Sunday, November 25, 2007
Saving Grace.
"May our prayers this Thanksgiving go out to all the flightless birds of the world. So selfless, so unfit for life, so unnaturally selected. The poor ratites, the emu and ostrich, awkward and dinosaurian, fifteen year old girls who outgrew their peers in height and scrawniness but never developed breasts. The reasonably extinct kiwi and New Zealand owlet-nightjar who we unfortunately will never be able to thank in person. And all the millions of extinct and absurd flightless birds who, by freak genetic accident, egg-birthed their way onto the planet of men and, in their flightlessness and usually delicious fatness, disappeared forever after their cameos like Brando after that shitty heist movie with Edward Norton. Our thanks go out also to the penguin. Though you, penguin, are really no good to anybody, your unholy, shitty, miserable existence is symbolic of the plight of all flightless birds everywhere. And now to the most unnaturally selected of them all, the chicken and the turkey. Though not inherently flightless, you've been bred and hormone-injected by men to the point of unflyable obesity. And on this special day, thanks go to the turkey in particular, though, it's only by chance that so many years ago at the very first Thanksgiving the similarly unfit brown people couldn't afford quail, else today we may be able to thank a more respectable creature. But anyway, by whatever roll of the cosmic dice, we are thanking you turkey, despite the uncountable retarded things about you, because that's what America means to me."
Monday, November 19, 2007
Joyeux.
And, as the jillion-sided die bounces and wobbles to a stop, that baby is me. Here I am. Here we are.
Happy birthday to all of you.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Rowboat.
At the moment, I might prefer that scenario to the gloomy halls of an advertising agency. Online advertising is on my shit list at the moment. Last Friday, I ordered tickets on Fandango for No Country for Old Men. On Sunday, a message showed up on my Facebook page that said "Evan bought No Country For Old Men on Fandango." I don't use the same email address for Facebook as I do for Fandango, so how the fuck did they make that connection? There must have been some sort of exchange of my personal information without my explicit consent. My guess is that somewhere in the Facebook Terms of Use, we inadvertently signed over all of our rights. I read that this new Facebook campaign might be illegal in New York, so hopefully someone with more initiative than myself will file a class-action suit on behalf of all of us. I want my seventy-five dollars!
For my part, I'm getting sick to my stomach about my job. For one of the accounts I work on, our "target" is fat, depressed, poor people. Even though what we're pushing might serve to make them happier, that's no excuse for helping someone exploit them to make them poorer and fucking Supercorp richer. I won't be doing this for much longer. (But how else do you eat in this town? A wise man once said, while shoving me out of the line for the bathroom at a Lower East Side dive bar, "you can't drink without pissing, motherfucker." It's true, but it doesn't tell the whole true. In this particular city, you can't drink without pissing on someone else's face.)
So I've been tossing around the idea of moving.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
don't think twice, shoot thrice.
on that note, here's a cute little verse i've put together on just such a theme.
________________________________________________________
balance
"what do you think is worse," she said,
"being crazy or being dead?"
("who cares?" i said,)
"what matters, dear, is, by design,
we can't be both at the same time."
________________________________________________________
Monday, October 8, 2007
a thousand tiny satans.
the saga continues. my strange cousin, between attemps at expelling body-thetans, is still communicating with me. on friday night, while i was in the movie theater (michael clayton--go see it), she called me three times. first from her phone, then from an unlisted number. eventually i answered, and she was calling to ask why i hadn't responded to her email (see previous post) and to make sure that she had the right "email number." at this point, a few things became clear to me:
1. she is not human.
2. she lives in a space cavern.
3. she sits indian-style in her space cavern all day, eating eucalyptus and reading my mind.
4. she sometimes inhabits my mind and makes me do shameful things.
5. she now goes by her space name which humans can't pronounce because they only have one throat.
i'm probably not going to survive her interrogations much longer. they will probably sick blackwater on me when i refuse to admit that each discontinuity in days of thunder was "intentional and comedic." i hear it all starts when beck's voicemail starts leaving messages on your voicemail. then you wake up on freewinds with a can of moxie where your prostate used to be, listening to jimmy buffett and being tickle-tortured until you admit that, technically, the story of xenu cannot be disproven. i'll be dead before you can count to ot-iii.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
pranks against psychiatry.
she wrote me today. not from her own email address, but from someone else's. (maybe she has to be supervised?) naturally, i googled his name. now, i've googled a lot of names in my day, and normally i expect to learn that a friend of mine shares his name with an australian soap star or college track and field champ. but this time i hit the jackpot. this guy testified in the lisa mcpherson trial. he was, according to the case file, the security guard stationed outside her door to keep her inside. at one point, he even had to hold her down while she was injected with sedatives. no doctors were present. if you don't remember this case, you should definitely read up on it. here are some tv segments as a refresher.
in other, less creepy news, the bank next door is begging me to commit vandalism. their enormous sign advertising "interest bearing" in human-sized letters makes me wish upon our very many stars for some scissors (i could probably find these at a store, also) and invisibility salve. a couple of minutes with these two things and i could redecorate park avenue with the words "interesting bear." this would make, at least, my day.
also, this morning i saw a woman fall victim to the marilyn monroe vent thing. a train went by under us and hot air shot through the streetholes. unlike marilyn, she made no effort to keep her skirt from flying up to her shoulders. also she was the fattest woman in new york.
i have other stuff to say, but alas.
