Can It Be True? I’m Getting Rid of My DVDs.

Last night I went out into our garage and brought in three large boxes.  In those boxes were hundreds–maybe close to six hundred–DVDs and Blu-ray discs.  I sat down with the contents of these boxes and divided them into two piles–“sell” and “keep”.  About two-thirds ended up in the “sell” pile.  Now, I didn’t do this because we are destitute and hard-up for cash.  I had just finally come to the realization that carting around that much physical baggage, representing movies that would be practically impossible for me to watch, was no longer a viable act.  (of note, these were simply the “garage” DVDs, the ones we couldn’t fit in the house.  I currently have no plans to get rid of the “house DVDs”).

I bring this up mainly because some of you may know I have continued to be a staunch advocate of physical media well into the digital age (I am a heavy user of digital media but have not abandoned the physical product like many have) and it feels significant to purge myself of all these DVDs.  The fact is, even without options like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and cable television, I would still be hard pressed to find the time to watch even a fraction of these movies.  Many of them are movies I truly love dearly, but when one has hundreds and hundreds of movies they love dearly, well…reality must be faced at some point.  Also, from a practical standpoint, these movies are tucked away in huge boxes in a garage.  The few times I’ve had a desire to watch one of them, the desire left after considering it for about ten seconds.  They’re just too difficult to get to.

Like many people, as the DVD age dawned, I delighted at the prospect of building a “film library”, and spent the next decade feverishly spending all my extra cash to own every movie I liked more than just a little bit.  Collecting DVDs became almost its own, separate pastime, mildly divorced from the pure love of film.  As I was single and childless most of this time, the extra room in my apartments made a perfect storage space for expanding Wal-Mart bookshelves full of DVDs, which I organized in many different ways over the years–sometimes alphabetically, sometimes by genre, with special sections for my favorite filmmakers and TV shows on DVD.  I kept going and going well beyond what was practical–I long ago lost the ability to even watch a tiny fraction of what I owned, often not even knowing for sure if I did own a certain film.

I became a completist of the highest order.  I loved the first three Todd Solondz films (I don’t love them anymore) and when I disliked his fourth and fifth films, I bought the DVDs anyway, to round out the Solondz section on my shelf (I can’t wait to not own “Palindromes” anymore!).  I bought every Stanley Kubrick film (these went in the “keep” pile) then had to buy “Eyes Wide Shut” again after they put out an unrated version.  At some point I began buying every movie made about a comic book superhero, because when I was REALLY into comic books as a young kid, I would have killed to see these movies–nevermind that I only liked about a quarter of them.  My superhero DVD collection grew to over 50, despite my actual ambivalence to the genre, out of some misguided favor to my younger self.  I mean, I own “Barb Wire” and BOTH “Judge Dredd” films.  But not for much longer.

It is, in plenty of ways, sad to see them go.  It was an impressive collection (people often say the DVDs in our living room are a lot of DVDs, which always makes me smile, as they’re about ten percent of the collection) and represented not just tons of money, but plenty of time and effort.  I’m also sad to, in some small way, be throwing in the towel on DVDs.  But I am definitely not abandoning them completely–with the “keep” pile from last night and the discs that were already inside the house, I’m sure we still have close to 300 movies in a physical format–and it’s hard to imagine saying goodbye to those.  And although purchasing new discs will be rare, I have no plans to stop for good.  My addiction to the Criterion Collection continues, and after seeing their slate for 2016, I anticipate buying three or four new ones this year.  I bought “Room” on Bu-Ray last month and have “The Revenant” pre-ordered.  As I get passionate about new movies, some will be added to the collection, but much slower than before, of course.

As far as other media: I stream a lot of music (but I use Tidal, which pays artists more than other streaming services.  I also use Pandora, but mostly to stream classical and jazz by people who are dead) but I still buy CDs, albeit at about 10% of the rate I did even three years ago.  I’ll probably buy nine or ten CDs in 2016.  I buy lots of vinyl–a combination of old music that’s freshly pressed (think brand-new factory sealed Beatles records), brand new music (the new Emily Wells album) and used vinyl out of dusty bins (just got The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Jazz Impressions of New York” at the local used record joint).

I read all my books, magazines, and newspapers on paper, although the Kindle ads in the New York Times Book Review make me a little itchy for one.

We currently have active subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, as well as Comcast cable…it’s an embarrassment of riches, to be sure, especially since our available TV-watching time is pretty low.  And most nights I just watch re-runs of “Shark Tank” on CNBC, anyway.  Can’t get enough Mark Cuban, I guess.

 

Jamboree

1.  Here are some questions I would like answers to:  obviously there is a bone in your nose, because it is able to break.  But skulls never have a nose bone, just a hole where the nose was.  What’s going on with that?  What is an electric acoustic guitar?  I mean I get the basic concept, but still.  When you cast a shadow, it is because your body is blocking light rays, but your shadow isn’t pitch dark; some light is still landing there; what mechanism is at play there?  Why can’t beggars be choosers?  Why do I love Furbys so much?  What the heck is fire?

2.  Ever since I became a vegetarian, I’ve noticed (at least on social media) a fair amount of mildly confusing hostility toward us.  Now I know that, like any subculture of people, there is a vocal minority that will actually make unprompted attempts to make meat-eaters feel bad, recruit people to the cause, etc (which honestly I say more power to them, it’s an important issue), but most of us just quietly eat our vegetables and say very little about it; what we do say is because this is an important part of our lives that we are passionate about; how odd to think we should be passionate about how we eat but remain silent about it.

So why do some people get so upset at vegetarians when most of us are largely leaving you alone?  And when most of us bite our tongues at the myriad, countless, terribly unimaginative pro-bacon posts that float around?  It is inconceivable that someone would be made to feel bad for voicing a pro-meat agenda, but those of us who are passionate about the lives of animals are made to feel like voicing our opinion would be indelicate?  The answer seems obvious.

Most people know, at their core, that eating meat is wrong.  Even if their conscious mind firmly believes there is nothing wrong with eating the carcasses of butchered creatures, deep down, at core, they know.  In our modern world, with all the options available to us, the wholesale slaughter and consumption of literally countless beings is radically unnecessary and a moral evil, and this fact resides in most of you.  So while I initially recoil every time one of my friends posts a completely unprompted anti-vegetarian meme, I recover quickly, secure in the knowledge they’ve done so because they wish, deep within themselves, they had the courage to act on what they know to be true.

3.  Let’s talk about sports for a minute; but more to the point, let’s talk about language and sports.  Even more specifically, let’s talk about “clinch”.

Now, in English at large there are quite a few ways to define exactly when one has “clinched” something.  It can mean to settle or finalize, but also to assure oneself of future reward.  In American sports, for many many years, it has meant strictly the latter; that an individual or a team had passed a mathematical hurdle in order to be assured of a reward–typically a playoff berth, but more rarely something like a batting title or a similar individual achievement.

In decades past, the word would be used something like this by a sports announcer:

“And with one more strike, the Padres will win their third game of the best-of-five series, thereby clinching their appearance in next week’s League Championship Series!”.  As in, with this win, they now are assured of moving forward.  They have WON this series, and have CLINCHED an appearance in the next round of the playoffs.

Then, a few years ago, I was watching one of the championships of the major American sports–I don’t remember which–when moments after the winning team won and had just begun their celebration, the announcer said something like this: “And with that, the winning team has clinched the championship!”

I knew it sounded wrong but it took me a few seconds to suss out why.  Really, they clinched it?  To my understanding, they won it.  Clinching implies it has secured further games.  There is nothing after the championship.  The season is over.  There is no longer anything to clinch.  They won the championship.  Nobody ever clinches a championship.  When did they clinch it, in the half a second from when the buzzer started to sound until it was done sounding?  Let’s end this madness, please!

4.

I know, intellectually, that humankind did not have anywhere close to the technology to put a person on the moon until right up until the moment we did so.  In fact, it was almost a miracle we were able to pull it off when we did it.  But it has always struck me as odd–and this is a really challenging thought to put into words so bear with me–that over the long and storied history of humanity, that somebody didn’t get there almost by accident at some point.

OK, let me pull it back a little bit.  Thinking about early Mount Everest climbing, the accepted knowledge is that Sir Edmund Hilary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, were the first human beings to summit the mountain.  And for all we know, they were.  It’s certainly not easy to get up there, and there’s no discernible survivalist reason to do so.  But human history is long, and there have been billions and billions of people walking over the surface of this planet well before we started keeping track of what we all were doing.  It seems to me the likelihood that some human being, at some point in deep history, for reasons completely unknowable to us, once trod upon that summit before Sir Edmund Hilary’s DNA was a glint in an amoeba’s eye.

Now it is harder to make a case for people having gone to the moon in ancient history.  I’m not some conspiracy theorist or quack, I’m just playing the numbers game (but without actual numbers).  While I will go out on a limb and say it is LIKELY a human summited Everest somewhere in the deep past, I will only say that it seems totally feasible that someone got to the moon at some point.

How?  I have no idea.  Some rudimentary capsule on top of a vast amount of explosives?  I really don’t have a working theory.  It does seem to me that if some human in history worked out a way to get to the moon, they probably didn’t arrive alive or live very long once they got there.

Just imagine, though.  Imagine we go back to the moon someday with more time and means to explore it.  Imagine an astronaut is walking down an embankment in a crater.  She sees a small cave tucked into an alcove.  As she approaches to explore, she sees footprints!  Closer still, sitting in dirt on the windless surface, a tattered copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”.  She hesitates before entering the cave.  What a story this would make!

And for you smarty-pants out there, I know lunar soil is called regolith, but that would have really ruined the pacing there.

The Scent of Bitter Almonds, and etc, etc.

1.  Nothing says “I’m a boring person” quite like posting pictures of your alcoholic beverage to Facebook.  Seriously.  You went out to a bar or club and you think the interesting thing that is supposed to happen is the drink itself?  Uninteresting, repetitive pictures of the person you’re with, or even another selfie, are more interesting than a beverage in a glass.  We’ve got the whole internet, and you want us to look at a beverage.

2.  I’ve brought this up before, but I just have to keep digging at this one.  Why are there two kinds of screws and screw drivers, ie flat head and Philips head?  I’m not over here like, meh, there should only be one kind! I am confident there are very good reasons for there being multiple kinds of screws, but I just for the life of me can’t figure out what those reasons are.  Anyone with any insight, please comment!

3.  War is terrible, but man, for a nation so young, we’ve had two very interesting wars!  I’ll be damned if the Revolution and the Civil War aren’t two of the most amazing stories ever told.

