in my humble opinion

2010-07-19T19:57:00.002-04:00

The Glacier Hop.

2008-01-25T09:32:00.001-05:00

When it's negative ninety degrees outside, the fifteen-minute walk to the train in the morning can make you feel truly unfit for survival: a one-legged man in a legs-having contest. In order to cope with the wind, the faceburn, and those subconscious pangs of impending doom, one must wisely choose the five to seven songs he is able to listen to while trying not to tip his rickety dinghy into the river Styx. Below is a humble suggestion for maximizing the artificial heat your record (read: mp3) collection can provide you.

1. Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies

The repetitive bells and piano can completely hypnotize you into feelinglessness. I'm surprised Stephen Merritt didn't make up that word. If possible, try to avoid listening to the lyrics; concentration can spoil the hypnotizing effects and lead to feelings of inadequacy and dejection.

Distraction: 9/10
Virtual Warmth: 8/10
Pumpedness: 4/10

2. The Dwarves - Cain Novocaine

Though this track will keep you warm for less than two minutes, its brand of straight-up brainfuckling, umbrella-codpiece slimerock is an essential part of your breakfast. Its chanty refrain will keep you focused and make you feel like your boring trudge through the gray streets of your dull town is a really important mission.

Distraction: 7/10
Virtual Warmth: 7/10
Pumpedness: 8/10

3. A Tribe Called Quest - Keeping It Moving

The effectiveness of this song hinges on one thing: it is impossible to not dance to. Dancing can warm most of your body, but maybe not the extremities. Try to incorporate face and finger movements into your dancing. Try to do this without freaking too many people out.

Distraction: 10/10
Virtual Warmth: 0/10 (This song provides, by extension, actual warmth.)
Pumpedness: 9/10

4. The Lucksmiths - Untidy Towns

The Lucksmiths' particular brand of Wintery twee was made for just this occasion. It's basically audio comfort food with happy melodies and a lot of humming.

Distraction: 7/10
Virtual Warmth: 10/10
Pumpedness: 5/10

5. Jay-Z - The Ruler's Back

The more curmudgeonly of my readers may scoff at the title borrowed from the bygone hiphop classic. But even if this isn't a song for the ages, it's certainly an effective source of heat. Walking down the sidewalk with this song playing, you feel like you must be prepared, fully on-guard, for any moment an enemy might burst through a glass storefront and engage you in kung-fu battle.

Distraction: 8/10
Virtual Warmth: 8/10
Pumpedness: 10/10

6. Wire - Field Day for the Sundays

It is unnecessary to wax talkative about the greatest twenty-eight seconds in music history.

Distraction: 10/10
Virtual Warmth: 9/10
Pumpness: 9/10

7. Booker T and the MG's - Green Onions

Simply the greatest walking-down-the-street song for any occasion, Green Onions is for people on their way to rob a bank, slaughter a rival, join a gang of misfits, seduce a rival's wife, win a game of skill, eat a big fucking sandwich, blow something up, win a game of chance, steal something you don't want, clothesline someone, become emperor of all hell, rake leaves, love everything, or just to pick up some eggs. Nothing will make you feel more important than this.

Distraction: 10/10
Virtual Warmth: 10/10
Pumpedness: 69/10
___________________________________________________________

Alternate Mix: Velvet Underground - Sister Ray

Saving Grace.

2007-11-25T15:02:00.000-05:00

Harnessing the spirit-power of the Native Americans from whom we borrowed our modern idea of gluttony and meat-savagery, I delivered the following address on the day of thanks:

"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."

Joyeux.

2007-11-19T15:01:00.000-05:00

Today is the quarter-century anniversary of the day that signified the successful humping of my parents. They managed, correctly, to bump against one another in that awkward and inelegant way, mixing the chemicals that cause the reactions that make the new person. Then the man went to work to make the money to feed the lady to grow the child to spit out the baby so they could forget about it. Congratulations to them on their special day.

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.

Rowboat.

2007-11-15T12:35:00.000-05:00

I must look ridiculous right now. I got biblically rained on leaving for work this morning, and I showed up for a "brainstorm" bright and early with the appearance and demeanor of a wet kitten. I've borrowed some clothing from coworkers and am now sporting a red and brown plaid shirt, an oddly-patterned black sweater and a green zippy-uppy polar fleece jacket. I look like I belong face-down in a rowboat next to a pool of post-drunken vomit and the naked body of a woman I've just killed.

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.

don't think twice, shoot thrice.

