Not-So-Divine Comedy

BVI &c.

2008-11-17T09:23:00.000-05:00

“There will be tarpon under there,” our captain said as we motored the dingy from the 45-foot catamaran where we’d been living the past two days to the shallow, tide-washed waters off Monkey Point. “They’re huge, and they’ll freak you out at first, but realize they’re just after the minnows.”

I was busy trying to figure out my snorkel, perched on the dingy’s gray-rubber side like a Navy SEAL, if Navy SEALs were lanky white boys in blue swim-trunks whose primary mission, instead of strapping C-4 to enemy hulls, consisted of tooling around the British Virgin Islands for a magazine story.

We stopped at the spot; the dingy tied to a moss-covered rope extending from the white buoy down into the deep. I worked on my breathing, sucked tube, and plunged overboard. Opened my eyes to a cloudy sea swirling with motes of vegetation, and a deep dark seafloor breaking apart into schools of tiny fish, and…

Shark!

Four foot silvery beasties gliding on long fins over the ragged topography of coil, fast and intent on the hunt, ready to feast and draw blood with their tiny…

…their itty-bitty…

…snouts?

Not shark!

“Tarpon,” I say to my diving companion, and point; but through the snorkel bit it comes out something like, “Mrph-Ughn.” Not that she can hear anyway.

Being out on the boat is something of a relief, after our time on the island went so disastrously wrong. With most trips, you have an itinerary, studiously prepared by some PR agency; but in this case, it had been left to some representative of the BVI who proceeded to, well, not plan a damn thing. And then tell us everything was okay. Leaving my fellow reporter and I, accompanied by a driver, to motor in useless circuits around the island for a day and a half until we could persuade our catamaran captain to cast off for the second part of the trip.

We did, however, have the opportunity to crash the governor’s mansion for some sort of boating party, pulling up to the front in a battered van; those waiting in the receiving line on the front steps seemed slightly nonplussed at us blasting Jay-Z at excessive volume. Both reporters sprawled in the vehicle, decked out in plane-rumpled finery yet eating take-out conch fritters out of cartons.

Never Get Into A Small Plane Piloted By A Celebrity

Seriously, though, Craig Ferguson is a hell of a pilot. And L.A. is a seriously scary part of the country to fly over in a tiny four-seater Cessa 400, what with all the other small planes flying past like TIE fighters at the end of ‘Star Wars.’

28! Aaagh!

Turned 28. No major existential issues. Aside from not publishing a novel, everything went pretty well, all told.

L.A. (again)

2008-10-29T18:59:00.002-04:00

If there's one big problem with L.A. (aside from the giant mothership of brown smog hovering over the city, obscuring the mountains in the distance) it's that you need a car to navigate around. Otherwise, you find yourself stuck in a Best Western a scant 50 feet off the 405 exit ramp to Sherman Oaks, watching Craig Ferguson clips on YouTube in prep for the interview tomorrow while slugging AquaFina mixed with fizzy Target-brand 'immunity supplement.' You can't walk anywhere. There's a mythical creature called a bus that, legend has it, makes an appearance at certain intersections if the right words are recited, but that's not exactly an option.

You have high-speed Internet. You compulsively visit the Presidential polling sites, and the numbers for Pennsylvania and Ohio haven't shifted in the last five minutes. You check your email, but nothing's coming in. You watch another YouTube clip, and realize 30 seconds in that you've seen it before. You wonder where the closest In-and-Out Burger is, and if you can reach it on foot.

Meh-hik-oh

2008-10-14T19:26:00.001-04:00

Southern Mexico, late night, a couple of weeks ago: Sheets of rain blasting from the lightning-ripped heavens, burning tires belching greasy black smoke in the road, half-finished high-rises looming from the Veracruz roadside. And then south, through winding green valleys into the greenest of them all: a lake in the bowl of an extinct volcano, teeming with fishermen, the black soil so rich in nutrients that you can plant a stick in it and – pop – up grows a tree.

The Last Two Months as a 'Blood Meridian' Chapter Heading

2008-08-28T10:38:00.000-04:00

Nantucket – Las Vegas, Part Deux – The Dark Knight: The Greatest Cinematic Masterpiece Ever – Friday Night, West Village Bar, Two Exes Within Fifteen Feet: Look Out Shit, Here Comes The Fan – Honduras: Guns, Germs, German Heavy Metal – “I’m going to finish writing this $(@)!* book even if it kills me” – Plotting The Great Escape From Bay Ridge

Why I Need Detox

2008-06-09T17:50:00.003-04:00

Next thing I know, we’ve been driven from the five-course meal with gallons of red wine and tons of carbohydrates, in a cab that seems to take pleasure in skirting the very edge of Capri’s massive cliffs, to a club filled with maybe four hundred drunken Italian sailors and a whole bunch of girls who’re probably really Catholic until someone buys them any number of shots from the bar. Our two millionaire hosts may have been nearly 60 years old but apparently have a habit of shutting down bars up and down Italy every night; they tossed a few hundred thousand Euros at the bartender and basically dared him to see if he could push enough drinks across the bar to have everyone babbling in tongues.

All this is how I ended up dancing on a bartop in Capri at four in the morning with a bunch of women while the live band up front sung ribald tales about screwing and the aforementioned sailors sweated and screamed and jumped in unison. The fact that I had to help race a sailboat across the Gulf of Naples the next morning mattered not. The fact that I had spent the entire day interviewing people aboard a futuristic motor-yacht mattered not. The only thought in my mind: I already had everything I needed for the story, so no fucking way was I going to let a pair of 60-something fashion house CEOs drink and/or dance me under the table tonight.

Which they did, of course. Enthusiasm never competes with experience, particularly if the enthusiastic party is a lightweight who ordinarily needs a grand total of four beers before he’s banging his head against the jukebox while howling along with Bruce Springsteen. The place so packed-tight I had to literally crowd-surf towards the door, reeling, ready to forcibly eject maybe eight shots of lemoncello onto the heads of the National Racing Team and their snarling Russian girlfriends. Heading off into twisty Capri streets loud with tourists, two fellow journalists in tow, ears still ringing.
The only problem was, my hotel was not reachable by car – being a tiny hole-in-the-wall 50 yards down a barely-lit path on the back end of Anacapri; a residence with spectacular views of the deep blue sea but lacking in accessibility. Which necessitated, at the end of the night, early birds already chattering in the trees overhead, a climactic sprint through the maze-like twists and turns of footpaths towards a dim light between dark trees. ”No wonder they have so much trouble catching the damn mafia in this country.”

Do not even ask me about the hangover.

Some of the best prose I ever spat out, though, at the end of it all.

Hell-A, Part Deux

Bombing along Sunset Boulevard with the whole crew in tow – photographer, photog assistant, art designer – passing the In-and-Out Burgers and trendy chrome-shiny eateries and the junkies scratching their forearms underneath the palm trees, and someone, with perhaps the dull predictability of young males stuck together in an SUV, brings up the topic of strippers. To wit:

“In Los Angeles, girls in strip clubs can’t actually go topless unless the place doesn’t serve alcohol. But if they serve liquor, they have to stay in a bikini top of whatever.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“What about cabaret? Can they go topless?”

“My mom used to sing cabaret, so fuck you, it’s burlesque, but no – even when it’s burlesque, the tops stay on.”

“So where are we going tonight?”

“In this Puritan burg? Best thing’s to grab a burger and go to bed. Turn in here.”

The Celebrity we're here to interview has a toothache. I’m hoping he’s jacked on Tylenol-3 when it comes time to sit down but you never know with these things – he may very well abort, leaving us to execute our pale imitation of ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ on an unsuspecting City of Angels. Either that, or sit in the too-trendy rooms of our boutique hotel with the stuffed sheep in the lobby, and watch music videos on YouTube.

But LA is good. Everything is macrobiotic; the sun is warm on your face; the sheets in that boutique hotel thick and white and cool. And point of fact, I needed to detox again, needed a period out here where I could break some of my worst new habits; The Girl leaving back in April led to a period where I was drinking too much, smoking too many cigars, stunt sex, not-eating, running until my knees threatened to crack like cheap white plates, writing until my knuckles cracked and the tips of my fingers reddened. Never losing control, never bottoming out like some bargain-bin Bukowski, but... there comes a point.

Vegas, baby, Vegas

2008-05-06T08:11:00.002-04:00

What happened in Vegas, two and a half weeks ago, stays in Vegas – at least until the next Private Air comes out in a few weeks, Bobby Flay squinting on the cover. Suffice to say, though, I’ve found the Death of Civilization, and it’s called The Strip.

Although, in my role as Hedonist-in-Chief (and primary copy-writer) of The Cigar Report, I had the strange pleasure of stepping into a high-end store in the Venetian and immediately being handed a box of hand-rolled premium smokes gratis. Perfect, the new tradition around the office being that all of us -- photog, assistants, writer, etc. -- light up stogies at the conclusion of a celeb shoot.

Anguilla

2008-04-06T22:49:00.004-04:00

Slamming through high seas between St. Maarten and Anguilla in a high-powered speedboat, catching air on the breaking crests of swells before crashing with a bone-jarring thud into the troughs, and the model sitting across from me looks ready to die. Seriously. Her expensive milk-toned skin has gone an even whiter shade of pale; a perfectly formed hand grips the seat as yet another wave crashes into the bow and over our heads.

"It's okay!" I yell to her, but over the sounds of the sea it's probably about as comprehensible as baying wolves.

What do you do when your assignment is to partake in the activities of a tropical island, the vast majority of which are sea-based, just as a tropical storm off Puerto Rico sends gale-force winds powerful enough to keep you land-locked for three days? What do you do when you're stuck on a bluff-top five-bedroom villa with a private pool on the terrace and an open bar in the marble-lined kitchen?

I must be getting old, because the answer to that question rapidly became: Sit on the kitchen counter in the sunlight, like a cat. Answer e-mail. Drink Ting, the curiously addictive Jamaican grapefruit soda. Jog on the beach at nine, swim in the pool at three, sit in the Jacuzzi with a glass of red wine as late-afternoon storms pour cold rain from scuttling clouds. Stop by the golf course and contemplate slipping a fuck-you note into a certain popular author's locker. Sure, there was drinking after a certain point -- no journalistic trip is really complete without a trip to the local road-house, where the locals can give you stink-eye as you sit at the bar listening to live reggae and wondering how many seconds it would take you to reach the door if those drunk Brits over by the bathrooms really decided to start some shit. But then again, I never really tore it up when I was younger, so why start now?

Off to Vegas this week, for a day; staring down the barrels of a 6:45am flight there, a 3:30pm flight back, five hours on the ground. Unhappy at the prospect, to say the least. Time will tell if a combination of lack-of-sleep and inability-to-tolerate-bullshit will result in me slamming a meat-fork through a certain celebrity chef's hand (hopefully we wouldn't be on-camera at the time). And to think, I used to be such a nice guy -- or at least more of a pushover.

Why I Am So Sunburned in Winter

2008-03-09T17:44:00.004-04:00

Seven-fifteen in the morning and the fists start hitting the door loud enough to explode me out of dreams, and for two seconds I think that I've already arrived in Cuba and that La Policia are trying to enter the room. This is a raid. In my bleary state I'm out of bed and halfway across the room towards the window when I realize that, through the glass, I can see a cruise ship parked along the near coast, a bit of a church roof -- I'm in Nassau, the flight for Havana doesn't leave for five hours, and it's not the cops but my editor banging like SWAT on my bedroom door:

"Turn down that religion crap!" he yells.

I spin around the room, still getting my bearings. The flatscreen TV is off, the radio silent. I head for the connecting door, still thrumming from the impact of fists -- in time to hear a loud 'thump' on the other side. Then silence.

Turns out, my editor, on top of the alcohol consumed during the massive dinner last night, had popped two sleeping pills. At seven-fifteen, his room's radio alarm had burst to life with some sort of evangelist morning program -- and in his severely drugged state, he thought all the holy hollering had been coming from my side of the wall. Roughly fifteen seconds before he crashed back to sleep.

Not the most auspicious beginning to the trip, I think, as I head for the shower.

Cuba Libre

Cuba -- crumbling beauty, the buildings along the coast road worn by decades of sea-air to the point where they look hit by artillery fire. On Brasil Street, a few blocks from the capitol, kids playing baseball in the dirty street, under the spray of a pipe burst two stories up. On the second day we fled our official government minder, paid a couple of kids six pesos to start up their rusty '59 Chevy and drive us into the oldest part of the city -- the kids having to pile out of their pornography-plastered ride at one point, tools in hand, after the antique motor died. Living off fried pork for days. The radio blaring government pronouncements about Baby Castro finally taking control.

There were no idle men on the street, an odd change from other third world cities. In your wake, people whisper, "Cigars, good price," hoping to sell you the rejects taken from some of the local factories. La Policia in their grey, keeping the citizens away from the tourists with a wave and an impatient tapping of a club against the back of the leg. Sipping espresso in the Old Square where the Spanish once sold slaves, watching an old man sharpen knives on a pedal-driven wheel for the local cooks. Drinking in Hemingway's old bar, Floridita, next to a life-size bronze statue of the man himself, and wondering what he would have thought of his city now -- the despair and the beauty of it. The government minders in their blue suits and open white shirts, smiling but reserved, their eyes watching you as you walk across the lobby of the hotel, where sunburned whoremongers and bleating tourists gather in clusters before being herded onto buses bound for the beaches, or the countryside.

At a state-sponsored dinner, gorgeous girls in purple slinky dresses swarming into the aisles between the tables, each of them bearing a box filled with the newest cigars, H. Upmann, Cohiba, etc. I am working, darting between tables, chatting people up, taking quotes, and all the while smoking or drinking whatever comes in range. Three cups of espresso, four cigars and five glasses of rum later, I stumble into the night along with the photographer, looking for a cab to escort us back to the hotel, our ears ringing from the cast-of-thousands stage-show complete with lounge singers and dancers -- a taste of old Havana, back when it was Gangster Land, before the Revolution came crashing down with its concrete-gray fists.

Miami

My article subject sweeps a few crushed Marlboro packs from the passenger seat of his Porsche convertible and bids me enter, hands me a box of cigars signed by him as a token of appreciation for me doing a piece on him, and then guns the motor at 120 mph over the Causeway to Miami Beach, as we follow our long convoy of cars heading from the party at the Havana Club to the after-party at some steakhouse where the girls whisper it'll take us two hours to sit down, even with 10pm reservations. That last bit of intelligence proves to be true, the restaurant being a new hotspot, and we move down the street to Big Pink, where triple-decker portobello sandwiches and pitchers of terrible beer can be had, along with a seat, for the mere asking. Considering that my article subject had started gesturing wildly with both hands removed from the wheel as we barreled over the bridge at a healthy fraction of light speed, I am merely happy to be alive.

Two days after Havana and my body has some sort of delayed reaction, my system pushing everything through like an express train. I slump against the passenger door of yet another car, the next day, as I am driven down Collins Avenue past all the fabulous people whose entire lives consist of tanning, eating at expensive beachside restaurants, and exercising themselves into hardbodies. I think about how 90 miles across the ocean, old men with faces like crushed leather come up to you when Castro's police aren't looking, and hit you up for a mere peso.

Santiago

Back in that smoggy basin; the Dominican Republic. On the last night there, we went to a party with Santiago's corpulent mayor, and stood around amused as his plainclothes security tried to keep the local citizens from infiltrating an outdoor event. When darkness came we were escorted into open horse-drawn carriages; cops stood at every intersection for a mile down the road, shutting down traffic in all directions as we clopped our way towards the city center, waving like dignitaries to sullen-faced people piling onto their balconies. A band dressed in white stood in a gazebo in the old square and played ancient tunes as the reassembled crowd drank and passed around business cards. My black suit smelled of two weeks' worth of cigarette smoke, its pockets filled with hastily scribbled story notes.

Brooklyn

Words do not describe the pleasure I feel, after 16 days on the road, of being able to turn on my kitchen tap and drink whatever comes out of it without fear of some microbe partying through my digestive system as a result.

Remind Me Why I Didn't Major in Economics Again

2008-02-12T01:13:00.000-05:00

“We need [big famous celebrity] on the cover next month, or we’re screwed! You hear me? We’re fucking screwed!”

“What, I’m a miracle worker now? You see the words ‘Mother Theresa’ tattooed on my forehead, asshole?”

Relatives sometimes call up and ask how Life in the Big City is going, if I’m having fun, etc. I always tell them, “Everything’s fine.” Yep, everything’s dandy up here in the Big Apple in the New Year: lost 10 pounds on the cheese-free pizza and organic energy-drink diet, ghostwrote for Gawker on top of spewing out 20 articles in January, and seriously considered offering the junkie haunting my subway stop $10 to punch one of my editors in the face, with a whole $5 bonus for a broken nose, and…oh dear me…

I just discovered absinthe.

Because nothing helps a late-night editing session like pouring a hefty dose of the Green Dragon into a tall glass, followed by cold water, followed by the drippings of a flaming sugar cube. Combine that with a Cohiba smoked on your office balcony, and suddenly your underlings are looking at you strangely because you’ve been humming Lily Allen’s ‘Everything’s Just Wonderful’ off-key at an extraordinarily high volume. “Just the wormwood,” you tell them, opening the CAO humidor on your desk. “Care for one of Castro’s finest?”

Hard Case Time turned down the book, after a solid week of deliberation. Publisher of that little outfit wants to see the next penny dreadful I churn out, so that’s more of a draw than a loss. Non-fiction book and its promise of an advance rolling forward, which is excellent, because the IRS wants a hefty chunk of last year’s freelance revenue.

The Girl’s roommate has been blogging about the ‘creative underclass’ lately. That’s us – underpaid, overeducated twentysomethings working the media trenches – more and more of us pour into the city on a monthly basis, and not enough of us die in comically horrific ways to make an apartment in Manhattan cost anything south of $2000. Except you look at our overlords, twenty years down the road: making bank, true, but with the loft payments and the wife and kids’ educations and mistress and BMW as the 800-pound gorilla on their back – Should we escape to the country? Get a place in Westchester. But…but…I can’t leave NYC! I’d be robbed of all that illicit NYU poon! It’s a trap either way.

First Weeks, New Year

2008-01-17T18:54:00.000-05:00

For anyone viewing Fox Sports last Sunday, yes, that was my cover story being waved around by Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long. Given that I would rather subject myself to an enema than watch a horde of overdeveloped men in tights fight over a ball for four hours, I didn’t know about it until my email inbox filled. I guess Terry liked the way I compressed his life into 2,500 words. (At least he didn’t jab a finger at the camera and advocate that the couch potatoes of America rise up and beat the crap out of yours truly for any misrepresentations; my morning commute is annoying enough without the risk of being cold-cocked by overweight Steelers fans.)

The Girl and I and our curiously mutual quirks are getting seriously domestic. Which is a bit of a high-wire feat considering we’re both working roughly a billion hours a week.

Nicaragua

2007-12-17T18:29:00.000-05:00

“How am I? You’re in Nicaragua and I miss you. That’s how I am.”

Indeed – driving the hilly but surprisingly smooth road between Managua and Esteli in a stick-shift SUV, staining its new-car smell with the pungent, nutty aroma of a Drew Estate cigar; weaving around brightly painted school buses with villages’ worth of cargo strapped to their roofs, the smoke-farting dirt bikes loaded with two or even three people, the rusty trucks loaded with cut logs. Driving across the bridge marking the entrance to the North Country, seeing the lower halves of the telephone poles and trees painted red and marked, in black, with the letters of the local Sandinista faction.

Pulling into Esteli in the late afternoon, veering from the Pan-American Highway onto dirt roads winding through kilometers of shanties and one-story homes whose stucco still bears the bullet-scars of the country’s civil war. Kids and stray dogs and chickens playing outside, men in horseback in white hats trotting past. We were camping for the week at the nicest hotel in the vicinity, which also featured a bar and restaurant. By ‘nicest hotel’ I mean a roof overhead and running water. Leading up to the front door was a truly magnificent stoop made of old rough-hewn stone, the kind of elevated perch where you could sit for hours on a Tuesday night and watch the street action, picking up the occasional pebble to dissuade the dog sniffing in the gutter from getting too close.

There is such a thing, by the by, as eating too much goat. A staple of the local cuisine, better-prepared than in the Dominican Republic, washed down with bottled water. We were there to profile the cigar-makers who had established their factories here, in the center of Nicaragua’s tobacco-farming areas – but what sticks in your head afterwards, as you steer the car back to the epic shantytown of Managua at the end of the week, speeding by flaming tires on the median, are the little details. The American films dubbed in excitable Spanish on the tiny TV in your room. The air-raid siren going off at six in the morning everyday, summoning the whole farming community to work, and then screeching again at noon to announce lunch. Workers lined up in front of the photographer’s Avadon-style white screen, holding their hammers and bunches of brown, fragrant tobacco, ready to have their picture taken. The berserk, rattling cab ride taken one Wednesday afternoon. Children standing by the side of the road, holding out sticks bending under the weight of bright birds sitting quietly as they wait to be sold. Standing in front of the gate of one factory and seeing a group of horsemen charge by like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel, their horses’ hooves throwing up bursts of dust.

