Another Year's Gone By

Braddock

2009-10-08T13:33:00.003-04:00

Today is my first day off work since two Mondays ago, and my to-do list has begun to overflow with letters to out-of-town friends. As much as I like the idea of old-fashioned letter-writing, I'm not in the habit of it and since I do so little writing by hand I write illegibly and get cramps, so maybe it's better to do the regular life updating via new media and leave the analog communication to fewer letters with more personal content. So, without further preamble, back to blogging.

As most of you probably know, I'm living in Braddock, PA. Moving here was part of the first phase of a plan that will hopefully culminate in a radically-minded art and music collective situated on property that it owns and allowing its members to devote more time to their creative pursuits. Unfortunately, that plan is predicated upon a few of us -- those without partners, jobs, leases, or anything keeping us in one place -- moving here before there is really a place to move and long before the majority of the collective members. So in early August, immediately following, in my case, a six-month period during which I was already away from home for about 3/4 of the time, we borrowed my parents' Ford Focus and bike rack and drove from the suburban DC-Metro area that we know and love/hate/are often ambivalent about to a building that used to be a convent, which is now an informal hostel owned by the mayor, across the main street from the Edgar J Thompson steel mill in the post-industrial outskirts of Pittsburgh.

Unfortunately for Welch, who was to spend his second and third weeks in town mostly on his own, my transient period was not quite over so after a week of looking for jobs and getting settled in and a weekend of collective meetings I left town again for Dewey Beach with the family, a wedding in Seattle, and an aborted visit with a friend in Portland. Just before midnight on Thursday, September third (a few days earlier than planned), my plane landed at the Pittsburgh airport. A long busride later I was eating half-priced Indian food with Welch and Mo (who was visiting for the evening) in my new city, and feeling relieved to finally be staying in once place for more than a few weeks.

Chapter 2: Chicago Weekend Part I

2009-05-11T14:58:00.002-04:00

Running on one night's worth of sleep spread over the past three, I woke up at 11:30 Friday morning to walk downtown and meet up with Harjit and a bunch of west coast kids at the May Day parade. Talking to people about it I'm consistently surprised by how little Americans know about May Day, if they've even heard of it at all. The Europeans, on the other hand, were shocked that businesses were open at all.

After a series of phone calls and half an hour of wandering through a downtown to which none of us had ever been in a city with which no one but me had any familiarity, we met up with the march for the last couple of blocks. Since there isn't much of a radical labor movement in the states, May Day marches tend to focus on immigrant rights (or at least this one did). It felt weird to be at a march again; I'm pretty sure the last one was some time in 2004.

The march terminated at an outdoor speaking event in some square downtown, at which point it started to rain and the majority of our company began to agitate for a move to the Chicago Diner. The Chicago Diner impressed the shit out of Sean and me last summer with it's seemingly better-than-Red-Bamboo quality and slightly-lower-than-Red-Bamboo prices, although looking back I suspect that our enjoyment of the food was partially a product of having eaten nothing in weeks but crappy Chinese food, Subway, and an extraordinary amount of Cliff Bars, as well has having ridden 60 miles without stopping that morning. This time around the food was less remarkable (though still slightly cheaper than comparable places in New York), but the experience was dramatically improved by the presence of a few dozen friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances that showed up during the meal; the diner is apparently the first stop for vegans visiting town.

After some wandering around in search of a mythical Urban Outfitters (which was revealed to be an Anthropologie store that, due to its ownership by Urban Outfitters, turned up in an iPone search, our group split up and several of us headed for Subterrainian to see the first Burning Fight pre-show featuring, among others, Converge and The Hope Conspiracy. As I entered the club the bouncer saw my x'ed up hands and didn't ask for ID, so I wasn't given a wristband. I asked about re-entry and was told that it was only possible with a wristband, which I couldn't get because I was under 21. I told him that I as, in fact, 23, and showed him my ID, but he replied that it was impossible because my hands were x'ed up as though to indicate my underage status. After a frustrating conversation I was given an wristband and told that if I wanted to re-enter I had to wash the x's off my hands because even with a wristband they would assume that I was under 21 and now allow me back in. Sheer idiocy.

I had the good sense to buy tickets ahead of time since I knew the show would sell out and it was to be the second of two shows that THC planned to play during 2009, so I ended up having to collect wristbands and sneak in several friends just in time for THC's set. The show turned out not to be very fun, especially not Converge's set, which began with some girl (that apparently was as smart as the bouncers) standing 5 feet from the stage with a full beer right when Converge began and subsequently dumping most of it on me as soon as kids start moving around. Not wanting to start a fight while standing alone in a city where I knew no one (and not really being the fight-starting type anyway) I opted to spend the Converge's set stewing over it.

While several of my traveling companions went to the late show to see Indecision, I waited at Veggie Bite for Lee and a car full of Fist City's finest vegan straightedge kids. We drove back to the apartment from the previous night so I could grab my stuff and then to a much fancier apartment downtown in a building that was rumored to contain a pool, and in a well-lit room full of people I fell asleep within 5 minutes of arriving, wearing a had over my eyes and headphones in my ears.