2007-10-16T14:11:00.000-04:00

as if you don't already love america too much, enjoy the pathetic state of our media as you are forced to watch a commercial before being able to hear the details of a sextuple-murder-suicide from the wisconsin attorney general.

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."

________________________________________________________

a thousand tiny satans.

2007-10-08T11:15:00.001-04:00

i know it seems like it would go without saying, but i was explaining to my girlfriend this weekend that while i am made out of flesh and bone, which is made of fats and fibers and proteins, which are made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of subatomic particles which some think may consist of infinitely small vibrating strings...she is made of a thousand tiny satans. she, being evil, took this quite personally. but it wasn't intended to be a personal attack. it was more an attempt to truly explain (in terms that a liberated, educated woman could understand) the difference between men and women. her base substance is sin. my base substance is universal truth. is it fair? probably not. but that's life. on the bright side, if a woman should succeed in manufacturing a baby, there is only a fifty percent chance that the tiny satans will be inherited. thank you, meiosis.

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.

pranks against psychiatry.

2007-10-04T11:51:00.000-04:00

so, the other day i get a call from a cousin of mine to whom i hadn't spoken in about eight years. word, as heard through the family grapevine, was that she was in clearwater training to be some sort of scientology priestess. i didn't know whether it would make her uncomfortable or not to bring this up, so we didn't talk about it on the phone. we exchanged news and the proverbial pleasantries (i don't know which proverb that comes from), and she sounded like a normal twentysomething who was doing a lot of traveling and enjoying herself. weird, yes: it was out of the blue. scientology-weird, no: an unspoken presence, maybe; the only thing a little odd about her was that i realized (as we concluded our chat by exchanging emails) that she had never heard of gmail. oh, also, "exchange" was misused there. i gave her my email. she didn't have one.

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.

jingles.

2007-09-24T11:46:00.000-04:00

it's reasonable to assume that when i was ten i was more susceptible to advertising than i am today. a catchy jingle, some near epileptic-fit-inducing images or some genius boobs might send me running to mother with a refrain of "want" and "need." these days, an ad for taco bell's new cheesy, beefy melt almost induces vomiting. i think the difference, though, is more than just the slow erosion of my naïveté: advertisements were actually better back then. they were much less conceptual, and often trimmed down (especially ads aimed at children) to nothing but other people having a great time and yelling "awesome" while using whatever absurdist contraption they were trying to peddle. these days, you have to be the fucking duke of irony to understand any ad for car insurance. it requires at least a bachelor's degree in pop culture to "get" the commercials for what i think is some sort of keyboarded wireless device. see? i don't even know what the fucking product is! will we ever revert to this time of simplicity? is the nature of advertising cyclical or only downward-spiraling?

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.

he's got style for a gentile.

2007-09-23T18:01:00.000-04:00

bigness

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.

the daytripper.

2007-05-22T02:32:00.000-04:00

last week i fell in love with new york and today paris is my mistress.

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.

la di da di.

2007-05-17T02:31:00.000-04:00

i can actually hear the forty ounce of old english sitting in my fridge, buzzering like a secret guitar string that only my poor sober heart and certain alcoholic dogs can hear. shut up already, you delicious whore! remind me not that the good lord made you the perfect combination of malt and liquor, brimming with golden condensation and mocking me: "i, perfect, malt and liquor. you, evan, girlchested tetrajew, bespectacled and scared of vegetables. you are but a squiggly little inchworm in the shadow of my magnificent, gothically-scripted superlove. drink me and be the power! sicken me no more with you earthly cowardice! come. come!"

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!

harlem nocturne.

2007-04-30T02:30:00.000-04:00

i told someone today that i'm building giant things with tiny tools. i am, and i meant it literally of course, but they took it metaphorically. i thought: might as well.

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.

ni le beurre ni l'argent du beurre.

2007-04-15T02:24:00.000-04:00

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.

and then they kiss.

2007-02-07T02:23:00.000-05:00

(the following was originally intended as a letter to someone. as a result, some of it might not makes sense to some of you. not as a result, some of this might not make sense to some of you.)

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.

faut pas faire pleurer les filles!