They Say You Can't Come Back

2007-11-27T08:09:00.000-05:00

I turned 27. No major existential dilemmas; it was a pretty decent year, career-wise.

Welcome Home. Ha.

M. informs me that there’s a substantial uptick of suicides around Thanksgiving, and that’s certainly understandable: The family interrogations, the ritual force-feeding, the encroaching cold and darkness as the Earth recoils from the sun, the Bataan Death March of good cheer.

I’m sitting in an Irish bar across from the Uptown and a friend of mine is saying that he went home with a midget during a drunken binge the week before.

“How many times do I have to tell you, it was a dwarf.”

Sorry, dwarf.

“You screwed a dwarf?”

“No, I just took her home.”

Like a pet?

“Shut the hell up.”

It’s nice to know that, no matter how far abroad you travel, you can always return home to find the weirdness in full swing. Comforting, really.

The Rock

2007-10-18T18:49:00.000-04:00

The boat rumbled to a stop a half-mile offshore, rocked by the stronger waves washing over the reef. Just ahead was Hell’s Gate, a massive chunk of coral rock jutting from the breakers; centuries of wind and water had carved a hole straight through the center of it. I sat on the bow of the boat, taking in the strong Caribbean sun pounding down out of the clear sky – and then I let myself tumble off the side along with the others.

It was maybe twenty yards of swimming until the sea floor rose enough for me to stand tall, one hand gripping half-buried pieces of submerged coral rock for balance against the waves pouring through the Gate. Another ten yards and we could see the fissure in the rock, a jagged path leading into the narrow opening of a cave. We climbed. Inside, the sandy path and low overhangs – this narrow, rocky throat, whistling – opened onto a two-story grotto, circular as a grain silo and honeycombed from eons of weather. On every tidal surge, white foam boiled up from the pool at our feet, connected by an underwater channel to the sea. We climbed, scrambling up the sharp rock – made the top of the overhang, the arch, with its vista of turquoise water stretching to the far Antigua shoreline.

At my desk in New York a few days later the red marks on my palms from the rocks’ jagged teeth are fading into dull clouds. We’re closing the cigar magazine; my skin is peeling around my forehead and below my eyes, from an overdose of tropical sun – yet I haven’t seen any sun in days.

Another 1,000 Miles East From Yesterday...

2007-10-12T23:11:00.000-04:00

Yeah, Antigua. Wind tinkling through wind-chimes hanging above the front door of the villa, whispering through the pines, stirring the surface of the infinity pool that spreads from the entrance-way of the dining room to the beach. Sitting by the aforementioned pool with a notepad, trying to transform notes from the Football Hero into something resembling a story, and not doing too well, because the view of the water and the misty islands beyond keeps distracting me.

North Dallas Forty

2007-10-10T22:28:00.000-04:00

I am kneeling on a square of dirt near the Texas/Oklahoma border, petting and scratching an appreciative older bulldog. Through the cell phone pressed to my ear, one of my editors bellows at me from 1,500 miles away; calls everything I am and do into question. I move to scratching the dog under the chin, and it smiles and wags its long and sloppy tongue. A few feet away, an aging Football Hero whispers to his champion horse, easing it around the entrance to the barn.

The editor begins to screech. I say nothing, simply move to rubbing the bulldog's belly. It chuffs softly, rolls over for more. The sun moves like liquid over the Texas Hill Country, making the shadows under the trees sweep and dance. I gaze at the slope leading past the stands of green trees to the far distance. In New York City, the editor launches into his second wind, a true Homeric rant -- and the bulldog chuffs again.

"Huh," I finally grunt into the phone. My first and only word in twenty minutes.

The aging Football Hero has his shirt up, showing off the scars of old Super Bowls. He laughs, heartily. And even though the editor later calls up again, and apologizes, and says none of that was directed at me ("It ain't personal"), the feeling I had looking over those hills stays with me: That I could chuck the open phone casually into the nearest ditch (the device still squalking with righteous indignation even as dust filled the speaker holes), hop the fence, and stride into the sun-dappled grassland; to become one with the beasts and the grasshoppers, to somehow sink roots deep into the Earth, into something eternal and with meaning.

--

The essential existential conundrum, Dallas, late-night: *What* exactly do you choose to eat from the lobby venting machine -- Cheez-Its, or Fritos? What does this say about you as a person? And why is it that Chicago, DC, NYC and LA seem to be the only cities in America that serve real food after 8pm?

For lunch, we stopped at a gas/BBQ/groceries complex carved from dust and weathered boards somewhere in Oklahoma. Great ribs; soggy fries; names and dates written on the walls in Sharpie, reminding me of Morgan Freeman's bar in Mississippi. A plague of black and somehow antedeluvian crickets had swept through, filling the bathroom, hopping on the warped wood of the porch. Before climbing back into the SUV I wiped the dirt from my boots, patted the pocket of my cargo pants where the digital recorder with the Football Hero's stories about Super Bowls and plane crashes, cheerleaders and finding salvation, sat waiting for transcription; within 24 hours I planned to be on an island far southeast of here; I paused for a moment to breathe in the dry air.

The Jungle

2007-09-13T08:04:00.001-04:00

Ah, nothing like striding onto what you assume is a swath of pristine private beach only to be greeted by the absolutely mind-blowing sight of a herd of half-naked, wholly sunburned German tourists lumbering toward you like cows for the trough; but that’s the Dominican Republic, at least in the barbed wire-surrounded resort area of Porto Plata. In the carefully manicured cul-de-sacs outside the elegant five-star refuge where we holed up for a few days before heading south to Santiago, it was truly a post-colonial paradise of garish, all-you-can-drink ‘resorts’ filled with pasty Europeans out to screw and imbibe their way through a broad swath of country.

I was enthused to escape, despite the elegant meals and vigorous massages and six-headed showers and neat little gardens where you could gaze over the mangroves and feed your growing smoke habit. There was something more real, more alive about the grimy streets of Santiago, filled with battered old cars and packs of furtive stray dogs and underage prostitutes in bright tank tops and street vendors hawking pineapple and phone cards on the other side of the car windows. Even then, we never joined the third-world chaos, not completely – always finding ourselves in the comfortable backseat of a Mercedes, or a van. We were there for the new magazine, interviewing el jefes and touring cigar factories where rows of diligent workers busied themselves rolling $30 cigars under the watchful eyes of supervisors; the air filled with blaring radios and the scent of cured tobacco like chocolate.

A cigar seemingly clenched at all times between my teeth; a cup of espresso or rum or wine or beer in my hand. A single perpetually-repeating thought, punctuating the static of chemicals rocketing through my brain: Once I get back, man, it is time for some serious detox. Peeling off brightly colored peso bills for tips, not exactly sure how much you’re spending but expensing it all. The car jostling over unpaved roads, houses on both sides of the road encased in bars and gates, the bee-buzz of motorbikes loaded with people riding pilon, fields of crushed sugar cane blurring by.

Two of the factory-owners took us to dinner our last night there, at a place high in the hills. From our elegant wooden perch we could see the lights of the city spread far beneath in glittering lines, crystal-clear once the evening mist cleared; and we spent hours eating island lamb (re: goat) and smoking thick cigars, protected from afar by guards with pump-action shotguns. On the way back, swooping through the thick blackness in an Audi SUV, there were brown cows in the road, staring at us with seemingly suicidal indifference as we neatly swerved around them. The night was alive, moving to its own voodoo rhythm; from the roadside shacks and gas stations, people watched us pass with wary eyes; dogs’ pupils glimmered as they slinked across the road; roadside churches lit bright, small gated parks dark yet filled with still silhouettes escaping the heat and human sight; the radio crackled with an upbeat tempo.

And then you’re back, dumping the hundreds of cigars you smuggled through customs into the special ‘ghetto humidor’ tucked under your desk – an Igloo cooler with two humidor packs, already filled with boxes of expensive tobacco sticks. Still tingling from the wave of alcohol and caffeine and nicotine that washed through your circulatory system for eight days.

Hell-A

2007-07-31T22:55:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles - The next stop on this summer's 'They're Sending Me *Where*?' tour...

9:00 a.m. and I was ascending through the chemical haze into the brown foothills above Los Angeles, the handy GPS clipped to the dashboard feeding me directions every 10-odd miles (“Take the next right”/”Stay to the left”). It was dry and hot and that was precisely why I was here: To spend the day hanging out with the aviators who fly those giant water-spewing supertankers over the forest fires threatening to destroy acres of very expensive Southern California property.

I am not very comfortable with driving. Partially this is because I learned on a snarky stick-shift with a seemingly variable friction point, partially because at 16 I was almost killed while driving by a woman who did a very stupid thing. As with so many things, it left me with unshakeable neuroses, a tendency to sweat while behind the wheel, an urge to stick to driving in the early morning hours when it’s just you and the deer and a few truckers.

Anyway, this is the cure: Strap the neurotic patient into a rental car with a sticky accelerator and then send them bombing down I-15 S from Victorville at 4:45 on a clear afternoon. Join the rest of the herd zooming along at 85-90 mph down steep switchbacks and over suspension-rattling thumps…building enough momentum by the end of that 15-mile stretch so you hit the concrete spaghetti of the LA highway system with the car shimmying on its axles from the speed. “I’m not dead,” I said to myself, half-wonderingly, half-expecting the universe in its infinite sense of humor to send an 18-wheeler crunching into me at that precise moment.

“Take the next exit,” the GPS told me.

“I love you, too,” I told the GPS.

Then we hit traffic. If '24' wanted to be realistic, they could do an episode where Jack Bauer shoots a whole bunch of people in the first two minutes, gets into his car to drive to his next destination...and sits in traffic for the remaining 54:30. Tapping his fingers against the wheel. Cleaning his gun. Practicing shouting "Damnit!" to nobody in particular.

Yee-Haw

2007-07-16T23:58:00.001-04:00

On a horse, riding on a narrow pine-lined trail through the Montana mountains. "Whoa, good horsie! Don't kill me, horsie! Don't gallop down that incredibly steep slope, horsie!" This morning I woke up in Brooklyn. Air travel is a very strange thing.

Blues Traveler

2007-07-05T09:08:00.000-04:00

Two things recommend the Deep South: the music and the lovely belles who will coo over your presence as they pour you yet another drink to combat the oppressive heat. Which is where I found myself mid-week: the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi…

The night before had been a three-hour cruise south from Memphis along US-61, a yellow moon glowering overhead and insects spattering clear on the windshield of my SUV like raindrops. Blasting through the Delta at midnight with Robert Johnson crackling over the radio, you feel in your soul the edges of the reservoir from which those legendary ghosts drew the Blues: You want to light a cigarette (preferably hand-rolled), even though you don’t smoke; you want to take a stiff drink, even though you almost never do; you want to ruminate over women done you wrong, even if you don’t realize yet you’ve been dumped.

It was my first time behind the wheel in several months and the directions from Memphis airport to Clarksdale had come in via text message, from a photographer trapped in NYC by a canceled flight and who needed me to pick up the rental vehicle. First I accidentally bombed down I-55 toward Jackson, singing along with heavy metal. Then realized I was going in the wrong direction, and had to drive all the way back to Memphis, play Flying Dutchman of the Federal Highway system, and eventually by one in the morning slingshot myself in the right direction, towards Vicksburg.

I pulled into the concrete lot behind the Ground Zero Blues Club at four in the morning (Clarksdale being a totally run-down, crumbling city amid the cotton fields), crashed out for two hours, woke up and drove back to Memphis to pick the rest of the crew up. Thus began my four days of getting a grand total of ten hours’ sleep…which was okay, because it helped kill the nervous jitters I usually get before celebrity interviews.

Why I Am Slightly Depressed

Well, A., now you’re gone. Abruptly, but not completely. You want to be friends, “hang out,” still be “part of my life,” and all the rest of it.

Which is why, early this afternoon, coming back from Coney Island and the annual hot-dog eating contest (shown live on ESPN), I’m sprawled in the back of the last car of the N train, listening to the Rolling Stones’ ‘Miss You’ over and over again on my iPod, when one of the train conductors walks up.

“Hey, my man,” he says. “How old are you?”

I turn off Mick Jagger wailing about walking in Central Park alone, which right now seems not a half-bad idea, especially if a mugger with a pipe can grant a bit of sweet oblivion. “Um, 26?”

“And how long you been losing your hair?”

“Um, seven years?”

“Yeah, it’s hereditary, then. Same thing happened to my bro. He uses this shampoo, it does wonders, I swear, he’s looking all good on top…” The conductor mentions the name of said miraculous product, then looks at me expectantly, maybe waiting for some sort of hallelujah act on my part, a collapse to the knees in wonderment.

“That’s, um, great,” I say, fixing my ear-buds back in, already wondering if my next song selection should be ‘Innocent When You Dream,’ by Tom Waits. “Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”

Why I Enjoy My Job These Days

2007-06-15T16:02:00.000-04:00

When you suffer from an extreme fear of heights, riding in a hot air balloon 500 meters above the rolling Tuscan hillside is akin to having a tryst with that tattooed-and-pierced girl at the end of the bar, the one your friends have been poking you in the ribs all night to approach because they’re too frightened to do it themselves: the build-up is terrifying, the actual event leaves you with a cold sweat and shaking knees – but afterwards (stumbling around in the early morning sunlight) you feel curiously alive.

Our insane pilot yelling in Italian over the lion roar of the balloon burners, a grill-like wash of butane-scented hot air crisping the top of my head as I exert a death-grip on a nearby railing. Floating over the villa and the woods beyond, dipping near the highway and the American cemetery…eventually settling, after an hour, on one step of a terraced field, said pilot having negotiated some sort of compromise with a bemused farmer seconds before actual touchdown. More Italians from the balloon company sprang from nowhere to wrestle our chariot back to earth; an SUV rumbled into the field from the road, its sides heavy with workers clinging to the doors, to pick us up. Our pilot, meanwhile, spread a checkered tablecloth on the overturned basket and popped open a bottle of champagne. Thus begins my first morning in Italy.

This coming after a private plane ride from Frankfurt that, after Florence denied us landing due to a short runway and high headwinds, ended up zipping like a $30 million mosquito over half of Italy, eventually settling at Bologna. ‘Story coming late diverted to different airport stop cannot figure out punctuation button on this borrowed blackberry stop must drive 150 km to firenze stop article will be late stop send wine,’ I wrote on the aforementioned device as we waited for the car to pick us up.

A few days later, we ended up at the vineyard of one of the region’s major chianti producers, who offered us lunch after a tour of the winery. Beef-like meat served along with plates of grain and 30-year-old proschutto and bottles of wine that, thanks to their sulfide content, left me sober despite my usual non-tolerance for things alcoholic. Someone at the table inquired about the animal we were eating; our host informed us that it was a deer he had shot in his vineyard the previous week. “They are pests,” he said. “I hunt them at night.” Apparently Tuscany is overrun with them.

Swung by Florence, four years after I’d arrived there the first time. To my own amusement I still remembered where to go for food.

School’s Out

Four years ago to the day, Dean Boyer handed me my degree, whispered ‘good luck’ into my ear, and then all but planted a shoe in my rear to send me off the graduation stage and into the bright light of a new world. Three days after that I visited Italy for the first time, then ended up in DC working for a couple years as part of the War on Terror’s propaganda machine while freelancing for the City Paper and the Post. Wrote a screenplay, which almost sold. Wrote a book, which might sell. Traveled to Halifax, Turks & Caicos, and Tulsa. Then moved to New York.

Shape

2007-06-05T09:01:00.000-04:00

Last week, Goddard Space Center. Seventy-foot blast doors open onto a windowless white room big enough to fit King Kong. Buried in the far wall: enormous speakers capable of pulverizing a man to dust with their vibration. “Their frequency mimics that of the launch vehicle on takeoff,” says my guide. “We use this chamber to see if anything will break apart because of the sound waves.” We head out again, weaving past a plastic-draped clean room where workers in static-free bunny suits inject fuel into a satellite, eventually coming to a suspiciously normal-sized door. Beyond: a centrifuge with a hundred-foot diameter, the central node a nest of steel girders capable of spinning a five-ton object at 33 rpm; your tax dollars at jaw-dropping work.

The Line Begins to Blur

June, and here comes The Hard Part, the potential crucible of my annihilation (“Oh God,” Dad said in response that particular phrase, when I briefly swung by the family abode after Goddard. “Child, do not drop your nihilistic bullshit on me.”). Three countries, five different stories whose details need to move at least somewhat in sync if I’m to come out the other end of the month in one piece. I love it, and the fact that I love it depresses me. In some alternate reality I’ve already taken a portion of my ill-gotten gains and moved to Vancouver or some small town in the Carolinas, where I help run a coffee shop while writing novels and short stories on the side. I practice guitar on a porch until my fingers bleed and the dogs howl; spend weeks learning how to craft a perfect latte, or make flapjacks that have the regulars applauding; grow scruff and drive an old jeep and grow my own herbs and tea; watch the night lightning roll over the dark and ancient hills. Freud says such dreams are death wishes; but I have no wish to die. Eventually your bloody race comes to an end, though, one way or the other. Eventually the time comes to speed away from the wonderful chaos, even if your eyes tear up as you glance in the rearview mirror.

Gee, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little!

Shut up. I have a knife.

Tell ‘em what brought on this latest bout of mawkishness, N., aside from stress.

Captain Angry was in town over the weekend. We stopped by this bar at the north end of Chinatown that I frequent when the mood strikes, a dark wooden cube where the beers are cheap and nobody puts on the excessive airs you find in some of those stark-white and ultra-priced establishments downtown. Maybe it was because we were both exhausted (him from driving; me from tending the night previous to an under-the-weather A.), but our dialogue lacked that wiseguy-on-speed energy it had back when we were 22 and doing dirty literary deeds for God and Country. Maybe we just didn’t need to impress one another, or maybe we’ve (gasp) matured. In any case, glancing at my reflection in the ornate mirror behind the bar, I had a moment where my adult life coalesced into definite shape, complete with terminus.

Whirlwind

2007-05-24T13:19:00.000-04:00

“Oh shit, my coffee!” Followed a second later by a thump as the paper cup of Dunkin Donuts java, balanced and then forgotten on the BMW’s roof, toppled over in the slipstream and sent a brown cascade down the rear window. G. hit the brakes, and centrifugal force sent a wave of steaming coffee forward and through the open sunroof to rain down on yours truly. Laughing my head off. Nine on a cloudy morning, somewhere in Maryland, eighteen hours or so until Ben’s wedding – an event that ended up going off without a hitch, on a sun-dappled bluff on the Maryland shore. Everybody shrugged into tuxes, looking ready for a James Bond audition.

At a meditation party on the Upper West Side – a large ground-story room, white, bright with candles – the only sound coming from the garden on the other side of the open French doors, rain dripping from the trees – until the sound of humming starts up, twenty people in the lotus position trying to reach the frequency of the universe.

A. and I dancing across the red-girder tangle of the bridge at midnight, oil tankers slipping beneath in the dark, the J train rumbling by in a hurricane roar of light.

This is your life, and it’s ending one moment at a time.

Why I'd Work Well In A Carnival

2007-05-02T17:23:00.000-04:00

By nine in the morning we had become a full-on traveling road-show: me, the photographer, the photographer’s assistant, the editorial assistant, our fashion director, the makeup artist, and two models all muscling a circus of wheeled trunks, dollies loaded with camera bags, equipment sacks, and notebooks from tailor to tailor. Speeding in cabs from the Upper East Side to Midtown and down, stopping for a cramped lunch at a greasy-spoon diner. Sweaty, aching, the chaos around the calm eye of whatever tailor posing for posterity with tape measure draped around his neck and a wristband loaded with pins around his right arm. Yeah, fashion spreads; no wonder everyone in that industry snorts nose-candy like no tomorrow – you need constant energy, or you feel like you’ll shrivel and die.

Four in the afternoon finds the Traveling Road-Show and its Equipment collectively sprawled on leather couches in an upscale lobby of a Chelsea apartment building, snapping gum and typing text messages and ogling passing super-models and generally being a larger-by-the-second irritant to the man behind the desk, until our next appointment called down to let us up into his apartment-backslash-workspace.

Going to Florence in a few weeks, for work. Returning to Florence, rather. Only with a shaved head and gainfully employed and a new tendency to spontaneously burst into dance whenever I hear The Arcade Fire’s ‘Black Mirror.’

