The Longbox Project is a site that asks folks to share memories tied to specific issues in their comic book collections. This technically means "Amazing Spider-Man #258 makes me think of...", but it's just as likely to mean "For 25 years I've carried some low-level guilt around about the time I stole something from my big brother, and I finally have an excuse to confess it."
You don't have to be a writer or a writer-about-comics to take part. It's not a comics criticism site so much as a memory project, and the posts tend to be conversational and honest. I wrote a new one that's up today called I Own This about the fairly traumatic period of my life when I moved from Los Angeles to Vermont to Baltimore in the span of 7 months.
What I said about it on Facebook, and what I wrote down on a legal pad as soon as I'd written the first draft of this piece, is "Sometimes you write something and say it's embarrassing because of how cool it makes you look and you want to seem humble. Sometimes you say it's embarrassing because it reveals the kind of asshole you can be. This is the second kind."
So, it feels very revealing to share this story with my friends and the internet-at-large. Kate and I sat on the couch last night before I officially submitted it so she could read and we could talk about it before I showed it to the world. I'd told Kate parts of the story before, but not the version that's presented there. And there are other parts that aren't in the Longbox version (sorry gang, I was already over the word count, but I'm happy to go on about it in person), and I told Kate those parts too.
I was nervous she'd think less of me. But what she said was, "I don't think learning more could make me think less."
So if you like comics, gossip, cross-country moves, Vermont, or confessionals, go read I Own This on the Longbox Project. I wrote it!
Showing posts with label things that happened. Show all posts
Showing posts with label things that happened. Show all posts
Monday, April 22, 2013
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
I went running today.
For the second time since I've lived in Baltimore. For the first time, probably, since the summer.
I ran for: 41 minutes and 42 seconds. I traveled a distance of 2.92 miles. I burned 356 calories. My average pace was 14'15", but I'm not sure what that means. Per minute? That can't be right.
(I know these things because my robot phone told me so.)
(My robot phone also shows me a map of the route I ran, colored green where I ran the fastest and colored red where I stopped to walk.)
I never once stopped to lean against a lamp post or a tree.
(This is untrue. I stopped once to wait for a crosswalk sign, and I was kind of mad when it switched to walk before I was ready. That was my first break, and when I was stopped I had to swallow once to keep myself from throwing up. I stopped a second time to put my hand on a tree and lean over and breathe.)
I listened to a WTF podcast as I ran. It was the episode with Donald Glover. After I got home I remembered that the last time I ran it was the summer, and I'd listened to a WTF podcast with Dan Harmon. Donald Glover is Troy on Community and Dan Harmon is the creator of Community. I didn't do this on purpose, except that when I looked at the list of recent WTF guests Donald Glover was the only one who looked interesting who wasn't Russell Brand.
(I really like Russell Brand. Mostly from his talk show appearances, where he comes across as being very charming and funny. I also really liked Arthur. I went to see it by myself at the movies after one of the times Kari moved out of our house in Vermont. When (spoiler alert!) Hobson died, it made me cry. I re-watched Arthur on HBO one and a half times last week and when (spoiler alert!) Hobson died, I felt a gravity in my guts and I teared up a little bit.)
I went running once in Vermont when the snows were heavy. I ran on the bike trail and had to kick my knees up high and leap for the footprints of whoever went running before me. The footprints only went one direction, so on my way back I had to kick my knees up high and leap for my own footprints.
I bought new pants to run in that have a little zipper and pocket right over the butt where I can put a housekey. This removes a lot of stress from my run. I still have to carry my phone, because I haven't bought a new arm-strap-thing and I don't know where my old one has disappeared to. I didn't wear my glasses and once I thought there was a fashionable young lady walking my way as I was running and I thought I was going to impress her with my athleticism, but as we passed I realized it was actually a private school boy. I bet I impressed him with my casual friendliness.
I'd like to go out running for about the same period of time (or less), but cover 5 miles. I don't know the best routes to take around Hampden. Some streets in Baltimore don't make me feel nervous at all, and some do, and sometimes I feel both ways about the same streets at different times. Sometimes when I run down streets where I don't feel nervous about crime I feel nervous about people thinking I'm dumb to be running, or assuming I won't go running again after this run because my running clothes are new and my belly is not that of a regular runner's. But today I got mud on the legs of my running pants, and I'm not even going to wash them yet. So what do you think of that?
I ran for: 41 minutes and 42 seconds. I traveled a distance of 2.92 miles. I burned 356 calories. My average pace was 14'15", but I'm not sure what that means. Per minute? That can't be right.
(I know these things because my robot phone told me so.)
(My robot phone also shows me a map of the route I ran, colored green where I ran the fastest and colored red where I stopped to walk.)
I never once stopped to lean against a lamp post or a tree.
(This is untrue. I stopped once to wait for a crosswalk sign, and I was kind of mad when it switched to walk before I was ready. That was my first break, and when I was stopped I had to swallow once to keep myself from throwing up. I stopped a second time to put my hand on a tree and lean over and breathe.)