2006-08-17T02:20:00.000-04:00

it's one-thirty in the a.m. i just made some pasta for mo and me. it was delicious, but, like the alcohol we drank, it comes with a price. we are almost guaranteed to be ill. we will wake puking. but it will have been worth it.

ingredients:

creme fraiche (open, expired)
gruyere (long open, very old)
prosciutto (unopened, very old)
pesto (open, almost empty, of mysterious origin, clearly ancient)
pappardelle (nontoxic pasta balls, safe bet)
parmigiano (open, probably nontoxic)

the odds are against us. but my bright college years as a slop-chef resulted in a tasty, drunken meal. in the end, we will be able to blame the alcohol anyway. moral of the story: maureen needs to snap out of her sulky summer depression and clean out the fucking refrigerator. where is megan? where have all the maids gone?

in other news, i will be back in the states on tuesday. all of you should call me as soon as i have a phone. if you are in france and haven't been invited to my costume picnic on sunday, you should call me, and then come.

dorothy got a new home today. she will be missed, though probably not by her true owner who completely abandoned her. in case you don't know, her name is elizabeth and her negligence is legendary.

carmen sandiego is hot.

2006-05-29T02:14:00.000-04:00

i'm a bit tipsy in a café i dont recognize with some people i dont recognize. they're talking about films i don't recognize and making esoteric references that end in a hearty, echoing laughter i can barely stomach. the lighting is sick and yellowish, reflecting off brass banisters and in huge, brass-framed mirrors. the dull bright has me feeling trapped in one of those going-crazy van goghs, so i grab the girlie by the wrist and we ditch these fucking potato-eaters for a starry night. but what to do?

thankfully, my folks are in town for some reason, staying at some ritzy hotel in a neighborhood full of post-game celebrating spaniards. we run up the spiral staircase to the hotel room. knock. no dice. but there's some free tour bus about to leave from the lobby, so we hop on in and move to the side-by-side twin beds in the back of this triple-wide monster. i lay on my back and watch basketball on the giant ceiling-mounted plasma screen. she gives me head as i watch the playoffs, all the while trying to hide my mounting anxiety that the tour is about to end as a robot-voice announces all our stops: "république...châtelet...grands boulevards." crazy fucking trajectory but whatever. my tour, orgasm, and basketball game end in a well-synchronized fashion, and as we make out way out the double doors i get a phone call.

it's jason, who is apparently now working out of his apartment in paris as some kind of state-sponsored rocket scientist. his parents are in town also, supposedly to help him clean up his room, which had blown up like a chemistry lab in a high-school comedy because his alpha-phase rocket detonated while he was lighting a cigarette. we headed over to his apartment to meet his parents. the place was all gray and in shambles and his marvin-the-martian-looking rocket was on the floor behind his computer chair, peeled like a banana. his parents offered to take us to dinner, and we graciously accepted. however, their car couldn't fit five people, so, naturally, we had to follow them on top of a train.

the top of the train is made of chicken wire, so it sort of hurts to hold on, but we manage. as we crawl along it like trench warfare we find a little glass box like a carrying case for a small pet. we look inside. it's a tiny french restaurant with little people inside!

so, we decide to say fuck it to dinner with jason's parents and find a way to make ourselves small enough to go to the baby resto. we hop off the train and start watching the little waiters serve the little breads. when the train passes, there is a police car waiting on the other side of the tracks (the wrong side). apparently it's illegal to have in your possession a tiny glass restaurant box. so the fuckers take us into custody. fucking pigs, man.

you got what i need.

2006-04-01T02:08:00.000-05:00

grève générale:

thanks to someone's less than completely justified desire to skip school and throw half-empty bottles of eau de vie at police barricades, it took me almost two hours to go twenty minutes. the bus stop at bastille had a sign that i believe translates "fuck off," so i obediently took the one-line to châtelet, where fiftythousand people had been waiting fiftythousand minutes for a train train that wasn't fiftythousand coming. resignedly enough, i decided to climb to ground level and catch the trusty thirtyeight, which was so nonexistant that it didn't even bother to leave me a (kind) fuck off: bonne journée. so i walked home. and it was tuesday. so it was pissing like a raining cow. (CPE: cow qui pisse sur evan.)

rêve général:

i'm in the lobby of the hilton next to the big metal thing looking to pick up a girl, maybe the daughter of a businessman here on vacation, interested in an exciting weekend but too timid to make one for herself. i'll know her because she'll smoke incessantly and probably dye her hair black. as it were, i find not the daughter but the wife, and no sooner do we find a bit a shade than her hand is looking for something in my pants. an almost frightening amount of desire. i chase something with a shot of whiskey and then wake up in that big apartment on rue de rivoli that i vaguely remember breakdancing in, but this time i remember nothing. i hear mumbled chatter in the adjacent room, interspersed with laughter and a few mispronunciations of my name. a girl comes in to clean my bloody knees and to tell me that i jumped off the bridge onto the boat. "you can't say i didn't warn you." like the night before in non-dream world, i grabbed her arm to pull her in to kiss me, but she was too annoyed that i'd grabbed her arm for me to be able to go throught with it. six times in one dream i woke up to no memory but the stories i heard from other people. when I finally woke-up woke up, i remembered everything from the previous night but convinced myself that i'd dreamt it.

il faut me jurer de m'aimer.