Why I Am So Quiet

2007-04-26T17:57:00.000-04:00

N.C. has thumbs calloused by sixty years’ work as a tailor. He stands in his little shop off Madison Avenue and flips through the paper patterns of bigshots’ bodies – the late-night talk show hosts, the rulers of industry – while talking about the work that goes into making a bespoke suit. At his feet, a couple hundred dollars’ worth of fine cloth soaks in a plastic barrel of cold water (to remove the manufacturing chemicals); in a few hours he’ll remove and dry it, and then begin to cut. “There are more tailors in New York than in Italy,” he sighs, running through why his art form is a dying one.

Sixty years ago, he started an apprenticeship, sewing along with a few dozen other boys whose fathers pushed them to learn a trade. These days, though, no 10-year-olds seem to want to spend sixteen hours a day in a hot and windowless space, practicing the same tiny hand motions over and over again, learning the ins and outs of the perfect two-piece. He shows off stitching along the inseam of a pair of tuxedo pants that apparently made a lesser tailor blanch, when the tuxedo’s owner came to the latter for alterations. “They have to send it back to me,” N.C. laughs. “It’s my hand.” Not to mention his giant pair of shears.

Four yards of cloth go into a suit. At nearly a thousand dollars a yard, plus labor, this means it costs nearly the median salary of an American worker to afford one of his suits. But they fit you like a second skin, and you can never wear a made-to-measure suit again.

N.C. is one of the last of his breed. The only thing you can tell about old and worn men is that they’re survivors.

To dedicate yourself to something, even if that something is a perfect 1/16” slice through a piece of super-160 wool. To transform your mind and body into a tool that is more than a tool – to try to harness the spirit within a process, the ghost within the machine.

--

“What are you thinking about?”

“Tailoring.”

“Why?”

“A second ago I was dreaming about talking to tailors.”

“That’s an odd thing to be dreaming about, two in the morning.”

--

Standing in the rain on Amsterdam Avenue, you think about old men – the survivors. And the ones who didn’t make it – the friends and colleagues and family eaten by cancer, or dropped by a heart attack, or who put the .38 to their temple and said why not; those who died in stupid car smash-ups and druggy stupors and at the hands of Minnesota psychopaths, left to dissolve under the woodsy backwoods loam. The rain comes down and you think: I have no right to be happy. The rain comes down and you think: In the face of all that, the only thing that matters is being happy, for as long as possible. The rain comes down and you think: Wow, I’m being pretentious again, and I need food.

Why I Am So Sunburned Today

2007-04-23T17:09:00.000-04:00

Speeding on a too-short and rusty bike through Brooklyn, from Williamsburg wearing its coffee-house pretensions on hipster-thin shoulders to the high-rise ghetto by Pratt to the brilliant greenery of Prospect Park; zooming past gaggles of black-clad Hasidic Jews and packs of gang-bangers and aviator-wearing parent-supported artists and tattooed moms with double-strollers and painters sunning themselves in front of waterfront warehouses. Readying to reply to the inevitable passerby shout of “Whatchu doin’ on that tiny bike?” with:

“Practicing for my circus clown career!”

Too-short and rusty bike having been custom-built for A. means my knees jackhammering near my chin as we breeze the wrong way down one-way streets at a healthy clip of speed, A. on her roommate’s bike grinning back as we dodge everything from school-buses decorated with Hebrew script to shining-rimmed Cadillacs. Collapse on the grass in Prospect Park, opening my eyes to a blazing blue sky and a random fuzzy puppy peering down at me, drooling on my forehead.

Three hundred miles to the south my friend lies in a hospital bed with his bones fractured and morphine in his bloodstream.

--

Walking into the Post Office across from Madison Square Garden, in search of a suitable box to mail K’s possessions back to her. With J. in tow, because we plan to grab food afterwards, explaining the car-wreck of the last couple weeks. J., for the record, is laughing his head off.

“Dude, totally, listen, in the envelope for the check, just put a photo of you giving the camera the finger or something. Like, Ha! I’m keeping the money! Combat pay! Show that grubby little –“

“Be nice, man.”

“You are a wimp.”

No boxes on view can accommodate a hair dryer and a shoebox of feminine products. This presents potential issues. “I’m just looking for a little good karma,” I say.

“Then send her the stuff. Save the money. Contribute towards an Xbox 360.”

“I said I’d send it.” I look around, as if appropriate-sized boxes will suddenly manifest themselves in one corner or another.

“Um, so?” J. bends at the waist to not-so-subtly check out a passing woman. “You don’t owe her crap. Besides, you paid enough already.”

“You’re becoming my jerk conscience, aren’t you?”

He grins. “I aim to save you from yourself, bud.”

Why I'm Wearing the Same Shirt As Yesterday

2007-04-20T09:32:00.000-04:00

Last night straight out of ‘Traumnovelle’ – featuring yours truly as a scruffy and increasingly disheveled Doctor Fridolin. Chelsea warehouses filled with new art (splattered Francis Bacon wannabes, ironic-kitsch flower displays, giant gulping fish projected onto walls in small rooms), viewed by relentlessly circulating groups of angel-headed hipsters; warm sake; an underground club off a cobblestone street, empty except for two people dancing. An old dream becoming real. Waking up naked on a mattress in a blank blue room, early morning sun streaming through a skylight high overhead; washing my face in a strange bathroom filled with hemp soap, olive oil-derived shampoo, iron dragonflies; trying to find my bag in a loft filled with contorted and gaudily dressed mannequins, as if the ashen of Pompeii had died with their party gear on; and onto a Queens street, kids running past shrieking, school buses rumbling down the road.

Never A Dull Moment

2007-04-13T10:06:00.001-04:00

First thing Thursday morning, A. emails and asks if I want to go to a party with some of her friends. And I’m thinking sure, why not; only so many nights you can head to the gym, do freelance stuff, read James Agee, maybe stare at the wall for an hour in existential ennui. Unbeknownst to me, however, this party was:

a.) At an adult toy store.
b.) At an adult toy store in the Village
c.) At an adult toy store in the Village advertised as ‘singles welcome.’

Hours later and I’m bracketed in by two massive pipe-workers describing in loving detail their technique for ‘tapping hos’ while in the background two toothless obese geriatrics with fanny packs grind to an 80s pop hit, in a room filled with all manner of buzzing/leaping/twitching plastic items whose function could only be properly delineated by reading a three-page instruction manual in poorly-translated Japanese. The mind, out of self-preservation, simply refuses to comprehend. Here I was thinking a West Side Chicago bowling alley was the world’s most dysfunctional location after midnight, but that was before some androgynous hipster with enough metal in her face to give a TSA employee a panic attack tried to solicit me for acts that get you burned at the stake in Kansas. Meanwhile the rest of my crew found themselves approached by a variety of men who made Stuntman Mike in Death Proof look like a model of clean mental health; lacking tasers, we almost had to arm ourselves with oversized Rabbits (no, don’t ask) to battle our way out of there.

Then we went for fries.

Afterwards, on the subway, an orange-haired Chinese woman decides to engage me in some sort of dialogue. It is 2am and I am simply not in the mood. “Coney Island!” she yelps.

“Yes. Coney Island,” I say, pointing to the floor of our train, before turning to point at Coney Island on the wall map behind us.

“Coney Island?”

“We’re on the right train. You’re fine.” I smile and nod.

”Coney Island.”

“You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?”

“Coney Island!”

“Swearengen! Swearengen!”

“Coney Island.”

“I have a full bladder. If I start giggling I’ll leak piss. Please, stop.”

”Coney Island!”

The train hisses to a halt, and the doors slide open. The Chinese woman shoots bolt upright, staring at the platform. A couple of construction workers are hunched there, beating on some oily piece of machinery with their tools. Something clicks in her mind; one-point-five seconds later she’s off the train and heading for the workers as fast as her generously plump legs can carry her, her last bellow of “Coney Island!” lost in the ding and boom of the doors mercifully sliding shut again. As we plunge back into the tunnel my last glimpse is of her trying to explain whatever predicament to a burly Brooklynite whose eyes say that he’s seen it all before.

Travels

2007-04-11T08:53:00.001-04:00

Miami, from a helicopter. Miami, from five hundred feet in the early morning air, buzzing soccer fields and trucks loaded with migrant workers and azure-blue bays flecked with sailboats, half-built skyscrapers glittering in the rising sun. A sudden burst of wind, tilting the ‘copter ever-so-slightly, as we dip over the beach. The sound of rotor blades muffled by Bose headphones; the pilot grinning in the face of twenty-mile-an-hour winds and saying, “Well, this isn’t so bad at all.”

Afterwards, a party at the Havana Club. Trying to wrestle down a fine cigar, rolling the ink-bitter smoke on my tongue and switching the increasingly hot stick from hand to hand. The kind of view out the window that you’d see from a low-flying plane. A cosmonaut training suit in one corner, like a prop from a Ridley Scott movie.

Then you’re back in New York. Waiting on a cold Newark train platform, already trying to assemble the story in your head. Juggling it with twenty other things, still.

--

“Quick, say something fucked up.”

“Everyone you kill on Christmas has to serve you in the afterlife.”

“Thanks. Things were getting a little too normal around here.”

--

Connecticut. Bitter little post-industrial towns, boarded-up factories and sad little houses, rising condos and pillbox bars, lone cop cruisers parked in the middle desolate parking-lots. New Haven, and out. The bitterness gives way to fields and hills still brown from winter-cold. An Old World weekend of red meat and interrogation, the sense that everyone is on borrowed time; a church service; a croquet game; three generations under one roof.
--

My Book Dreams Limping Along

2007-04-10T17:48:00.001-04:00

So I have an agent – sort of.

Isn’t that like being ‘sort of’ dead?

Well, said agent read the book, and really liked the book, but pointed out major structural issues that impede the book from being all the book could be. Specifically, the book veers from, first to third act, “interesting, intellectual thriller to gruesome-but-quirky shoot-'em-up violence” without a consistent spine. If I fix this, apparently, she thinks she can sell it. All in all she handed back maybe three pages’ worth of notes; but if my revisions aren’t up to snuff, then it’s all for nought.

So it’s not like you’re signed or anything.

Yes! Nothing is easy these days – particularly over the last week.

How long will these revisions take?

Oh, about three months.

Guess who’s living like a monk until Independence Day!

Shut up. I have a knife.

Tell them about the other not-so-fantastic thing that happened!

Relationship fall down go boom?

No, not that, the other thing!

Oh yeah, I failed to make the semi-finals in the Gather.com First Chapters contest. I’m tempted to make a disparaging comment here about chunky antisocial Renaissance-garb-wearing motherfuckers having more World of Warcraft battle-buddies to vote on their abysmally structured Harry Potter rip-offs than I had actual people giving me constructive criticism, but my intention from the beginning wasn’t to win (although it might have been nice); I just wanted to get high enough in the rankings to give me leverage and visibility for my own literary-world designs. Argh!

More about Miami, Connecticut, etc. upcoming…

I Trust You to Kill Me

2007-03-20T22:28:00.001-04:00

It is two in the morning and you could pick up the phone and order any number of exotic dishes delivered right to your door but for some strange reason, in a city of twelve million people, in what some argue (stridently, loudly) is the nerve center of the West, you can't find an all-night hardware store with a toilet plunger capable of dealing with the mess boiling up through your pipes. Standing in my Red Army t-shirt and a pair of ghost boxer shorts, awakened seconds before by the sucking sounds emanating from my bathroom, I stare into the toilet and mentally beg the thing to retreat before it reaches the brim. And it does.

The next evening I purchase the aforementioned plunger, stride into my bathroom, announce to the still-burbling plumbing that "It's Giuliani time," and proceed to correct the situation with extreme prejudice.

Thus begins my third week in New York.

I understand why a friend of mine, over beers last week, pronounced this the unhealthiest city in the world. You grow used to juggling ten things at once, spending eleven hours in the office and then another five in front of your laptop at home, drinking cup after cup after cup after cup after cup after cup of white tea, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping away while trying to calm down a bull-goose loony in Mexico or arranging a helicopter race or asking your contacts in DC (politely but with clenched teeth) where exactly your fucking money is. You're always *on.* On the weekends you see the Pogues at Roseland or a dance production or simply cruise Chinatown negotiating in your bullshit three words of Mandarin over three oranges. Which is fantastic; indeed what you've always wanted. But at the end of the day your hands shake and you feel too drained to do anything but sit on the couch and watch Daniel Craig snap a few necks while you eat an egg-white omlette with roasted garlic and sundried tomatoes.

So you start another novel. Never mind that your first one is still being considered by an agent, or that it's winding its way through the Gather.com contest. You take up again what you started in the scrub-jungle six lifetime-long weeks ago, churning out another 2,000 words a night. In the morning you awake from dreams of being torn apart by dogs and boil your skin under the shower, and start again.

Live from NYC...

2007-03-11T22:44:00.000-04:00

So. Made it to NYC with my 10 cardboard boxes of possessions, my furniture, and my sanity relatively intact. Set up last Saturday. Ever since, have been rodeo-riding the bucking-clanking-booming R train to work every morning, iPod turned up against the world, plowing through whatever pulp fiction I've dragged along.

Work has been a matter of hitting the proverbial ground running; I'm a cigar reviewer, a celebrity interviewer, an expensive-watch researcher, and a high-tech gear writer in one neat little package. Our office is under moderate construction. The Post and EE have continued to flow without interruption; for the former I'm working on an article about jellyfish.com.

No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn

2007-02-21T15:21:00.001-05:00

In the last three weeks: Was offered – and accepted – a position as an editor for my mentor’s publishing company in New York; found an apartment in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, at the very end of the R Line; interviewed John Travolta; quit the current job; drove from DC to NYC with two feral cats (rescued from the Turks & Caicos) scratching away in the back; was serenaded, spontaneously, by a mariachi band wearing leather biker jackets, while traveling on the aforementioned R Line.

I’ve been chewing antacids and slugging Pepto-Bismol like there’s no tomorrow.

A lot of the uncertainty has been eliminated, though. From here on out it’s a logistics issue; which always turns me into a sort of penny-ante Patton, complete with muttering about timetables and contingencies and probable failure rates.

Pine Cay

2007-01-31T16:58:00.000-05:00

The tropical storm raked the island with warm rain, and in its wake I had to look for someone down near the Devil’s Cut. The sand road had flooded; filled with murky, pearl-colored water of unknown depth, and despite my vehicle’s fat wheels and high undercarriage I decided to play it safe and go off-road, crunching through the reeds near the shore-break where Columbus’s men landed 500 years ago…right onto the island’s private runway. Fishtailing across the cracked tarmac, spattered with mud, bumping over rocks, humming along with Regina Specktor’s ‘Fidelity’ playing on repeat in my head (“suppose I never, ever saw you”/”suppose it never fell apart”), face tilted out the side-door for any executive jets that might take this highly inappropriate moment to drop out of the low cloud cover for touchdown. Back onto the parallel sand road, swerving past the pigmy garbage truck trundling towards the dump, heavy with stone-faced workers who sardonically yell “Joe-Ni-Deep!” at the sight of the red bandana around my head, the four days’ stubble…and at that most excellent moment, I think: I could live down here.

Except for the bugs. Staying in a farmhouse in a clearing in the scrub jungle, 200 yards from the beach, means all manner of crawlies and beasties come out to sip at your blood. You wake up four times a night, pad into the living room, and soak yourself in bug spray before heading back to bed. Out kayaking in the Caicos Banks, sea turtles and bonefish diving through the sand below, the sea breeze keeps the buzzing buggers back…but once you get back onshore, you’re theirs. Which is why I found it surprising, walking along the beach one late morning, to see the 10,283-richest woman in Europe and her 17-year-old stoically mute Italian boy-toy stumble out of the weeds stark naked, running for the water.

“Bonjour!” I called, with a cheery wave.

“Gawk!” The Countess went, sprinting double-time for the breakers.

“Arf!” cried her little dog (a four-legged one, not the two-legged), galloping after her.

Having interrupted the spirit of the doubtlessly post-coital swim, and having gained some small measure of revenge for La Comptessa’s open mockery of my French accent at a dinner last year, I gave another faux-oblivious wave and continued up the beach past them…but her little bijoux chein decided to switch national alliances and follow at my heels. Creating an issue for both the Countess, who, now safe in the opaquicity of the water, began to call for her little monsieur to return to her, as well as for me, threatening via pantomime to drop-kick the animal into a convenient rip-tide and send it to Spain.

Back in Providenciales, riding in the back of a pickup towards the docks, seeing campaign posters on everything. “They call elections now,” someone told me later. “President wants them held in March, so he can bring up Haitians and make them belongers, keep him in power, but the Queen calls elections. He is so corrupt. It is hard to hide that kickback wealth, a tiny place like this.” The campaign posters are stapled to the rickety boards of chicken-shacks, taped to the grimy walls of auto-repair shops and windowless cinderblock boxes; and in the hills above, facing the ocean, the steel and concrete skeletons of new condos and hotels, sprouting all along the island chain. Some need to hide their wealth, true; others want you to be able to see it in a boat from miles off.

Crowd Control

2007-01-09T15:37:00.000-05:00

“Think about it,” the bartender with the red shirt and the long greasy hair tells me. “What’s the Cat known for?”

“Alcohol poisoning,” I joke, and regret it. The downstairs bar around us is empty except for a pair of washed-out women in hooded sweatshirts and a bony man flicking a piece of tape between his fingers. The bartender stares a hole through the back of my head.

“Guess again,” he says, very quietly.

“Music?”

“What’s the capacity upstairs? You don’t know, so I’ll tell you. Six hundred. How many smoke, you think?”

“Say half.”

“And all those people, filling the upstairs, suddenly needing to smoke, come outside. Clogging everything up. Listen, I used to smoke. I stopped smoking and drinking three years ago.” He holds up a bottle of Budweiser in each hand for a significant moment, before lowering both into the cooler behind the bar. “But this is America, and in America, I believe you have a God-given right to kill yourself however you want to.”

I drink up, jot a few notes, and leave. No way will that part of the discussion end up on my DC Style blog on the smoking ban.

First Week, New Year

I win the National Press Club’s short story contest, using the first chapter of the book; an agent in NYC is reading the first 40 pages. AARP the Magazine story comes out. OnTap issue comes out. Post story runs on Sunday. Amy Lin story runs in the City Paper.

New Year’s down at Lake Anna—a giant house in a forested stretch off the 606. Three days with journalists and other drinkers with writing problems, not to mention the contingent of increasingly belligerent Russians. I get the opportunity to work on my grilling skills, and develop an affinity for Rusty Nails.

I come back to a new office—and a desk with my chair and screen to the door. People sneak up and shoot rubber bands at the back of my head. It makes me think of the television ad where the monkeys scream and leap and basically destroy the life of their one human co-worker.

Halifax

2006-12-11T16:35:00.000-05:00

Q. How do Canadians mug people?

A. Apparently by taking 30 of their best friends and jumping you in a dark alley. What they lack in firepower being made up, apparently, with a whole lot of fists. At least, this is what someone told me on my first night in Halifax: rumors swarmed that whole gangs of restless youth were engaging in a little bit of street capitalism with any bastard unlucky enough to walk down the wrong road at the wrong moment.

Plus Canadians – at least those stuck on the Atlantic seaboard during winter – tend to be on the short side; so needless to say, I was excited about the prospect of matching my soft and relatively untrained fists against some sort of Midget Massive Attack. A little bit of revenge for burning my hometown during the War of 1812.

(Speaking of which, as I walked the ramparts of Halifax’s Citadel, playing British general, a Canadian woman shouted out, a propos of nothing: “Yeah, Americans can get all cowboy, but we kicked their asses during the one time we fought.” Well, not exactly. The British burned the District, yeah, which was a swamp with a couple of outbuildings – now it’s a swamp with a couple of Starbucks shops, at least in summer – but then they got repulsed by the heroic forces of…Baltimore. Which given the context of the times, is kind of like Muhammad Ali getting beaten down by a one-legged asthmatic gimp with syphilis. But I digress.)

Anyway, I decided to take a walk into the neighborhood where these attacks supposedly happened, not because I harbored any sort of death wish but because it stood between me and another neighborhood that, for the good of the travel article, I absolutely had to visit. Frankly, aside from some seriously sketchy-looking auto repair shops and some frightening mullets, the neighborhood in question wasn’t any different than any mildly rundown blue-collar place you’d find in the States – at least during daylight.

Halifax itself reminded me both of Seattle – rainy, piney, hilly, filled with free-trade coffee shops and vegan eateries and bookstores – and Baltimore – grimy, industrial, filled with port cranes and ships. Worth spending a few days in the other week, but not the most exciting geographic point in North America; as the customs agent laughed as I crossed back into the States: “Nova Scotia in winter? What’d you do, lose a bet?”

Not exactly.

The Week in Writing

My article about Darren Aronofsky is published in the Post. I send a snowball-in-hell query letter/chapters of the first book (revisions continuing) to Ann Rittenberg. My next Post article, written on Sunday night, clocks in at 3,500 words, meaning it needs to be cut by, oh, 93 percent. Dad criticizes first draft of Halifax article, sent to him in a moment of early-morning idiocy on my part, as “hopelessly contrived in some sections.” Work on second book begins. DC Style renews my blogging contract for another record-breaking month. I now have a couch in Damascus, thanks to my former intern.