4.  With Philip Seymour Hoffman dead, the greatest actor of this generation (ie the generation currently the correct age to play the most interesting parts in the kind of films that get made the majority of the time) is James Franco.  Discuss.

5.  I get pretty tired of taking the trash out.  I mean, we really just have to keep doing this?

6.  Look at this picture of my dad and sister on vacation in Brigantine, NJ in 1980.  What’s not to love about this picture?  I want to sit on a porch listening to that radio, wearing those socks, next to a child dressed like that:

7.  I recently asked a few friends of mine which baseball team they would like, if they had only to consider the teams uniforms/ colors and logo.  Where you grew up and your previous loyalty should be not considered.  I got a few interesting answers—Billhanna said the Astros, which was a damned good answer.  My answer?  The Marlins or Blue Jays.

8.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez died this week.  He is one of my (and many others’) favorite novelists.  His most famous book is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, which I love, but my favorite book of his is “Love in the Time of Cholera”, a book about a man who is obsessed/in love with one woman for his whole life, and dedicates his whole life to being with her.  It sounds creepy, and at times, it is, but what I love so much about it is that it is the only work of art in any medium that I have ever encountered that treats the obsessive side of love with the tender and insightful kind of care that most people reserve for “romantic” love.  It is a game-changer of a book.  Here is the first sentence from that book: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”

9.  I understand you didn’t ask for my postcard or letter in the mail, and I understand, in this day and age, you’re not really sure how to respond to such antiquities.  I really don’t care too much.  Ideally you’d send a letter back, but I’m not expecting that.  You can ignore it.  That’s fine, you didn’t ask for it.  You can text me a response, which is the main thing people do, and that’s fine, if a bit gaudy.  But please, please…don’t post a picture of it on Facebook.

10.  What about this?

 

37 of the Worst Oatmeal Beers

What is up with this trend of inane lists on the internet that have a purposefully odd and senseless amount of items in them?  38 Things White People Don’t Know or 16 Ways I Blew My Marriage or The 42 Most Haunted Places in Ireland.  When they first started popping up, I just assumed the list makers had gotten lazy and didn’t feel like making a list that made it to an even number, but it soon became obvious that the trend was too prevalent and too consistent to be an accident or a product of laziness.  Something about this odd-number list is a draw to readers–or at least a proven click generator–and I just can’t figure out why.  Why would an oddly numbered list prove to be more attractive to a reader?  Is it just a curiosity thing?  Maybe the number itself jumps off the screen at you more, because our brains are trained to scan past numbers we see all the time, like 10, 20, etc?  No matter the cause, it should surprise nobody that this annoys the shit out of me.  I like my lists nice and tidy with rounded numbers, you know, like you were kind of trying.  And don’t get me started on the silly, needless lists that this tactic has caused to pop up on my news feed.  Sigh.  I really do kinda hate the internet.  But it’s definitely a love-hate kinda hate.

I still have yet to be able to find any information about those piers in my video on my previous blog.  Of course, I’m just Googling.  Does a more in-depth way of researching things still exist?  Does going to a library and…I don’t know, doing something there increase my likelihood of figuring something like this out?  I mean, not everything is on the internet, believe it or not, but I seem to have lost the ability or the know-how to do any research aside from internet searches.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m really good at internet searches, but still…

Sometimes in life you say something, maybe just a few words, a sentence, and you regret saying it.  Even twenty years later, you regret it, and maybe you regret it for the rest of your life.  Because saying something is an action, and maybe something you said hurt somebody, and somewhere deep inside us we know that some things do last forever.  And you wish you hadn’t hurt that person.  You wish you hadn’t said or done the thing.  People love to talk about not having regret, but you do.  You have regret because you’re a human being and having regrets is as much an ingrained part of the human experience as pooping, or stretching in the morning, or hating the Pittsburgh Penguins.  You can get into some stupid language game like well to me regret means blah blah blah, but I don’t, I just use experiences to blah blah blah.  Whatever.  Stop watching daytime TV.  Life aint tidy.  Own your regret.

I’m sure glad I stopped drinking before this whole “craft beer” thing started happening.  I certainly would not like these sludgy beasts.  Oatmeal beer and wheaty stuff and dark beers with bits of rice floating in them, or whatever.  Of course, I am sure that many people are constantly forced to pretend to like these things by a hipsterish peer pressure.  I can tell just by looking at these bottles that these “micro-brews” (once you’re bringing science into beer, you’ve probably lost the plot) are like beer syrup.  They probably make Guinness look like Coors Light.  No thanks.  Thank you, sobriety!

Here is me, looking at The Signer:

 

The Light From Everywhere

A long time ago, what must be over 10 years ago now, I was a man just recovering from alcoholism—a long bout of sickness— and the first few weeks and months were filled with a special kind of freedom.  But aside from all the weighty big topics that came up in such a time, I also was just able to start discovering the internet. It had been there during my drinking but it wasn’t something I had much interest in or capacity to utilize. My very first blog was on some sort of AOL blogging community.  I loved everything about it. I loved that I could write was on my mind, and write whatever I wanted to say, however I wanted to say it, and some people would actually read it! This is back before everyone was doing it (and way before everybody stopped doing it!) But of course, basically still nobody was reading. Anyway, one of the first entries I ever wrote was called “The light from everywhere, the light from nowhere”. It had just snowed the first snow of the year, which must have been 2004. I was in love with a woman at that point in time who was a pain in the ass, but I was in love with her anyway. That night, as the snow was coming down, I drove her home to where she lived on the side of a mountain, and in the cold snowy wind, we shared a kiss on her doorstep. I wrote a lovely blog entry about it on that AOL website, which has long since been erased by the great internet gods. I wish I could remember most of it, or  that I had saved it somewhere, because I know even now it was a doozy.  I talked about that ambient light which those of us who live in wintry states are very familiar with, which seems to slowly take over the nighttime in the first few hours after a snowfall, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once.  And then I made an analogy between this light, which I had just seen that night for the first time in my sobriety, and the slow sneaky way that love overtakes a person. It was a really great piece of writing. Well, I am a 10 years older old fart now, and a little more cynical. Still happy as a clam, but I kind of hate snow, and I don’t plan on falling in love anytime soon. I often think of that blog entry when I see the light from everywhere. Tonight, as a big nor’easter blew into Philadelphia, I had already done all the outside things I needed to do for the day, and was just planning on settling in for the night, putting on my sweatpants and maybe putting in my DVD of “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, and eating some rice and drinking some diet soda. But as I got up to go to the bathroom and walked past the front door, I saw the light from everywhere and the light from nowhere, and I was drawn outside. I can’t re-create for you the magic of that first blog entry 10 years ago, but I did take some video, and I was feeling pretty good about the world:

Philly Journal, 12/5/13

I present to you, my video tour of my house and surrounding neighborhood!  As well as me wearing every Philly-sports-themed Santa hat I own (someone find me a 76ers one).  Yes, that is toothpaste in the corner of my mouth in the intro.  I’m not the sort of man to re-shoot it just because of that, though.

 

 

 

Young Blood

1. Let’s talk a little bit about Facebook, and/ or any other online social media you’d like to apply this to: my Facebook page is not a magical realm of free speech and considered debate.  It (as well as, obviously, my blog.  Hey, you want a blog too, you can get one!) is a place where I put the stuff that I already think.  Sometimes, that stuff is “I like Triscuits”, but other times it might be “We need stricter gun control in this country, because guns and people kill people.”  Those are my opinions, and I didn’t get them from numbskulls like you, I got them from the world, and my observations of it.  Now, you are of course more than free to have your own opinions, and even ones that are different than mine, but these people that seem to think that everything needs debated all the time, and that you need to listen to all sides of a debate! are mistaken for a few reasons.  Yes, debate is healthy and necessary, but I don’t spend all my time online, nor do my opinions get formed or forged there.  By the time I’ve “statused” an opinion, I’ve read about, watched something about it, talked to a human being in person about it, observed something about it, etc.  I communicate things via social networks that I already think.  Now, you may ask, what’s wrong with even more debate?  And my answer to you is, nothing is wrong with more debate, but not Facebook debate.  Facebook debate sucks.  Nobody is ever swayed by anything said online, it makes me hate you, it reveals your lack of grasp of the English language, it wastes my time, and makes people who like each other say things they regret.  Just don’t bother.  And then, the topper, is when since it is after all MY Facebook page, I delete the contrary comments so as to avoid the debate, the person notices I’ve deleted the comments and wants to get all high-and-mighty as though I am oppressing their free speech or quashing some important, vital public discourse.  Listen Chachi, this aint Meet the Press, you aren’t the Op-Ed page, and Facebook isn’t housed in the National Archive. Step off my status, Anthony Scalia, I already know what the fuck I think.

2.  I just saw “Gravity” in the movie theater.  This was a fantastic experience.  Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about to become my “favorite” movie, but it is very unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in a movie theater.  It is an experience.  I don’t want to oversell it here, but listen, this thing has GOT to be seen on a big screen, in 3D, if you want to grasp what the whole point of the endeavor is.  Do it.  Go.  Soon.

3.  As you may know, for many years, I was a very vocal opponent of professional sports.  I thought they are a nuisance distraction from what is generally important in the world.  I thought the energy and attention that followers of sports devote to them was a drain on other places they could be placing that attention, such as government and world affairs, the fine arts, the world of science, and the great story of human history.  Guess what?  I still absolutely think that is true.  There isn’t really any getting around it: professional sports are, by-and-large, a great waste of time by otherwise fantastic cultures.  It’s just that at some point a few years ago, I made a conscious decision to drink the Kool-Aid.  I now follow sports like a 70s housewife followed soap operas; all-too aware of their impotence in the world, but completely invested regardless.  And it is through that lens and with those caveats that I now say this: why the fuck do some of you people make a conscious decision to have “your” team be a team that is nowhere near you?  Like someone from Pennsylvania, with no connection to Colorado, being a Denver Broncos fan (hey! We have two pretty neat football teams in our very own state!) or someone from California being a Green Bay Packers fan (again…THREE serviceable teams in that particular state).  Now, I hear what you’re out there saying: But Seth, didn’t you just say that sports were essentially meaningless?  Didn’t you compare them to soap operas?  If so, isn’t my choice to follow the Vancouver Canucks just like preferring “General Hospital” over “One Life to Live”?  Well, that’s a pretty good point, but you’re wrong.  One of the few socially relevant and culturally significant facets sports do afford us is the ability to help define our regional cultures, bring us temporarily and intensely together as citizens of a common area, form loose bonds out of otherwise unrelated people, and energize regions and cities with not only economic growth and civic pride, but a kind of localized patriotism which, even though it arises from games that in reality mean nothing, it serves to define us as people from a certain place, with a certain history and tradition.  Once you have bought into this artificial but nonetheless powerful facade, you become part of the tapestry of the history of a place and culture.  And you want to go and just…like some team colors?  For a team that is from a place you’ve never been, and which you know next-to-nothing about??? That is NOT like choosing one soap opera over another, it’s like watching static on a screen while “Gone With the Wind” is on the other channel.  Put some meaning into your meaningless sport, I don’t care how long you’ve “liked” the Yankees.

