The Glacier Hop.

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
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Alternate Mix: Velvet Underground - Sister Ray

Saving Grace.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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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."

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a thousand tiny satans.

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.

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.