26

2006-11-22T14:03:00.000-05:00

I'm So Old. Not.

So I turned 26 last Friday. K., with the combined efforts of B., B., M. and apparently a whole lot of others, managed to a.) fly totally beneath my radar for three weeks, b.) infiltrate my apartment the day of, c.) set up said apartment to look like a casino, and d.) surprise the hell out of me (in a good way; the best way; the 'best birthday ever' kind of way) once I walked in the door after having dinner with my parents. The world's most intense poker game over $7 took place at my living-room table; bottles were dropped on my kitchen floor and more were opened; good things happened in corners.

I also turned another year older without the massive existential angst that came with turning 25. Mostly because, over the last year, I've managed to complete a big chunk of the life goals I hadn't accomplished up to that point. Also because 26 isn't really a milestone; that's reserved for 30, particularly if I haven't published at least one book by then.

The search for an agent is still ongoing, thanks for asking. [growl] The literary world's equivalent of Ari Gold takes the manuscript of 'Q' for four weeks and comes back with, "You're a good writer, and I love the premise, but I'm not passionate enough about this...it's really a subjective thing." The next day I sent off query letters to two more.

By way of suicidal birthday resolutions, I'm upping my running regimen from 6 miles to 8-10, which I'm sure I'll curse myself for as I plow through the riverside muck and cold under a gray sky, before heading back to my place for a cup of unsweetened green tea. Hoo-rah.

Post piece on Friday. Speaking of shameless plugs, another City Paper squib (it's a couple ones down). Also had a short piece on James Bond for the DC Style blog. Speaking of which...

Bond. Angsty Bond

So early last week, I took a spare hour and wrote a spec piece, politically-tinged, on the then-upcoming 'Casino Royale.' Neither Slate nor Salon went for it, of course, because they had their own features in the pipeline, but I'm pasting the first draft below, simply because I hate to see it languish on my Mac's hard drive.

(I enjoyed 'Royale,' when I finally ended up seeing it on Saturday. Craig looks like a Bond actually capable of hurting people, as opposed to a GQ cover boy to whom someone happened to hand a Kalishnikov. If anything, he's far more impulsive and unrefined - at least in this initial film - from the Bournes and Bauers the producers were trying to emulate. But I leave the deeper discussion of that to the below.)

Anyway.

HED: Fractured Ice
DEK: Onscreen spies and our national character.

"Shaken, not stirred," Sean Connery murmured in the first James Bond movies – a phrase that not only described his martini preference, but a sort of general 1960s super-spy aesthetic: unflappable under fire, emotionally cool, utterly assured of the moral superiority of his purpose. His fictional contemporaries often evinced the same kind of righteousness.

But in the past few years, you had to pity Bond a little. While he was off playing with an increasingly ludicrous series of gadgets – invisible cars, satellites that could harness the sun's power – his super-agent descendents have busied themselves with all sorts of moral quandaries. Jason Bourne (of the Bourne soon-to-be trilogy) expresses rigid-jawed regret for his actions; Jack Bauer (of the TV show 24) tortures and kills in the name of Truth, Justice and the American Way, or at least allowing millions of Angelinos to breathe radiation-free air. Villains often turn out to be the same government – or at least a rouge faction of it – that created the hero.

And still Bond continued on his merry way, through a world of clearly delineated good and evil that bore increasingly little resemblance to reality. That is, until now: Casino Royale marks the emergence of a different Bond, as represented by the spooky-looking Daniel Craig: tough, impulsive, violent. More than willing to bring the hurt, and then examine his bloodied soul in a bathroom mirror.

Our onscreen super-spies are now on the same page. But why this page in particular? The spy thriller used to be about escapism: fabulous locations, beautiful women, elegant dining, and a little bit of state-sanctioned violence to cap off the evening, so to speak. Yet Bauer, Bond and Bourne live in gray and unhappy worlds; their actions not only kill villains (still cartoonish) but also the innocent – and often eat away at their own souls.

The times in which we live might have something to do with it. Bond – the old Bond, the one who spoke in Scottish brogue while stopping yet another Soviet-funded missile – personified the West's sense of rectitude during the Cold War. Today, with the upheavals over Iraq, when the majority of Americans cite 'corruption' as their major influence at the polls, well, that old image of the spy seems positively dinosaurian. To look at it one way, our spies end up reflecting how we feel about our government.

Which is all well and good, but why watch in the first place? What appeal do these onscreen agents have for a West that's sick of the actions of their real-life counterparts, including those at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

They feel regret. At the end of The Bourne Supremacy, Bourne's final mass-demolition chase through Moscow isn't driven by a need to save the world, but to apologize to the daughter of a couple he killed long ago. Over the course of five seasons of 24, Jack Bauer loses everyone he loves in the course of preserving millions of lives – turning him into a drug addict and, at one point, a quivering mass of nerves. And not to ruin Casino Royale, but there are reasons Bond becomes an emotionally distant borderline-sociopath. They are shaken and stirred – and perhaps give the viewer some catharsis in the bargain.

Which makes Bond films suddenly relevant again, at least as subtext, as "stay the course" gives way to trying to find alternate ways out of our international quagmires. But while Bond can strip off a bloody shirt and have a moment of reflection in a hotel bathroom, and Bauer can have exactly two minutes' worth of nervous breakdown alone in a car, what form will our own collective regret take?

Sighted in the Wild

2006-11-13T17:45:00.000-05:00

“Hey, I’ve seen you before.”

I’m standing in a corner of the office elevator, singing the chorus of The Killers’ ‘Uncle Jonny’ under my breath (“Tell us what’s going on/Feels like everything’s wrong/If the future is real/Jonny, you’ve got to heal”), when the man standing in front of the doors turns to me, squints, and says the above.

“Huh?” Momentary panic seizes me. Do I owe this person money? Accidentally bump into him and spill his beer at the Cat last weekend? Am I about to get pummeled? My foggy pre-9 a.m. brain desperately sorts through scenarios…should I launch some sort of preemptive attack here?

“Yeah, you write those restaurant reviews,” he says. “Small plates.”

Ah. Yes. The OnTap restaurant review page, which unfortunately features a headshot of me looking like a chainsaw-brandishing maniac right out of an 80s horror flick – not in any way the fault of the photographer, I hasten to add, but because my natural aversion to having my photo taken often translates itself into a distinctive do-you-feel-lucky-punk grimace whenever a camera is pointed in my general direction.

“Yep!” I say.

Random person nods again and steps off the elevator, leaving me mildly confused. Also present in the elevator: our marketing director, who twists around and says, mildly wide-eyed, “You moonlight?”

Yeah, you could say that.

Bread

In a fit of temporary insanity I decided to make bread over the weekend. It turned out well, actually, for a first attempt. A recipe involving a minimal amount of yeast and a high water/flour ratio, then left to sit, in its covered bowl, for 18 hours. The dough had the consistency of warm glue as I poured it from the bowl into a towel dusted with flour; I poked it into a rough ball and went running (a cold and rainy early Sunday morning, a muck of wet leaves clinging to my shoes and shins), and then came back and baked it on high heat for two hours.

The whole process left me with a faint understanding of why the chefs and butchers in Bill Bufford’s ‘Heat’ constantly refer to their foodstuffs as live things, with their own personalities and fickleness. Bread dough quickly assumes its own destiny – it’ll rise when it feels like it, but maybe not – and depending on which ingredients you use, has its own quirks; just as, I imagine, certain cuts of meat or animals have their own structures and idiosyncrasies that demand the respect from whomever’s doing the cutting. The tragedy of mass-market production, in a way, is that by producing uniform products by the tens of thousands or even millions, all those quirks are stripped away, leaving you with something bland of soul if not of taste.

Oh, great, I’m a friggin’ New Yorker food critic now.

Shameless Plugs

New City Paper piece (City Lights) on Nov. 17; interview with Darren Aronofsky runs in the Washington Post on Nov. 24; Post piece on Internet leagues sometime in Nov.; new issue of OnTap on Nov. 30.

Daylight Nil

2006-10-31T17:18:00.000-05:00

So Lazy

Signed a two-month blogging deal with DC Style; every Wednesday at 4:00, a couple-hundred word missive from me will be posted on their (ever-growing) site, to likely be met with thundering silence. Joke. Hopefully. In any case, a bit rushed to type the hyperlink to it (so far have done three), but they're up. Also, links abound to my City Paper piece of three weeks ago, the newest OnTap issue, and my Washington Post piece last Sunday. More deals developing. Have heard nothing about the book. Argh. Argh. Argh. Meanwhile, the day-job (ha!) plans on shipping me to...Nova Scotia sometime in the coming weeks. A lovely warm place with lots of sunli...wait, what's that you say? Oh crap.

The week in weirdness

So last Tuesday I go to a press screening of ‘The Fountain,’ and afterwards Darren Aronofsky answers questions from a few of us ink-stained wretches in the basement of the Four Seasons Hotel. He’s a month away from releasing a film that’s taken up six years of his life, gone through two cast changes, and been booed by part of the audience at the Venice Film Festival; in other words, he’s not taking any shit. He half-jokingly refers to another reporter as a bitch; and when I inadvertently keep up my steak of pissing off celebrities I interview by asking him about the reaction at Venice, he gets downright combative:

“Half the audience booed, but half of them cheered; but the lady from Variety didn’t report that part, and here you are asking your question.”

(I paraphrase that, not having my sound file of the interview handy.)

The issue is, while I wrote about Aronofsky for OnTap, I haven’t been able to sell a second article – written on spec – to anybody else. This is because everybody wants a piece of him at the moment; everyone from Wired to Stop Smiling had set up their arrangements with him halfway through the summer. But it imparts a valuable lesson about freelancing: get there first, get there fast, and hold your territory.

The words ‘hold your territory’ come to me again during the 1st Annual Usual Food and Wine Festival, held at a house off Dupont Circle. This is after I’ve consumed a fair portion of fried calf testicles, ostrich meat, and tripe (everything tastes vaguely like chicken or beef - strip the labels from the plates and you'd be able to serve it anywhere); I’m leaning against a pillar, jotting notes in my pad (this is for DC Style, but I'm also trying to pitch a longer version to CHOW) when a blonde woman my age with heavy jewelry and an expensive suit walks up and says,

“Look at you, taking notes. What are you, some kind of dork?”

I look up. She’s not smiling. She means it. Beside her, in a moderately expensive outfit, stands a blank piece of meat I assume is her boyfriend.

“I’m sorry?” I say.

She stares, still not smiling, and sniffs.

“I’m covering this for a magazine,” I say, considering my options:

A.) Let this slide.
B.) ‘Accidentally’ spill my glass of Greek wine on her pricey heels.
C.) Sucker-punch her boyfriend in the face.

But while the idea of this woman realizing her error every time she looks at her boy-toy’s broken teeth has a perverse appeal, I don’t want to be ejected before I’ve interviewed enough chefs about their philosophy involving the deep-frying of calf balls. Which I do. And then I leave, and head home, and watch ‘Lost’ while typing up everything, including this blog. Hours from now I’ll go to sleep.

Because it could be worse.

Jumping back in space-time for a moment to yesterday: the drag-queen race down 17th St., an annual event that attracts hundreds of people to watch men wearing tights and Hillary Clinton outfits sprint in five-inch heels for five blocks. At one point, standing on a stoop above the crowd, I see a police car roar past with a severely burly man in a skirt lying on the back bumper, flailing his legs; the cop inside howls something vaguely panicked or threatening over the in-car megaphone. You could always be that cop. Forced to do something you probably hate.

The Usual

2006-09-19T15:53:00.000-04:00

Observations:

1. So here’s my philosophical conundrum of the day: if religion, per David Wilson’s 2002 book “Darwin’s Cathedral,” is an evolutionary adaptation that allows intra-species groups to compete more effectively for the same resources – akin to pack behavior, in other words – then doesn’t that make inter-religious strife, well, the whole *point* of religion in the first place? A group’s behaviors and beliefs allow that group to not only operate more effectively as a unit, but also spread both its genes and memes in as many directions as possible. So, to wit, is the most violent religion also the most advanced? Is ‘peace, love and understanding’ merely polite window-dressing for a biologically sanctioned ‘kill the infidel’?

2. “You’re not a bad person,” the ever-loveable H. tells me very early this morning. “Yeah, you do stupid things and hurt people, but so the fuck what? Join the club. The fact that you didn’t mean to do those things is what matters. If you were a bad human being, you’d actually go out of your way to hurt people. You need to stop watching three-hour German movies where everyone dies in a bunker at the end.”

3. For this AARP the Magazine freelance piece I had the chance to speak to Mighty Famous Author (MFA). MFA wrote a couple of books about his young life as a junkie, one of which was turned into a big movie about a decade back. He also has a severely overprotective assistant who apparently researched me with the single-minded vigor of a KGB agent on speed, because midway through our interview MFA sprung the fact that he’d read a short story I published in college and a bunch of my nonfiction. “So, when’d you write that?” he asked. “Um, sophomore year of college,” I rattled, seized by total ball-crushing terror. “Yeah, college,” he said, voice loaded with appropriate ‘it sucked, but we’ll humor it because you were obviously younger’ subtext. “College,” I repeated again, with appropriate ‘I’m a better writer now, maybe, hopefully’ subtext.

4. But I finished the freelance piece. My hour-and-a-half interview with him ended up boiled down to about 100 words worth of quote.

5. M. was my editor for that. Our relationship is totally Janus: the ‘friends’ half of it consists yakking companionably about books or whatever while co-writing the occasional screenplay; the ‘writer/editor’ half consists of her whaling on me with revision questions, muttering ‘I’m sorry’ all the while, while I cheerfully grumble after more sources.

6. Writing a nonfiction book at this point would be total overload. But I find myself plot-plot-plotting anyway. I still haven’t heard from J. about ushering me into the Promised Land of Representation.

7. My arch has healed.

Tofu!

2006-09-05T23:10:00.000-04:00

So, back in the proverbial day I used to cook stir-fry a good deal; this was in college, and my weekly food budget was something on the order of $15-20, which meant a lot of peppers and tofu. What eventually ended up percolating in my increasingly non-non-stick pan was stir-fry in the same way that two hundred pounds of undifferentiated carbon is a walking, talking human being: kinda ballpark, but kinda not. Kinda edible. Maybe. Maybe not. D. would scarf it down when he came back from his strange midnight runs in the driving snow; E. would make polite noises and keep smiling as she ate; I shoveled it down telling myself that it was protein, damnit, of which I needed all I could get at the time.

Fast-forward through time and space to tonight. I have a new wok (cheap, Ikea, nonstick, wide and deep) and an array of peanut sauces, pad thai noodles, chopped extra-firm tofu, etc. etc. I follow the recipe found on the back of the noodle box, humming and bopping along with the Stones' 'Brown Sugar.' And lo and behold, after much fire and steam, I not only have a meal that's edible, it's...kinda good.

My cooking skills officially evolve beyond pasta, sushi, and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Work is insane. Not sure if I need a fixer for Kuwait. Not sure until Friday if I'm making it to Kuwait at all. Not sure if my pitches over the last two days to Slate, Salon, AARP and DC Style will be picked up. Hoping J.'s new baby hasn't vomited on my novel manuscript. Even so, I'm enjoying the tumult of work; it's either that or take up kickboxing again and goad Type-As to punch me in the face over and over again until we work out our respective l'il demons.

Observations:

1. 'The Wire' is the best television show ever.

2. 'Serenity' is not half as great after you've seen 'Firefly.'

3. 'She Wants Revenge' is worth listening to over and over again.

4. Justin Timberlake's new single is an instrument of torture that should be banned under the Geneva convention, and is doubtlessly already utilized at 300 decibels in CIA Black Sites all over the world, forcing dozens of jihadis to scream, "Yes! Infidel! Yes, I tell you the location of the bomb! Please do not play 'SexyBack' again, for the love of all that is holy!"

5. Running 7.3 miles with strained left arch = not greatest idea.

6. I would have made the greatest Roman general of all time. I base this assertion on taking three ancient warfare classes at UofC, reading exactly five books on the subject since, and playing a couple dozen hours of 'Command & Conquer: Generals,' so in reality I'd probably have been up on a cross before day's end. But based on how the generals/Senators act in the HBO series 'Rome,' well, let me put it this way: Cesear could have taken them if he was a half-blind retard with palsy. Seriously. That show makes them look like a bunch of pansies.

7. I am no longer seized by one of my periodic death-wishes.

8. 'Lolita' remains, in my humble opinion, the best novel of the 20th century.

9. 'Everything is Illuminated,' on the other hand, is an unmitigated, stinking piece of pretentious shit.

10. I have to start hitting the biking trails by 8 at the latest on weekends. By 9/9:30 they begin to clog with every single screaming child, slowed-to-a-crawl bicyclist, baby stroller, Fat Person Collective, oblivious (thanks to their iPod) Desperate Housewife, geriatric jogger, loud family walking four abreast on a two-lane trail, spandexed moron and Nike-wearing mental dwarf on the Eastern Seaboard. This does not mesh with my desire to bike 30 miles at a healthy fraction of light speed (also known as 15 mph) while softly singing the Smashing Pumpkins' 'Everlasting Gaze' to keep my breathing regulated. I will run you over with extreme prejudice. I don't care about your 401(k) or what school junior's thinking about or how you're putting one over on your spouse with the door greeter at Wal-Mart or how standing in the middle of the trail relieves the stress of your nothing job at Evil Empire Consulting. When you don't heed my increasingly loud call of 'On your left,' well, that's the moment your life becomes forfeit. Seriously. Go ahead and stand there. Your stupidity and my front tire will help keep the gene pool nice and sparkling clean. But I'm nice. I even veered my 24-speed titanium-frame hybrid into the bushes yesterday because you had parked your bike *across* the trail in order to fish your cell phone from your yellow Lance jersey. Actually, let me amend that penultimate sentence: I'm nice for now. Next time I stir-fry your children. [rant complete]

Link O' Rama

2006-08-31T15:06:00.000-04:00

So yeah, my usual opening refrain: haven’t written in awhile. Been busy with work. Had a fun-in-retrospect, pants-crapping-at-the-time incident coasting a nearly gasless sedan down a dirt road in West Virginia. Revised the book (again) and sent it to my maybe-agent. Survived a chance encounter with the Tongue Monster (don’t ask). Saw two of my friends leave town.

Anyway, the first piece from my new gig as a semi-regular blogger for DC Style, Threadless , got picked up by ThisNext, and my OnTap article on DC Rollergirls got picked up by DCist maybe two weeks back. The edition of Frommer’s with my chapters comes out next month. The new issue of Washington Flyer with my Boston/Park City story should be online within a week, as should my piece for the Editorial Eye.

Life According to N., Season 25, Episode 12

2006-07-28T16:54:00.000-04:00

So I sent an agent a synopsis of the novel plus the first four (revised) chapters. Now said agent wants to see the whole book by Monday morning, and therein lies the problem: I've only rewritten the first four chapters. The rest, well, if not exactly a mess, is the writerly equivalent of a duty VW bug with 80k miles on it - gets from Point A to Point B, has some interesting quirks and tricks left in it, but you wouldn't pony up the cash to buy it if you had other options. So I know the bulk of the weekend will be spent at my desk, scribbling and typing away - or overhauling the engine, as it were.

Ultimately, though, it's a positive, because the producer that M. and I were talking to about the screenplay has gone AWOL. Which isn't a huge loss, but I kind of wanted the oodles of cash that we would have been entitled to under a deal brokered on WGA guidelines.

Argh.

Freelancing is likewise in limbo. Last week was somewhat lucrative, this week editors were nibbling but noncommittal. Suddenly I understand why people in professions based on the vulgarities of chance are always so stressed out.

Once this is all over and done with, one way or the other, I plan to open the bottle of red I bought during the day-trip to wine country last weekend, drink maybe half, and pass out in front of '24.'

From the Department of So-Very-Screwed

2006-07-16T14:18:00.000-04:00

It's official: the world is off its meds. As the IDF rolls the clock back on Lebanon 20 years with its sustained bombing campaign, as Iraq continues its daily grind of blood and fire, as DC hipsters and yuppies find themselves pistol-whipped by the disenfranchised within *gasp* three blocks of a Whole Foods, as Britney Spears continues to reproduce, I find myself in one of those deep, dark places.

By which I mean mentally, not the downstairs bar of the Black Cat.

Producer 'postponed' our ridiculously hard-to-schedule script meeting to a to-be-determined date; I lost out on a job that I believed I'd been obscenely qualified for; my best platonic female friend/editor/screenplay partner just scored a long piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is fantastic news (I'm happy for her, believe me) but merely highlights that my freelance career over the last three years has been pretty much nil, Frommer's and pieces for bar magazines nonwithstanding. I'm gripped by a keen sense that I'm *losing,* whatever that means; that the world-conquering impulses that have governed my whole young-adulthood have been thwarted despite my best efforts.