I listened to a WTF podcast as I ran. It was the episode with Donald Glover. After I got home I remembered that the last time I ran it was the summer, and I'd listened to a WTF podcast with Dan Harmon. Donald Glover is Troy on Community and Dan Harmon is the creator of Community. I didn't do this on purpose, except that when I looked at the list of recent WTF guests Donald Glover was the only one who looked interesting who wasn't Russell Brand.
(I really like Russell Brand. Mostly from his talk show appearances, where he comes across as being very charming and funny. I also really liked Arthur. I went to see it by myself at the movies after one of the times Kari moved out of our house in Vermont. When (spoiler alert!) Hobson died, it made me cry. I re-watched Arthur on HBO one and a half times last week and when (spoiler alert!) Hobson died, I felt a gravity in my guts and I teared up a little bit.)
I went running once in Vermont when the snows were heavy. I ran on the bike trail and had to kick my knees up high and leap for the footprints of whoever went running before me. The footprints only went one direction, so on my way back I had to kick my knees up high and leap for my own footprints.
I bought new pants to run in that have a little zipper and pocket right over the butt where I can put a housekey. This removes a lot of stress from my run. I still have to carry my phone, because I haven't bought a new arm-strap-thing and I don't know where my old one has disappeared to. I didn't wear my glasses and once I thought there was a fashionable young lady walking my way as I was running and I thought I was going to impress her with my athleticism, but as we passed I realized it was actually a private school boy. I bet I impressed him with my casual friendliness.
I'd like to go out running for about the same period of time (or less), but cover 5 miles. I don't know the best routes to take around Hampden. Some streets in Baltimore don't make me feel nervous at all, and some do, and sometimes I feel both ways about the same streets at different times. Sometimes when I run down streets where I don't feel nervous about crime I feel nervous about people thinking I'm dumb to be running, or assuming I won't go running again after this run because my running clothes are new and my belly is not that of a regular runner's. But today I got mud on the legs of my running pants, and I'm not even going to wash them yet. So what do you think of that?
Monday, January 16, 2012
Emoticon, Emoticon, Emoticon
Chris Hunt is my uncle, and he wrote a book. It's called My Life with the Scorpion Kitten and it's about his life over the five-year period he spent with Mathias, a cat he adopted with his wife, my mom's sister, my aunt Tina.
Early in kitten-hood Mathias got a severe eye infection that cost him an eye, and left him blind in the eye he still had. He also had the feline leukemia virus, so I'll tell you straight up, dudes -- the book can carry the sadness at times. But from my personal perspective, what I found most interesting was the insight it offered into my family and some of the people in it.
The book covers the 5 years of Mathias's life, from 2003 to 2008. I lived in Chicago when it started and was just starting to wade back into the life of an undergrad. I started college right out of high school (CLASS OF 97 RULES), but after two years of bopping through the University of Cincinnati, I gradually dropped out of all of my classes. My last semester at UC had basically been a money pit, where my body knew I had dropped out (sleeping til 2pm or so) long before my brain had accepted it (obviously, blowing off my English Lit classes was simply the first the step toward changing my major to anthropology). But in 2003 I was attending classes at Columbia College Chicago as a Fiction Writing major. By the spring of 2008 I had earned my BA, left Chicago, and was wrapping up my MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Which is to say -- it was an eventful time in my life and I probably wasn't paying the best attention to family goings-on in Ohio. So in a lot of ways reading Chris's book was like reading one of those novels that gives a parallel view to stories you think you know well.
My grandmother passed away on Christmas Eve of 2004, and the way Chris writes about that night is different from the way I remember it. Chris is probably right -- I'm just surprised that I'd filled in so many details so incorrectly. I remembered our entire family being at Chris & Tina's that night -- my folks, my brother's family, my mom's older brother John and all of his kids. Grandma Mathews had been sick for a long time, and she'd been moved from hospice to Chris and Tina's, and she passed away while we were all there in the house. It was a strange, significant, sad Christmas. But Chris writes that John and his kids weren't there at all, and that John only came after Grandma had passed. I think that's probably true, but in my memory I'd created an entirely different sequence of events. Without reading Chris's book, I never would have entertained the thought I was wrong.
Early in kitten-hood Mathias got a severe eye infection that cost him an eye, and left him blind in the eye he still had. He also had the feline leukemia virus, so I'll tell you straight up, dudes -- the book can carry the sadness at times. But from my personal perspective, what I found most interesting was the insight it offered into my family and some of the people in it.
The book covers the 5 years of Mathias's life, from 2003 to 2008. I lived in Chicago when it started and was just starting to wade back into the life of an undergrad. I started college right out of high school (CLASS OF 97 RULES), but after two years of bopping through the University of Cincinnati, I gradually dropped out of all of my classes. My last semester at UC had basically been a money pit, where my body knew I had dropped out (sleeping til 2pm or so) long before my brain had accepted it (obviously, blowing off my English Lit classes was simply the first the step toward changing my major to anthropology). But in 2003 I was attending classes at Columbia College Chicago as a Fiction Writing major. By the spring of 2008 I had earned my BA, left Chicago, and was wrapping up my MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Which is to say -- it was an eventful time in my life and I probably wasn't paying the best attention to family goings-on in Ohio. So in a lot of ways reading Chris's book was like reading one of those novels that gives a parallel view to stories you think you know well.
