File Under: 'Oh No They Didn't'

People of Lesbos take gay group to court over term ‘Lesbian’

Highlights!

"Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," [a plaintiff] said.

"But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years," he said.

Highlights over!

The Welder's Body

One of the strangest pleasures I have ever had is being crushed by a limb. Not crushed, exactly, more like weighted.

A man who sleeps as soon as he closes his eyes, the way I imagine a child might, he has limbs that weigh more than I would have ever known looking at them. A leg is made of lead; an arm is a similar kind of metal.

I had not felt that pressure from his limbs in a long enough time that I smiled and did not push his heavy leg off mine as I listened to him breathe and waited in the night for sleep. I smile again now remembering this—he is kind, and his body is possibly heavy with this. Heavy with the mass of his sense of responsibility to the world, dropped in closed-eyed abandon on me.

Raining.

It's raining.
And in googling rain, I found these images. All are evocative of what it feels like to be here tonight, in New York City, late at night, as the rain clicks against your windows, thrilling you somehow. My experience, at lease.

The Death of Chinoiserie, by Which I Mean Something Kind of Different

I used to live half a block from here.

My kooky [for “kooky,” read: “batshit annoying”] roommate and I used to order from Bamboo House, oh, nightly? And they would arrive before we hung up the phone. I didn’t know it had produced its last water-chestnut-laden crapmash, so to you, Bamboo House, I say R.I.P. Couple that with the closure of my years-local favorite Chinese place in Brooklyn (whose sexy cash register ladies have been memorialized forever in a red LP by a friend), and, well, fuck me.

In other restaurant news (which I now see has been a neglected category on this blog), hoorahs to X, whose T-shirts are apparently the best thing going on with a new restaurant. (“If Hanson has to shut down the restaurant and turn it into a t-shirt shop, he'll still come out ahead.”) Get me an “I [splat] BBQ” T-shirt, stat.

Royal Wisdom

Foodstuffery

I’m through with days of jury duty, which were, as a friend put it from my descriptions, “High Brooklyn.” (One witness was a Teamster.) Ralph was our bailiff: our self-professed “guide through our journey at jury duty.” He has a baldpate but with a stubby, sickly ponytail; he’s gangly with pants pulled up to his armpits.

“You’ll want to bring cookies tomorrow for everyone,” Ralph told us. “The good kind—don’t buy the cheap stuff. Especially men, you should bring the cookies. Men nevah bring the cookies.”

“Don’t drink the water in this building,” he told us. “It’s full of rusty chunks. You’ll see me carrying around a pitcher during the trial and pouring water for the lawyers and the witnesses—I scoop out the chunks as best I can—but don’t you drink the water.”

[Imagine jurors suppressing horror and laughter and skinny Ralph glides through the courtroom, paper cup in hand.]

After we delivered our verdict, I asked Ralph in the jury room: “Ralph, what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

“About the case,” I said to him.

“I have no idear,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 36 years. Believe me, you stop paying attention after 10.”

~

Bonus nonsense:

My Gmail is sporting this ad at the top of the page this morning:

“Spam Fajitas - Serves 8, add extra salsa if desired”

Enjoy!

Answers Welcome

Is it wrong or somehow stunningly naive to think that a lot of people are dopily honest to a fault instead of manipulative?

This Weather Makes Me Want to Eat My Own Eyeballs for Pleasure

My bike has been making “clicka-clicka” sounds. Yesterday evening, just at twilight, I unlocked it from a gate outside a Brooklyn bar. Next to me, a tall, handsome lad was unlocking his.

“Do you know anything about gears? Mine are making a funny sound,” I tell him.

“I’m terrible with mechanical things,” he says. “But if you needed something highly technological done to your bike, I’m your guy.”

“Oh, really?” I say. “So if, like, I wanted to make my bike wireless, you could do that?”

“Totally,” he says. “I could totally make your bike wireless. Or, you know, fit it for a BlackBerry.”

Cute. Brooklyn tech dudes are everywhere.

I spent the rest of the evening snagging that one into conversation: “So, like, I could ride by someone, and they’d be, like, ‘Oh! Network! Oh, wait.’ ”

Jury Sniddly

Jury snoozey.
My eyes flutter closed as three interpreters step up to say whatever this guy, Mr. James Blain, just finished saying. On she goes in Chinese.

Jury dury.

The thing about that guy is that he’s got small round sunglasses on, a real hip voice, kinda making this whole thang kinda sexy.

Now the bleachy-blonde Russian interpreter, blowing out the mic with her “specibos.”

And now the meek and whispery Spanish interpreter for, as the guy next to me just said, “Spanish people with really good hearing.”

The people behind me are laughing, I’m laughing, the guy next to me is laughing, the lady on the other side of me is scowling. Borrowing my pen repeatedly, scowling.

“If you do not have a basic understanding of English, then stand up and get on this line, is what these women just said to you,” hip-hoppiter says.

Ten people stand up.

“NO! DO NOT GET UP if you UNDERSTOOD what I just said!”