So I'm on battle footing. New policies of professional viciousness have been instituted, plans laid out.

Brief Update from our Not-Sponsor

2006-07-07T17:35:00.000-04:00

Finished the novel last Sunday and promptly sliced 10,000 words out of it. Sent it to the distribution list for the first round of comments, then promptly shoved the manuscript in a drawer and forgot about it for five days. The next part of the to-do list was to meet with a producer this week about screenplay work, but suddenly the man’s vanished and I’m starting to get twitchy about it, in typical N. fashion. Not that said vanishing wasn’t halfway expected, and not that the situation won’t resolve itself, but I’ve found myself hovering over the phone a bit too much, lately.

Bought a new bike – hybrid, titanium frame, top-line tires, etc. Justified the expense (the freelance payment from Frommer’s, gone with a magisterial swipe of the pen) by saying it would help me get more in shape, pay for itself with reduced health costs, etc. Except that it’s hot outside – pavement-softening, dog-killing hot – so I’m not sure about the wisdom of biking 40+ miles every weekend. It’s a world away from last week, when the rains and flooding shut down Beach Drive, allowing dozens of us runners to trot through the downpour while watching abandoned cars bob their way down Rock Creek.

Cheap Bastards

2006-06-26T17:12:00.000-04:00

To say I’m a movie buff is an understatement. Yet for however many hours and how much cash I spend for the privilege of celluloid bread & circus, I never stop at the snack stand on the way in – something about spending $10 for stale popcorn just doesn’t compute. However, the other day, as I was waiting in the lobby of Gallery Place for a couple of friends to show up, I noticed that the smallest popcorn size was labeled ‘child.’

I can just picture the meeting where whatever marketing guru (doubtlessly smelling faintly of brimstone) told the head of the theatre chain that, if he wanted to draw in money from more concessions, to just label the smallest possible size something that would make an adult hesitate in shame to order. It’s so brilliant that I’m surprised other industries haven’t picked up a variation of it. I mean, hell, instead of ‘economy’ class, we can just label that whole section of the plane ‘cheap bastard seating.’ Instead of a ‘value meal,’ we can call it ‘poorhouse special.’ I mean, if you can’t sell it through sex, just use the almighty power of shame. It’s a very powerful thing indeed, the need to preserve one’s status in the eyes of your fellow man.

Big things happening - by the end of July, either lots of balls will be rolling in beneficial directions, or I'll be crushed. In the meantime, a Noah-scale deluge has sunk our fair city (or at least its subway and most of its federal core) under a couple inches of water. Everyone's roof has leaked; everyone's commute ruined by 3-4 feet of water on the subway tracks. And because of the low-pressure system hanging off the coast, the weather will be general for the rest of the week. That's okay with me, since my place has stayed watertight; I spent yesterday night (between bouts of writing) sitting on my stoop and getting joyfully soaked as the heavens roared and flashed with the Earth's artillery, and sheets of rain soaked my skin.

Axial

2006-06-09T14:37:00.000-04:00

So H. and I are drinking in Bar Pilar, whose relatively cheap beers (at least compared to Saint Ex next door) and excellent location vis-à-vis my apartment (around the corner) are being rapidly outweighed by the flood of carefully disheveled hipsters who storm it every night. I’m extrapolating, to maybe the one person who hasn’t heard it yet, my current rant about a particular philosophical age as it applies, however narcissistically, to my own existence:

“But there was also the Axial Age, when Grecian philosophical inquiry,
Middle Eastern monotheism, Buddhism and Confucianism all developed simultaneously,” I say, the top of the bar cool on my forehead. “That might have been when people started tackling the Heavy Questions as opposed to relying on superstition and rituals with vaguely obsessive-compulsive overtones. All those Axial Age lines of inquiry, of course, came to the same conclusion that one's ego was the harbinger of destruction and that, to survive as a people, you had to aspire to selflessness and self-control. Which is an argument that religion is a sort of societal-genetic meme allowing the perpetuation of entire groups of individuals, much as certain fish have a pack mentality that makes a few sacrifice themselves so the group as a whole can survive when a large predator approaches; but that's outside the scope of this discussion. More to the point, maybe I get depressed and upset because I'm too ambitious and ego-driven. Maybe the Axial Age is telling me to sit on the couch and smoke more pot.”

H. has heard about this. “Are you still on that ‘Axial Age’ poop?”

“Yeah, I’m just another solipsistic asshole.”

“What does that even mean?”

“That I’m having a quarter-life crisis.”

“Shut up. Don’t use that term ever again.”

It’s true, though. I am one week like this one away from finding a Buddhist monastery somewhere and sitting in the lotus position for the next forty years exploring the non-nature of the metaphysical singularity. Whatever brain chemical governs one’s sense of self-worth is at an all-time low; it becomes a near-physical battle not to condemn my own life as total mission failure on a regular basis. Then I find myself detesting the impulse towards self-pity and head outside to run a few miles. I can’t win. But I can apply for new jobs. Getting out of town this weekend will help, too.

Slice

2006-06-02T16:31:00.000-04:00

So Kate brings me back a wicked machete of a knife from the Arctic Circle, the kind of sharp instrument you use to carve unyielding whale blubber or an ice-clogged rope, and the next thing you know I’m walking around the apartment looking for something to cut; realizing that, thanks to the steady progress of civilization as it applies to the packaging and processing of food, there really isn’t anything in my abode that would need cutting with the Mother of All Chopping Tools. Unfortunate.

It’s been the week of Family Events, thanks to a confluence of cousins graduating high school, grandparents in town, and other cousins about to leave for Africa. Which has left yours truly desperately seeking any sort of Me Time, big blocks of which are increasingly going towards the 35k-words-and-counting Book…

Plus Family Events are always filled with queries from relatives that I feel the need to respond to with either taciturn monosyllables or else extended philosophical treatises that don’t do much other than make me come off as more pretentious than usual. It’s like,

Grandma: “Do you think this hunger in Africa is part of God’s divine plan?”

Response Option A (taciturn): “No.” *grunt*

Response Option B (pretentious): “During the Axial Age, the simultaneous developments of Buddhism, Confucianism, monotheism in what is now the modern-day Middle East and philosophical inquiry in ancient Greece all arrived at the common conclusion that the ultimate path of man’s salvation lay in forsaking the ego. Therefore the evolution of the singularity commonly known as ‘God’ from destroyer to…blah, blah, ba-blah…”

I’m always a hit at those things, let me tell you. Not helping my mood on Sunday was the three hours of sleep I’d gotten, courtesy of the singing Rastas planting an extensive garden in my back alley, until another neighbor started yelling at them; prompting one of said Rastas, at 6:45am, to cause me to leap nearly five vertical feet from bed by booming right underneath my window: “ENJOY YOUR DAY, MON. ENJOY IT OR I WILL DESTROY IT. THAT IS MY JOB, TO DESTROY WHAT IS NOT ENJOYED.”

The neighbor, whose pleadings for silence I’d previously slept through, mumbled something largely unheard through glass.

Rasta: “RELAX, WHITE BOY. EVERY DAY ABOVE GROUND IS A GOOD DAY.”

Right-O; truer words never spoken. We landed the Big Project at work, but I’m waiting to see what the nature of my role could be. Battling through the press office of the mayor of Los Angeles for another article.

Go Down In Infamy

2006-05-16T16:26:00.000-04:00

Public Diplomacy was canceled; or our corner of it, at least. Two and a half years after joining this happy little unit as a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate, the order came down on Friday that the Arabic magazine and its various Web sites were canceled. I am a little relieved, to say the least, filled with the same feeling as when I was a kid on the first day of summer vacation.

On the Waterfront on Saturday night, in the middle of a kind of impromptu Propaganda Is Dead celebration, C. turns to me and says, ‘You realize that you’re now a platinum card-carrying member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.’ C. is a young conservative himself, so the tone wasn’t accusatory.

‘I vote Democratic, dork,’ I think I told him. And it’s true; every time I mentioned to someone new what I did for a living, I found myself inserting a phrase immediately afterwards backing up some sort of liberal credentials – ‘But I worked for Kerry last summer,’ ‘But I’m ambivalent about my role’ – out of a vague sense of guilt. As if I was saying, I am not part of what you see on the television every night. I am not part of this tsunami of shit consuming everything around us. I am not one of those pale fascist vampires stalking around the lobby of the Willard Hotel.

So it’s over for us. But never fear; State is busy on its next project to bring peace, love and understanding to the Arab World, a project that will doubtlessly make jihadists from Cairo to Baghdad throw down their weapons and join hands with their new American brothers and sisters for a rousing chorus of ‘Kumbaya’: a translation into Arabic of the Bronte classic ‘Jane Eyre.’ Your tax dollars at work, making sure that the female version of David Copperfield is greeted with the rousing silence of total indifference.

Meanwhile, my good buddy and former roommate writes from the center of Iraq:

“During today it peaked at 112, 170 in our body armor. We're all constantly dirty; there is a perpetual film of gray dead skin all over our bodies, exacerbated by the rawness of hard wind... This whole affair is best summed up by a soldier's experience in the portable shitters. It’s an oven in those things during sunup, but your nose is numb to the odor of rot. You shit like you shit everywhere else whether in comfort or nausea. You get your crusty ass out, grab a hot bottle of water, curse the army... But ya know what? I have Doritos baby, nothing like a bag of crunchy salty fat shit to humor the weather...”

On the afternoon of September 12, 2001, we sat on the ratty blue-and-grey couch we pulled from the dumpster in a Chicago alley to watch on our other roommate’s television as firemen picked through the rubble of what had once been the tallest building in the world. I don’t think either one of us knew what we wanted to do with our lives, exactly. But we were both filled with the surety that, come what may, whoever had propagated destruction on such scale against the United States would be annihilated like a roach hit with a pile-driver.

Jeepers, did we ever underestimate the incompetence of our elected officials. That faint whirring sound you heard when CENTCOM failed to drop a couple thousand Marines into Tora Bora to wipe out that last pocket of disgruntled Saudi engineers and homicidal goat herders was General Patton and every other red-meat commander this country ever had spinning in their graves over our total ineptitude. And the problem metastasized. We invaded the wrong country. We poured metaphorical fuel on the fire. And part of our solution was to send me into the Heartland with a digital recorder, a couple of Steno pads, a few Outkast CDs for those hundreds of road miles, in order to export what Americans were really like.

But we failed to understand the most fundamental thing: our audience didn’t give a solitary shit. It’s hard to care about pro wrestling or Ashley Judd or movie reviews when your own local news channels are filled with IEDs and screaming babies and infidel tanks crashing through the center of Baghdad. It wasn’t even a case of analyzing the demographics or psychographics; the goblins in State were more interested in slapping Laura Bush’s face on whatever they could in order to curry points with people in the Executive Branch. Now that it's over, I can say full-on that I was part of the problem, not the solution.

Warning: I Bite When Startled

2006-05-12T16:19:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve written last, due to life rocketing along with all the speed and stability of an X-1 rocket controlled by someone with brain damage and palsy. ‘Pilgrimage’ is finished and sent to HKD’s agent/manager out in LA. I’ve been writing an average of three articles a week and two daily news stories for Propaganda Today, plus WebMD stuff, the book stuff, the other screenplay stuff, the stretching-myself-too-thin stuff. Kate emails me Snoop Dogg songs in which he sings, ‘You’re doing too much’ as the chorus. The personal life is the usual roller coaster. It’s enough to set anyone to drink, which is exactly what H. and I ended up doing the other night, in Bar Pilar around the corner from my apartment.

There was an impressive stack of OnTap magazines on the windowsill beside us, and H. took one and started flipping through it while I was at the bar ordering drinks. She starts giggling as I walk back with pints in hand, and then tilts the page to reveal a small headshot of me looking like the sort of psychopathic Russian hitman who could set someone on fire while whistling Happy Birthday, next to the 20-point title ‘The Cheapskate.’ My restaurant mini-column: I hadn’t been aware of Monica’s choice for the title. I definitely hadn’t been aware of the photo, which was snapped in a record-breaking 10 seconds before both me and the photographer had to scamper back across two Metro stops to our respective offices. I nearly die on the spot.

‘I think it’s cute,’ H. says.

‘That title, and that photo, I’ll be surprised if women just don’t preemptively pepper-spray me every time I head down the street.’ I take a sip of whatever hipster-friendly import the bartender suggested I try, and put my head in my hands.

‘It’s cute in a very Stalinist sort of way,’ she says. ‘By the way, what’s with the umpire shirt? Seriously, I every time I look at you, I get this strange urge to walk into the nearest Foot Locker.’

I am wearing a blue-stripped shirt with dense lines. I think it looks distinctive.

‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘What else is new?’

I almost died on Tuesday. Or at least I thought so, for a moment. My boss had set his toast on fire in our office kitchenette and, after people started to bitch and complain about the smell and the smoke, ran around spraying the air with a bottle of pine air freshener. My eyes started to water; I retched, coughed, fell to my knees. Within two seconds I was doing my best impersonation of taking the Auschwitz spa treatment. On the upside, my annual performance review was right afterwards, and I think my whole surviving-a-chemical-attack thing bought me sympathy points on the proverbial carpet. I want the title bump, the salary bump, if I can’t escape from here posthaste.

I am going through, to paraphrase Thoreau, the life of quiet desperation, trying not to go to the grave with the song still in me. Some people deal with it by drinking copious amounts of beer; others buy the 200-gross “My Daddy Didn’t Love Me” condom box and head down to the local yuppie-hole for humiliating bathroom sex; others commit some sort of A-for-Effort suicide involving string, just for the attention. I go running. I head out while the sun’s still rising and power past the other gasping joggers, down through the Monuments and across the bridge into Virginia. You’re doing too much. I come home and write – I churn through the book that might not work, the next script that might never be bought, the articles that either pay 10 cents a word or else end up translated into Arabic and used as jihadist toilet paper in some Baghdadi crossfire hurricane. I practice my Chinese along with the podcasts on my iPod, yelling Homeric-scale profanities at imaginary Shanghai cab drivers and Beijing businessman. You’re doing too much. I eat takeout tofu and my blood sings with caffeine and alcohol. In the shower in the early morning, the alternating hot and cool of steam and water and air from the open window, I feel the most fundamental need for the house in the hills, the thatched hut on the island, the boat heading for the ends of the earth.

Boom

2006-04-10T17:09:00.000-04:00

The Blog: now with more blast, less radiation.

First off, a big “WHERE’S THE BOMB, DAMNIT?!” to Fox for renewing Kiefer Sutherland for another three seasons of severely irate, world-saving ’24’ goodness. If only our federal government truly were actually filled with pill popping, borderline-psychopathic federal agents with interests in smooth jazz and kneecapping anyone who looks at them funny. But no, alas, all our Homeland Security people are allegedly using the time they were supposed to be spending, well, actually protecting our borders to seduce 14-year-olds in Tampa.

That’s okay, though, because our Whackjob-in-Chief over in the White House is allegedly considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran in a bid to stop their nascent bomb program from taking off, at least according to the upcoming Seymour Hersh article in this week’s New Yorker. Never mind that a successful military strike against the 22-35 hard targets that represent the totality of Iran’s program would be virtually impossible, and never mind that such a move would unleash a tide of international condemnation that would overrun any last vestige of respect our nation has on the international stage – Bush just wants to see stuff done blown up good.

‘Pilgrimage’ is finished, at least until we get input from People In a Position to Do Something on the West Coast. M. and I are prepping ‘Aisle 13’ to move past the outline stage into actual script-writing. ‘Q.’ is up to 15,000 words. I thought I had another three weeks to finish personal projects before the propaganda mag made the shift from monthly to daily, but instead they decided to roll the latter out this afternoon, with me as photo editor in addition to writer. In sum: this week is pretty much guaranteed to be Chinese takeout-filled.

SoaP

2006-03-24T13:02:00.000-05:00

You know it’s late at night when conversations like the following develop:

“It’s kismet!”

“Kiss who?”

“Not me!”

“Fuck.”

“Not that either!”

There is a bottle of maple syrup on my kitchen counter, won yesterday night at the NPC Pub Quiz. It is glass and allegedly modeled on the State of Liberty and amber with sugary goodness, looking in all respects so much like an Oscar that I can’t help but pick it up every time I walk by and intone, “I’d like to thank the Academy…” They say that those who pick up an Oscar replica and fake like they’re accepting the award for best supporting actor tend to be passive-aggressive; those who accept for director, type-A personalities; those for best actor or actress, ego-driven. I tend to rehearse my best-screenplay speech, so I’m not sure where that places me, other than mildly delusional.

M. and I did a read-through of the screenplay on Wednesday night. What I thought was a pretty decent first draft is going to need its proverbial flooring torn up and replaced, particularly in Act II. It reads too much like stuff that’s come before. In the meantime, a couple of freelance projects and work have been chewing up my time. I’ve become cynically insurgent against one project, seeding it with lines such as, “Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement was remaining relentlessly chipper in the face of the threat of Soviet hegemony.”

It’s either that or sparing my sanity by watching the new fan-edited trailer for next year’s shoo-in for Best Picture, “Snakes on a Plane.” Actually, I'm enjoying how the term 'Snakes on a Plane' has started to register in the popular lexicon as a sort of geeky 'C'est la vie,' a kind of shorthand for a sense of existential resignation.

Sports Gods Are Just Like Us

2006-03-20T16:32:00.000-05:00

Sunday afternoon and I am lost in the bowels of the Verizon Center, trotting down white cinderblock corridor after corridor, looking for the Press Room. I have my press badge around my neck, which is probably the only thing keeping me from being tackled to the ground by some roving security guard. Through layers of concrete, I can hear a couple of thousand people cheering; a gaggle of cheerleaders runs by at one point to take starting positions. Finally, I find where I’m supposed to be going – a bunker filled with gray semi-cubes, a phone and a plaque bolted to the wall of each one: Associated Press, Washington Post, Washington Times, etc.

I am none of these. People glance at my tag and the name of the magazine on it with curiosity, but nobody speaks up. In the next room, a crowd of cameramen has gathered to watch the finale of some NCAA game on the television above. I have a fair amount of money on the tournament but can’t tell the teams apart; made my selections last week based on a complicated mathematical system that my editor up in NYC devised but whose thickets of probability and numbers I can't penetrate. Unlike everyone else here, I have little interest in basketball (although I do have an interest in making a 2000 percent return on my cash investment); I grab one of the plates of slowly melting pie lined up on the nearby counter, and find an empty table, and work on my interview notes while the small crowd around me erupts in cheers at a near-basket. Sports reporters seem to be artifacts of a bygone era of journalism – they remind me of the guys from the Sun-Times and the Tribune who used to hang out at the Billy Goat on Hubbard Street in Chicago – profanely avuncular, often massively obese, chewing out copy rapid-fire on the phone, the look in their eyes like they’ve seen so many press conferences where the coach talks about how well the team is doing, they practically don’t even need to attend anymore. They wear faded polo shirts and glasses and sometimes swipe a soft rhetorical paw at the team employees, dressed in slick suits, who cluster around them and jabber.

The game starts; we file out to courtside to witness the bread and circus. Players’ moves and collisions, which resemble nothing so much as airy wire-fu from a bird’s eye TV camera, becomes sweaty and crunchy when viewed from six feet away. The Wizards are playing the Bulls. Fortunately for the hometown team, they are playing the Bulls about ten years past their sell-by date; the Wizards win by ten points. The giant screens above the court flash messages such as ‘the Verizon Center tries to create an atmosphere conducive to family entertainment,’ as the cheerleaders roll out at halftime to do some sort of borderline-stripper routine. Yeah, fun for the whole clan; the irony, obviously, is priceless.

Afterwards we file into the locker room for the post-game interviews. Each locker has no door – the better to see your bling – and each is stacked high with pristine-white Nike sneakers, jacks for satellite radio, expensive suits in bags. Each player files out, some of them in towels, playing oblivious for a few more seconds as the crowd of reporters sneaks up on them like hyenas stalking the herd. The average post-game getup for your mid-level NBA player seems to involve a tailored three-piece single-breasted suit of extremely loose cut and long coat, along with diamond studs in the ears and watch-faces crusted with diamonds. The lights on the cameras click on, and every player gives their humble, mumbling spiel about teamwork and chances at the playoffs, and then they lope away. Outside, a bunch of teenagers wait at the entrance to the parking lot for whatever pimped-out SUV carrying their hero to emerge.

I got what I needed, but it came to exactly 1:30 worth of tape. Which I am stretching at the moment, Gumby-like, to 1,000 words' worth of article. Fun times.