Monday, September 24, 2007
jingles.
here is one of my favorite childhood commercials. it succeeded in doing something that not a ton of advertisements are capable of: it made me desire a product that truly, truly sucked.
you can actually witness the slow but sure gaying up of this ad over the course of a couple of years:
note: these videos are meant for entertainment purposes only. in know way are they intended to help "prove" a "point." i have a job, you know, and i don't really have all day to find fucking video links that show the gradual faggening of my entire television experience. professional bloggers do. also, they like to use fancy words like "caveat" and "ostensible" and "laconic" and "quaff" and "queaf" and they can eat poop like streetflies and sprain their face. but i digress.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
he's got style for a gentile.
i’m taking in the black bigness
of the sky from a manhattan roof.
stars are breaking through it,
more than i imagined i’d see in the city.
i remember reading of some galactic
car crash, milky ways and andromedas.
millions of particles collide:
my fingers, her hair.
how many windows do you think
are in this city? she says.
unknowable, i say, still looking
up. something moves or doesn’t.
millions of particles collide:
the wind, my arms.
this isn’t how i imagined living
on an island would be, i say.
you want chinese? she says,
looking over the edge
where two rails meet at a corner,
her face lit with the street below.
millions of particles collide:
my mouth, her neck.
i wrap myself around her
like the black around the stars.
yes, i say, i’m hungry. i peer
over the rails and take in the neon.
the chinese place downstairs
is called good advice. we go there.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
the daytripper.
it was the weekend to end all weeks: dirty tea and dirty non-tea, to say the least. everything was punctuated with an overwhelming sense of goodness, affection, and community like some sort of homosocialist paradise. it's hard to say if i was ever really awake or asleep, but i compensated for at least one of those on two flights brought to me by icelandair, old granddad, and a gay polo team (redundancy check). not even the sound of your fat child eating starburst could spoil my mood. i don't know what year it is in iceland, but neither the richard gere vehicle first knight nor the ancient and grossly overlauded stand by me could bring me down. i was on an airplane! how impossible are airplanes! on arrival:
"bonjour."
"bonjour. vous connaissez alexandra qui habitait en face...?"
"je la connais."
"elle vous a laissé ses clés?"
"oui. votre prénom et le code secret."
"evan."
"et...le code?"
"j'en sais rien."
smartass. i'm gonna go slam a noisette and then roll around in some liquor like a dog scratching his back.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
la di da di.
hold on a second. i have to go to the kitchen.
ahhh. there you are, sweet bravery. somewhere in your foggy, pearshaped figure lie two ounces of pure alcohol. only twentyfive badtasting minutes to go. only twentyfive badtasting minutes to go.
last night i tried papi's medicine. it was all i had hoped for and/or. in my pumpkin-carriage of upsidedownness, motion became my bitter enemy, stringcheese my friend. pillows and pillows of pillows! i slept like twin fetuses. and today i awoke to insane amounts of work to do, which, for the first time in my laughable life, i did with secret glee. everything i do with glee i do with secret glee. is that spelled correctly? it looks weird. fuck it.
normally i would go back and spellcheck at this point. but i don't think this entry is something i can afford to relive. and: a lesson i had forgotten from my teenage years: dryhumping destroys your pelvis!
Monday, April 30, 2007
harlem nocturne.
which reminds me.
__________________________________________
scorpions
the sand in which I lie
reminds me of her hair
and i tell her
i am covered in scorpions.
i had cut the cactus wrong
and the water spilled into the sand.
she asks is that metaphor.
she turns the lantern on in the tent.
the sky looks big as the sky,
minus the parts the stars take up.
i say no it is not a metaphor,
i wouldn't metaphor
about something like that.
she says i do not see any scorpions.
that is because you are in the tent, i say,
and i am outside of it.
come see, they cover me like stars.
like stars, she says, that is a simile.
