointed out that Ray Nagin's name sounds just like "rain again." Curious.]

Trying Not to React

Quiet hibernation is no more than small attempts at house cleaning. It’s amazing the amount of mold that likes to grow in a bathroom with no windows. “No windows” is not exactly a correct assessment of my bathroom: there is a window, but it leads to an airshaft and was nailed shut a couple years ago after a party at which some friends tried to open it for air. [See previous entries for entreaties on such friends, and such “parties.”]

Maintaining a large New York apartment is a unique experience (and “large” is a relative term for those in other cities). The black layer of dirt(?) that coats furniture insistently. The strange crevices between wood moldings and linoleum overlays. The holes behind the tub-on-feet that create a feeling of illness and despair somewhere deep in the stomach….

~

The shift between summer and autumn has brought cleaner air and much talk of death, oddly. Friends promising not to die, others admitting they are slowly dying. Still others looking for affirmation of their own lives in ways that will kill them. Why does this happen? Why does a shift in season seem to route out such existentialism? Is this a uniquely citified preoccupation?

In a recent meeting with fellow thesis students, I had to listen to an exegesis on the meaninglessness of psychological treatment. The blathering student came from a Central Asian country. “Why don’t people just talk to their friends?” she wondered.

I steeled myself and did not smack her.