4.  My buddy Kyle knows a girl who is in a band called The Colourist, and it turns out, they might actually be on the cusp of being a legit famous band!  (how do we know they are going to be famous? You have seen them in a commercial! This commercial!) They are currently on tour opening for a band called The Naked and Famous, which is a band that is currently enjoying a fair amount of stardom, at least on the “indie rock” scene.  Anyway, Kyle, knowing my penchant for concert-going and thinking one or both bands might be down my alley, asked his friend who is in The Colourist (her name is Maya) if she could put me on the guest list for their upcoming show in Philly at the Trocadero, and she did!  So tomorrow night, I get to go see a rock show for free! Yay!  Now, I have not been able to really familiarize myself all that much with the material of either band, but the listening I have done, I like but don’t love.  Both bands do make, generally, the kind of music I like, but they seem to draw a bit more from pop influences than usually suits my taste, but again, I haven’t listened too much.  But I certainly like them enough to go see them play!  Thanks again for the hookup, Kyle!

Here are the songs I have liked most so far from The Colourist as well as The Naked and Famous:

The Love Letter I Got Today

Faithful readers of my blog may remember a short while ago when I came across a very curious letter to a banana at my place of employment.  Well, a similar thing happened to me today.  As I was walking out the door, I glanced at the stand we keep some of our retail merchandise on just to see if it was placed well and looking good.  As I was looking, something underneath one of the travel mugs caught my eye.  It was a small envelope.  I picked it up and tucked it in my pocket.  This is the envelope:

I opened it on the street, eager to see what zaniness I had found this time.  Inside was a card.  The outside of the card looks like this:

This is the inside of the card:

Interesting, right?  You’ll see there is a website on there.  This appears to be part of some kind of movement.  This is the website written inside the card.

Hot Dog Soup

About once a month, somebody “accuses” me of having an “opinion about everything”.  Some people actually find this to be a negative trait!  While I suppose having constant opinions coming out of one’s mouth might, over time, seem “negative” or “cynical”, what is the opposite?!  Certainly not “optimistic”, it’s just…unopinionated, which I can’t imagine is very different than uneducated.  Or at the very least, uninterested or lacking any substantial level of curiosity about the world around you.  And to me, a lack of curiosity is just about as unattractive of a personality trait as you can have.

“The blog”, as a general phenomenon is sadly going the way of the dodo.  The lion’s share of the content on the internet is now filtered through three or four different social network sites, with instant sharing, commenting, “liking”, where all the people you know are already congregated.  Taking the time to create and maintain your own blog, and then trying to convince everyone to leave the comforts of the social networking site to actually read your blog, is now more trouble than it’s worth for most people.  Myself included.  My blog output has been pathetic for over a year now.  But that might be partially because when I drop a blog bomb on you, like this or this, it goes largely unnoticed and uncommented on.  You people don’t deserve my blog.  Regardless, I mourn the end of the blog era, when, briefly, a bunch of everyday folks fancied themselves writers.  It was fun.  Now we’re all just statusers.

I’m scared by how fast technology is evolving.  I know, I know: what a very typical thing to say.  Everyone who has tons of opinions has that opinion.  But do you know about Moore’s law? If not, you should click on that link and read that article.  Moore’s Law is not a theory anymore; this is how the world is working now, and it is truly ghastly imagining what things will be like even five years from now.  Microchips in our brains is not a joke anymore.  I dare say it is something that will be happening soon.  And hey, look, I’m not afraid of change.  I’m afraid of change happening faster than we can adapt to it or control it.  There were thousands of years from when we invented the wheel to when we came up with the car.  It’s been 80 years since we invented television, and now we’re about to control them by waving our hands in the air.  And that progress is only going to keep speeding up, according to Moore’s Law.

I’d eat Hot Dog Soup, if it existed.

I will come to your house and I will be Vicky, alright.

Last night, I called my friend Kyle to try to help him with a phone problem he was having.  The first call unexpectedly went to voicemail, and I thought I’d leave him an interesting one.  Using something like a cartoonish gangster 50s-era Brooklyn accent, I went on a long, stream-of-consciousness tirade that made almost no sense.  I’m certain it wasn’t comedy gold—perhaps just a little interesting.  But it got funny when Kyle e-mailed me a little later saying that Google Voice had transcribed the message, or at least, what it THOUGHT it had heard.  I suppose the program was confused by the accent and the speed at which I spoke.  The transcription is below.  It is amazing just HOW wrong it is.  I said almost none of these words.  (interestingly, I didn’t even say the names it uses!  I think the only name I said was Frank).  The only words I recognize as having used are Frank, Pickles, Key, and Meet.  Thanks, Google Voice, for a great laugh!

Bill, Wayne Anderson. Here there buddy there, but I’m lying Towers guy. They’re, weighing fishermen. Frank this a number that is exactly the other day and I was walking around the world of Pickles and i was like in the building another. The because of the been fickle. Look, I don’t know from the close. What I’m trying to sell used. I don’t have the key it in the comment tonight. Alright, I can meet today without the key. You know I don’t know where you live. I don’t know what I mean. I don’t know what the story. I don’t know whether golf balls well, but I don’t know if you knew and I. If you wanna. I had to go out to the possibly work with Chef and you wanted to add. I will come to your house and I will be Vicky, alright, do a complete and clear one alright. Bye bye.

 

Seven Parts Blog, One Part Turducken

1.  My Diet Update

I guess it’s been awhile since I updated everyone on the status of my diet.  And I’m sure you are all just dying to know how it’s going.

When last I left you, I had just made it to 150 pounds—ten pounds shy of my goal of 140.  And, interestingly, that is exactly where I still am.

Now, I suppose in some undeniable ways, this is a setback.  But I quite honestly don’t feel like it is.  Out of the gates, I just went at an unbelievable pace.  It required a level of obsession and single-mindedness that even I could not sustain.  The diet was too extreme and the exercise regimen too punishing.  I’m glad I did it like that, so that I could get to this more comfortable point and then settle in here, but there’s just no way I could keep that up.

Please don’t misunderstand me:  I am still, like, all about fitness.  I still go to the gym five times a week, sometimes more, depending on if I get out on my bike much, which I often count as a workout if I go hard enough on the bike.  I’m still eating about a thousand times more healthy than I did from 2003-2011.  But I do allow myself a reasonable caloric intake now, and have had a couple stretches of all-out “off the wagon” eating (not binges, just ending up at the wrong restaurants two days in a row) which I quickly correct; my experience with substance addiction recovery comes in handy when I fall off the wagon—I’m already very familiar with my psyche’s tendency to reason with itself thusly:  well, you’ve already fucked up, you might as well just keep going.  Just like I eventually found out that this thinking with alcohol or cigarettes would end up taking me down the black hole, I know this thinking with food will make me fat again.  And while I may have this belly for a long time, to varying degrees, I swear, I am never going to be that fat again.  I’m not trying to get married, be in magazines, or pick up one-night stands, but I prefer to be able to tie my shoes without falling over and being out of breath.  Also, almost more than anything (perhaps unreasonably) I really hate the double chin.  So, any of you who might see me in the immediate future, you will not be seeing “skinny” Seth, but you will definitely not be seeing “fat” Seth.

In addition, another of the major reasons I’m not shedding the pounds as quickly is I have really thrown myself full-on into weight training.  Like, the kind of lifting designed to gain mass.  Stretching back to my teen years, this has always been the kind of “working out” I most enjoy.  I like how it makes me feel physically, I like how it makes me feel psychologically.  I like seeing the results, and I like planning out the strategy of the whole thing (which day you’ll do which muscle groups, how long to wait until you go back to a muscle group, what to eat after a workout, etc).  So, while the belly is still hanging around, if I were to take my shirt off and suck my belly in, you’d be all like, Dang, Seth, if you had any formal training or even the most remote inclination toward physical violence, you’d totally Steven Segal my ass right now, wouldn’t you?  Because above the belly, I am fucking stacked.

2.  Questions

Do you own stuff or does stuff own you?  Why are we afraid to ask for help?  What have you left behind?  How important is it that you are liked?  Are you openly admitting your addictions?  Is there a cause you would actually die for?  How much of our lives do we imagine?  How do you find calm in a hectic world?  What is beautiful about life?  Are you thanking the right people?  When was the last time you did something for the first time?  Who is the most loyal person you know?  What was the last thing fear stopped you from doing?  What are you a product of?  What makes you relevant?

3.  Oil Creek State Park

4.  Speak For Yourself

There’s a common punchline on Facebook, or on other platforms where people might be referring to Facebook and our generally lived-online lives:  folks claiming everybody is living much more boring lives than they pretend to live online.  There is always some meme floating around or someone cracking wise about “yeah, like their lives are as interesting as they say they are!”  Well speak for yourself, Buttafuoco.  The ones throwing that unoriginal nugget around are probably the bored ones, waiting to see their favorite television commercial.  Believe it or not—and you probably won’t—but (to my standards, at least) I actually live a more interesting life than I present online.  I worry about clogging people’s newsfeeds, I struggle with the idea that what I find interesting others might find boring, and most ironically, I think if I documented every thing I actually do, folks would probably start to suspect I’m lying about it. (you may claim I have more fun because I’ve moved somewhere that I feel like a tourist, but I’m confident if you went back to old Facebook posts of mine in Carlisle, you’d find the same guy).

But I don’t bring this up just to point out that I personally am really enjoying life (well, maybe that is why I brought it up; our own motives are sometimes hidden from us) but rather, to highlight the uncontrolled cynicism that online life breeds.  Granted, I’ve been known to throw around my own share of cynicism, but I try to reserve it for artists or cultural movements I deem unworthy of praise (a cultural guardianship that some of us actually take seriously, despite how it makes us look like pompous jackasses.  We’re taking one for the team).  The wide sweeping cynicism that life in general sucks and is boring and wherever you happen to live, well, there’s just nothing to do there, so hopefully everyone else is just as damned bored as I am…well, I just kinda hate that kind of cynicism.  There’s nothing I can do about it.  I just wanted to point out that it sucks.  (is it ironic to say cynicism sucks?)