Afterwards, went to the Go!Team concert at the Black Cat; they were great and the crowd was raucous, in that arm-waving way; the first opening band was good, the second, well ... made me want to stick my thumbs in my eardrums. A good time was had by all, although I was moving half-speed this morning as a result, my hand still marked with that indelible blue ink signifying over-21. My ears still humming faintly with deafness.

Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. Ha.

Meanwhile, M. and I finish the first draft of the screenplay: 110 pages, 29 days in the writing. Now comes the hard part, to wit, rewriting. We’ve been firing tender broadsides at each other all day (“You are the man who wants Bollywood dance numbers, insane chase scenes, and 1970s rockers hanging out as ghosts after their deaths, but you’re worried that what might not be believable is that a pilot would have a cargo run to the right airport?” etc.). We might get M’s theatre group together to do a read-through.

In the meantime, there’s also the book. I’ve put the Western aside for now, if only because a giant book with Shakespearean pretensions, tracing along years of incestuous bloodlines, involving genocide and patricide and all those other happy things, is probably outside the scope of my somewhat discombobulated and frantic self at the moment. So I’ve switched back to the other one, which hopefully I’ll have done in a few months.

Memo

2006-03-13T14:29:00.000-05:00

From: The Department of Snark
To: World
Subj: Biking

To those nuclear families using the Capitol Crescent Trail on an unseasonably warm Sunday morning, walking four abreast down a two-lane path with dogs in tow and three-wheeled athletic baby-carriers in front: You are the plaque in this particular cardiovascular system of running/walking/biking trails. You refuse to heave to one side or another in the face of incoming traffic, preferring instead to prattle obliviously about breeding as one or another Lance Armstrong wannabe bears down on you at a healthy fraction of light-speed. And while I am not one of spandex-clad legions of weekend warriors with the titanium-frame hybrids, their Type-A personality on full display, I swear next time you refuse to heed the call of ‘left,’ I will drive my front wheel so far up your chubby patriarch’s ass, he’ll be able to roll from one side of the house to the other just by sitting down. Thank you.

Fun Game

2006-02-28T15:24:00.000-05:00

First, put your playlist on shuffle.
Second, post the first lines for the first 20 songs to come up (along with these instructions).
Third, have people guess the songs and artists in comments to the post.
Fourth, in a few days the answers will be posted.

I’ve been locked in your heart-shaped box for weeks.
Might as well have fun
Mama, take this badge off of me
I’m going to get my gun
Lately I’ve been feeling low
There come a day when you take it all with you*

I never dreamed in a million years I’d see
Please, please, please, no more melody
Watching the day slip by so fast
I was patrolling the Pachinko
Things just ain’t the same for gangsters
There must be some kinda way out of here.

I hurt myself today
I know I’ve been changed
I don’t want your big French fry
I hear you talking
Tonight the monkeys die.
I’m sitting in the crib dreaming about Lear jets and coupes.

You’re all I ever wanted but I’m terrified of you
In my happy home I barely breathe

*From the beginning of 'My Old Friend,' by my friend Scott's band 'East is East.' Unless you haunt DC9 and certain other venues around DC on very specific dates, chances are you won't know this one. But it did pop up on 'Shuffle.'

Catchup

2006-02-24T11:49:00.000-05:00

Cross the Kansas state line and the first thing you see, looming out of the dark, is the billboard proclaiming: 'EVOLUTION IS A FAIRY TALE FOR GROWNUPS.' This was two weeks ago, an adventure to the heartland to see E. - a weekend involving some of the best BBQ I've ever had (burnt ends on open-face bread, in a tiny linoleum-and-flourescent joint with yellowing celebrity photos on the wall and register-mistress with gold front teeth), a bit of medical intervention on a barely-alive fish, a hot tub, miraculously preserved artifacts from the 19th century, and a mildly terrifying sojourn through Ivanhoe, a little slice of Mogadishu in smack-dab in the middle of Missouri.

I've been back for awhile, but busy. M. and I are currently chewing away at a screenplay, a romantic comedy. We write nights and email the pages back and forth, then spend downtime at work picking over each others' copy. At the same time, also working on the book, which I'm trying to make as dark and gritty as possible; and shifting between these two modes - light and breezy, Peckinpah-on-a-bad-day - often several times a night, induces a kind of mental whiplash. Thankfully, I have the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth. And other than that, ghost-writing a few pieces for Big Shots who don't have time to churn out their own copy, and becoming cynically insurgent over the job.

Attack of the Clones

2006-02-05T15:03:00.000-05:00

Party at Topaz on Friday night, and I'm sitting on a blue couch in front of a blue table in a blue room, the people around me sipping azure martinis the color of Pine Cay water before you hit the reef. Also sitting at the table was a marketing director of a local firm and the husband of someone else I know; when the waitress (blonde, short, shapely grad student) came over, the latter turned to her, squinted, and said, 'Hey, you look familiar - do you work in the adult film industry?'

At this point, if the speakers hadn't been blasting Chill techno, you would have been able to hear the fabled pin-drop. The waitress, frozen smile on her face, probably hoping against hope that this guy orders some food so she can spit in it, says, 'No,' and walks away.

Marketing Director turns to the other man. 'What the hell was that?!?'

And the man replies, 'Hey, dude, I'm being a good wingman. Now you can find her and apologize for my behavior.'

The human race: Always reaching new depths of moral bankruptcy.

We'll Look Back on This and Laugh. Or Cry.

Last night I went to a house party on 13th and Harvard populated with so many hipsters, you could have wiped out half of Death Cab for Cutie's audience with one bomb. The suspiciously underage band in the living room was setting hard guitar to lyrics about how their mom had destroyed their dating life; the per capita of people wearing Buddy Holly glasses and t-shirts with slogans such as 'Vote for Pedro' and 'Team Jolie' was at times distressingly high; the decorative motif of candles on every riser of the stairways leading up to the second floor was a Brooklyn Theatre Disaster waiting to happen.

The weird thing was, I recognized everybody there. Not as individuals but as archetypes. The Russians and Indians turned think-tank brains; the K Street junior associates on their never-ending quest for Truth, Justice and as much pootie as they can reasonably seize without getting a juicy case of VD; the scenesters 'between jobs' trying to talk up Donnie Darko or their latest Korean movie find; the budding nuclear scientists trying to take revenge for all those years spent in the library on the nearest bottle of vodka. I kept walking up to people, honestly thinking they were somebody else, only to realize from two feet away that they were merely a near-clone of someone from work or Chicago or some other location of my short and wayward life:

Me: 'Jimmy?'

Not-Jimmy: 'Um. No.'

Me: 'Thank God. I was going to throw you over the balcony otherwise.'

Not-Jimmy: 'Um. No!'

Me: 'Are there empty glasses over there?'

So I spent a half-hour amusing myself by convincing a group of interns that I worked for the CIA as some sort of cryptic Jack Bauer badass, then the next few chatting with some random people who had been sitting on the stoop smoking cigarettes in the cold and passing a bottle of whiskey around. Then the friend I had came with ended up too drunk, wandering around clutching a bottle to their chest while trying to lick my neck, so we extracted. A bunch of us went for late-night pizza afterwards. I crashed into bed finally at a quarter to five.

The State of the Union is ... Ugh

2006-02-01T17:20:00.000-05:00

This fine and sunny day, I look and feel like Death microwaved on the ‘Jiffy Pop!’ setting because of an unfortunate drinking game played last night during our Fearless Leader’s State of the Union address, a speech whose only value to humanity is that it preempted Ice Skating With Celebrities or Dancing with the Stars or Dry-Humpin’ with the B-List or whatever variety show my fellow Americans are choosing to boil their brains with these days. To wit:

When Fearless Leader mentions ‘Iraq,’ ‘tyranny,’ ‘homeland security,’ or ‘September the 11th,’ take a drink.

When Fearless Leader mentions the legality of wiretapping, drain your glass.

When Fearless Leader says the economy is doing great, drain the nearest drinking buddy’s glass. Explain to them that you’re just doing what your average CEO is doing to the American worker.

When Fearless Leader mentions healing the partisan disunity in the nation’s capitol, turn around and slug the conservative next to you.

Having spent the last six years pushing a major transformative vision for this country that only got a lot of people killed and money squandered, Fearless Leader is now reverting to the form that everyone expected back on that snowy day in January 2000: tentatively offering a middling agenda with neither sound nor fury. The speech took 52 minutes and ended up killing a whole lot of my brain cells, and now I feel like a secondary character in a Bukowski novel, only sitting in front of a Mac with my headphones tinkling ‘Tiny Vessels’ instead of filling a Chicago gutter with vomit and existential despond.

Faraway

2006-01-27T09:06:00.000-05:00

Hang around me long enough and inevitably you’ll hear my lament to give up the daily grind and retire to some pristine but remote area; an almost stereotypical wish for the stereotypical malaise of the 21st century Westerner. If I were to actually forge my own Kurtz-styled refuge in the outer wilderness, we have no doubt it would end badly:

PURSUANT to the legal matter of 87 US 291, myself along with second-year firm associate Melvin Jenkins III traveled via 777 to Bangkok (12 billable hours), upon which we transferred to a 6-seater turbine plane for the journey to the location 50 km south of Nakhon Ratchasima, 14 degrees 43’ 0” N / 102 degrees 2’ 0” East (2.8 billable hours), for the stated purpose of finding witness N. and securing his legal deposition to the matter at hand. Upon landing we ventured to the nearest commissary through thick jungle (3 hours), only to learn from the locals that N. had ‘retired’ to the ruins of a Buddhist temple deeper within the border zone along with several former Miss Indonesia winners, several crates of Chinese AK-47s and Jack Daniels, a copy of ‘Heart of Darkness,’ and a long-lost tribe of cannibal midgets who worshipped him as the second coming of their deity, whose name is pronounceable only by several sharp clicks in the back of the throat. At this point Jenkins became visibly agitated and attempted to leave the area, at least until I persuaded him to stay with the point of my sterling silver corkscrew.

Two billable hours and some medical attention later we set out again along the path, only to encounter one of the midgets blocking our way. After a few minutes of increasingly frantic sign language it was ascertained that unless my associate and I turned back, we would quickly discover how anatomically feasible it would be to have our laptops inserted forcibly into our rectal cavities. We took this motion under advisement. Deciding that we could achieve victory in the case without said deposition we turned back for the plane, only to find it had been stripped and set on fire on the runway and our position surrounded by dozens of the little fuckers. Only by offering myself to their depravities could I secure my freedom (18 billable hours).

And God, oh God, I think they sacrificed Jenkins to the creature they call the Lizard From Beyond Time.

Cordially,

Mason Goldenbacher IV, Esq.

Cc: Medical

Anyway. This past week, I found a suitably empty beach, on an island in the Turks & Caicos. By mid-afternoon I could separate myself sufficiently from the family and wade into the lapping surf, the sand empty in both directions for hundreds of yards, and let my mind drift off into the blue.

When a catamaran from Provo, groaning under the weight of several paunchy Baby Boomers trying to relive their frat days with a couple of beers, beached on my little piece of serenity, I simply veered away into the water. If I were less civilized I probably would have considered the use of a spear-gun to re-secure a little peace and quiet. Legend has it that Columbus first sank his boots into the sand of the New World on this spot, in search of the freshwater lakes at the center of Pine Cay, and I wonder what the natives thought when those boisterous creatures crashed upon them.

A few days later, I fly back north. My face tanned, my hands covered with near-microscopic bites from a few dozen Darwinian Superstar insects that managed to get past my copious amounts of repellent. I trade shorts and sandals for a thermal shirt under a hoodie under a heavy suede jacket. Walk back into the office, one of my co-workers sticking her head up and querying, with rising incredulity, “You actually came back?”

A Million Little Fixes

2006-01-12T17:03:00.000-05:00

I have something to confess. In the wake of various hysterical news stories about James Frey and how he supposedly manufactured out of whole cloth his history of self-abuse, police abuse, drug abuse, parental abuse, alcohol abuse, money abuse, and pretty much everything-else abuse with (hopefully) the exception of boinking the family pet – I have to get something off my chest to the all of 10 people who actually read this blog.

I did not actually shoot a man in Reno to watch him die.

There’s that story I like to tell about where I flew out to Los Angeles to interview Gary Oldman and we ended up in that highway standoff with the police, throwing Molotov cocktails as police choppers circled overhead and whatever bullheaded SWAT lieutenant nearly had an aneurism deciding whether to snipe our nation’s most beloved character actor on live national television. In truth, I took a few small liberties with that event. I spent that weekend playing ‘Civilization III’ and occasionally walking down to my mailbox to see if my Netflix had arrived yet. I have never met Gary Oldman, and hope never to do so without a sizable bodyguard escort, because I hear he preys on the flesh of the living.

I am not big in Japan.

The trauma of watching a beloved friend die when I was seven did not propel me into a life of debauchery, drugs and crime, climaxing with twelve months spent in a rehab facility sharing a room with a 400-pound tweak freak known only as ‘The Ram.’ In truth, I had no friends in elementary school, because I wandered around using words like ‘discombobulated’ and ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘asshole,’ frequently in the same sentence.

Thirty seconds ago, I announced to somebody that this entry was entirely my idea. I have to confess that I stole this idea from that piece by the ‘Daily Show’ writer in today’s New York Times. God forgive us all.

Seriously

I liked Frey’s book, despite his reluctance to obey the rules of proper grammar. He has skill; there’re not many authors who have the ability to make the decision over whether to drink a glass of beer as gripping as he does. But I think all the legions of fans who decided to affix themselves to ‘Million Little Pieces’ as a sort of Gospel of Addiction are feeling severely put out – I mean, if you tattooed ‘Hold On’ on your bicep, only to find that the entire narrative behind that particular phrase was a falsity, you’d probably be pretty miffed. Plus he angered legions of Oprah fans, who, like Gary Oldman, prey upon the flesh of the living.

Satan is my Motor

2006-01-10T16:45:00.000-05:00

Most writing jobs do not pay well. Particularly when you get down to the level of local alt-weeklies and bar magazines, you're looking at the princely rate of 5 to 15 cents a word for your deathless prose. A large paper like the Washington Post will, on a good day, pay you around $400 for a short feature, closer to $1000 for the longer ones; but the space for freelancers is limited. Then there are the bigger jobs, the feature pieces for the New Yorker or comparable publication, which will pay you thousands - but unless you're Joan Didion, those are often three-times-in-a-lifetime affairs. This is why most of the professional writers I know (myself included) also have day jobs within the publishing industry, be it art direction or as an editor at a custom-publishing house or what-have-you.

And for 99 percent of the time, the assignments your day job or freelancing gigs assign, you are 100 percent A-1 copasetic with. Taking Miss DC bowling. Watching rednecks drive super-reinforced cars off cliffs during ESPN2 tryouts. Faking like you're homeless for a few days. But then there are those assignments, accepted purely for the money, that leave you feeling so evil afterwards you figure the only way to keep the streak going is to go out and stomp some kittens or sell heroin to octogenarians.

Which is precisely the situation I'm in right now. Evil Client, Stupid Article, Ton of Money. In a state of near-constant verbal and electronic bombardment by people whose email addresses read things like 'BILL SMITH - LEGAL' and whose voices carry the brittle desperation of four-pack-a-day smokers caught for 100 billable hours a week on the 99th floor of a non-smoking office building. I even cupped a spider and took the tickling beastie outside last night instead of stomping it because I felt it would give an incremental boost to my karma, which sorely needs it.

My moral ambivalence translates into pumping a lot of weights, watching bad French horror movies, working on the book, and generally remaining as cheerfully acerbic as possible. My office-mate says, "Arik Sharon had a stroke," to which I reply, "I guess that shatters his lifelong dream of ever appearing on Final Jeopardy."

I'll take Inconveniently-Timed Brain Damage for $500, Alex.

Although it looks like the Prime Minister might very well recover. The only thing you can tell about broken-down old men is that they're survivors. The only thing I conclude from the last few days is that, where man used to try and conquer other men by hurling loads of flaming arrows and other large missiles via catapult, now we launch legions of chattering lawyers via Gulfstream IV. Meanwhile, I find myself listening to a lot of Spoon and Joe Strummer. In less than a week I will be on a beach, praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

Rolling

2006-01-06T14:31:00.001-05:00

So the bar magazine sent me to bowl with Miss DC last night, and afterwards I went home to write a Woody Allen-style comedy piece based on the experience, before turning it into Monica this morning. Of the 250+ words that she chopped out of this, most were similes, which is fine (they were a bit excessive). I just thought I would include my draft here without having to do another post:

Beauty and the Zen of Bowling

I am not good with really beautiful women. Talking with them often makes me do a classic flop-sweat like Johnny Cash, only without the guitar and black suits and actual songwriting ability. Ask me about it and I’ll inevitably flashback to that time in college when I asked out that model living in our dorm, and what should have been a suave query ended up ruined because I was jittery as bin Laden at an FDNY convention.

Today, though, I am recovering from both a Mongol of a virus and a festive and mildly felonious New Year’s, too drained to be unnerved by even the prospect of imminent nuclear attack. This is a good thing, because tonight I’m hanging out with Candace Allen, Miss District of Columbia USA 2006, and we’re going bowling.

Bowling, like songwriting, is not a skill I possess in my repertoire, unless you define it as ‘sending a 12-pound ball airborne in the general direction of the pins, likely giving any innocent bystanders a cranial contusion in the process.’ If this were the 1950s, I would be banned from the neighborhood bowling league, which would only be a positive, because I’m allergic to polyester shirts. Fortunately, we’re going to the new Lucky Strike in Chinatown, which is quite a bit swankier than the lanes your grandfather rolled on, in a retro-ironic sort of way.

Allen is pretty much everything you’d expect from someone who beat out 25 other women to become Miss DC: poised, articulate, intelligent, and beautiful. Mind-numbingly beautiful. She sums it up as the two of us walk over from the Metro: “I’m easy going; my friends say I’m laid back. It takes a lot to irritate me. I just like being around other people; I’m gregarious.” Which is probably why I’m not a sizzling bundle of nerves as we lace up our bowling shoes. The bowling shoes that Lucky Strike provides, just as an aside, are immaculate – in marked contrast to the footwear normally provided by bowling alleys, so diseased-looking that it would make a hypochondriac’s head explode.

Anyway. It was family that drew her into the pageant to begin with. “It was something I was motivated to do by my cousin, who was Miss Pennsylvania 2003,” says Allen, a Philadelphia native who is now a senior at Howard University, focusing on media law. “It was somewhat on a whim, and I was a bit nervous, but that drove me more.”

In April she’ll head up to Baltimore and face 50 new faces for the Miss USA title. Baltimore, with family close by, means she’ll have a cheering section. This is necessary, because while the contestants do their best to help each other out backstage, the competition itself can be tough. “You’re judged on personality. There’re a lot of tough questions. You have a one-on-one with the judges beforehand,” she says, adding. “There are people who don’t understand, that it’s more than just walking around in an evening gown.

“Though a girl does like to dress up, whether she admits it or not.”

Allen, just as another aside, has an iPod filled with everything except country, although she does make exceptions for some cowboy music. She has a small tattoo on her wrist and a diamond ring on her right hand.

We start to bowl. She favors a coral-pink ball. I grab pretty much anything heavy enough whose holes won’t pull my fingers out of their sockets, and through massive effort manage to keep the ball on the ground. The screen above our heads helpfully provides, in addition to the score, a little window showing how fast our ball is moving when it hits the pins. Allen rolls between 11.2 and 13.4 miles per hour.

The last time she played was at a charity bowl for the homeless, where “we didn’t keep score, but I had more strikes than this.” Indeed, volunteer work has always been a big part of her life: tutoring kids at elementary schools throughout the District, even a gig as a candy striper. “My main thing now is working with children, tutoring in an after-school program. Right now it’s pre-K; it’s wild but it’s fun,” she says. “Just reading to them and helping with homework. More people should volunteer – they don’t realize the satisfaction they’ll get out of it.”

If she weren’t so nice, she’d probably be getting satisfaction out of whaling me at this moment.

Allen rolls with what a purist would likely call a classic form: windup, aim, release, and follow-through, in one graceful, arching movement. At first her ball keeps curving left, but then she corrects; her scorecard begins to read like a New York phone number: 9-1-7-9-9-3-7-7-6-9… Meanwhile I hold my own with the occasional strike. I do not mind. At the end of the first game, she leads me by five points.

The last time I went to a bowling alley was on an insomniac summer night in Chicago, an old-school West Side place filled with old wood and cigarette smoke and bad intentions. If you want to see the textbook definition of ‘dysfunctional,’ I give you some of the people chain-smoking and rolling in a place like that at three in the morning. But most bowling alleys these days, in a bid to attract what marketing directors expansively refer to as the ’18-to-25 demographic,’ now resemble the interiors of UFOs. Lasers rake the ceiling; black light casts everything in alien hues; music videos flash and gyrate on big screens over the lanes.