~

Picked on a case for next week. Tweedledee and Tweedledum put me on their car accidento case. After I was repeatedly harassed by one of them, let’s say Tweedledum, with his Guidoey slicked hair and his way of lisping as in: “She shaid,” for “she said.” He impressed upon us his “aggressive style” and wanted to know how we plan to distinguish between two people who say different things about the same incident. You know, what clues might they give you…YOU, journalist, what do you look for?”

“Well,” I said, “you take cues off of body posture, like, for instance, when someone crosses their arms and cocks their head” as he crossed his arms and cocked his head.

Laughing at him seems to have scored points. Picker picked me. So it goes.

I Spoke Too Soon

He was only 23.

Terrarium*

Things explode today. In a way that is positive, if that is possible. World-wise, work-ward, good things are happening this morning.** This, however, makes me want to poke my eyes out as my phone rings and copy moves and headlines need writing and dogs bark in the back of my mind.

It never helps to wake up irritated.

The bagel man, however, made me smile.

I’m new to the world of coffee carts, but there is a man on my corner who, every morning I see him, smiles with a butter-yellow radiance and says, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting dear.” Now that I have pointed out to him that he says this even when he does not actually keep me waiting, I like him all the more. Now he smiles impishly and says it all the same, eyes alight while he wraps his hand around a square of wax paper.

And I have not yet touched my bagel.

Sesame with cream cheese. Tomato ready for slicing. But I’ve placed the tomato, the size of my palm, on my windowsill so I can see it next to the sky: icy pale blue near orange-red. Lovely.

—————

*I will return to this. Mark these typographic signs.

**As I just said to my boss: “Nobody’s dead yet today. It’s awesome. Good things are happening.”

Taking Stock, One Could Say, 'ACCOUNT'

After Business Writer sent me to her accountant, who is directly named after a kid’s pop culture CLOWN, I sent Mza to him. He does various entire magazine staffs' taxes, it seems.

When I saw him, I melted onto his desk for an hour as he told me how he wanted to be a journalist, how he wanted to be a gonzo journalist, but how Hunter S. Thompson beat him to it. He also told me how very wrong I’ve been doing my taxes all these years.

He would jot down numbers, occasionally look up, and say things like:

“What did you do there?”

“What did I do there?” I asked.

“Did I say that?” he asked.

[This is a real conversation.]

“Yes,” I said. “You just said, ‘What did you do there?’”

“Oh,” he said. “Sometimes I just say things and don’t know I said them. I’m just working out stuff in my psyche.”

[This is what the Gonzo Accountant said to me.]

Back to Mza. She went to see the CLOWN postnamed, and decided GA, obv, would make a great profile. She called him to discuss.

Ring. GA answers the phone.

“I’m not here!” he shouts. He hangs up.

Yes, he did this. Yes, this is my accountant. Yes. Yes, yes!

People are wonderful.

Not Boring

I awoke this morning to a phone call from Baghdad.

“Hello?”

“Hi, McBickle. This is _______, I’m a colleague of One Man in Baghdad’s.”

Pause. She says nothing.

He’s dead, I think. This is it. This is the phone call.

If he is not dead, he has been wounded. There has been another blast, this one too close, closer than the one last week 50 yards from his colleague’s car. Please, let him be okay. Let him not be dead.

My sleepy brain imagines it out, steels my breath; waits for words.

“I’m calling to ask for…”
…Something related to my work. She is calling about work.

“Holy crap,” I tell her. “I thought you were calling to tell me something had happened to OMiB. Christ.”

“No,” she laughs. “He’s right here. He says hi.”

“Christ,” I say. “Tell him hi back.”

Christing hell.

I take down information, tell her what I know, hang up the phone, close my eyes, breathe shallowly, marvel at the oddity of being awakened by a call from a war zone and thoughts of death. I think about how the faceless voice of a woman I’ve never met just raked me across the world from my slept-in bed in Brooklyn to a room I’ve never seen but envision as white-walled and sparsely furnished containing a man I care about deeply who drives me utterly batshit bananas because of incidents like this.

Yes, Pnin Is Really My Favorite Book

Sunday afternoon, Al Green playing.
Cold at the ends of my fingers, stomach full of huevos, receiving messages from a Finnish man I could swear I never gave my number to.

Did I mention it’s chilly? It’s gray, it’s cloudy, it’s a day best spent under multiple soft blankets.

Pre-gym, post-brunch, mid-deciphering people and texts and men.

So there’s this guy who I think is pretty interesting. He’s got brains, and he’s got eyez. And he’s slightly retarded, clearly, since he flings himself off the nearest cliff whenever possible. And this is a theme I keep discussing with Mza. Menz, and womenz, who can’t stay in a moment, who would rather crumble than possibly hurt, maybe later, maybe never.

Like Nabokov, I believe in rereading. Nothing upon re-inspection can be less interesting.

But have we all (and by “we all” I mean my dopus friends, not you, surely) broken down into a re-inspection without the first read? Are we pre-empting through pre-inspection? Post-empting for the final read?