5.  wtf

Sports history seems to have largely forgotten Mike Schmidt.  Wtf?

6.  August, a Wood Path

This is “August, a Wood Path” by Sanford Robinson Gifford:

7.  Sometimes When We Touch, the Honesty’s Too Much

You may have noticed, for good or ill, a slightly more…honest…tone to my blog lately (and you will notice even more of it in The Rub and Tug Capital of the World, a little booky-wook you are about to get in the mail from me, if you haven’t got it yet).  I do apologize if this more straightforward approach has stepped on anyone’s toes or generally made me seem like an asshole.  Apart from the fact that I actually am an asshole, I also had gotten bored and a little frustrated trying to censor everything I wanted to say by first thinking of everyone who might be reading it and trying to figure out if they might think I am talking about them or calling their lifestyle or hobbies or commercial-watching into question.  It is way too hard to think about all of those things and still write anything interesting.  And I humbly think I have some unique and important things to say, most of which I always feel compelled to not say.  Well, I’m just gonna start saying it.  Allow me to take this little moment to say, I don’t ever write about people I know in veiled references.  If I’m bitching about “people”, well, that’s really what I’m talking about:  people in general.  If there’s something you do that I just can’t stand, you either already know I can’t stand it, or it’s something I can’t stand about hundreds of people, so I am most assuredly not writing about you.  OK.  Disclaimer over.

8.  I Drink Your Milkshake

Manic Panic

I am currently in the midst of a months-long creative and intellectual mania.  I often say I don’t have enough time in a day, but it has certainly never been more true than it is now.

I attribute this primarily to getting healthy and exercising; it definitely kickstarted an increase in energy, and a change in mood to the extreme end of “good”, and energy plus super good mood=extreme mania, and it’s lasting a long time.  Which is good—damn good—but my lack of ability to do every single thing I want to is getting a little annoying.  Let me describe a little better what the mania entails:

First and foremost, I want to do stuff constantly.  Like, outside of the house stuff.  It being winter, there are a limited amount of things to do, but I have lists of things I want to do when I have time, like “take pictures on Raspberry Street” or “tour the Watson-Curtze Mansion“, etc etc.  When I do have time for activities such as this, it’s damn difficult deciding what to do.

Secondly, I have an enormous list of creative and artistic projects that I want to start, work on, or complete, and the list of projects itself has become a project.  When I’m at work or out and about, I find myself typing ideas into my cell phone’s “notepad” for me to add to the project list when I get home.  Hell, my list of potential blog entries alone is staggering.  This aspect of the mania is the most frustrating, as I am getting more and more interesting and ambitious ideas and I simply don’t even have the time to start on most of them.

The mania is also driving up my appetite for media/ information consumption, even as the mania means I have less time to partake of that particular fountain.  For many years now, most of you know, rather than watch much television, I’ve (through Netflix) watched, on average, one new movie a day.  Even as my appetite for film continues to grow, my attention to other projects and interests is decreasing my time for them.  And the mania has only increased my desire to read; I currently could probably read all day for four straight days and not get sick of it.  Information, information, information, my mind screams at me.  I currently have very little desire to read fiction (although, Mom, I really DO want to read that Stephen King book you sent me, and probably will start it in about 2 weeks).  I read the Erie newspaper every day, and often stop somewhere for a USA Today, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal, depending on what’s happening in the world or if I heard about an article or feature in one of them from one of the websites I simply can’t stop reading thoroughly every day (Slate.  Huffington Post.  Oh, and Hacking Netflix and Deadline).  And my magazine consumption, which I had finally whittled down in recent years, has skyrocketed during the mania.  I can’t seem to read enough science writing.  I currently read all of the “big three” science mags (Popular Science, Discover, and Scientific American;  I’ve been a big Discover supporter for years but right now it’s just not enough), and it seems my hankering for history now bleeds over into magazines.  America’s Civil War has been a mainstay on my bedside table recently, as have some oddballs such as Archaeology and The Saturday Evening Post.  And these are all in addition to the standard entertainment, arts, news, and cultural magazines you’d expect me to be reading.  Oh, and yes, I read books, too!

I have also taken quite a shine lately to just listening to music.  I have found that, in most of my adult life, I have rarely simply sat down, doing nothing else, and listened to music intently.  And now I have started doing it and it is changing my life.  But where is the time???

Oh, and I have REALLY started to enjoy just puttering around my apartment, re-arranging things, finding new homes for this or that, hanging the artwork in new arrays, paging through my old books, putting old photos in little frames, etc etc.

In short, I literally do not have enough time in a day right now.  I already start out with a deficit, working 50-60 hours a week.  Then, remember, I’m spending between 8 and 12 hours a week in the gym, so there is potentially almost 80 hours unavailable a week.  And then there’s sleep, at some point, and getting on the internet.  I have essentially zero downtime.  Please do not misunderstand me: I am loving this.  I am in a constant good mood, and never even remotely close to being bored or sad.  But damn.  Who knew there could be so much to do (without, really, doing anything)?  Also, this is a way of explaining to some of you how and why I might occasionally sound out of my mind, especially after a day that may have been devoted to intense, marathon bouts of reading, followed by writing or otherwise creating something incredibly personal and emotive, followed by going to a hockey game or something, and then back home to shower in the dark while The National plays on my stereo.  It’s a whole lot of fun, but sometimes can make me a little crazy.

I anticipate things leveling off as my body continues to adjust to being some degree of healthy.  But I just had to put it out there how wild and fun and jam-packed my life is at this point, even if it might not sound particularly fun to a lot of you, it is for me.  And almost everything I’m doing or want to do is free or relatively cheap (not to mention my food budget being more than halved in recent months) so I’m actually saving a lot of money recently (concert-going has all but stopped, and there’s much less time to go to the movies now).  How one starts saving money by doing more stuff is some sort of mystery!

Hey, have an awesome day!

Maghound, Tree of Life, and holy boxes!

1.  Yesterday I learned that one of my nearest and dearest services, Maghound, will be going out of business.  Now, Maghound isn’t famous, and I’ve never mentioned it on this bloggy wog despite being a product evangelist for four years and an early adopter of the service (I signed up in it’s first month of beta testing).  What it is (was) is a service that allows you to recieve a bunch of magazines without subscribing to them, and to change which magazines you get a monthly basis.  I was usually on the 7-a-month plan, so I would choose 7 magazines from their vast selection.  If one month I got, say, Golf Magazine (I never did) and didn’t like it, I could change that slot the next month to get Mother Earth News (great mag).  Maghound wasn’t the method I used to get my favorite magazines—those I always actually subscribe to, the old-fashioned way, but Maghound has been a wonderful way for me to explore new realms of reading, and along the way, I’ve found a lot of publications that I’ve really loved, and been able to get one or two issues of magazines that interest me but not enough to recieve for a whole year.  It really has been a great service (and they have some of the best customer service representatives I’ve ever had to talk to) and I am extremely sad that it is going out of business.  It’s been a part of my life like Netflix is for myself and many others, and it sucks that there’s probably not even a single other person I know who will mourn it with me.  So I say here, on this tiny little bloggy wog:  I’ll miss you, Maghound!

2.  The order I would vote for the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (I’ve seen them all):

1.  The Tree of Life
2.  Hugo
3.  The Artist
4.  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
5.  The Descendants
6.  Midnight in Paris
7.  The Help
8.  Moneyball
9.  War Horse

3.  I’m not a pack rat, but it’s dawned on me recently that I may have a few too many things that I am just “kinda into” that I am constantly accruing for no serious purpose.  For instance, I can’t stop aquiring bags; I love getting messenger bags, sling backpacks,  cargo bags, and, most shamefully, totes.  I essentially have a closet full of these (thankfully inexpensive) things I almost have no use for.  In the summer, when I bike a lot, I have one small backpack that I use exclusively for biking, and one messenger bag (the first one I ever got) that I use when I do things like go to a Starbucks and write and read like a pompus asshole.  These bags are not falling apart anytime soon, so why I keep getting new ones is mystifying.

Likewise, I have about 200 more notebook-type things than I will use in a lifetime.  I simply cannot stop buying composition books (in 3-packs), small yellow legal pads, cheap black patent leather journals (for the love of God, don’t ever buy me a Moleskine journal, I hate them!), planners, and, oddly, these.  Now, I actually do quite a bit of writing, and not just the fancy-schmancy crapola that turns up on ye olde Notes From the Fire, but I’m always making little insignificant lists and writing little cheeseball sayings and quotes from movies and letters to friends, etc etc; I typically have one or two notebooks of various types going for each room of my apartment, and some that travel from room to room for various reasons.  I seriously require 7 or 8 different notebook-type things at any given time.  But I probably have close to a hundred (again…thankfully cheap) things of this nature right now.  I just love buying them. 

Guess what else this weirdo loves?  Boxes.  Not cardboard boxes, but boxes like this and this and this.  Oh, I’ve got them.  Oh, and photo boxes?  Michaels has them on sale for 2 bucks right now and it’s all I can do to keep myself from buying 50.

I guess what I’m saying is…what the hell is wrong with me?

Reading the latest issue of TIME magazine, I was intrigued by an article about YouTube, and was so blown away by some of the stats (and some of the writing, which in a few sentences manages to encapsulate what would take me a paragraph; let’s hear it for journalists!) that I felt the need to share it here.  This is two small excerpts from an article by Lev Grossman:

For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.  You can turn that number over in your mind as much as you want; at no point will it stop being incredible.  Sixty hours every minute.  That’s five months of video every hour.  That’s ten years of video every day.  More video is uploaded to YouTube every month than has been broadcast by the Big Three TV networks in the past 60 years. 

There’s never been an object like YouTube in human history.  It gets 4,000,000,000 page views a day, which adds up to 1,000,000,000,000—that’s a trillion—a year.  It has 800,000,000 users who watch 3,000,000,000 hours of video a month (that’s 340,000 years).  Human civilization now generates massive quantities of video footage simply as a by-product of it’s daily functioning, much as some industrial processes generate toxic slurry.  Before YouTube there was no central catchment for all that video; now it drains into a single reservoir, where we as a species can pan through it and wallow in it endlessly.