My grandmother passed away on Christmas Eve of 2004, and the way Chris writes about that night is different from the way I remember it. Chris is probably right -- I'm just surprised that I'd filled in so many details so incorrectly. I remembered our entire family being at Chris & Tina's that night -- my folks, my brother's family, my mom's older brother John and all of his kids. Grandma Mathews had been sick for a long time, and she'd been moved from hospice to Chris and Tina's, and she passed away while we were all there in the house. It was a strange, significant, sad Christmas. But Chris writes that John and his kids weren't there at all, and that John only came after Grandma had passed. I think that's probably true, but in my memory I'd created an entirely different sequence of events. Without reading Chris's book, I never would have entertained the thought I was wrong.
Mathias, the Scorpion Kitten in question.
Chris's book has rippled quietly through the family, if it's even fair to say that much. I've been writing my novel for -- yikes dudes -- almost ten years now. I'm certainly near the end, but it's more than a little humbling for Chris's book to start off by saying that he's writing the first words in 2008, and for it to include a section in which he reads my novel-in-progress, and wondering when the end will come. All of which is to say, I've known for a while he was writing a memoir of his life with Mathias, but it was still a surprise when my mom called one day to say that it was available on Amazon. She sounded kind of excited, but not in a pleasing way. I think it's fair to say that my family doesn't always talk to each other easily about -- you know -- feelings. It's always been that way, and it's always felt uncomfortable (at best) or even like an act of great contrary will to talk to each other about things that we feel, or about things that someone else feels. Chris married into our family, but I get the feeling that this could be true of his family life too. So for him to write and publish a book that is almost entirely a journey through his inner life, examining what he feels and why, and how he feels about others, is, I think, causing some turmoil around the Jent/Mathews axis.
I don't think it's bad or wrong of him to do this. But my mom was nervous about the book, I think Aunt Tina is too. My writing about him writing about it is probably a cause for tense nerves too, but what I read in Chris's book is an attempt to have a conversation with his friends and family about things that are hard to talk about. The bulk of the book is about Mathias and the other cats Chris & Tina have lived with and cared for, but an undercurrent of it is their attempts -- or, Chris's wishes -- to have children. They never did, and in the book's afterword he simply states that "We also learned that we are unable to have children." I feel like that's what the book is really about -- much of it is concerned with the passage of time, with family and friends who have passed on. The cats Chris and Tina adopt are loved by them, but people live a lot longer than cats. They are born and live and pass on while people are still around. Children are meant to survive their parents, to carry on and to be part of a continuity of family and love. Cats are loved -- I have one of my own -- but they're not comparable to children or what children represent. They just can't be. When I asked my mom if she'd ever talked to Tina about their desire or ability to have kids, she said she'd never asked. She didn't think it was her business.
And I guess that's kind of true? But the truth of that statement is getting in the way of a deeper kind of connection that I think everyone in my family lacks, yet desires very much. I was home for a week and half this Christmas, and it was good to be home, but it was a tense time. The specific reason is difficult to pinpoint. But it seems like everyone walks on spiderwebs -- not putting too much pressure on any specific place, or else the whole thing might fall apart. We joke with each other and watch TV together or Christmas shop together, but it's hard to have a conversation that runs deeper than surface concerns.
My dad and my brother in particular are having trouble connecting, because when they talk they have a hard time getting beyond "here are the ways you've wronged me." Both have strong points of view, and their relationship goes back 40 years, you know? Chris writes in his book about times he's been angry with people in our family, or his mother, but in a way that I think is remarkable healthy and honest. I hope it's not something that causes a rift or a fight, and I don't think he ever says anything that anyone should be offended by. But the act of communication can be offensive to some -- or, at least, it is alien in a way that causes gut-level offense, due to its strangeness. I think the best thing that could happen to my brother and my dad is for them to get caught in a log cabin during a snowstorm.
Or, you know when Spider-Man and J. Jonah Jameson used to get handcuffed to a bomb together and they learn to set aside their differences and work together? Something like that could work.
They only need to talk, but they need to talk for a long time. Like when you're having a fight with your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife, and the talk goes over peaks and valleys that are good, then bad, then good again, and you wind up in a place where you're exhausted, but emotionally vulnerable, and saying things that are honest and straightforward and hopefully helpful to everyone.
Well. I've definitely gotten off track here, and the entirety of this post falls under the realm of Things We Don't Talk About in Public, but surely one of the things that's kept me from blogging ever since I read Chris's book is that I knew in order to write about it I'd have to write about things my family doesn't like to talk about. Chris's book is really good and I'm really proud of him for writing it and putting it out in the world. And it could be that saying it here is better than not saying it at all?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Interlude 2
There was something I wanted to share with you, but it doesn't seem like I really can. (But then that's what this blog has become, yeah?) It would seem like I was being petty, or that I felt things that I really didn't, or that I didn't feel things that I really did.
I won't quote it exactly, since that's not the sort of thing I believe in tonight. But it's a sentiment expressed in Michael Ondaatje's DIVISADERDO: "Romance is romance, and not a promise of permanence."
And I guess that's true. I guess objectively I believe that. And I guess (all the same) that you (once again, as always, I) never really think it will happen to (me).