2006-03-15T02:07:00.000-05:00

(pierrot le fou taught me that a life of excitement can be so boring.)

i find myself overtame and underjudged. i yearn to make a fool of myself. all of you who constantly see me drunk: expect to see me drunker. i want to know that my friends are whispering behind my back in tones of disapproval. that i break glasses. grab asses. i want that my cheeks know the heat of embarrassment. i want you to have to justify me to people i don't know. "nah, he's all right when the spirits don't gots him."

i think i've forgotten what stories are and how they're told, or that's at least the impression i get from looking back at what i've written here. all fuzz with some minimalist narrative. woke up at the mayor's house; argued with a haughty native american. that was my week. it's all hot air except the dream about s&m incest. which reminds me.

it seems i'm throwing a party and some mean old hag demands that i fetch her some ice cream. i go halfway up the stairs where it's sitting in a big bowl. but in the ice cream is my pet mouse, who is so fat that he's just this perfect sphere with little arms and a face sticking out. he's been eating the ice cream, which worries me because it's chocolate (and because he could catch a cold). i don't have time to tend to him though, because i have to go put together a drumset really fast. which reminds me.

we now have a pet rat named dorothy. the conditions under which i was willing to approve of this adoption are yet to be met.

je ne boirai pas de ton eau.

déviation.

2006-02-22T01:50:00.000-05:00

"totalement, tendrement, tragiquement."

two days in the last five get an exclamation point; or maybe an interrobang. See also: colonostrophe, quotentheses, typhoid.

chapter one: Saturday

sometime around eight, before the tournament began: dizzy. feverish. something high enough to make hot feel cold. i was already commited to play so i ended up staying until one in the morning, reeling. decent luck, but i attribute that to the african wristcharm. (thanks.)

one o'clock. don't have my keys.

"don't have my keys."
"shit."
"can you meet me at home?"
"rather not."
"can you work it out?"
"yeah. hold on a second."
"you know i can't trust you when you speak in units of time."

two o'clock. enter the apartment. darkness. three lightswitches: no, no, no. fuses blown. i fumbled around with a lighter. yanked out all the fuses, rearranging them. three lightswitches: no, no, no. repeat.

two thirty. still dizzy, pukish. no. no. yes! kitchen light works. find medicine. lie down. phone rings seven times. can't get up, too heavy. where are you? come fix this. come with a cold rag and fix this.

six-thirty o'clock. sleeping, finally. pool of sweat.
six-thirty one. awake, coughing.

chapter two: wednesday

completely alien lovesickness. what is this? heavy like a fucking fever. further punctuated by utter confusion; looking at myself from the outside. who is that?

concerts are sold out. stay home to wash dishes, unthinkingly exhausting a very finite supply of hot water.

bad idea #99345: i'll cut my own hair! should be simple enough. i have clippers. (something they never tell you about clippers is that they only work on the parts of your head where you can push them against the grain. so if you have hair like mine, which just sort of juts out directionlessly, well, they only work in a few select places, leaving you ridiculous-looking.) so i'm left ridiculously-looking, but still covered in itchy hair, which i can't shower off for fear of hypothermia. fuck, fuck, fuck.

so, naturally, i vaccum myself. and the floor. file my nails. wait for the hot-water heater. completely alien lovesickness. what is this? i unintentionally water it, and it thrives (like the late-great milton, god rest his little jacinthe soul).

in a fit of something, i jump in the luke-cold shower and get the spiders off me. i dry off. dress. run to the arab shop.

a cup of tea. beers like tiny hugs. next up: pills.

"donc, tu m'aimes totalement?"

excerpts.

2006-02-16T01:45:00.000-05:00

"pencil me as an adventurous and felicitous cat; hardly anyone knows me better than this."

"je me suis pris un rateau
trente-six chandelles sur le gateau
on a fait l'amour sur un bateau
mais ton amour tombait dans l'eau.

"women don't say know with their hands. they say no with their mouths."

"who will be the fastest to recover?
the one who's first to find another lover."