 

Strange Quirks

I make no secret of the fact that I really, at this point in my life, have little-to-no desire to be in a relationship.  This is, most likely, because something is wrong with me, but whatever.  That’s not what this post is about.  But I promise it’s true: I really have no desire to date anyone (although I stop short of saying “never again”).

A few weeks or a month ago, I was reading an article somewhere about the internet company Yahoo, and how they were failing despite having a multitude of sites and featues available that at first glance, it would seem many users would benefit from.  So out of curiosity, I surfed on over there.  And they DO have a ton of channels (and I was reminded that I’ve been using their movie-showing-times feature for years).  I clicked around a few times just to see what this ghost town was like.  Finance, Shopping, Sports.  It was a fairly nice and helpful site.

Then I clicked on Dating.  Just to see what it was like.  As I said, I have no interest in dating.  Now, I am not opposed to online dating.  I have tried it myself more than a few times, even shelling out big bucks over the course of a whole year once for eHarmony.  I really just wanted to see what could possibly be going on—in Erie—at this supposedly failing ghost town website.  Of course, the site (which is apparently a hybrid of Yahoo and Match.com, which Yahoo owns) basically makes you set up an account just to do a search for people in your area.  I was annoyed by this but just casually sped through the process, having no actual interest in getting dates out of the profile.

So I set up my quickie, no-thought profile, checked out the site for a minute or two, and moved on.  But the next day, they started pouring in.  Winks, nudges, private messages.  Match.com sends me an e-mail every time a woman interacts with my profile—and it’s happening a lot.  Every day, for weeks now, the women of the Erie Match.com seem to freaking looooove me.  Now, I can’t interact back, because you need a paid account to do so.  But they do link me to their accounts, and they are real women, no doubt about it.  And having done online dating before, I can tell you this level of attention is unusual.

You may be asking, why am I telling you this?  Because interestingly, this is the profile I created in a quick moment just in order to see the website.  I tried to make it shorter but they had a somewhat annoying minimum character limit.  I tried to be brutally honest about myself to AVOID interest:

Hey there!  I’m just a guy who hasn’t been in a relationship in, like, 5 years and has lived totally alone and developed all kinds of strange quirks that will probably keep me single my whole life.  I am overly opinionated on all sorts of things from art to politics to culture and this overbearing nature often makes me seem like a pretentious know-it-all, which I suppose I am.  I’m a recovering alcoholic (sober 8 years)…it’s not a big deal to me anymore but it seems to matter to women.  I don’t care how much you drink.  I quit smoking 2 years ago and I got fat and haven’t got unfat yet.  I’m short, too, although, despite all this, I think you’ll probably find me undeniably attractive.  I have the face of an angel.  A masculine angel.  I can’t stand sitting at home.  I have to be biking, or walking, or exploring things like historical sites or museums or what have you.  Although I do have a DVD collection so extensive, it’ll make your toes curl.  So go ahead, get in touch with me, let’s see if you can handle me.

 

The World Where they Never Stop Screaing At Us

There was a small news story a few days ago about how a few retialers, including Best Buy (whom I have on online account with) had had their customers’ e-mail addresses stolen.  It’s really no big deal—everyone has assured everyone that it was only e-mails and no other information could have been stolen (I hear you, Dad, I hear you).  The reason I bring this up is that Best Buy sent us an e-mail talking about it, and there is just one little sentence that disgusts me beyond all belief.  In re-assuring us that our very identities will not be stolen, ruining our lives forever, Best Buy couldn’t help but advertise their stupid Geek Squad service.  Really, Best Buy?  You never turn that shit off, eh?  I’ve posted the e-mail here, putting the offending sentence in bold and italics:

Dear Valued Best Buy Customer,

On March 31, we were informed by Epsilon, a company we use to send emails to our customers, that files containing the email addresses of some Best Buy customers were accessed without authorization.

We have been assured by Epsilon that the only information that may have been obtained was your email address and that the accessed files did not include any other information. A rigorous assessment by Epsilon determined that no other information is at risk. We are actively investigating to confirm this.

For your security, however, we wanted to call this matter to your attention. We ask that you remain alert to any unusual or suspicious emails. As our experts at Geek Squad would tell you, be very cautious when opening links or attachments from unknown senders.

In keeping with best industry security practices, Best Buy will never ask you to provide or confirm any information, including credit card numbers, unless you are on our secure e-commerce site, www.bestbuy.com. If you receive an email asking for personal information, delete it. It did not come from Best Buy.

Woot

I’ve recently been introduced to the Woot family of websites.  These websites are a handful of sites that sell one item a day.  Woot.com (the original) sells, typically, an electronics item.  Check out today’s woot.  The success of woot spawned some mini-versions, like t-shirt woot, which sells one t-shirt a day.

Anyway, I tell you about this not because I think you need to buy things from woot (I did recently buy a new digital camera from woot.com however, but it hasn’t shipped yet), but because these websites maintain one of the most interesting and hilarious tones of any business I’ve ever encountered.  They’re funny and snarky and, at times, almost mean.  It is a sales business with a limited audience, as some people just will not get it. 

For instance, I just got an e-mail from them regarding my recent order.  Here is some text from the e-mail (which is basically introducing me to woot):

Once the item ships out, you can access your tracking data by going to Your Account and clicking on the order number. If you have a problem receiving your order, or you receive the wrong item, contact service@woot.com.
If you receive your item and it doesn’t work, contact the manufacturer first. They made the junk.  Let them deal with it. If they turn out to be total tools, contact service@woot.com and we’ll grudgingly provide some further assistance.
If you receive your item and decide you don’t like it, take it to eBay or pawn it off on one of your so-called friends. We don’t want it, either.
That goes for Woot.com and all of the sites in the Woot.com family. There’s some specific stuff you might want to know about each of the others. And here it comes now.

Shirt.woot – Check the size chart, check the size chart, check the size chart. It’s at the bottom of the product description for each sale. If you order the wrong size, we won’t take it back – your only option is to gain or lose weight so it fits, possibly including painful, costly cosmetic surgery. If you want your overnight order the next day, place it by noon Central time. International orders generally take about 3-
4 weeks to arrive. Looking for an old shirt design? If you’re lucky, it’ll still be for sale via our Reckoning page. If you’re somewhat less lucky, it might turn up as one of our weekly Shirt.Woot Classics. If you think your one-year-old can design a better shirt, encourage your one-year-old to enter the Derby, our weekly design competition. That $1,000 prize can buy a lot of Binkies.

Wine.woot – First, don’t get your hopes up: wine orders can only be shipped to certain states, so read the entire list of eligible states before you print up the invitations to your wine party and place your order. Ineligible orders will be cancelled and refunded. If you do complete your order and receive the tracking data, make sure you give it some time to update. It won’t be uncommon for it to take a little while for real, actual data to show up. You might call the data “late” – we prefer to think of it as “aged”.

Kids.woot – Keep in mind that Kids.Woot is a site that sells childrens’ products, not necessarily a place you’d want your kids hanging out. We make every effort to monitor the content and activity in our message boards, but you should approach Kids.Woot with the same circumspection you’d bring to any other adult-oriented site. Well, not “adult-oriented” in the nasty sense. We just mean it’s for mature
audiences only. But not “mature” as in- ah, forget it, you know what we mean.

 

OK, it’s me, Seth, again.  I mean, right?  That is some good stuff!  Can you imagine another internet retailer sending that message?  And if you click on the link to woot and check out today’s deal, you’ll see that thier description is usually pretty insane (or at least inane).  Here is today’s description of wireless iPod speakers (I admit I am even a little lost with this one):

Can’t Have Your Pi And Eat It Too

I had this whole Pi Day thing planned just for today and what do I get? Speakers. Wireless sports speakers.

Oh, man, it was going to be so great, too. You guys would’ve loved it if the product had been one of those HDTVs or digital camcorders or silly robot vacuums we always seem to have scooting around this place. I begged, PLEADED with The Monkeys At The Top, “PLEASE give me Monday’s writeup. I’m gonna rock it, I’m telling you. There’s gonna be math, baked goods, references to obscure mathematicians EATING baked goods… It’s going to be sweet! HA! ‘Sweet!’ Get it?! This thing’s gold. Gold, I tell you!”

For weeks, I planned this thing. Every little detail was meticulously orchestrated into a symphony of madcap hilarity. I even planned for the dreaded “toothbrush sanitizer scenario” just in case that devil’s product reared its head. I thought of everything. Or at least, I THOUGHT I thought of everything. Wait, is that… No, that’s right.

I see now where I messed up. It was when I was dancing about in the Sales Setup room and talking about how rad today was going to be. Decided to have a little fun with me, eh? Decided I had grown a little too big for my britches, did you? Is that why you decided to throw me for a loop and schedule cy-fi Wireless Sport Speaker for iPod or Bluetooth?

Well, congrats. You’ve broken me. Nothing that I had planned for today works with these. Nothing. It doesn’t matter if they’re Red, Black, or Silver. What good are these to pie-eating mathematicians? ALL THEY KNOW IS MATH AND PIE. What are they going to do? Rock out to some kind of crazy Crust-Core Math-Rock band?

And the two different types don’t even do the same things! The Bluetooth version lets you make calls with a speaker-phone function and uses Bluetooth A2DP. Meanwhile, the iPod speakers use Kleer Wireless technology and have a slightly longer battery life. That’s, like, two different write-ups right there!

What gives, Sales Setup? I thought we were tight. I thought we meant something to each other, you and I. But this? This is a smack in the face to everything my Pi Day loving heart ever stood for. I hope you’re happy.

Hey, it’s Seth again.  Crazy, right???  And I remember, what caught my eye about the digital camera I ended up buying from woot.com was the blurb next to the picture of the camera:  “The world’s first unisex digital camera…or at least the first one we’re going to advertise that way.”  It blew my mind! It’s just a regular digital camera!

Anyway, it was blowing my mind so I thought I’d share.

Sheenglish

One of the only articles, online or otherwise, I’ve ever found about Hey Rosetta!  HERE

Sunday Morning Ramblings

1.  Thank you, three days of fantastic weather, for reminding me how Spring and Summer are going to be.  Also, up yours, three days of nice weather, for teasing me.  Now back under 20 degrees, it’s like you never happened.

2.  The new Hey Rosetta! album has essentially brought me to my knees emotionally.  This band just continues to improve, grow, and evolve and it is just killing me.  More to come on this, I’m sure.