I won't quote it exactly, since that's not the sort of thing I believe in tonight. But it's a sentiment expressed in Michael Ondaatje's DIVISADERDO: "Romance is romance, and not a promise of permanence."
And I guess that's true. I guess objectively I believe that. And I guess (all the same) that you (once again, as always, I) never really think it will happen to (me).
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Dear, part two
Back to the car for a minute...
One of the things BSG left me with was this idea of species memory. SPOILER ALERT if you're thinking of watching the show, but the ending basically tells us that we have neckties and democracy and a legal system because, 150,000 years ago the human race as WE know it was born from a human/cylon hybrid baby.
(Look: it's a good show.)
And I'm not so much talking about "specie memory" as a scientific true fact -- I'm more interested in its neatosity factor, its narrative potential, and the way it makes my brain tingle. Lord knows I think enough about spaceships and dinosaurs as I walk around the world, but I haven't really thought about -- you know -- cavemen very much. As individuals with day to to day dramas and epic troubles. And surely there were wars, there were loves, there dramas among people who were literally the first humans (or human-like) on Earth. They had art, and the ability to perceive the real world through art. And that's enough for me to believe that they qualify souls worthy of consideration from those of us left today. We've had language for something like 40,000 years, but we've had history for, what, 5,000 years? There have been tools for about two and a half million years, and those are just the ones that we've found.
And when I think about human history (or human pre-history) in that vastness of time, my first impulse is to feel sad for all the names we don't know anymore, the sagas -- real or imagined or metaphorical -- that are lost. But that's a selfish way to think of it, yeah? They are still things that happened, whether I know about them or not. There's plenty of history that happened, and was written down, that I don't know simply because I haven't read the right books. And I don't get sad about that. So...
I dunno, a lot of this feels like college-age navel gazing. But I can imagine you nodding and smiling as I talk this out, happy to read what's going on in my head, happy to watch me work it out and articulate it. And that's not embarrassing at all.
My second impulse is to be so very pleased that it happened at all, to remember that there's so much happening right now that's being experience by those there to experience it. Something Dr. Baltar says near the middle of season four jumps out at me: "I love living. I really do. I really, really love living." I like it too.
While I was driving I also saw something that caused another piece of my novel to click into place, which is a much appreciated gift, and really the whole reason I wanted to be alone in a car for ten hours in the first place. It was grafitti on an overpass, the kind you have to hang upside down from the top to write (or at least, that's how I imagine it has to be written), and it was simple, with no embellishing flourishes and no punctuation, and it said I LOVE YOU AMY and I thought, well damn right you do.
Ethan is a junior whose girlfriend Amy has dumped him. She's reconnected with a middle school love she mostly talks to on the phone and sits in food courts with, and Ethan's been trying to sort out how to win her back. It's a relationship between supporting characters, and it's something I've known was going to happen all along, but I was never quite sure how much of it was going to go on the page. There are plenty of things I'm secretly proud of myself for with regard to the book, and one of them is the rather involved and evolving lives the supporting characters have that Berto never even finds out about, since he's so stuck in his own head. But Ethan and Amy's relationship troubles are something I wanted him to encounter, but I didn't really have a sense for how they would wrap up, or what role Berto might have in their conclusion. But seeing that simple spraypainted line, I thought of my ol' pal Adrian, who went on a spraypainting spree after his high school girlfriend broke up with him. He sprayed "KLF" over a Pepsi sign on 131 going toward Day Heights, and I remember -- we were just out of high school at the time, so I was 18 or 19 -- driving back to Clifton from visiting my folks and feeling so Tall whenever I saw those three letters over that rusty old Pepsi sign. Someone I knew had changed the landscape of familiar ground, even in a very small way, and I liked that.
So, "I Love You Amy." I immediately thought of our man Berto being driven in a car (he's a lad of fifteen), or maybe out riding his bike (he hasn't yet, but I imagine he's the sort who would like to range far on two wheels), and discovering a message written to someone he knows (Amy is his cousin, remember?), by someone else he knows, and I imagine it opening up entire rooms in his brain he'd never even known were there. I imagine Berto buying his own can of spray paint and spraying I Love You Amy on the linoleum floors of his high school, not directly to help Ethan, but because he has the power to do it. He can alter his world very easily and change the way people walk on the floor beneath their feet.
They probably won't think to write it down, and somehow that floor will be torn up or the school will fall down around it, and maybe by then no one will remember or no one will care that a boy once loved a girl named Amy and wanted her to know it, but then -- it wasn't written for posterity, was it? That's not really what we think about when we write. We have a message we want to impart to another person in the world, so we write them a letter or a statement or a blog.
I don't know what Amy will make of it yet, but that's okay. I also imagine the feeling Ethan's gut having written it down in the first place (I know that feeling well, and can feel a little bit of it now). Sometimes it's about killing the bull, but sometimes it's just about drawing the bull on the wall.
One of the things BSG left me with was this idea of species memory. SPOILER ALERT if you're thinking of watching the show, but the ending basically tells us that we have neckties and democracy and a legal system because, 150,000 years ago the human race as WE know it was born from a human/cylon hybrid baby.
(Look: it's a good show.)