Lucky Strike doesn’t fall into either of those extremes. The décor is tasteful and expensive, about what you’d expect around the MCI Center, an area that under Abe Pollin’s wrinkled but iron grip is starting to look like Times Square’s bastard lovechild. There are screens over the bowling lanes, and they play silent clips from movies – Bill Murray going wild near the end of ‘Kingpin,’ Christina Ricci and Vincent Gallo fighting in a photo booth in ‘Buffalo 66,’ among others – alternating with still shots of abstract art. There are couches and tables that look like they belong in a club, recessed lighting, and pool tables in the back.

Because this article is for the February issue of OnTap, devoted in a large part to Valentine’s Day stuff, I ask Allen her thoughts on Lucky Strike as a date spot. I also do this because she’s just rolled a strike, nearly terminating my narrow lead with extreme prejudice, and I feel the urgent need to throw in a distraction.

“[The place] is good,” she says. “It has food. Entertainment. It’s a little loud. It’d be a good place for a first date, because you’re out there doing something.” And that’s important. “As a first date, movies aren’t any fun, because there’s no interaction.”

Ladies and gentlemen, take note.

At that moment she winds up. Aims. Sends her arm sweeping back – and the ball goes flying backwards, where it bounces once and rolls to a stop against the couch where I’m sitting, taking notes. No harm; it doesn’t smack the large group of poets who have, incongruously enough, decided to use a bowling alley for a reading, and who more to the point have taken over our couch. How anyone can analyze iambic pentameter while “Stuck in the Middle with You” blasts on the speakers is beyond normal comprehension.

“I’ll try not to kill anybody this time,” she says, taking up her favorite ball again, and rolls. Pins scatter with a resounding boom. Strike. Vindication.

With one game left, the score on the screen says ‘Candace: 339 / Nick: 333.’ But I am coming back, just like Jesus. Rolling that 12-pounder right down the center, just like the Big Lebowski. The scores are staying close. I roll. Allen and I have developed a shtick that revolves around memorizing a positive outcome as the ball streaks toward its target: strikes, splits, pins flying. It’s seemed to work so far. I concentrate. I am but a monk in the Temple of Rolling, intensely focused. The ball goes straight … at 15.2 miles an hour … straight … starts to curve, and (oh crap) whispers by the leftmost pin and flops into the gutter. Three lanes away, meanwhile, a little kid totters with a ball the size of his whole upper body and scores a strike. My irrational jealousy at him knows no bounds.

Allen wins, which is exactly the way it should be. She is happy about this fact. In another two months she’ll head for the Miss USA pageant, and there’s a solid chance she’ll earn the crown, because she has personality and beauty to spare, but for the moment she has another victory to pump a fist about: kicking ass at bowling.

January 2006

My Body is a Temple. The Temple of Doom.

2006-01-03T15:13:00.000-05:00

There’s a theory that the human race owes everything to alcohol. That it was fermentation sites brought people together out of the hills and forests, who then, once they gathered together in sufficient numbers, created trade and culture. But I’ve never had the same affinity for liquor as others; I’ll have wine with dinner sometimes and beer when I’m out, but I don’t spend the equivalent of a small nation’s defense budget on getting smashed. With the exception of two or three times a year, when a special occasion or happenstance dictates that I unleash a chemical Tet Offensive on my cerebrum.

New Year’s is as good an excuse as any.

At Ben’s party, in the midst of firecrackers, music, game-playing, and a rhetorical discussion escalating into a fistfight in the backyard, I quaffed three-quarters of a bottle of red and two glasses of champagne and then, because I am a lightweight, fell asleep on a couch. Woke up the next morning to the usual distressing symptoms: headache, stomach apparently trying to qualify for acrobatics at the next Olympics, a world that kept threatening to fall distressingly out of tilt. I was still on the couch. Maro had taken off my boots and someone else had thrown a blanket over me.

Now it’s the Year of our Lord 2006 here on the east coast of America, three hundred and some odd years after the first European settlers landed on New England shores in search of someone weaker to terrorize. We are still stuck with a President whose literary pursuits extended to the nutritional label on the back of a Tabasco bottle, when he should have been studying Kipling or Conrad for examples of what happens when Westerners fuck around in the wrong Sandbox. And my landlord still hasn’t fixed my kitchen ceiling.

A group of us wake up and wander out to forage, finally ending up at Tonic for pancakes, before heading back to Ben’s basement apartment for the inevitable cleanup. I walk out back. Ben, Joe and Hanna are standing in the small, brick-enclosed back yard, scanning for something. I ask, “What are we looking for?”

“Miller lost his glasses.”

Miller lost his dosage, is more like it; he and Patrice had gotten into some sort of argument that has escalated to a full-on brawl, the sole casualty of which was a small tree in the center of the yard that had been broken by the force of two grown men slamming against it. It tilts askew like the mast of a sinking ship amid the cracked, wet concrete and piles of brown leaves. We begin to search, the three of us, flicking our boots through the quasi-humus.

Joe, peering into a large ceramic pot on the back stoop: “I think there’s a dead pigeon here.” A stick is procured, wet leaves parted to reveal a dirt-clogged Marv action figure, grimacing manfully with a severed head in one hand.

“There’s still that smell,” I say. The glasses are not in plain sight. I decide to find them by listening: I’ll stomp through the leaf piles and if I hear a metallic crunch, jackpot. “It’s like overcooked chicken or something. Maybe it is a dead pigeon.”

My head is throbbing like a broken tooth. I help mop the floors inside, and then head home, resolved to start the year off right by writing lots of Nabokov-quality copy.

The Body

An hour later I come back down the hill. There were two police cruisers parked behind my building, and a navy-blue Ford Explorer with the words OCME-14 in white on the door, below a city seal. Under the pretext of taking out the trash I wander out back and peer in the windows. No cops, just crackling radios and a half-finished bottle of Snapple in the dashboard drink holder of one cruiser. The ‘ME’ part of ‘OCME’ stands for ‘Medical Examiner,’ and in the back of the Explorer is a cardboard box filled with cartons of latex gloves. Huh.

I wander back inside and stand in the stairwell, cocking my head for the sound of radios or the usual chaos that accompanies the arrival of law enforcement. No sound except for my new neighbor continuing his seemingly days-long phone conversation with someone who berates him constantly. I wander back outside, immediately greeted by the sound of sirens. A vehicle that looks like a navy-blue ambulance is pulling up outside, the words OCME-2 on its side. I promptly sit down on the stoop and watch as the driver, wearing latex gloves and a blue mesh cap over his hair, steps out. Even before he walks over and opens a side compartment, pulling out a gray bag wrapped in clear plastic, I know what I’m looking at: the meat wagon. He goes around, opens the back doors, and yanks out a collapsible stretcher. The scene is starting to draw a small crowd. Out of the building next door walks the medical examiner, an older woman with gray curly hair dressed in a white turtleneck under a black jacket marked OCME on the back. Two cops follow her. Words are exchanged between tech and cops and medical examiner; tech and one cop disappear inside as the others drive off, to reemerge minutes later with a body sagging in the gray bag between them. Whoever the person was, they spend their last thirty seconds in daylight being bumped and wheeled over the sidewalk and into the back of the wagon, which unlike an equipment-packed ambulance is empty save for another collapsible stretcher. And the wagon drives off.

“That’s it, my New Year’s resolution is to eat right and exercise,” I say to nobody in particular, and it seems forced and hollow coming out of my mouth. I wonder about the person, and about how they died. Not a homicide – there would have been detectives, more cops, the front entranceway of the building taped off. Maybe natural. Maybe suicide: someone who decided the New Year – and every New Year after this one – didn’t really look all that promising. I walk inside and select the loudest action movie in my collection, make some popcorn and spend the next two hours forgetting about how the tech and cop grunted and fought against the weight of the body as they carried it out the front door, and the slithering sound of the body bag sliding onto the scuffed crimson backboard of the stretcher.

Slug on a Razor

2005-12-30T15:59:00.000-05:00

My holiday raft of new DVDs and books is decimating my productivity with regard to nocturnal novel-writing, although yesterday I picked up two pieces of freelance work - one bizarre assigment for the bar magazine, another for a travel guide to the District - to kick off the first week of the New Year in a big way. Last night I was watching one of my new acquisitions, the British gangster film 'Layer Cake' (starring the scary-looking next James Bond, Daniel Craig), and near the end Michael Gambon's master criminal gives his climactic speech:

"You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son."

It's all about working your way up through the levels of the aforementioned metaphysical dessert; although from the perspective of the cold absolute, even reaching the pinnacle means nothing. In a related tangent, in the New Year I'm resolving to discard most of my pretensions to nihilism, maybe in favor of deconstructionism. Or Dadaism. One of those '-isms'; though subscribing to Dadaism as a guiding philosophy could have a negative impact on my work, particularly if I were to turn in a piece on, say, erectile dysfunction, and instead of an opener along the lines of, "In a new research report that will doubtlessly make stockholders of Pfizer nearly pee themselves with gee..." I wrote something like, "Der DADA, Every man has his Football. BY whom? I like electrons, HELLO..." It'd be enough to make any editor snap my neck.

Apologies for the absurdities ... It's been a very long couple of days down here in the Alamo.

There's been stress and caffeine and plotting galore. They canceled my main print magazine, and we ended up being pilloried by a large number of newspapers. We're the slug on the razor at the moment, and while I've made resolutions for the coming year, I have not even an inkling of what the next 365 days will bring. From my perspective, this is not a bad thing.

All I Want for Christmas is Revenge

2005-12-25T14:33:00.000-05:00

This holiday season, send a few thoughts in the direction of our troops in Iraq. And don't forget some of our other government employees who are spending this holy time of year on the front lines of America's 'War on Terror.' Those CIA operatives at that Black Site in Poland? They're spending Christmas Eve lighting up a detainee.

Poodle

Take this guy and call him Billy; a pothead par excellence; a legend in his dealer's time. One day Billy gets a gig housesitting for a friend who owns a spread that belongs in the pages of 'Town & Country,' or maybe 'Martha Stewart Living.' We're talking stenciled baseboards, color-coordinated walls hung with tasteful and expensive art, multiple bathrooms outfitted in marble and chrome. And a small, coifed teacup poodle. Expensive, dumb, prone to peeing on the Persian rugs. Now for Billy, this housesitting gig is the perfect job: sit on the Italian leather sofa with your favorite bong and watch cartoons, collect cash. There's enough ice cream in the fridge and all-natural snacks from Whole Foods in the restored-wood kitchen cabinets to last him through a whole week's worth of the munchies. Life is good.

Two days into the gig, Billy emerges from his haze of bong smoke to realize that - hey - he hasn't seen the adorable 2-pound ball of fur that's at least nominally supposed to be his charge. So he wanders around the house, calling the poodle's name. As Charles Bronson would have said, 'No dice.' Dog is neither upstairs nor downstairs. Then Billy notices that the back door is open a crack, so he pads outside. What he sees, well, kind of blows his already-baked mind.

Wait, let's jump back in space-time for a moment. We need to explain how, in the equally fabulous spread next door, there lived a Great Dane. A majestic and massive and un-snipped animal.

And this majestic and massive and un-snipped animal, well, somehow it managed to make it past its owners' hundreds-of-dollars-per-foot fence and into Billy's friend's yard, where it came across the teacup poodle doing whatever poodles (nervously) do. Billy comes out and sees the Great Dane, in violation of every tenet of sexual dimorphism, humping the teacup poodle for all it's worth, jackhammering away.

Billy just can't process this. The synapses of his mind are stalled as a subway train during an MTA strike. "Uhhh..." Meanwhile, the Great Dane is heading for glory. The poodle is, not to put too fine a point on it, nonplussed by this whole situation. And will probably need a colonscopy afterwards. Or something. Definitely Billy's day is heading downhill. His high is acting as a sort of mental shield; it's probably the only thing preventing his mind from totally snapping. "UHHH..."

That gets the Great Dane's attention. Its head snaps up. Caught! It takes off running back for the fence ... with the poodle, well, not to put too fine a point on it, still attached. One gets the sense that the poodle is going to need Valium if anyone ever tries to take it outside for a walk again. Great Dane is running for fence with tiny dog impaled on its member and Billy is like, whoa. The Great Dane hits the fence. It can't remember how it got over here in the first place. It stands on its hind legs and puts its paws on the top of the fence and still the poodle is hanging there, little eyes bugging out, and Billy finally gets a solitary thought and goes for the hose. Unwinds it. Aims. Squeezes the trigger under the nozzle and the stream of water smacks the poodle dead-center, sending it rocketing head-first into the fence. Now the little thing is traumatized on both ends. Fortunately it's a teacup poodle so it'll never have to do higher math or anything. That was the last time Billy house-sat for anyone.

Look Out Shit, Here Comes Fan

2005-12-23T16:02:00.000-05:00

Thursday (12/22):

11:53am: Slightly bored, contemplating weekend.

12:02pm: World turned upside down and shaken like a kitch holiday snow-globe.

1:10pm: news.google hits: 10.

1:34pm: Someone writes 'The Alamo' on a piece of paper and tapes it to section door.

3:34pm: Mix of euphoria and panic sets in; checking Orbitz for flights to Thailand. Other side of world looking real fine.

4:15pm: news.google hits: 54. Chinese get their hands on information.

5:45pm: Fucked. So. Very. Fucked.

6:00pm: news.google hits: 77. ABC Television posts online.

7:00pm: Drinking begins.

7:20pm: Wondering if last 2.5 years of life can be parlayed into book advance.

7:45pm: Drinking continues.

8:00pm: news.google hits: 95. Salon.com fixes napkin around neck, prepares to dig in.

8:15pm: Drinking: The Motion Picture.

10:45pm: H. finds and yanks me out of random bar.

Crash and Burn

2005-12-19T17:15:00.000-05:00

I am not good in crowds. And since ‘tis the season to network, with holiday parties every night, it becomes a struggle to wade into the midst of it all, shaking hands and exchanging cards left and right, dispensing witty banter, above all keeping up the necessary momentum to move from one end of the floor to the other and then out into the soothing, empty night.

Friday night is George’s party. This is fine. This is hookah and rum and video games on two big televisions in the living room. As controlled by me, Master Chef dodges and blasts his way through Halo with all the skill and accuracy of a special-needs student charging across a classroom after the afternoon juice. The ingestion of controlled substances actually helps my game-play, imbuing me with enough skewed focus to at least put a clip’s worth of ammo in the approximate area of the next slobbering beastie. “Go ahead, make my day,” I growl with sufficient Clint Eastwood gravitas, the controller jumping and vibrating like a live thing in my hands.

Saturday is the office party, which means expensive catering to the tune of crab cakes and lamb kebabs, an open bar on a back porch encased in heat-retaining plastic, people milling about with their significant others. Such work-sanctioned events require a Kabuki-like dance of graceful rigidity, and I often leave them feeling more exhausted than those other, wilder parties that usually climax with somebody riding a mountain bike through the living room while screaming incoherently.

A slow Monday afternoon and M. in NYC and I are emailing back and forth:

M: “I’m being priced out of this city.”

N: “Don’t worry. The plebs will revolt. The rich will be forced to sell their houses, entertainment centers, cars, timeshares, dogs, and children in order to buy weapons in a futile effort to turn back the human tide determined to rip them apart like uncooked pizza dough. The blood-dimmed tide will be loosed. The goat with three eyes will walk down 5th Avenue with the Anti-Christ on its back.”

M: “Nick, I … don’t know what to say to that one. I think now is as good a time as any to go get plowed.”

N: “I am so bored.”

Yes; and frustrated. The infamous writer’s block came down like a brick wall yesterday, cutting me off some 36k words into the book. I need to go back and revise, rewrite, re-think. Yet every time I write a fictional sentence, it comes apart on the page irrevocably as ash in a high wind. I run. I stomp. I screw. I cook. I curse. I watch most of the discs of 24: Season 4. I toss a stress ball against the wall, over and over again, like Steve McQueen in ‘The Great Escape,’ until the next-door neighbor starts banging on his side of said wall in furious response. And this is just yesterday afternoon. Then, walking to work in the predawn, headphones on and listening to Tom Waits, the answer comes. I sprint to work and slide in front of my workstation and jot out three sentences, and – boom – the glacier cracks apart, water and chunks of ice beginning to move again.

At this juncture I harbor no more youthful illusions that the first book out of the gate will make me a solid seven figures, allowing me to grow a beard, get weird and disappear to some far-off swath of beach. Right now I simply want to finish it; it’s become a looming shadow, ever-present, ever changing.

Epigraph

2005-12-16T17:01:00.000-05:00

Brawl

Last Saturday, ten minutes before the fists started flying, I was sitting in the back booth of Panache, being interrogated by a blonde about the merits of red wine. I was trying to explain that a good zinfandel could be calibrated to any number of dishes; she was talking about how she normally never drank anything that cost less than $150 a bottle. “Well, okay, but I’m discussing your everyday table wines here,” I said, wanting this conversation over with, even if it meant being impolitic. “If you’re paying that much for something to go with a plate of pasta, you’re just an idiot.”

She heard only bits and fragments of this, like a static-heavy transmission from Mars, because at that moment the turntable-jockey decided to throw on Gwen Stefani, the air molecules trembling and dissolving under the heavy base-thump. D., who had pulled us here to celebrate her birthday, came over and grabbed my hand, as the darkened room began to thrash with the beat. I was up and moving, the two drinks in my system almost but not quite overriding my normally acute case of White Boy Syndrome, my feet going left-right-left, my hands going up-down-sideways. “What am I doing here?” I asked D.

She smiled: silly boy. “You’re dancing.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

We danced. The song ended. I plopped into a convenient chair and the blonde plopped down beside me, limbs now loose as a doll’s on a toy store shelf. Her head lolled back. She gave a point beyond the far wall a beatific smile. One look at her dilated pupils told the story: Her brain had officially departed the last rocket from Earth. “Long line in the bathroom, huh?” I asked her. Your normal semi-cognizant cokehead will usually respond to such insinuations with a lopsided grin or else haughty indignation; but the woman’s blank china-doll smile never wavered. “You’ve just spun right off the surface of the planet,” I said, leaning in until our noses were an inch apart. “Do you even understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”

Houston, we’ve lost contact. She was still facing straight ahead, totally oblivious, as a table a few feet behind us went over with a crash loud enough to be heard above the sound system, with an accompanying tinkle as its freight of glasses hit the floor. A pile of people, dark forms, rolling and punching. Bouncers leaping left and right into the fray. A woman’s voice, high and strident, yelling with feral intensity. The front door crashed open and the winter wind swept in, blowing shards of glass and napkins across the floor, as the bouncers heaved and dragged the combatants outside.

My company holiday party tomorrow night, I’m betting, won’t have near the same level of fisticuffs. But you never know.

Groan

Two-and-a-half years back, when I was still at Chicago, Terrance Malik gave me a piece of writing advice that I’ve always remembered but never followed. “You just have to write,” he told me. “Don’t look back, just get it all out at once.”

Every late night, I sit at the Spartan wooden table in my living room, usually with a cup of tea or a bottle of water depending on how late it is, the quiet only occasionally interrupted by the sounds of a car honking outside or a police chopper overhead, tapping away at the laptop. Tapping away at a book that constantly mutates, absorbs past fragments, slips away on new and occasionally ludicrous tangents. And the whole time, it’s the Battle of the Somme. I type a sentence, and then delete it. Type. Delete. Repeat. If I smoked, the ashtray would be a forest of crushed filters and ashy mounds. It reminds me of that time over a decade ago I was lost in the Appalachians in December, while hiking, and ended up picking my way for what felt like miles down a rocky, icy and wooded slope, unmoored in an alien world. Where are you going with this?

While we're striding down memory lane, let's jump back in space-time to an interview I was doing, a few months ago, for a bar magazine I freelance for in exchange for free concert tickets and the princely sum of five cents a word. I was talking to someone who had once been a talent agent, mostly for rock bands. Not top-tier; he hadn't been one of those million-a-year Universal execs forcing their gold-plated 9mm against a manager's forehead while informing them that the phrase "Kanye West won't be able to play your son's bar mitzvah" simply did not compute. But he handled some major-in-a-minor-way name acts. He asked me how much I made annually, and I gave him a ballpark figure. He told me to get into another line of work. "Back when I was doing what I was doing," he said, loosing a chilly laugh. "I knew most of the ladies only by the top of their heads."

Such gruesome invitations aside, this is what I do - writing, that is. Other than watching movies, pontificating on arcane and slightly pretentious theories at parties, taking punches from strange and attractive women, and occasionally picking the right stock, it's one of the only things I've ever been good at.

Siberia Lite

2005-12-02T16:42:00.000-05:00

Sample conversation between my office-mate and me this afternoon:

Me: "Meredith, who was the Russian writer who wandered off into the
Siberian wilderness and encountered a bunch of tribesmen with no knowledge of Western culture, except that they all knew who Abraham Lincoln was? I'm thinking of Dostoyevsky, maybe; I want to use it as the opener for this article."