3.  So about two months ago, I cancelled my New York Times subscription.  Now, you know I totally heart the NYT.  But since I’m still relatively new to the home-newspaper delivery world (I got my first Carlisle Sentinel subscription about two years ago) I figured I should try a few more papers, maybe a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and then perhaps a regional favorite like the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the Buffalo News.  So.  I cancelled my NYT subscription.  My home delivery stopped.  For two days.  Then on the third day, there was a NYT on my porch again.  I figured it was just a momentary error, a slip of habit by the driver.  But then there was one the next day, and the next.  So I called the Times and inquired about this; I don’t mind free newspapers, but I also didn’t want to keep being charged after I tried to cancel, and I really wanted to further explore the newspaper world.  The dude on the phone assured me my account was cancelled and that he’d make sure the driver stopped delivery.  But he never did stop.  I’ve been getting a free NYT for about two months now.  I don’t feel bad about it; I’m not sure what else I can do to make it stop.  I’m not going to keep calling and complaining that my paper will not stop.  But here’s the really, really strange part:  about a week ago, an Erie Times News also started showing up on my porch every day!  In addition to the New York Times.  For the last week I have been getting two free daily newspapers.  I suspect the same driver must deliver the two (there can’t be that many NYT subscribers in Erie, so it’s probably just a small supplement to the driver’s income) but how they suddenly started thinking I was on the Erie Times News list is beyond me.  I did subscribe to it when I first moved here but it’s been at least 6 months since I cancelled that one.  I am not even calling them to tell them.  People wanna give me free papers, I’mma take them, although I do feel bad about not giving money to these papers (although I am a “circulation” number, helping out their ad rates, so I’m not doing nothing, ha!)

4.  I don’t like to ever even mention the fact that I eat fast food, as it is so in vogue for people to poo poo even the mere idea that fast food exists, but I just cannot NOT mention the fact that I have found the best fast food chain ever.  It’s called Back Yard Burgers.  Here’s their website which includes a site locator (seems it is mostly an eastern chain, and the Erie location may be the northernmost location)…if you are into burgers, you MUST check this place out if you’re ever able to.  Pretty much the best burgers I’ve ever had, fast food or not.  And the environment inside the place is just fantastic.  Spacious and calming, with a fire place and light music playing, as well as multiple televisions (with the volume off) and booths that give you privacy.  I actually go there with a book or magazine to read and find myself staying for a decent amount of time after I’m done eating. 

5.  Anybody who is more tech savvy than I am (read: almost all of you)…what is the process for getting something from a DVD and onto YouTube?  Obviously I’ve got to get it from the DVD onto my computer.  What is necessary on my computer to make that happen, and what does the process entail?  Thanks!

An Oddity…

I recently purchased the new Decemberists album, “The King is Dead”, via electronic form from Amazon MP3.  Yes, I know, I am a big stickler for physical media, but I do occasionally buy an MP3 album from Amazon for ease of use as well as Amazon often having craaaaazy deals for MP3 albums (I think I paid 3.99 for the entire Decemberists album)….anyway, the point of all this is that I recieved a very strange e-mail this morning.  It was from Amazon, and the subject line said “Your Promotional Credit”, and this is what the e-mail said:

We recently received a new version of the Decemberists song “This Is Why We Fight” that more accurately represents the artist’s vision. You can use the code below to download the updated version of the song at no additional charge.
Here is your promotional code:

Is this weird or what?  I haven’t downloaded it yet.  What does it say about me that before I wanted to hear the song, I wanted to blog about it?

Monday’s Song: Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”

I may have officially decided on Grinderman’s album as my album of the year, but Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” is undoubtedly my song of the year (their album, The Suburbs, was prevented from being #1 simply by having too much filler, but the good parts of the album are so good as to be timelessly classic rock and roll).  “We Used to Wait” is about as great as a rock song can get: it’s about big but real human stuff (how is technology changing basic human emotional experience?), discussed in unique, innovative ways (lyricist Win Butler never feels the need to over-explain, while not being overly daft or dense), on top of layered sound which is not too-produced but is obviously passionate.  Please enjoy this live version of the song (and in a nod to Dellinger family heritgae, notice the images of U.S. mail the band uses on a screen on the stage, mostly toward the end of the song.  And seriously, how rad is that to use this as the main propulsion of the concept of the song, that we don’t have to wait to recieve our discourse in the mail anymore?  Writers of any ilk—let alone wongwriters—would be extremely fortunate to find such a creative and effective linguistic device!)  And there is very little triumph of rock and roll more succinct and powerful than the ending crescendo of this song, with Butler belting out “Wait for it!”

Three more things right quick:

may I plead with you to re-familiarize yourself with this blog post of mine, about Arcade Fire’s truly incredible online experience centered around “We Used to Wait”, and if you decide to do it, I encourage you to go through the experience a few times, using different addresses from your past.

It has also come to my attention that embedded YouTube on my blog is best when viewed using Firefox or Chrome, but is often quite bad through Internet Explorer.

And in case you missed it, click here for my top 15 albums of 2010.

We Used to Wait
by Arcade Fire

I used to write letters,
I used to sign my name.
I used to sleep at night,
before the flashing lights
settled deep in my brain.

But by the time we met–
by the time we met
the times had already changed.
So I never wrote a letter,
I never took my true heart,
I never wrote it down
So when the lights cut out
I was lost standing in the wilderness downtown.

Now our lives are changing fast;
hope that something pure can last. 

It may seem strange 
how we used to wait
for letters to arrive,
but what’s stranger still
is how something so small
can keep you alive.
(We used to wait.)
We used to waste hours
just walking around.
(We used to wait.)
All those wasted lives
in the wilderness downtown.

(We used to wait.)
Sometimes it never came.
(We used to wait.)
Still moving through the pain.

So I’m gonna write a letter
to my true love,
I’m gonna sign my name.
Like a patient on a table,
I wanna walk again,
wanna move through the pain.

We used to wait for it,
now we’re screaming,
sing the chorus again!

I used to wait for it,
hear my voice scream
and sing the chorus again.

Wait for it!

50 More Things from 2010

Due to the severe limitations of “top ten lists”, as well as the sheer amount of crap I love each year, I’ve decided to institute this general list of 50 things I plain-old loved in 2010.  Most will be things that did not appear on my music or movies list, as well as things created, released, or performed in 2010, but I’m not going to limit myself with actual ground rules.  Here are, quite simply, in no particular order, 50 things I loved in 2010:

50.  The New York Times

Hear hear for a newspaper that still dares to have sections devoted to important things like science, business, and art.  I’ve found it difficult to spend less than two hours on a copy—even on a day like Tuesday.

49.  Red Bull Cola

It will probably be a short-lived experiment, but the delicious and almost-natural cola from Red Bull was a tasty shot of adrenaline (even if it was overpriced).

48.  Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson in “The Other Guys”. 

The movie itself may have been lacking, but these two good sports’ 5 minutes of screen time made the enterprise worth the price of admission.

47.  “Dancing with the Stars”

For awhile, I hated myself for this guilty pleasure, until I realized it was actually genuinely compelling television.  Cynical hipster naysayers need to actually watch a season (I should know–I am a cynical hipster naysayer)

46.  The segment on NPR’s “Whad’Ya Know? with Michael Feldman” where they listed fake WikiLeaks

Far and away the most I’ve ever laughed at the radio.

45.  The new Ansel Adams photographs

Whether or not they are actually Ansel Adams’ is still in dispute—but they’re terrific photographs anyway

44.  This.

43.  “8: The Mormon Proposition”

The documentary that reveals (gasp!) how Prop 8 was engineered by the institution of the Mormon church.  Enraging, and engaging.

42.  VEVO on YouTube

Sure, this music channel on YouTube is 100% a corporate whore, but my year has been exponentially enhanced by concert footage of my favorite bands not shot by a drunk frat boy with a first generation iPhone.

41.  James Franco’s “Palo Alto”

Franco’s collection of short stories is good—real good.

40.  James Franco on “General Hospital”

Yeah, it’s on before I leave for work, so sue me if I watch it every now and then!  Franco’s performance as–ahem–Franco was an over-the-top piece of performance art so nuanced (with nods to the real-world oddity of James Franco being on a soap opera) that I often found myself stunned something so lovely and sophisticated was happening on American daytime television.

39.  James Franco in “127 Hours”

Portraying a not-so-likeable man within a bare-bones script who also has to cut off his own arm, Franco manages to make us like him, and makes us want to be better people, too.

38.  James Franco’s art opening in New York

James Franco opened a gallery exhibit of his art in New York this year, and although not all of it is great, some of it is incredible, and it’s all very valid.  To imagine a Hollywood star opening an art show he says–out loud–is about the “sexual confusion of adolescence” makes me think we may be living in a culture with, well…culture.  See some of the art here. 

37.  James Franco in “Howl”

So, the movie kinda stinks, but Franco hits an underappreciated home run as the poet Allen Ginsburg, an unlikeable, grizzly gay man with so many conflicting character traits, it’s an amazing juggling act Franco had to do–and a bona fide joy to see.  Also, John Hamm is in the movie, too!

36.  Salvation Army Stores

Thanks to this discovery, the visual palette that is me (it seems absurd to call what I have a “fashion sense”) is evolving for the first time in a decade.  (read: more sweaters)

35.  Joel Stein’s column in TIME magazine

The most self-absorbed man in the newsmagazine business continues to get funnier, even as his subjects get more serious.  Every week, I’m sure he’ll be arrested.

34.  The Mac Wrap at McDonalds

I seem to be the only human alive not disgusted by this, either literally, morally, or some other, more etheral way.  But I’m not disgusted.  I’m delighted.

33.  “Gimme Shelter” performed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony by U2, Mick Jagger, and Fergie.

Rock and roll heaven.  An absolute orgasm.  And I don’t even like U2!

32.  The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Because even republicans want to get into Heaven.

31.  Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”

Franzen is this generation’s Hemingway.  And “Freedom” is his “A Farewell to Arms”.  Read it.  Just do it.

30.  The March to Restore Sanity

I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see a lot of it, but I love it anyway.

29.  The “LOST” finale

It’s much debated, but I was never an “I need answers to X, Y, and Z, and I need them freaking spelled out for me” kinda guy.  I didn’t have LOST theories.  I work more by “feel”.  And the finale certainly felt right.  I still cry, every time.

28.  The “twist” ending of “Remember Me”

Everybody hates it.  I love it.  What’s new?

27.  The Chilean miners

Seriously?  This story was too good to be true.  If they made this movie and it was fictional, you’d be all like “No way this would happen like this.”  Just an unbelievable story.  The rare event of real news being real entertaining–and then uplifting.