And I'm not so much talking about "specie memory" as a scientific true fact -- I'm more interested in its neatosity factor, its narrative potential, and the way it makes my brain tingle. Lord knows I think enough about spaceships and dinosaurs as I walk around the world, but I haven't really thought about -- you know -- cavemen very much. As individuals with day to to day dramas and epic troubles. And surely there were wars, there were loves, there dramas among people who were literally the first humans (or human-like) on Earth. They had art, and the ability to perceive the real world through art. And that's enough for me to believe that they qualify souls worthy of consideration from those of us left today. We've had language for something like 40,000 years, but we've had history for, what, 5,000 years? There have been tools for about two and a half million years, and those are just the ones that we've found.
And when I think about human history (or human pre-history) in that vastness of time, my first impulse is to feel sad for all the names we don't know anymore, the sagas -- real or imagined or metaphorical -- that are lost. But that's a selfish way to think of it, yeah? They are still things that happened, whether I know about them or not. There's plenty of history that happened, and was written down, that I don't know simply because I haven't read the right books. And I don't get sad about that. So...
I dunno, a lot of this feels like college-age navel gazing. But I can imagine you nodding and smiling as I talk this out, happy to read what's going on in my head, happy to watch me work it out and articulate it. And that's not embarrassing at all.
My second impulse is to be so very pleased that it happened at all, to remember that there's so much happening right now that's being experience by those there to experience it. Something Dr. Baltar says near the middle of season four jumps out at me: "I love living. I really do. I really, really love living." I like it too.
While I was driving I also saw something that caused another piece of my novel to click into place, which is a much appreciated gift, and really the whole reason I wanted to be alone in a car for ten hours in the first place. It was grafitti on an overpass, the kind you have to hang upside down from the top to write (or at least, that's how I imagine it has to be written), and it was simple, with no embellishing flourishes and no punctuation, and it said I LOVE YOU AMY and I thought, well damn right you do.
Ethan is a junior whose girlfriend Amy has dumped him. She's reconnected with a middle school love she mostly talks to on the phone and sits in food courts with, and Ethan's been trying to sort out how to win her back. It's a relationship between supporting characters, and it's something I've known was going to happen all along, but I was never quite sure how much of it was going to go on the page. There are plenty of things I'm secretly proud of myself for with regard to the book, and one of them is the rather involved and evolving lives the supporting characters have that Berto never even finds out about, since he's so stuck in his own head. But Ethan and Amy's relationship troubles are something I wanted him to encounter, but I didn't really have a sense for how they would wrap up, or what role Berto might have in their conclusion. But seeing that simple spraypainted line, I thought of my ol' pal Adrian, who went on a spraypainting spree after his high school girlfriend broke up with him. He sprayed "KLF" over a Pepsi sign on 131 going toward Day Heights, and I remember -- we were just out of high school at the time, so I was 18 or 19 -- driving back to Clifton from visiting my folks and feeling so Tall whenever I saw those three letters over that rusty old Pepsi sign. Someone I knew had changed the landscape of familiar ground, even in a very small way, and I liked that.
So, "I Love You Amy." I immediately thought of our man Berto being driven in a car (he's a lad of fifteen), or maybe out riding his bike (he hasn't yet, but I imagine he's the sort who would like to range far on two wheels), and discovering a message written to someone he knows (Amy is his cousin, remember?), by someone else he knows, and I imagine it opening up entire rooms in his brain he'd never even known were there. I imagine Berto buying his own can of spray paint and spraying I Love You Amy on the linoleum floors of his high school, not directly to help Ethan, but because he has the power to do it. He can alter his world very easily and change the way people walk on the floor beneath their feet.
They probably won't think to write it down, and somehow that floor will be torn up or the school will fall down around it, and maybe by then no one will remember or no one will care that a boy once loved a girl named Amy and wanted her to know it, but then -- it wasn't written for posterity, was it? That's not really what we think about when we write. We have a message we want to impart to another person in the world, so we write them a letter or a statement or a blog.
I don't know what Amy will make of it yet, but that's okay. I also imagine the feeling Ethan's gut having written it down in the first place (I know that feeling well, and can feel a little bit of it now). Sometimes it's about killing the bull, but sometimes it's just about drawing the bull on the wall.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Dear __________
Nerd Alert: over the course of the ten hour drive to Baltimore, I spent most of my time thinking about Battlestar Galactica. I won't bore you with why you should have been watching BSG if you weren't, because this isn't really a story about a TV show. But I watched the last episode of the show, went to bed, woke up early and got in a car headed east. I had a little Cylon on the dashboard of my rental car, and I was taking special pains to be nice to him. I'm trying to break the old cycle, right?
I've never driven east before. The mountains (the hills?) were sloping and broad. I like them in retrospect, but I remember wanting to get out of West Virginia. It felt good to arrive in Baltimore, though the directions from Google Maps dropped me off the highway farther west than I might have liked. I made promises to myself not to think (or at least not to talk) about the Wire in the lead up to my trip, but it was hard not to when I got off of 70. I've been in rough neighborhoods before -- I've lived in rough neighborhoods before -- but this was honest to goodness block after block of buildings that were boarded up, but not abandoned. One two separate occasions I wondered why dudes were trying to hail my car like it was a cab, before realizing they were simply offering me a unique business opportunity, much like D'Angelo or Poot. I looked straight ahead at stop lights and turned down my Morrissey cd, lest the rental car stereo be more powerful than I might realize.