Her: "I have no clue."

Me: "The problem is all those fucking 1800’s Russian authors decided to up and do the whole 'I'm going to wander in the wilderness and either discover my pure and unadulterated soul or die of starvation' thing, which makes it hard to differentiate. I can’t Google it without getting every English department syllabus between Boston and Bangladesh. Was it Gogol?"

Meredith: "Why do you always ask me these things?”

A minute-long pause, then:

Me [tearing off headphones]: "And why the FUCK am I listening to Kelly Clarkson?"

Snow is coming, by Sunday probably. There will be panic in the supermarkets, and the rampant purchasing of bread, water, and, in the Whole Foods on P Street, the last of the soy milk. The cold is already here, whistling down the emptying streets. This friend of mine and I, late last night we’re lying on my living room floor wrapped in blankets against the creeping chill and finishing off the six-pack of Bass that had been languishing in my fridge. “Winter’s coming on,” she says, taking a pull off her bottle. “Survival of the fittest.”

Indeed. Gogol and Dostoyevsky knew it: Winter makes people crazed. You ease into your running rhythm early on a Saturday morning, sneakers slapping the icy sidewalk, and pass someone wearing a fur hat and boxer shorts pissing off their stoop, Hunter Thompson style. People start parallel parking by ear, waiting for the manly crunch that signifies they’ve come bumper-to-bumper with the SUV in front of them. Cabin Fever builds. And this is for an inch of powder.

Chubby Clooney vs. Kong

2005-11-28T17:25:00.000-05:00

Went to the Dandy Warhols concert at the 9:30 last night; the band collectively kicked the door in, energy-wise, during the first five songs of the set, then dissolved for the next hour into sonically mushy chord experimentation and feedback play. Worth going to – not just to see one of my personal favorites, but also for the conversation that preceded the lights going down, as I was sitting on the balcony surveying the crowd.

My date had abruptly canceled with the same stomach flu that left M. incapacitated on her couch, and I was alone but not lonely. Suddenly materializing at arm’s length: five-foot-eight of jailbait in a skirt and purple shirt that proclaimed, in spangles, ‘Hustler.’ She put a hand on her hip, and cocked her head, and smiled. I smiled back, tentatively, unsure about the nature of this invasion of my personal airspace. She said, “Just wanted to let you know, I wouldn’t even sleep with you if the per-pet-u-ation of the species depended on it.”

I smirked at her, playing like Johnny Cash during his blackest flop-sweat years. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, sweetie?”

She gave me the finger, then turned on a 2-inch cowboy heel and flitted away. Why this incident made me laugh, I can't really say. Maybe the ludicrousness of her assumption that somehow my ego would be crushed with the rapidity of Bruce Lee chopping through a set of wooden blocks. Maybe because it was some welcome randomness after a weekend of Thanksgiving events through which everyone deliberately moved with the formality and care of Kabuki dancers, anxious to not offend, to play nice in the proverbial sandbox.

Later on, after the concert was over and I had completed the five-block shuffle past the underage kids trying their best gangsta lean against the sides of the darkened Ethiopian restaurants lining U St., I sat down and churned out another 5,000 words for the book, the one that I was supposed to complete in a month. December 1 will see me roughly 15,000 words short, I’m estimating. Half of me wants to go stream-of-consciousness simply to meet the deadline; all of me wants to simply finish the thing. At work, trying to get to Dubai.

Upright and Breathing

2005-11-21T17:30:00.000-05:00

Six years ago, as part of the overflowing package of vaguely university-related paraphernalia I received upon moving into the freshman dorms, I received a compilation CD – a dozen or so artists of that particular period (Moby, etc.) all contributing a song in the name of some social cause (I think it was ending world hunger). The first cut on this album was a remix of a G Love and Special Sauce song which, while not the greatest four minutes ever burned into silicon, was good enough to last to this day on various hard drives and iPods.

So this weekend, the editor of a magazine I freelance for on a semi-regular basis decided to leave me with two tickets to G Love at the 9:30, as a means of apology for paying me six months late for two articles. They were for Sunday night, which ordinarily means time for Netflix and reheated pizza, so I was glad at the chance to head out. The opening band came and went. The lights went down. Little strips of yellow paper kept fluttering from the ceiling. Then G Love came on, and burst into song, and in a minute of confusion dawning on vague wonder, I realized that the song I had been carrying around for the last fourth of my life wasn’t actually by G Love at all – either the initial CD had been mislabeled; or somehow along the way I had mistakenly named the song something else, and my Loki of a brain, my occasionally treacherous mind, had gone back and re-etched my memory to make me think it was G Love. Anyway, I’m standing there under the bright lights open-mouthed, experiencing an epiphany about the nature of memory and time, two random girls in front of me engaged in some sort of lipstick lesbian routine for the benefit of the practically slavering frat boys in front of them, and I say, in what would be the most random comment of the evening if anyone could hear me over the roar of guitars and drums: “Wait! You’re not a Hispanic rap group!”

I am a quarter-century old now. There was a brief existential crisis at around midnight last Thursday, but that passed after a brief phone call to the ever-reliable Ben:

Ben [sleepy]: Hello?
Me [sitting in front of laptop, working on the book, sipping Zinfadel and listening to Pachabel]: I’m floating in the existential black.
Ben: What the fuck time is it?
Me: It’s too late, man.
Ben: You’re the editor of a major magazine. So what if you haven’t published the Great American novel yet. Go back to bed.
Me: (beat) Okay.

And I realized, despite my continual bitching, that I really do have a lot to be thankful for:

1. I am upright and breathing.
2. Ronald Reagan is still dead.
3. Salmon roe.
4. E. (The person, not the drug)
5. I have the ability, despite the flimsiness of building a career on words, to put a decent roof over my head.
6. ‘24’ was renewed for a fifth season.
7. Angelina Jolie
8. The freedom to make snarky comments without being tossed in a ditch and shot.
9. That I don't live in a red state.

So that’s that, for now. I am thinking about doing one of those DNA tests that National Geographic offers, to trace my ancestry back to the first human.

Yikes

2005-11-11T16:57:00.000-05:00

I glanced at the blog the other day and realized that I hadn’t updated in several weeks. The reasons are fairly straightforward, namely a combination of projects and social engagements that have made even taking 30-45 minutes to write an in-depth analysis of said activities an exercise in futility. The Monster project that dominated my life for eight months out of this year is finished but I haven’t seen hard copies of it yet; I’m participating in nanowrimo, the national contest in which you attempt to write a novel in a month; I just finished a piece on Riz Khan, and my interview with Ashley Judd went online; and if I’m not careful, I’m going to soon end up in the middle of another love triangle, two and a half years after I should have learned my lesson about such things.

And I’m nearly 25. Ready for the cliché of the Quarter Life Crisis, complete with additional navel gazing and drunken pronouncements to Ben that I’m adrift and floating in the existential black, which will doubtlessly earn me a well-deserved slap to the back of the head.

Which I probably won’t do; but it’s a scary comment on your life when the first 30 seconds of the trailer to Albert Brooks’ “Looking for Comedy In The Muslim World” seems exactly like a typical day at the office.

Train Delay

2005-11-10T12:59:00.000-05:00

Insanely busy for the last month ... more posts starting next week.

Need Gills to Cook

2005-10-10T18:24:00.000-04:00

On a scale of 1 to 10 of the magnitude of shit that can happen to you on the average day, where 1 is missing the train in the morning and 10 is getting kidnapped and beheaded by insurgents moments after finding that your girl is sleeping with your best friend, well, water pouring from your ceiling probably ranks around a 1-point-2. But damn, it’s irritating as hell. Last night I stood underneath the corner of my kitchen ceiling by the fridge, holding a trashcan newly conscripted into a bailing pail, as muddy bio-toxin water poured at a half-gallon a minute from a widening crack above.

My domicile was doing its best imitation of New Orleans’ 9th Ward thanks to my upstairs neighbor, an elderly woman of questionable mental facilities who decided to leave her bathtub taps on full blast. As I shoved the trashcan/bucket into position, I could hear a dim pounding as my landlord forced his way into her apartment.

This is the second water incident in as many days. Saturday night, the water heater in another apartment above mine decided to give it up, sending a steady trickle of water into my place. Both times I just started laughing. It seemed the best option. As some philosopher once said, the world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.

People ask me how my weekend went and I always say, “Good,” and leave it at that.

Renting in this Brave New World of skyrocketing housing prices is always an adventure, just like Russian roulette. Depending on where you choose to live, you may find yourself freezing, falling through busted floorboards, dealing with armor-plated cave grasshoppers, or doing a Chow Yun-Fat roll through your bedroom door at 2am when your drunk/psycho roommate decides to open fire with the Nerf cannon.

This place I live now, though, is good, except for those two months in winter where the old furnace has a little trouble keeping up with the cold. The water was more of a reminder of the 2-bedroom I lived in back in college, which had all of the aforementioned issues, plus the occasional police action in the alley out back.

Anti-War

2005-09-26T07:21:00.000-04:00

The National Park Service no longer gives official estimates of the size of marches in downtown Washington, but from the roof of the Hotel Washington on Saturday morning, there seemed to be at least 75,000 anti-war protestors swarming around the White House. Of course, even before the event organizers had finished dotting the last ‘i’ on the placards screaming ‘BUSHIT!’ and setting up the main stage on the lawn near the Washington Monument, the whole thing had morphed from an anti-war protest to one pretty much anti-everything Bush. Everyone from aging hippies to hipsters to kids waving the Iraqi flag, from a gaggle of old ladies calling themselves the “raging grannies” to teenagers in black playing anarchist – they were all out there, to rail against the war, the deficit, African poverty, even the repeal of Section 8 housing vouchers.

Taken in conjunction with the administration’s falling poll numbers, not to mention the general anger over everything from rising gas prices to FEMA, one thing is clear: The state of the union is officially Pissed Off.

Minutes before the march, on a grassy space near the main stage, a small group of people are putting the finishing touches on 75 flag-draped cardboard ‘coffins.’ A woman whose daughter had been with the Navy at Annapolis is busy making the red, white and blue on every box militarily crisp. “It’s important to get it right,” she says. Behind her, a protestor in a yellow shirt brandishes a megaphone and roars for volunteer pall bearers for a “dramatic theatrical event.”

“I don’t like what he’s saying,” the woman says, before going back to pin the edge of a flag to the cardboard.

This is not the first time that John Lake, standing nearby, has done one of these events, in which the crowd bears the line of coffins before the eyes of crowd and media to represent the dead. He was at the RNC last year, where he says more than 4,000 people volunteered to carry the boxes aloft. For him, it’s all about getting the troops out of Iraq; everything after that, he believes, should be up to the Iraqis themselves. “When Mt. Saint Helens blew, it took down all the trees. In a year they grew back. These things happen naturally,” he says.

On the main stage, the first of the day’s speakers begins to whip up a crowd that doesn’t need much prompting. When Cindy Sheehan gets up to speak, they explode in a flurry of sign-waving and cheering. A man on stilts wearing a ratty Uncle Sam outfit and a Pinocchio nose teeters above the Raging Grannies, who are busy letting the press snap their photos.

Some of the protestors are familiar faces. The men in Bush, Satan and Cheney masks, making their way up 15th during the march with world globes aloft and slugging from oil canisters, made an appearance nine months ago at the inauguration, taunting the crowd trying to file through the C St. underpass.

The atmosphere then was as bitter as the January cold; the proximity of dejected protestors to bling-laden Texans trying to squeeze their way through the security tents was too much for many. A few thrown rocks at the 7th St. checkpoint resulted in two lines of riot cops stomping in to cordon everyone off. Today, though, there seems to be a sense among many protestors that Bush is now on the run. “We’ve got him surrounded!” someone in the crowd yells at one point.

But Bush himself is under a mountain in Colorado, monitoring the hurricane Rita relief efforts. Nonetheless, the Secret Service has snipers on the roofs. A line of well-trained horses, ridden by equally well-trained Park Police, keep the crowd from spilling onto Independence Avenue, south of the White House. Behind a waist-high gray metal barrier stretching the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, a line of DCPD and Secret Service in riot gear stand at attention, watching impassively as the crowd heaves and surges and whistles and roars a few feet away. A lone helicopter chatters overhead.

There are the counter-protestors, as usual, but not in massive numbers. A fat man on the corner of 15th and Pennsylvania screams through a megaphone that all assembled are headed straight to the fiery pit, while his companion holds up a sign saying, among other things, ‘REPENT.’ He is there in the early morning; by the time the main march rounds the corner, people breaking off to climb statues and the sides of nearby buildings, he is gone. Billionaires for Bush, decked out in evening wear, conducts an ironic sing-a-long in a corner of Lafayette Park.

Further down the street, another man with a megaphone is busy bellowing: “Get this straight: Terrorists are bad. America, good. Christianity, good.” A protestor sneaks up behind him and holds a sign saying, ‘RIGHT WING BIGOT’ over his head. A group of college Republicans verbally battles it out nearby with anyone willing to engage. “I don’t like deficit spending, either, but we have to do what’s necessary,” one of them says when asked about how the administration can keep spending on Iraq, hurricane rebuilding and the recent highway bill.

Al Sharpton makes an appearance just after 1 p.m., striding down Independence with an entourage in tow. He says nothing, but his 4’11” assistant more than makes up for it, yelling, “Get back! Get back!” at the crowd swarming behind. This same assistant, apparently, booted photographers out of a Louisiana refugee shelter when Sharpton made an appearance down there a few weeks ago, and seems apparently intent on repeating the same performance up here. No luck. Photographers and gawkers buzz close. A black Secret Service SUV on some undefined mission roars down the street with a man in a suit running behind, stops, and then takes off again, rounding the corner.

The march, meanwhile, keeps swarming up 15th St., part of the circuit that will take it in a tight circle around the downtown core. A light rain falls, briefly, and then stops. People fall out of the crowd, sitting on the traffic medians or the middle of the street, climbing on top of cars. The riot cops stand at loose attention beside their cars and buses. The anarchists give up and head for Starbucks, where long lines of protestors are already forming for their early afternoon latte break.

In the Hotel Washington, a few photographers file past the tables of people having lunch to snap some bird’s-eye view shots of the crowd. At these heights, it’s still somewhat business as usual. People are here for the conference, not the protest, and you have to wait ten minutes for a table. A woman drives a Segway down a hall.

Back on the street, past the student groups pumping their fists and the theatre people carrying a giant effigy of Wolfowitz as a bloodthirsty Roman emperor, past the protestors in front of the White House screaming, “The People’s House!” and the New York Times photographers taking shots of them, past the lines of cops on horseback and bikes ringing them all in, life continues on. Buses and taxis zip back and forth. People cross 16th St. bearing big bags of shopping. But from blocks away you can still hear the crowd roar.

Basic Math

2005-09-23T17:17:00.000-04:00

The New Orleans levees are breaking down again. A bus loaded with geriatrics and oxygen tanks explodes in a greasy ball of flame on a Houston highway. Turn on the TV and see that big Red Ball of Death on its unstoppable march for the Gulf coastline. But that’s okay, that’s just fine, because your federal government is on the job. A dispatch from Texas, via CNN:

The two National Guard tanker trucks, each carrying 5,000 gallons of gas, were sent at daybreak Friday to help thousands of people who had run low on gas while trying to evacuate, said Chief Master Sgt. Gonda Moncada, spokeswoman for the national guard.

Moncada said that 10,000 gallons of gas might not be enough to help everyone who needs it.

Let’s see: 10,000 divided by an average of 15 gallons of gas per car equals 666 cars. Now take a look at the parking-lot that was formerly dozens of miles of highway heading out of Houston.

Still Alive

2005-09-16T14:55:00.000-04:00

I want my MTV

I am always early to everything. When I was younger, it was a neurotic impulse to show up to any event a half-hour early; now I usually arrive a more sedate five minutes before show time. When I caught the cab from 94th down to Times Square last Friday morning I overestimated the time it would take the refugee from Alpha Centuri behind the wheel to screech and power-slide fifty blocks. I ended up in front of the Viacom building twenty-five minutes before my press escort was due to pick me up, twenty minutes before I was supposed to hook up with my photographer.

So I went for coffee. Whenever I’m in Times Square, I always have to resist the urge to crane my neck upwards to all the screens surrounding me – I have to fight to not look like a tourist. I found the first Starbucks and ordered something called a Chai latte that tasted vaguely sweet and then walked around for a while, earphones blaring David Bowie, soaking up the bustle and the steam.

The story was ‘inside MTV.’ The climax of which, hours later, I got to stand on the little piece of tape marking the blind spot for the swinging cameras of Total Request Live, surrounded by shrieking little kids. After almost being accidentally elbowed in the head by Elijah Wood and watching the MTV staff making cement for Shakira to make hand-prints in for pop posterity, went to visit my NYC editor down the street. We ended up having drinks at the Algonquin.

Afterwards, Ian and I did a sort of NYC-in-ten-blocks tour: We had the famous thin pizza, saw the neighborhood political march, passed by a filming of ‘Law and Order,’ swung by the riverfront, and then back to the train station, where I caught the 8:50 back down to D.C. I spent the train-ride writing; spent the cab ride writing; booted up the laptop and got to work when I finally got home in the absurdly early hours. Fifteen hours later the story was finished, and I crashed asleep for a few minutes on Ben’s couch after uploading it to my NYC editor.

Happy Monday, Motherfucker

Call them Big Shot Publicity: the kind of New York firm with a roster of the movers and shakers, players and groundbreakers. Close your eyes and you can imagine their offices, stark wood and gleaming chrome fifty floors up, and assistants with mouthpieces scrambling like ants in Armani. They represent your cover-boy or –girl for whatever issue of the magazine you’re working on at the moment, and they’re late in getting you the email interview they promised a few weeks ago.

Monday morning and you’re in absolutely no mood. You want to be in bed. You want to be in bed with someone else, but your ‘someone else’s seem to be in New York, or Chicago, or in relationships, so you’re stuck holding the pillow. You’ve had a Red Bull and a cup of strong black tea so far, and that’s not enough. Back in the day, all of three years ago, you used to bounce back from the weekend’s chemical stimulation in no time; now you feel empty, hollowed-out. You dial the assistant-to-the-publicist at Big Shot. No answer. You try the main number.

“Hi,” you say, pile-driving the cheer into your voice, “is [publicist] there?”

“What’s this about?” Whatever assistant-to-the-assistant picking up says.

You mention the interview.

“I’m going to transfer you to her assistant,” the assistant-to-the-assistant says.

“I just tried her assistant. She’s not in.” Tone like: do not fuck with me on this.

The assistant-to-the-assistant transfers you anyway, and – Holy Smokes, Batman! – the assistant actually picks up this time. “Hello, this is…”

“Hey, it’s Nick. Any luck on the interview?”

Pause.

“Well, unfortunately there’s been a bit of an incident with the talent…”

As in, the talent just crashed their brand-new Diablo into a bridge abutment. Or got arrested in Oklahoma for cocaine possession. Your Rock Star or Movie God in major-league legal trouble, it’s as American as apple pie or the lone gunman on the roof. But it doesn’t solve my problem. I probably already know what the ‘incident’ in question was, given my near-religious reading of Salon, Gawker, and every other site that uses the Web, that ultimate telecommunications marvel of the modern world, to instantly broadcast photos of supermodels shoveling Bolivian marching powder up their perkily enhanced noses.

Flipping back in time-space to NYC last week, four hours off the train and locked down finally in my seedy hotel on the Upper West Side, a girl I know curled up with me, and for some reason I find myself talking about how much this actress made last year versus that actress, and how much of a gross percentage of box office gross another star demands per picture.

She turns head so her chin is resting on my sternum, cocks an eyebrow while still keeping her eyes shut, and says, “Do you spend all day on the Internet?”

Pause.

“Um, sometimes.”

Jack

Jimmy Bedford is master distiller for Jack Daniels. With his southern-fried accent and the cell-phone clipped to his expensive slacks, he could just as easily be any other Tennessee ol’ boy done good – Colonel Sanders, if he shaved the beard and went into alcohol instead of chicken. “You hang around a place long enough, eventually they think up something for you to do,” he says when someone asks him how he got into the job.

He was at the Press Club last night, before Bradley went and showed me his photos from New Orleans. Bedford had his assistants bring out three different kinds of Jack, poured each of us three glasses, and had us absorb the quote-end-quote “vanilla and caramel favors.” To someone who almost never drinks hard liquor, save for the occasional screwdriver or rum-and-coke, it pretty much tasted like burning. But he was nice enough to sign over an unopened bottle to me – a trophy that could go up next to the plastic severed foot signed by Chuck Palahniuk – and afterwards Sylvia wanted to watch the end of the Yankees game, so we trotted over to the fratboy Disneyland of the ESPN bar to watch. Then came home, and crashed out.