26.  John Updike’s “Endpoint”

Sadly, this posthumous collection is the last poetry that will ever be released by Mr. Updike.  Luckily, it’s amazing (but, also, terribly terribly sad.)

25.  “The Good Wife” on CBS

I’ve just discovered it, so I have to get caught up, but it is tickling me.

24.  Seeing Art Speigelman give a talk at Dickinson University

Seeing the legendary literary graphic novelist give a highly entertaining and informative talk was one of the live event highlights of my year, and nobody had a guitar.

23.  My super-secret crush, The View‘s Sherri Shepard.

I will do unspeakble things to this woman.  In the good way.

22.  Mila Kunis and–yes–James Franco in “Date Night”

See #48 and substitute these actor’s names.

21.  The comeback of The Atlantic

One of the oldest and most respected magazines in the world revamps itself and somehow does not end up sucking.  In fact, it’s now better than ever, and just announced a profit for the first time in a decade.  And thankfully, it is somehow still completely pompous.

20.  Michael Vick

I sure know when to get back into Philadelphia sports, don’t I???  I simply love this real-life tale of redemption; if I didn’t believe in second chances, my own life would probably look a little bit different.

19.  This.

18.  TurningArt

The Netflix-like service provides you with rotating art prints (and a neato frame).  Sure, they don’t do much but hang there, but it’s a great way to explore what you like and don’t like about art.  It’s interesting to find how your relationship with a piece of art changes as it hangs in your home; much different than seeing it for 5 minutes in a gallery.

17.  Dogs

Still the best thing going.

16.  “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”

Fallon has really hit a stride that is pure magic.  Sure, he’s not breaking new ground like his competition Craig Ferguson (who’s got a bit of briliiance working, as well), but Fallon’s show works miracles within a formula.  Delicious.

15.  The Fusco Brothers

The smartest, funniest comic strip in (or probably NOT in) your local newspaper just keeps getting funnier.  And smarter.  And harder to find.

14.  BuyBack$

A store that is just cheap, used DVDs, CDs, and Blu-Rays?  Yeah.  I’m kinda all over that.

13.  The re-release of new-age symhony In C.

Composer Terry Riley’s experimental, semi-electronic classical piece In C was re-released on CD this year, and it is just as addictive as when I first owned it back in high school.  Shades of just about all my current favorite artists can be heard in this breakthrough work.

12.  Cherry Crush

Because it’s fucking delicious.

11.  “What Up With That?” sketches on Saturday Night Live

This is by far the most enjoyable recurring sketch on SNL I’ve seen in years.  It has a concrete element of the absurd, and a perfect setting for uproarious celebrity cameos.  And Keenan Thompson is a genius, I don’t care what you say!  Click here for a selection of this year’s What Up With That’s on Hulu.

10.  Roles For Women

There’s still not nearly enough meaty roles for women in movies—Hollywood, indie, or otherwise—but this year saw a few choicer roles than before, thanks to dandy’s like “The Kids Are All Right”, “Please Give”, and “Secretariat”.

9.  Dan Simmons’ “The Terror”

One of the most interesting, and also more difficult, novels I’ve ever read.  Simmons’ explorers-trapped-in-icelocked-ships-being-terrorized-by-unseen-monsters-yet-also-slightly-based-on-historical-fact-of-Franklin’s-lost-expedition has got to be the world’s first historical fiction gothic horror novel.  And it scared the shit out of me.

8.  Cleveland

It really does rock.

7.  slate.com

The one-time almost-sad story of an great website gone bad is now a must-read internet newsmagazine.  I have it set as my homepage.

6.  Blu-Ray discs in Reboxes

Hey thanks.

5.  The first fight scene in “The Book of Eli”, where Denzel cuts that dude’s hand off.

OK, so the rest of the movie is kinda hum-drum, but that knife scene by the underpass with above-mentioned amputation is pure badass movie magic.

4.  Free concerts in the square in downtown Buffalo

I got a free front-row Ed Kowalczyk show, courtesy of the city of Buffalo, in a very attractive, quaint little square with a big statue of some dude (Mr. Buffalo?) in the center.  Can’t wait to see next year’s schedule!

3.  Katie Couric doing CBS’s Evening News

I just plain trust her.  A throwback to old-school news.

2.  The poster for The National’s album “High Violet”.

Good art and good music, all affordable?  Sign me up.  Check out the poster here.

1.  “The Expendables”

The movie was pretty bad, but I’d watch these guys pop popcorn.

 

But mostly, I just wanna know about the neckties.

1.  Seriously now, what is up with neckties?  I just don’t even understand why they exist.

2.  I’ve got nothing against this Justin Beiber guy, but I really really hope he knows it’s not going to last.  Does nobody notice that our culture requires a new, mid-to-late teens super-mega-squeaky-clean star every 3 to 4 years?  I mean, don’t get me wrong, Miley Cyrus and Jonas Brothers are not gone, but they’re fading, and I feel bad for these kids that almost (I said almost) certainly will not be able to make a transition to an adult career in entertainment.

3.  So I’ve waited years to get back in touch with you, wondering where you are, how things are going and, yes, what you look like.  Not out of (solely) my continued attraction to you, but simple curiosity: nobody knows better than I how interestingly years change a person’s looks.  So after once-monthly searches on Facebook for two solid years (and the same on MySpace for 5 years before that) I see you have finally made a facebook account, and I quickly request you.  Except, when I am finally able to look at your pictures, there’s not a single picture of you.  There are 50 pictures of your kids (I’m happy you have kids you enjoy, but I give about zero shits about kids I’ve never met and who have no idea who I am), 20 pictures of your pets, and three albums of the house you had built.  But not a single picture of you.  I friend requested you, not “Old Friend’s Kids”.  C’mon, you haven’t really disappeared completely into them, have you?

4.  Number 3 was not about a specific person, but something that I’ve experienced a few times.  Stop thinking it was harsh, you know you’ve thought it, too.  And Paul, really, don’t argue with me.

5.  I now get home delivery of The New York Times.  Let me tell you, there is no reason to get any other newspaper, ever, anywhere.  This thing is amazing.  Every copy–daily–has more information in it than a copy of TIME and Entertainment Weekly put together.  I’m especially impressed by their daily entertainment coverage; I might seriously not resubscribe to Entertainment Weekly.  Plus–and this is what really, REALLY tickles me—most days, there is no sports section.  The sports are in the entertainment section.  (guess what folks>  That’s what sports are!)  As I’ve said again and again recently, my demonization of sports is over as I find myself more and more drawn to them, but devoting a third of a newspaper or televised newscast to sports still seems like the work of a bestial culture.  I wanted to hug The New York Times when I realized how they did it!

6.  Along the lines of sports, now that my head is back in that realm, I feel I need to make clear, here in a public forum, my official favorite teams in the three sports I care about (eff basketball, though I’ll probably end up going to a few of Erie’s semi-pro team, the Erie Bayhawks, cause why not?).  Here are my 3 favorite teams in each sport, IN ORDER:

Baseball
1.  Philadelphia Phillies
2.  Cleveland Indians
3.  Washington Nationals

Hockey

1.  Columbus Blue Jackets
2.  Philadelphia Flyers
3.  Buffalo Sabres

Football

1.  Philadelphia Eagles
2.  Buffalo Bills
3.  Baltimore Ravens

7.  I saw a convoy of plows driving down the highway today, even though it hasn’t snowed yet.  Winter can suck it.  (I know I sound bitchy tonight but these can’t all be rainbows and angel farts, you know.)

Vote for my new mousepad

So, it’s time for me to get a new mousepad, and I figured since I was having trouble deciding on one, I’d open a poll and let you folks decide for me.  Currently I have a kickass Jack Bauer mousepad that has served me well for a few years, but the bottom of it is becoming frayed and is annoying my wrist.  You can see the fray in this picture I just took of it:

So, here are the options for the replacement pad, with the poll at the bottom.  Thanks for voting!

A Pearl Jam mousepad themed after their "avocado album"---one of my favorite albums of theirs.

 

A super-funky Mr. T mousepad!

Super badass "LOST" mouse pad

The Wilderness Downtown

I feel like quite a failure as a blogger as of late.  I haven’t really done much new stuff at all since I moved to Erie; maybe 5 or 6 good blogs of new material (aside from the Erie journals) and a few poems; the rest have just been re-hashed or cheap re-packagings of old work.

The fact of the matter is, this is primarily because I spend a lot less time in my apartment than I used to, and even less time at the computer (for instance, I am almost never actually on Facebook–I just check it obsessively from my phone) and during my limited time at home, I’ve just not been spending it writing.  Winter is fast approaching though, so new, exciting blogs should be coming soon!!  In the meantime, I’m going to keep posting cheap re-hashes and the occasional list of crap, and I’m not going to feel bad about it anymore!

Real quick though, while I’m thinking about it, I’ve got yet another music thing I need to rave about, but I think just about all of you can get behind this.  Perhaps you’ve heard of a band called The Arcade Fire?  (if not, now you have)  They have a new album out, and it is just superb.  Anyway, I’m not here to try to get you to listen to it.  I’m here to get you to check out one of the coolest online things ever, and it revolves around a song called “We Used to Wait” on their new album The Suburbs, which is a concept album all about–you guessed it–the suburbs.

I’m not gonna tell you too much about it, please just trust me, all of you.  Go to www.thewildernessdowntown.com.  It is going to tell you that it will not work if you are not running Google Chrome, which is true, but listen: download it.  There’s a real simple, easy link to download it right on the main page, and it only takes about 30 seconds, and you can get rid of it really easy later if you want.

Once you’re running Google Chrome, go back to the website.  It will ask you to enter the street address you grew up at.  Do it, precisely.  This doesn’t work like a charm for everyone, but it works really well more often than not.  Then, sit back and watch “We Used to Wait” unfold just for you.  I’m pretty sure, when it’s over, you’ll want to hear more Arcade Fire.

Videos taken on my recent trip home

This Blog Entry is Definitely Not It

Something you already know about me:  I used to drink every day and I was a miserable human being.  Pathetic, really, in a lot of ways.  This story, like many I’ve told, starts back then.  But this one is only half about me.

You might not like the me that is in this story very much.

I don’t know where I officially lived at the time, if in fact I officially lived anywhere.  I spent alot of time at my mom’s small Dillsburg apartment (which I’m convinced, to this day, is still set up exactly how she left it, just waiting for me to drop by, watch some DVDs, eat some leftover lasagna from the fridge), where I had a tiny bedroom in the back which I shared with a multitude of big plastic bins filled with Beanie Babies.  I liked this room.