"you'd think that these days nobody outside the clergy could make it past sixteen with a hymen."

shortly after arriving in paris last year, my hard drive exploded. it didn't crash or malfunction or any sillily such euphemisms. i plugged it in, it made a blam! and then smoke came out of it. i lost all my documents, hundreds of pages of writing, hundreds of albums of music. luckily i had copied all of the documents onto a laptop. its drive crashed a few short days later. chagrin!

"i'm not the devil, but I possess you."

"emotional insurance
the best kind of assurance
i can't spend money, but honey
i can sure spend time on you."

and all the things i've forgotten to write down.

plaqué.

2006-02-14T01:42:00.000-05:00

i guess this is my first valentine's day alone since i was old enough to be together. for fear that i might actually not care, i spent yesterday compiling a heartbreaking playlist, beating hours of jiltitude into my tiny head. in effect, i managed to convince myself that i was still in love, that i wasn't capable of it, that i prefer masturbation, and then that gravity didn't exist. it is, you know, just a theory. no one in iceland believes in evolution. and vice versa. some lowlights...

1. Roy Orbison - Crying
2. The Smiths - I Know It's Over
3. Patsy Cline - I Fall to Pieces
4. Jacques Brel - Ne Me Quitte Pas
5. TV on the Radio - Don't Love You
6. The Broken Family Band - You Broke My Fucking Heart
7. Bob Dylan - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright
8. Magnetic Fields - No One Will Ever Love You
9. Beat Happening - I've Lost You
10. Carla Bruni - Quelqu'un M'a Dit
11. Silver Jews - Random Rules
12. Hank Williams - Lovesick Blues
13. The Velvet Underground - Pale Blue Eyes
14. Love - Live and Let Live
15. Otis Redding - I've Been Loving You Too Long
16. The Sixths - As You Turn to Go

and much, much more!

saint valentine was beheaded i think. so, in his memory, tonight we shall drink whiskey and watch the texas chainsaw massacre.

blush factory.

2005-12-24T01:37:00.000-05:00

"object i: the bag itself

it’s an oversized department-store style paper sack with shoelace handles, ornamented with a simple white design and the word FENTE, which I don’t recognize. it’s sitting by the door when i walk inside, waiting to be taken. i didn’t realize she had already packed it. it’s heavier than i expect when i carry it to the sofa and begin to pick at its contents: everything i’d left at her apartment. “je suis une personne sérieuse,” she had told me once. true enough. meticulous, nostalgic, she couldn’t have missed a thing. not a penny i’d dropped, nor a note i’d scribbled. a pubic hair.

she says take off your shoes and she sits on a rolling desk chair with her feet propped up on the coffee table beside a carnivorous plant named after an american actor that’s only famous in europe. it isn’t well. november. following her feet up her bare legs i think about burying my face between them, about fucking her against the wall, about dirty words in a thick accent. when i move my gaze to her mouth she stares back coldly so i drop my eyes quickly into the big red bag. she won’t say another word for half an hour. i take off my shoes."

and this is how i found my calling as a smut writer. what happens next (in what was supposed to be a relatively serious work of semi-nonfiction) is that i replace the heartbreaking bit of nostalgia i had intended to examine with something far more interesting: a "sex scene" so wet with detail that it is, in fact, a more accurate portrayal of the thoughts and motivations of our, how shall i say, hapless narrator. unfortunately, i will not be posting that here. however, garbage will be available upon request. also, i might be soliciting for experiences (read: research) vital to the past (read: present) of a future smut writer. this doesn't mean put your finger in my ass. it means bring your sister.

have some class.

note: the above excerpt is from a work of (as of now) fiction. any resemblance to real people or events is completely coincidental.

fond.

2005-11-22T01:34:00.000-05:00

it's been a long time, diary! last time i basted you with hot words was i can't remember ago.

this is the first i've been sick since the last post (one disease ago). at the moment, my throat feels as if i spent my birthday swallowing jacks, crackerjacks, firecrackers, tacks and tax(idermal porcupines). additionally, my whole body is sore, but that's probably from shaking what my momma gave me. if i never hear another madonna song for the rest of my life i'll probably be the better for it.

thanks for the mexican food, mexicans. and thanks to everyone who put on a mask of my face to scare the fuck out of me when i walked out of the bathroom. eleven evans: i swear i thought i was about to be sodomized.

thanksgiving is up the backstretch. i'm envisioning a turkey sandwich. or maybe just a sandwich from a turkish restaurant. or maybe a turkish lover. those sideburns are so sexy, ladies! god, that was racist. so in the spirit of thanksgiving, i will go into the banlieue, and the racaille and i will make smores over a flambeau de renault. if smores don't mean brotherhood (and isn't smore what those needies always need?) then i'm lost.

come and find me. bring soup.

ladies and gentlemen.