__________________________________________
god, i used to be a much better miscommunicator. i dreamt that we couldn't wait for my girlfriend to leave the house so we could play hide the doctor. but she was being so incredibly and likely intentionally slow. in fact, she didn't leave until she'd invited two friends to babysit. well, they invited friends and they invited friends. pretty soon there was a huge party, and the place was wall-to-wall peopled. so i had to settle for a blowjob in the shower, just outside of which we could hear people we hate dancing. but it was so good that it probably gave me real herpes.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
ni le beurre ni l'argent du beurre.
maybe i'm too proud to deal with any of it.
it rains. it rains overground. it rains underground. it rains from the ground. up. it rains like firecrackers on my ceiling room windows. it rains on a random cafe in gramercy where a blonde waitress with an indistinguishable accent adjusts her top in the window where the raindrop shadows make lovely pockscars on her face.
"how are you?" she says.
"do you really want to know?" i say.
"that bad?" she says.
"yes," i say.
"no," she says.
"how are you?" i say.
pause.
"do you really want to know?" she says.
"yes."
and she says, but she doesn't have to say. thank my luck for wandering into the only bar in town whose forlorn waitress's ipod shuffle function reads everyone's mind and plays nothing but the smiths, the cure, and cat power. i think the rain was djing. from the ground up; from like firecrackers.
"tell me what's killing you," she says as i leave.
i say: "when I want to tell someone, i know where you work."
it all began here: five hours of nearly hungover on a bus. i say nearly because i can't, unfortunately, blame the whiskey this time. it was gray all around the windows. couldn't see for six feet out. she had black hair. black eyes. black wool coat. i didn't know until i breathed on her neck and grabbed her wrist that she didn't have a wrist. her arm just tapered off to a dull point. she did have a right hand, but i didn't hold it. why did i feel like i knew it all so well?
after the storm she said "i will never love you."
"i will never love you, too," i said, like a reflex.
everyone tells me everything, and yet i tell them nothing. how can i have so little shame and all this embarrassment?
and then my heart is insulted from so far away. à quoi ça sert d'aimer?
ha.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
and then they kiss.
remember all those sunflower seeds i ate on (superbowl) sunday? well i think that was largely the cause of my mouth/throat/head soreness yesterday. and today, an even stranger result: my tongue is peeling! it's as if i had sunburnt it. imagine me lying on the roof with one of those aluminum sunflectors on my chest, my tongue hanging out of my mouth. or, even stranger: imagine me eating so many fucking sunflower seeds!
yesterday i searched for "salt poisoning" on the internet. obviously eating salty stuff until your mouth hurts doesn't qualify, but i did find some strange things. people who want babies dead can poison them to death quite simply and without traces of poison; all it takes is about two teaspoons of salt. for an adult, it would take forty teaspoons, which (i used an online converter) is a little more than four fifths of a cup. four shots of salt. mmmm.
(unrelated note: i recommend that if we ever write a song about new york, we title it "the big rock candy apple." on another unrelated note, we need to build a much better bar-trivia team. i'm afraid you're getting the cut, darling; you and i know all the same stuff. time to diversify.)
remember in the first scene of that severence film when those girls were speaking romanian or magyar and we had to keep playing it over and over because we thought it might just be english with a really thick irish accent? well, i need not comment on our mental shortcomings, but the "severence effect" is alive and in full effect here in the city that never sleeps. on the train this morning i was sitting by two chicks (butter pecan rican, perhaps) who seemed to be babbling absolute nonsense. after about eight straight minutes of listening intently to their conversation, the world seemed to pull itself instantaneously back together (image: exploding head, slow motion, reverse) to uncover the horrifying truth: they were speaking english!
upon rereading, that was a stupid story. but i'm going to leave it in so that this paragraph makes sense. this is the last sentence of this paragraph.
anyone who knows how to do the shing-a-ling, the skate, the boogaloo, or the philly please get in touch with me. also if you have night terrors and want to tell me what that's like. i think i've been dancing in my sleep. this is at least what my hair, sheets, tent, bedside lamp, and reliable eyewitnesses seem to be implying. for those of you in birmingham: that town needs a volcano. i just found an article i wrote at some point in my rememberless life that says exactly why. provided upon request.
it's been in the teens every morrning this week, and that's before accounting for the wind. i like how the bitter cold makes normal humans moody and unpredictable. (i'm immune since i don't have feelings.) watching coworkers, roommates, and people on the streets see-saw between angry sensitivity and hopeless malaise has become my great pleasure. another is watching sleeping people wake up at a stop on the train and frantically try to figure out, in their sleepish daze, whether or not they have missed their stop. here's an example from this morning that combines the two:
a man is sleeping on the train. he wakes up at the chambers stop and it takes him a full minute of looking in all the wrong directions to realize that he has missed his stop. he looks at the man sitting beside him, whom he apparently doesn't know, and says "why didn't you wake me up?"
"what? i'm not your daddy," the guy beside him says.
"well you sure look like my daddy. that horrific tweed getup. and you're both dead, too."
"that doesn't even make sense," says unsuspecting man as he gets up to move away.
"oh, yeah," says angry guy, standing to meet him, "neither does this."
and then they kiss.