Adam called while I was following the internet's labyrinthine directions to their apartment, and I tried to be clever as I a) told him I was nearly there, and b) realized his call had instantly distracted me from an important split in the road I was traveling. So I tried to follow my spider-sense out of the Wire's establishing shots and the apartment of my friends, and as you may have already guessed, I eventually made it there safely. I picked up Adam and Kate Lynn, changed my shirt, ate a veggie burger, and we went to see a Talking Heads cover band.
Adam brought up seeing the Psycho Killers (natch) when we were emailing about trip specifics, and I took a moment before responding, and then decided not to be a dick about it. On the one hand: a cover band? On the other hand: Talking Heads! As I yelled to KL during their set, it's not like I'm going to get to see the Talking Heads perform in a club in Baltimore anytime soon ... but after about two and a half songs I was ready to not be listening to a cover band anymore. On the plus side: their David Byrne looks like the son of Dave Matthews and Jon Favreau, and that was kind of awesome.
One of the many TV shows I have made up and secretly journaled about is about a rock band, and it was fun to watch the band on stage and imagine the relationships at play. The singer/guitarist was obviously the most interested in what was going on ... one of the two backup singers got bored and left after the first song turned into a ten minute jam session ... the bass player never looked at anything but where the walls met the ceiling ... the drummer would continually get frustrated and try to catch the singer's eye so he could wrap up the song. The keyboardist looked 17 and overjoyed to be playing Talking Heads songs. Adam also told me the drummer had had a thing for Adam's high school girlfriend when she went off to college, leaving Adam at home for his senior year. He would continually update Adam that he was "looking out for her" at school. Secret failures and embarrassments ... and the feeling I wasn't getting the whole story. I liked that.
The night may have ended with an episode of Flight of the Conchords, and then a phone call to KM. I don't entirely remember what happened after the band though. I met a lot of Adam's high school chums but I couldn't hear anything they said to me. I was hoping they would ask what I did for a living, because my prepared response was "street juggler." And then, in case they asked me to juggle something, I would say, "Look, I don't ask you to suck my dick on YOUR day off, do I?"
(This is not something I would have actually said; rather, it was a thing I told Adam the next day after seeing an ACTUAL street juggler, and it made us laugh, and I put it here so I don't forget it.)
Next time: The Po' House, crabs, clawed tour guides.
I've never driven east before. The mountains (the hills?) were sloping and broad. I like them in retrospect, but I remember wanting to get out of West Virginia. It felt good to arrive in Baltimore, though the directions from Google Maps dropped me off the highway farther west than I might have liked. I made promises to myself not to think (or at least not to talk) about the Wire in the lead up to my trip, but it was hard not to when I got off of 70. I've been in rough neighborhoods before -- I've lived in rough neighborhoods before -- but this was honest to goodness block after block of buildings that were boarded up, but not abandoned. One two separate occasions I wondered why dudes were trying to hail my car like it was a cab, before realizing they were simply offering me a unique business opportunity, much like D'Angelo or Poot. I looked straight ahead at stop lights and turned down my Morrissey cd, lest the rental car stereo be more powerful than I might realize.
Adam called while I was following the internet's labyrinthine directions to their apartment, and I tried to be clever as I a) told him I was nearly there, and b) realized his call had instantly distracted me from an important split in the road I was traveling. So I tried to follow my spider-sense out of the Wire's establishing shots and the apartment of my friends, and as you may have already guessed, I eventually made it there safely. I picked up Adam and Kate Lynn, changed my shirt, ate a veggie burger, and we went to see a Talking Heads cover band.
Adam brought up seeing the Psycho Killers (natch) when we were emailing about trip specifics, and I took a moment before responding, and then decided not to be a dick about it. On the one hand: a cover band? On the other hand: Talking Heads! As I yelled to KL during their set, it's not like I'm going to get to see the Talking Heads perform in a club in Baltimore anytime soon ... but after about two and a half songs I was ready to not be listening to a cover band anymore. On the plus side: their David Byrne looks like the son of Dave Matthews and Jon Favreau, and that was kind of awesome.
One of the many TV shows I have made up and secretly journaled about is about a rock band, and it was fun to watch the band on stage and imagine the relationships at play. The singer/guitarist was obviously the most interested in what was going on ... one of the two backup singers got bored and left after the first song turned into a ten minute jam session ... the bass player never looked at anything but where the walls met the ceiling ... the drummer would continually get frustrated and try to catch the singer's eye so he could wrap up the song. The keyboardist looked 17 and overjoyed to be playing Talking Heads songs. Adam also told me the drummer had had a thing for Adam's high school girlfriend when she went off to college, leaving Adam at home for his senior year. He would continually update Adam that he was "looking out for her" at school. Secret failures and embarrassments ... and the feeling I wasn't getting the whole story. I liked that.
The night may have ended with an episode of Flight of the Conchords, and then a phone call to KM. I don't entirely remember what happened after the band though. I met a lot of Adam's high school chums but I couldn't hear anything they said to me. I was hoping they would ask what I did for a living, because my prepared response was "street juggler." And then, in case they asked me to juggle something, I would say, "Look, I don't ask you to suck my dick on YOUR day off, do I?"