2005-08-28T01:30:00.000-04:00

exhibit i:

effluvian sinus infection. dizzish fever. feelings of pukishness. someone dropped an anvil on my head. this was the morning of my flight; well, my first flight; well, my non-flight. luckily, the transparent glue rolling out of my nose was able to power a small hydro-electric plant on my upper lip that released a squadron (herd?) of robotic beagles to run into the forest and fetch me some ephedrine-based decongestants. once again, i said luckily.

exhibit ii:

the french are known for being bureaucratic (in fact, i think they invented the word). short story short, i got my visa a day after my airplane flew into outer space. i rescheduled my flight, like a good frenchman, about twenty minutes before missing it.

exhibit iii:

re-flight delayed three hours. to apologize for this, klm gave everyone $10 vouchers for food anywhere in the airport. the catch: it was ten o'clock at night and everything closed at that precise exact moment. unfortunately, someone slid under closing gate and got in line at burger king, causing the manager to open the restaurant to the entire airplane. what this means: 200 people trying to spend as close as possible to $10 (without going over) at burger king. luckily (again), i wasn't hungry. so I got a giant ('king'-sized) milkshake, a bottle of water, and two pieces of pie. $8.81. keep the change.

arrivant.

no two brands of bottled water are the different.

2005-07-26T01:25:00.000-04:00

translations of common expressions that aren't common in english:

1. that makes me shit.
2. put your fingers in your ass and whistle.
3. you make me shit.
4. you can't pickle a pickle.
5. i make myself shit.
6. pig-god!

(1) and (3) are pretty self-explanatory. (5) is an expression of boredom. i think that (2), though similar linguistically and imagistically to "put that in your pipe and smoke it," actually means something closer to "fuck off." to be honest, i don't think i know what "put that in your pipe and smoke it" means, but as i sit here saying it over and over to myself aloud at seven in the morning, it begins to taste a little like "i told you so." (6) is, in its native tongue, something like the worst thing you can say. i think i just made up (4), but it doesn't matter, because this entire entry exists only to get...

...TRANSLATO-ED.

____________________________________________________

is not uses the english common expression together the translation:
1. that signs i shit.
2. invests your finger in yours donkey and the whistling.
3. you make my shit.
4. you are unable the salt system salt juice.
5. i make oneself shit.
6. pigs gods!

(1) and (3) is quite obvious. (5) is the tasteless expression. i believed, (2), although similarly invests that to "pulls out it in yours pipe and the language and imagistically," meant in fact something boils to nearer ". "honestly speaks me not to think i knew any" invests that and pulls out its "in yours pipe to mean, but when i sit here to say many times it to i loudly in seven mornings, it starts to taste little likes" i telling you so. "(6) is, in its mother tongue, the worst matter which some phenomenon you can say. i thought i have made up (4), but its not critical time, because this entire entry existence have to...

... translato ED.

____________________________________________________

the general expression reassignment not generally uses england:

1. this make the excrement and i.
2. it places its finger to enter its donkey and to blow blow whistling.
3. your excrement is isn't them with me.
4. you are unable one pickle pickle
5. if my will is the excrement.
6. porco-deus!

(1) and (3) they will be evidentes consideravelmente. (5) they will be the tasteless expression. i believed, (2), even so similar ling? ? stica and its "placed this to enter its conduit and imagistically pulls it out," in fact middle something more "if went to fodder." then in order to is honest, 4 did not think 44 knew "it places this to enter my conduit and it to pull out its" it to care for, but i sits by 4 itself proportion to under here govoryashch biggest repetidamente enters 7 mornings, starts some proof taste "i him thus thinks this." (6) they, with theirs mother tongue - casti, something the matter which you possibly thought as plokh. i believed that, i it has included (4), but 4 i do not have the value, because this entire entrance existence in order to only starts...... the translato-TRANSLATO- translato-TRANSLATO- unit.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

three and a half tongues.