When I was staying at my mom’s, I’d often be up all night, drunk as humanly possible, and addicted to my newest form of escape:  the internet.  I don’t need to tell you the kind of horrible, immoral things a depressed  horny alcoholic misanthrope can get up to on the internet, especially when the tool is rather new to him.  Sure, sometimes it was Pearl Jam message boards.  Other times, it was more than that.

One night, in an especially deep alcoholic stupor, I was perusing some very adult chat rooms.  I have no clear recollection of how my relationship with her formed–what we said, how we started talking.  No memory of it.  But I know that we somehow had a nice enough chat to exchange e-mails.  This was before cell phones, and giving out home phone numbers over the internet was a very big step.  So for a few weeks, we e-mailed, chatted when possible.  I even wrote a poem about her (quite horrible).  It was the lonely misanthrope’s version of falling in love.

And then we did exchange numbers.  She lived in Chicago, so we could never talk as long as we wanted.  We were always worried about the cost of the calls (remember, I don’t have a home at the time, so it’s always someone else’s phone.  I bought phone cards, and so did she).  I loved her voice.  It was sexy without being demur and unapproachable.  I loved the way she described herself physically–digital photography and sharing of such online was much less prevalant than it is now; I had not seen a photo of her, but I believed her descriptions and it sounded right down my alley.  She was an artist (a singer and lyricist), she was fun-loving, spontaneous, sharply sarcastic, very sexual, and she loved to drink.  I was actually waking up in the mornings with that “I’m in love” glow, despite the fact that I’d never seen this girl and she lived in freakin’ Chicago.

Sometimes I’d call her from work, assuming nobody would know who the hell called Chicago.  Nobody ever knew.

Eventually, we said enough is enough, and she came to see me.  She flew into Baltimore and I picked her up in my falling-apart 1983 Ford Escort that my mom helped me buy.  I’d never done something like pick someone up at an airport.  I felt very grown up.  I of course had no idea what I was doing and struggled to get to the correct terminal on time.  I remember I was sober when I first saw her.

My heart sank.  She was ugly.  Truly ugly.  I cannot sugar-coat it for you.  She had not really lied at all in her description of herself, she had simply manipulated things a bit, used the creative vagaries of language to her benefit.  Now, I do realize that I am not Tom Cruise, but back in those days, I was almost Breckin Meyer, which isn’t nothing.  She looked kinda like a turtle. I knew immediately that I was still going to sleep with her.  It would just have to wait until I was all the way drunk.

What followed was three days of severest debauchery.  A lot, a lot of drinking.  Oh, and driving, too.  We spent all night in a bar watching bands play and then I tried to drive us to my dad’s house in Newville, but I was so drunk I got on a highway going the wrong direction.  When I realized it, I backed up–on the highway–for a couple hundred yards and back down the on-ramp.  While blindly drunk.  I think about that often, at least once a month, anytime I am feeling sorry for myself.  After getting off that highway we somehow ended up back at my mom’s.  I don’t know how I was too drunk to remember how to get to the house I grew up in.

And sex.  Yes, lots of sex, when I was blind enough to bring myself to it.  But once there, it was fantastic.  Despite being obliterated I still remember moments of it, as it was so transcendant it created moments of clarity.

And during these three days of debauchery, I did not like this girl at all.  Not a single little bit.  But what was I to do?  She was there for three days no matter what.  I couldn’t very well tell her I didn’t like her!  After all, she paid for the plane ticket!  I thought I was just giving her what she wanted.

Eventually I got her on a plane back to Chicago, breathed a sigh of relief, and figured I’d go back to my life.

Which is what I did, for the most part.  I gradually eased off the e-mails, IMs, and chatting. Phone calls became virtually non-existent.  I had succesfully gotten rid of her.

Except I was still a drunken lonely misanthrope at night, and sometimes the temptation to reach out became too strong.  And so, sometime about a year after our initial visit, I began communication with her again.  And around this time, a friend of mine was also in online talks with a girl who lived in Chicago.  I have no idea how in the world we actually set this whole thing up, but suddenly this friend and me found ourselves in his car driving halfway across the country to Chicago.  We had booked a hotel for two nights.  The road trip itself was marvelous because this friend let me smoke AND drink in his car.  I got drunk the whole way to Chicago.  Pretty much heaven, to me then.

I don’t know what I expected to happen.  I don’t know if I expected her to be pretty now.  But she wasn’t.  We met her at a friend of hers’ apartment and had a few beers.  I thought she was obnoxious and unbearable and uglier than before.  I could not believe we had just driven to Chicago for this! (although a part of me still remembered the amazing sex, but the draw of that was simply not enough)

I pulled my friend aside and told him we had to escape.  He understood.  We made up a story about an emergency with the girl he had came to Chicago to see, and I told her I’d call her to set up a time to meet the next day.  We got the hell out of there and went to see my friends’ girl.  She was adorable and awesome and her fiance was there to keep my friend away.  Both dejected, we went to our hotel room, dumped a bag of ice and a 12-pack of beer in the sink, and got wasted.  The next morning I called her and told her some lie I can’t even remember.  We drove back to Pennsylvania that very day.  I’d never see her again.

Many years passed.  My alcoholism got worse and my life got even more depressing.  I rarely thought about her.  There were new women to worry about, right in front of me.  Then things got better.  I got sober and happy and started living a good life.  I started to think about her sometimes.  Not because I wanted to see her or because I missed her, but because I knew I had, in some way, perpetrated a wrong against her.  I wondered how she was doing.

MySpace became a big deal, and I caved and signed up.  She was one of the first people I looked for, but to no avail.  Every few months I’d look again, and nothing.  Then Facebook became a big deal, and I caved and signed up.  She was one of the first people I looked for, but to no avail.  Every few months I’d look again, and nothing.

Then, one day about a year ago, I had a friend request waiting for me when I got home, and it was from her.  I was so happy!  I think I just wanted to see that she’d turned out OK, had a family and a dog and all that good stuff.

Turned out, she’d turned out just like me–if I hadn’t quit drinking.  She was single, living on friend’s couches, drunk and high every night, working at a string of low-rent bars and clubs who’d take just about anyone, depressed and talking crazy.  She was, however, still living quite an exciting life–she was still in a band, though they seemd to change monthly, and the pictures she posted to Facebook looked like she was living a celebrity lifestyle.

Oddly, she seemed to have no concept that I had harmed her in any way.  She immediately sent me many Facebook messages that were so complimentary I almost laughed at them.  If I were to print them here, you’d think I made them up.  It is not exagerrating to say that no human being has ever admired me more than this woman did after we reconnected on Facebook.  And despite the self-destructive lifestyle she was living, I started to see that this woman had a soul that shone so brightly it was nearly blinding.  What was annoying 13 years ago was now endearing, what was unbearble back then seemed bold now.  Not that I fell in love with her, oh no.  But I did see her greatness.  And she knew just what to say to me about our romps in the sack all those years ago to get my engine in the red in no time.  Yes, she was good at that.

We started talking on the phone every couple weeks.  She was amazed to hear my story from the previous decade, as she had never even known me as an alcoholic (she somehow did not recognize it in me during our three day meeting years earlier), and I think my story sounded more like I was reading a novel to her than it being my own actual life.  Regardless, it clearly hit home for her.  I could tell she felt herself slipping away into madness.  Her illness was not just one of addiction; she seemed to be going truly crazy.  She would call in the middle of the night and ask me how I’d turned things around.  I never know what to say to people when they ask me something like that.  There are no easy answers, and I only know about being a drunk.  I know shit about being crazy.  But I’d do the best I could, trying to listen more than speak.  Sometimes she was desperate, other times quiet and close to happy.  Always at the end, she talked dirty to me.

Once, she went a few weeks with no calls, texts, or Facebook posts.  Finally she called me.  “I’ve been away in the mental hospital for awhile,” she said.  She’d tried to kill herself.  I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not; she was crazy but also a drama queen.  But I treated it as if it were real.  She seemed more ashamed of having been in the mental hospital than anything else.  We were on the phone for hours that night.  She kept talking about coming to visit me, but I kept brushing it off.  I knew that I had changed a lot over the years, but not enough for that.  In the end analysis, I’d simply use her again.  Best to keep it to phone calls and texts.

About 4 nights ago, I was laying on my couch here in Erie, going through my cell phone deleting numbers I don’t use anymore.  I came across hers and realized I hadn’t heard from her in months.  I texted her asking what was up.  When, by the next night, no reply had come, I got on Facebook and went to her page.  I was aghast.  Here is a sampling—copy and pasted—of some of the posts on her wall:

“There’s no one in town I know You gave us some place to go.I never said thank you for that.I thought I might get one more chance.What would you think of me now,so lucky, so strong, so proud?”

 

“I am so sorry that you never got to meet Gabrielle. Who would have thought that Dave (the man you carded) would end up my husband and I would have a family with. I think about you lots.”

 

“Just logged on to Facebook and it “suggested” I re-connect with you. Oh how I wish I could. Love you — missing you more than you’ll ever know.”

 

So.  She’s dead.  It happened in May.  I messaged a few of her friends and it seems details are sparse.  All we know is that it “happened at her family’s home”.  It had to have been suicide.  If I know her–and I think I do, now–it was suicide.

I’m not extremely broken up about it.  I feel weird.  I only met her twice, in person, many years ago.  I don’t feel a void in my life where she once resided.  But, again—I feel weird.  There is no happy ending here, and I have no great wisdom to impart.  She’s dead, and I feel like I still owe her something.  And this blog entry is definitely not it.

Erie Journal, 5/2

I go to Erie tomorrow for two days to find an apartment.  This is my first time actually being there!  I’d have loved to post more leading up to this event, but as you may know, my freaking computer died essentially the same exact day I was about to start searching for apartments online.  Now, when you are moving as far away as I am, the searching must be done almost entirely online.  It’s not like I can just go out and buy an Erie newspaper.  Anyway, I am really really crunched for time, and I can’t wait to blog more to tell you just how difficult my last week was (if by difficult, I mean how I had very little free time while living an amazing life).  Anyway, I’m off to Erie tomorrow through Tuesday and should have a significant amount to report come Wednesday evening.

Strange side-effect of the social media age:  it is way too easy—all alone at one AM— for me to watch videos of my ex-girlfriends playing with their infants while their husbands whom I loathe ask for directions from the front seat of their SUV.