(This is not something I would have actually said; rather, it was a thing I told Adam the next day after seeing an ACTUAL street juggler, and it made us laugh, and I put it here so I don't forget it.)
Next time: The Po' House, crabs, clawed tour guides.
Friday, August 15, 2008
8-14-08
And I mean, such a strange day.
I woke up with SJ, my back hurting, but grateful to be there with her on her floor, hoping to hold her a little longer. She'd turn her back to me and I'd curl behind her, or I'd lay on my back and she'd rest her head on my chest. Finally she said, after several false starts and faux awakenings, "I think I'm up."
"What?"
"I think I'm awake."
We laid there a little bit longer, feeling the skin of the other against our own. I smelled her hair, I touched my fingers to the spot above her hip -- to the place below her breast -- both where her curves were about to begin, or end, depending on which direction you were going. But then we did, we got up, I went for breakfast and helped her put things away once I came back. "You've been really supportive of me, these last days," is one of the last things she said to me, her face to mine.
I ended the night with my friends of the past two years. Adam and Kate Lynn, Ryan and Ben. Folks I haven't hardly seen this summer -- all of us scattered and looking for our own ways ahead. We told stories. Kate Lynn's been in Chicago, then Baltimore and Washington with Adam, Ryan in Italy, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Ben drawing comics in San Jose, or seeing Amy at Zine Fest and ComicCon. It was good to have them together again. I loved having them together again. Adam says I should move to Baltimore, we'll start a Rock Band rock band, he'll introduce me to nice, single, Jewish girls. "They put out," he says.
"That's all I ask," I tell him.
I hugged him at least three times tonight, not sure when I'll see him again. It's downright cute how affectionate we are of each other. I hope he can tell. Kate Lynn wants to come to dinner tomorrow, which I like, and she offered to help me move. I like that too. I felt awfully fond of her tonight too, and she's got biceps I wouldn't turn down when there are things to lift. Or any other situation.
I couldn't stop talking about the Olympian softball players -- no sleeves, muscles as they pitched 113km/hr balls, nails painted red.
"That's what does it for your," Kate Lynn says, "that mix of strength and femininity."
"That's definitely what does it for me."
"That's a good writerly detail," she says.
I think about SJ's orange fingernails, newly painted, greasy and wet from a chicken we've torn apart on a lunchtime date at the farmer's market on the Bay. It is a good writerly detail.
"You're right," I say. And I resist the temptation to show off our photobooth pictures again. I want to keep them private a little bit longer.
I woke up with SJ, my back hurting, but grateful to be there with her on her floor, hoping to hold her a little longer. She'd turn her back to me and I'd curl behind her, or I'd lay on my back and she'd rest her head on my chest. Finally she said, after several false starts and faux awakenings, "I think I'm up."
"What?"
"I think I'm awake."
We laid there a little bit longer, feeling the skin of the other against our own. I smelled her hair, I touched my fingers to the spot above her hip -- to the place below her breast -- both where her curves were about to begin, or end, depending on which direction you were going. But then we did, we got up, I went for breakfast and helped her put things away once I came back. "You've been really supportive of me, these last days," is one of the last things she said to me, her face to mine.
I ended the night with my friends of the past two years. Adam and Kate Lynn, Ryan and Ben. Folks I haven't hardly seen this summer -- all of us scattered and looking for our own ways ahead. We told stories. Kate Lynn's been in Chicago, then Baltimore and Washington with Adam, Ryan in Italy, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Ben drawing comics in San Jose, or seeing Amy at Zine Fest and ComicCon. It was good to have them together again. I loved having them together again. Adam says I should move to Baltimore, we'll start a Rock Band rock band, he'll introduce me to nice, single, Jewish girls. "They put out," he says.
"That's all I ask," I tell him.
I hugged him at least three times tonight, not sure when I'll see him again. It's downright cute how affectionate we are of each other. I hope he can tell. Kate Lynn wants to come to dinner tomorrow, which I like, and she offered to help me move. I like that too. I felt awfully fond of her tonight too, and she's got biceps I wouldn't turn down when there are things to lift. Or any other situation.
I couldn't stop talking about the Olympian softball players -- no sleeves, muscles as they pitched 113km/hr balls, nails painted red.
"That's what does it for your," Kate Lynn says, "that mix of strength and femininity."
"That's definitely what does it for me."
"That's a good writerly detail," she says.
I think about SJ's orange fingernails, newly painted, greasy and wet from a chicken we've torn apart on a lunchtime date at the farmer's market on the Bay. It is a good writerly detail.
"You're right," I say. And I resist the temptation to show off our photobooth pictures again. I want to keep them private a little bit longer.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Dateline: Awesome
Unemployed Creepo wages one-man war on drugs ...
'They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.'
... until an intrepid small-town reporter checks his name on Google or something, and discovers there's no such thing as a “multijurisdictional task force” sending federal drug agents to Missouri to fight meth.
found via BoingBoing.
'They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.'