Do we reach for the next experience without fully living the last one and then turn it around with our critical theory educations on the tips of our fingertips like a shiny glass globe that will at some point drop and shatter into a hundred shards of possibilities, possibilities we will sweep up and discard as easily as the way we fall asleep each night at the end of a full day?

I, for better or worse, suffer from insomnia.

Asshatbananary

I don’t actually want to explain this man again. This is his “store.” Apparently he is about to lose his “leases.”


Do you want a pair of ice skates?

This Is a Window in New York With Complex Objects

I too am befuddled.

Olympics Quote of the Day, Courtesy BD

“We got monks tomorrow, Desmond Tutu and Richard Gere here today, and a nude torch relay in the works,” Mr. Ballard, a San Francisco city spokesman, said. “And I have no hope of leaving here without tripping over hundreds of members of the foreign media. I’ll tell you one thing: it won’t be boring.”

A Vivere

This morning feels like Rome. Like the summer I lived there, waking early, as the haze on the city was just lifting—I would dress lightly, a tank top and a skirt and sandals, and I would hike the hill to the newsroom, soaking my back with sun-wet damp. I would arrive wanting to strip off my clothes but instead stand in front of a fan until the sweat turned chilly and then I would settle down between an overstuffed card cabinet and an ancient computer where the newswire ticked off at global-rotation speed.

I would get on my story—say, a fire in an upscale clothing store—and leaf through my dictionary until I had every word I may need in making calls to police and owners. Then I would call, feel pre-linguistic, stammer through a few questions and answers in Italian until my head felt jumpy, my chest full of rocks, hang up the phone, stare at the foreign words I had typed, wondering what the hell a “giachiatorianare” or whatever it was, was.

Today is New York, and it is not nearly that hot, but the haze is here, lifting minute-by-minute, and I am again in an office, this one my own, and I am not struggling in anything. Today is one of those days where words are mine to savor and arrange as I would flowers in a vase if I would only drop more money on those beautiful things. I would, right now, buy peonies.

T-Shirts I Shall Make Toute de Suite

*“Owls Are Assholes”

**“Beards Are Evil” ™

***“All Cats Have the Same Face” ™

****“Half of Tadzio’s Face From ‘Death in Venice’ and the Other Half Melting” ™

—————

*An actual Onion T-shirt Mza and I purchased for ourselves and wear daily, nightly, and in the bath.

**They are. They just are.

***Mza said she decided this once when she was stoned.

****Which reminded me of the time I was on…hallucinogens…and decided this about my then-boyfriend as we lay in bed staring at each other. For six hours.

I Am Expecting Him in My Vegas Shower, Yes

Anyone have a clue as to why these are the two ads Google chose to run with my last entry?

Las Vegas Repair Shower
Professional plumbing services Sewer, Pipes, Water Heater Repair

Desiring Lord appearing?
Expecting Lord’s return? A pleasant surprise is awaiting you

Sometimes the world is soothingly random. At other times, startlingly so.

Mappy

My colleague just told me about the “corrected” map of the world in his lilty Welsh accent: “The world as seen by someone other than a Renaissance cartographer.” I’d been showing him this blog of strange maps, which I found through this, a thing obsessed with round objects and pointy things in space and out of time.

Oh, and some other stuff.

Linky

A morning of congestion in which I will attempt to link various items.

Silently.

Because I can’t seem to get the words.

Speaking of words, have you seen the Red Hook sign in red lights? Probably not. I hadn’t either. But I did after biking over to that neighborhood, getting lost in the wasteland of cobblestone streets, construction sites, and the insanity of the blue-and-yellow Ikea building, eventually ending up in a quiet house made loud with a cigarette, a glass of cotes du rhone, a book, a Hall of Endless Learning, a naked lady on a wall, a naked outline on a rug, a tour around a wooden jungle gym and a series of attempts to go eat.

The sign sticks in the mind.

—————

In other news, two doth not make a trend. Two hundred and nineteen doth.

I'm Betting They're Technical Manuals

I don't like to crib from Gawker, but this photo they found of an abandoned Russian library is stunning. So here it is.

(Awaiting my handy Central Asians’ translation of the original site to see what it is.)

In other news, Zimbabwe is a wreck post-election. Rounding up the foreign journalists, as my colleague put it, is always a sign of a deeper crackdown. In a place where exiles are spending dollars to have South African bus drivers carry in a bag of flour for their relatives, how much worse can it get? I heard on NPR the other day inflation is at 100,000 percent.

Books in a heap; reporters in prison. Wrecks everywhere: Everybody blog.

Crazy Hazelnut*

Astragalus is a genus.

—————

*courtesy SL.

Like Finding Old Photos But Better

A couple of weeks ago, I told a man I had not seen in years that I am the woman now he’d wished I was back then. He agreed. I told this to another man I hadn’t seen in years last night. He said, “No, you’re the woman I hoped you’d be one day.”

I Don’t Know What Else I Expected, Really

Last night I dreamt I had sex with a man I know who is a design critic.

I told him as much when I awoke.

He said, “Yeah? Where?”

And I said, “Um, which way do you mean that?”

And he said, “Both ways. But, architecturally, where?”