2005-06-17T01:20:00.000-04:00

i turn a comforter into a cocoon because i am never satisfied. she does it so she can make a sulking tent, a depressio-hut, but she doesn't know quite how unsanitary it is. i learned that you can climb into the internet and make sushi or indian food show up at your door in less time than it takes me to construct a sentence in this godforsaken lung. you can turn your whole body curry-orange and feel like you go on forever, like you're looking in a mirror that has a mirror in front of it. i think that's how everything looks in places that are far away from here. you know, secret places. secret, cosmic places so cosmic and so secret that i lost my train of thought.

my phone died, which is to say that at one in the morning when you try to catch the last RER home because you don't want to pay for a cab and you're in the traincar without seats and there are fortynine people in a seven foot square and the lights are flickering and you don't know if you're a virgin anymore someone took it out of your pocket. it's okay, though, because i was given a new one by the red cross. hospitals are made up of a bunch of apartment buildings that aren't even glued together.

there is something with three and half tongues that doesn't know the difference between do and make (and now neither do i) and that kills me and then washes its hands like a surgeon. more on this later.

i'm trying to skip the middleman so i've written an email to the director of the math department at paris iv. if he speaks english then he'll think that i'm a bumbling, stupid american, take pity on me and make me his apprentice. we'll probably sleep together and his wife will find out and kick him out of the house. he'll try to move in with me but i'm not having it. i'm just not ready for that sort of commitment, much less complete disregard for the professional ethic. maybe i can babysit his kids and learn broken french. maybe the government will give me money. i need to play cards tomorrow. they actually gamble with tarot cards here. there goes your "joke," mr. wright.

tomorrow i will buy sneakers so my feet don't bleed anymore. the ghosts in the bathroom slammed the door again. i knew there were magnets here. i have some explaining to do.

the miserable circus of storytelling.

2005-06-14T01:17:00.000-04:00

you're drinking orange juice and someone taps you on the shoulder. it's you! "you will see me tomorrow," you say. "tell me to stop thinking about her."

the fact that some messiah is not going to come knocking at my door tomorrow to tell me that my heart is like an overchlorinated swimming pool doesn't keep me from incessantly getting up and looking through the peep-hole and once in a while knocking on it myself from the inside. that last sentence was not a metaphor. i think it was a dream.

and if you ever find yourself inside of a dream don't take the advice of a family member when they tell you to go to a house in the middle of the woods where supposedly live and aunt and uncle of yours you've never heard of because it might mean that you have to stave off a goblin insurrection in a mansion that can be driven like a car. it could also mean that after the rebellion has subsided you're going to be forced into s&m torture by those supposed family members alongside a sexy "cousin" who makes you feel a little better because you figure it probably happens to her every day. you might even tell yourself that this is a dream and then wake up. but you don't wake up in the place you went to sleep. instead you're in your grandmother's house eleven years ago and you're thirsty. so you walk past the dog that's a scorpion and get yourself some orange juice.

why i say "jesus" and "fuck" when i fuck

2005-06-08T01:11:00.000-04:00

(it is my solemn oath that the following entry will not have anything to do with its title.)

we are going to record an a capella version of "if i can't have you" where girlvoice mimics the piano by screaming like a monkey. it won't be perfect; it won't even be good. but it will be more fun than those nights i spent walking on the inside of a telephone. anything would.

i wonder how les voisins will feel if i try to throw a fourth of july barbecue in the courtyard. do you think i could make some flyers that pitch it as a cultural event? or is america not exotic enough since it's already everywhere? they'd be there if i played that goddamned rap music they love. please, baby, if you come i'll force down your fucking foie gras on bastille day. i can handle it...it's just like potted meat. yet despite my namesake i have no taste for caviar.

i don't know anything about nutrition, but i think cheese is a good source of protein if you can't afford meat. and cheese is more expensive than meat. and i can get a bottle of fake champagne pink for 1€ but i'm afraid to go outside because

(i'm going in search of the titular line and on my way i'll ask god why temptation can't resist me.)

bitten again.

2005-06-05T01:07:00.000-04:00

(umpteenth spider in less weeks. on my belly button!)

discothèque. i wish ambrose were alive for this. is anyone named ambrose alive right now? since i bought her way in, she was obligated to drink as much at the open bar as the cover seemed to suggest. about halfway to that quota, she was so ivre fucking mort (astheysay) she couldn't stand up leaning against the sink-shelf and the bouncers were chasing the two of them in and out of the bathroom like benny hill and on the dance floor the men were dancing a combination of like women and like scooby doo when he tries to run away.

then a man who looks more like a spider than the spider but who tells me he's never slept with his husband before tells me tonight might be the night, the night i find out i'm not really hetero, a word that when spoken by him sounds like "retro," which i'm not, not even in whatever language he was speaking. it was all fine until he touched my arm like he was made out of a thousand spiders, then i had to run to my wife whom i've never slept with and jet jet jet.

i want to drink this, but i will.