... until an intrepid small-town reporter checks his name on Google or something, and discovers there's no such thing as a “multijurisdictional task force” sending federal drug agents to Missouri to fight meth.
found via BoingBoing.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Auto-mytho-biography
-Age 3: Like early man, I have trouble telling the difference between waking life and dreams. My Aunt Sheryl, my dad’s step-sister, only a few years older than my big brother Dave, passes away but her spirit is kept safe, entombed in a bulbous device of yellow plastic, with a red knob and many pipes. It comes to my attention, at a time unspecified, that the bulbous yellow device is a water pump, cobwebbed in the corner of our basement, and Sheryl has simply moved out of Ma and Pa’s house, and in with her boyfriend Lance. Years later: Lance becomes my Uncle. A few years more: Sheryl and Lance no longer speak to our side of the family, and she might as well be a spirit in a water pump after all.
-Age 6: In a panic, I ask my mom what happens to me when I die. Mom is cleaning out the hall closet and would rather be left to it. “Jents don’t die,” she tells me. With a great relief -- the greatest relief -- removed from my shoulders, I return to playing He-Man. Today’s adventure: Mek-A-Nek’s funeral. Prince Adam’s eulogy: “Farewell, friend Mek-A-Nek … if only you had been born a Jent.”
-Age 9: I practice my stand-up routine before our large bathroom vanity. I give myself the willies by turning the lights off, closing my eyes and saying, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody -- Mongoose, Manny, Maxwell!” I run from the room.
-Ages 13-17: Every Saturday I spend the night at Shaun’s house, along with Bobby, Adrian and Jarrod. Our adventures begin with the discovery of an empty bread bag and some matted down grass under a fallen tree. That night, we explore further and meet the Devil living in Shaun’s house. The Devil chases us up the hill to Shaun’s house, where we cower sleeplessly as he bangs on doors, removes screens from windows, and dances cloven-hooves on the roof. In the morning we find clawed potatoes in the yard and ashes where his knuckles stuck the doors. Every Saturday night thereafter he chases us from spring until fall, but our physical forms evade him. Mentally, emotionally and spiritually we do our best to stay out of his grasp, and succeed to varying degrees. Some of us drop out of school and take jobs in nursing homes. Some of us date girls who are dangerously younger, some get fat, drink beer and do drugs. We lust for hand models and enroll in vocational school. We drift apart, and nod goodbyes on graduation day. The devil catches each of us, in ways only we know for sure.
-Age 23: I experience my life’s great trauma. Her name is Xxxxxx Xxxxxx. Three months after I see her for the last time, she tells me she won’t call me again.
-Age 27: I go to bed one night, safely ensconced in Illinois. When I awaken, three days later, I live by sea.
-Age 28+: My adventures continue. Somewhen in the interval between six and now I learn that Jents will die after all.
-Age 6: In a panic, I ask my mom what happens to me when I die. Mom is cleaning out the hall closet and would rather be left to it. “Jents don’t die,” she tells me. With a great relief -- the greatest relief -- removed from my shoulders, I return to playing He-Man. Today’s adventure: Mek-A-Nek’s funeral. Prince Adam’s eulogy: “Farewell, friend Mek-A-Nek … if only you had been born a Jent.”
-Age 9: I practice my stand-up routine before our large bathroom vanity. I give myself the willies by turning the lights off, closing my eyes and saying, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody -- Mongoose, Manny, Maxwell!” I run from the room.
-Ages 13-17: Every Saturday I spend the night at Shaun’s house, along with Bobby, Adrian and Jarrod. Our adventures begin with the discovery of an empty bread bag and some matted down grass under a fallen tree. That night, we explore further and meet the Devil living in Shaun’s house. The Devil chases us up the hill to Shaun’s house, where we cower sleeplessly as he bangs on doors, removes screens from windows, and dances cloven-hooves on the roof. In the morning we find clawed potatoes in the yard and ashes where his knuckles stuck the doors. Every Saturday night thereafter he chases us from spring until fall, but our physical forms evade him. Mentally, emotionally and spiritually we do our best to stay out of his grasp, and succeed to varying degrees. Some of us drop out of school and take jobs in nursing homes. Some of us date girls who are dangerously younger, some get fat, drink beer and do drugs. We lust for hand models and enroll in vocational school. We drift apart, and nod goodbyes on graduation day. The devil catches each of us, in ways only we know for sure.
-Age 23: I experience my life’s great trauma. Her name is Xxxxxx Xxxxxx. Three months after I see her for the last time, she tells me she won’t call me again.
-Age 27: I go to bed one night, safely ensconced in Illinois. When I awaken, three days later, I live by sea.
-Age 28+: My adventures continue. Somewhen in the interval between six and now I learn that Jents will die after all.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Earth Rules, and stuff on it is awesome
My friend sees coyotes in Chicago:
I can't decide if this is awesome or terrifying. I guess it's both.
In other news: there was a naked lady in my driveway earlier. She was sunbathing, so I guess that makes it summertime. Or, it just means I live in California these days.
Also, this is a thing that happened today:
I can't decide if this is awesome or terrifying. I guess it's both.
In other news: there was a naked lady in my driveway earlier. She was sunbathing, so I guess that makes it summertime. Or, it just means I live in California these days.
Also, this is a thing that happened today:
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