2005-05-29T13:02:00.000-04:00

(four in the morning: putting it in my nose en france.)

so far, incredible fun. almost died in new jersey. torrential winds make it difficult to land airplanes, i hear. next thing i know, some muslims steal my whiskey by the seine. they were very drunk and i, having already consumed too much of the bottle, immediately forgave them. not so for others. "why don't you stop her, evan?!" "why doesn't she stop herself?!" i wish i could find the interrobang on this thing.

tomorrow, which is essentially today since i essentially woke up at midnight (and by essentially i mean actually), i am going to go look for a job and find out how to apply for school here. in preparation for this, naima has given me a beautiful and hilariously european haircut, which i will post some pictures of as soon as i can kill someone and steal their money and go buy some amero-europo adapters at the hilariously european fnac.

no one should ever throw their money away on a fancy weight-loss program. they should throw their money away on moving to france, where there is no such thing as food and every such thing as walking around all the time. i think i've already lost ten pounds, and at this rate I should weigh approximately zero pounds in approximately 25 days or, as the natives say, "approximately zero kilograms."

i miss everyone in alabama, and by "miss" i mean "need a favor from." make those goddamned "bush/cheney '08" bumper stickers, tshirts, and hunting caps, then sell them for a lot of money and send me a generous portion of the proceeds. file it under R & D, R.D.

inanimate objects.

2005-02-23T03:48:00.000-05:00

ideally, this publication (what?) should contain little more than rambling lists of things of which i am sick and tired. it might be entertaining. funny even. unfortunately, i am cursed with more patience than the yarmuk hospital (okay, maybe it would never be funny). i need to be more infuriated. i need to feel anger. to hate inanimate objects. to want to break people, places and things. add ideas to that.

the only thing that has even gotten close to frustrating me this week is the ebay treasure hunt. this is a game where the lovely people at ebay post incredibly vague clues intended to lead you to an object being sold at auction. if you find it, you get $1000. simple enough, right? well, here's an example i've thrown together to try and explain the logic behind this little scavenger affair:

clue: phalanges.

answer: well, a phalanx is a bone in the finger or toe. that song "head, shouders, knees, and toes" sort of reminds me of a shampoo, and that's also the name of a warren beatty movie which co-stars goldie hawn, who's name rhymes with "dawn," which is when the sun rises; bread rises too and, slangily, bread is money, which is, by an old adage, equivalent to time, which can be read on clock; clocks tic(k) and so do people with tourette's syndrome; george gilles de la tourette was born in london, a city sharing its name with the guy who wrote the call of the wild; a WILDebeest is a type of antelope and "ante" means "before," so what's before "lope" in webster's? lop! and you could, if you chose, lop someone's arms off with a samurai sword. so, if you want the $1000, you should enter "teenage mutant ninja turtles" in the search bar because, if i remember correctly, at least one of them has a samurai sword. if that doesn't work, you need to delve into the history of whichever artist that turtle is named after. try searching the maiden name of his long-dead wife.

the spirit catches you and you fall down.

2005-01-24T01:36:00.000-05:00

they call it an aura, of all things. dogs can smell it. sometimes you itch, get vertigo, sweat. at the wake of a young dog, my nephew turned seven with a dozen or so electrodes on his head. they destroyed his hair.

there is a ladybug crawling across the screen of this computer. they have ceased to be beautiful. now they are only here until they cease to be. i tried to decipher their cultural meaning in an essay, but it came out to be about blowjobs, which would have embarrassed me if only i had the capacity. from what i hear, it's not such a bad thing that i don't, but just wait, you'll tire of it.

two people owe me comments. you know who you are. and I know who you are, so I know that you won't be reading this.

two theories:

1) sexual prowess is inversely proportional to dancing talent. this doesn't apply to the classically trained. it applies more to the general ability to move to music with rudimentary rhythm and grace. to your credit (i guess), there are plenty of ballerina's who can't do that. case in point: italians.

2) i'm beginning to think that even the most intelligent of my friends are christians. anyone who uses the phrase "beyond biology" should at least have the self-awareness to admit that they are no longer arguing reason. these people, of course, would be offended that i call them "christians," because apparently thinking that man is the greatest thing to ever happen to the universe falls within the realm of their proclaimed atheism (or, for the pussier ones, agnosticism). it's all the same to me.

okay, okay. i tire.