The next morning I woke up on the early side and Josh No Job (AKA Josh Hate Edge AKA that kid that I got in a fight with (for at least half of Richmond's non-straightedge population)) and I took the L (is it L for "loop" or El for "elevated line? I'll just stick to L) to the end of the line where we met up with an assortment of anarchists and walked to the graveyard in which Emma Goldman is buried. I had my picture taken in front of her grave, but it either hasn't been uploaded or I haven't been tagged because I still haven't seen it. After the graveyard we headed for The Metro.

Summer 2009 chapter 1: Brooklyn to Chicago

2009-05-08T14:40:00.004-04:00

We woke up early Thursday morning for french toast before leaving for Chicago, despite the fact that two nights before I got back to Brooklyn at 5am and only slept for a few hours and the previous night I was up late watching Buffy with Melanie, but it was worth it because Janne made the most incredible home-made vegan french toast I've ever had. At least, at first we thought it was worth it, until it turned out that meeting us at noon meant meeting us at 3:30 (of course it was no fault of Mike's that he was so late, but sitting around all afternoon made us all a little antsy). Because most of my belongings, including my computer, were already packed away in anticipation of Adam subletting my room for the summer, we all sat cross-legged around my room listening to records; all anxiousness aside it was a lovely afternoon.

The first stop was the Vegan Treats bakery in Bethlehem, PA, where I once again did not have the willpower to resist Danielle's excellent food presentation. I don't have much of a sweet tooth and most of the things she makes are on the rich side for me (the goal is Vegan desserts that taste as good as or better than non-vegan ones, and in the pursuit of that goal I don't think she holds out on the white sugar and Earth Balance), but every time I see the elegantly prepared mini-cakes and brownies I break down and buy at least one thing.

The next several hours of driving were uneventful - I tried to nap while listening to relaxing music on my supposedly sound-cancelling headphones but minivans are not as comfortable for sleeping as tour vans and I was distracted by the European style dance party infiltrating my attempt at solitude. Around 3am, not feeling particularly well-rested, I gave up on sleeping and took over at the wheel since Mike and Josh were both getting too tired. I drank about 3/4ths of a Big Blue - a midwestern soda that tastes like cotton candy flavored bubble gum and contains about as much caffeine as coke or mountain dew - and set the cruise control at about 9 mph over the speed limit, a speed that I have been told in the past by cops is safe to drive without getting pulled over. Not so in Indiana. Around 5am I saw a cop car pull off the median going my direction after I passed. I slowed to just under the speed limit and got over to the right, but to no avail. After checking my license and registration and failing to notice Mike hiding under a blanket on the floor (there were 8 of us in a 7-seater) he returned to my window, perhaps dissatisfied with my clean driving record, asked me to step out of the car, and told me that he smelled marijuana. I tried to suppress my laughter because stone-faced as he was I knew he was bluffing, and explained politely that there was no marijuana in the car. He insisted that I had better give it up because he was going to find it anyway and I'd be in way less trouble if I cooperated, I asked him if he was familiar with the concept of straightedge, and the blank look on his face told me that no, he wasn't, so I sighed and held my arms out to be patted down.

Two more cars pulled up and helped search everyone for knives, guns, illicit substances or any excuse to arrest the city slickers that dared to drive through their quiet Indiana town, population: 1000. By some miracle the found nothing on our persons and pig #1 proceeded to search the rental car, hand in latex glove, with admirable determination. His bluff would not be called by a bunch of punk kids, god damn it! The 8 of us, under dressed for the late-night cold and groggy from road trip napping, waited on the side of I-80 while I chatted with pigs #2 and #3. I've always prided myself in my ability talk with adults, and after a while we were all chuckling and conversing about punk music, tattoos (pig #3 had one or two and was frustrated that the local police department didn't allow any below short-sleeved shirt length), and my bike trip through Indiana the summer prior. At one point #2 quietly asked #3 if he smelled anything, which he didn't, and several times throughout the 20-minute ordeal they looked over at #1 and rolled their eyes.

Finding nothing, pig #1 wrote me a warning for speeding and Adrian and I busted Chain of Strength, Go It Alone, Carry On, In My Eyes, Count Me Out, Strife, and other such straighedge and youth crew jams (beginning, of course, with True Til Death) for the next several hours.

We rolled into Chicago at 8am, EST, now locally 7am, and shuffled into a large, fancy, and mostly empty apartment in what used to be the newspaper building. Being the only one still hopped up on caffeine, I offered to return the rental, and no one complained. I dropped it off a few miles away, and having worn my running shoes and mesh shorts, I ran 3 1/2 miles back the apartment, did some push-ups and sit-ups, showered, and finally went to sleep around what felt like 10am, only to be woken up less than 3 hours later for the Chicago May Day parade, vegan sandwiches at the Chicago Diner, and eventually, the Hope Conspiracy Burning Fight pre-show.

It's fucking cold in Florida

2009-02-06T00:56:00.002-05:00

In the past I've had no trouble finding time to hang out with a computer on tour, but so far I've had scarcely a minute to spend internetting - hence the lack of blog updates. Sadly, I don't have a ton of time right now either. I'm in Orlando, a city I normally associate with warmth, sun, sunglasses, flip flops, and hardcore kids that wear Nikes. Unfortunately it is below freezing right now, my sunglasses and flip flops are pouting in my backpack, and the show that happened tonight was with a small handful of lame crust punks that were extremely reluctant to donate any money to the touring bands. We were doing really well in the beginning of tour (financially), but we've been losing money in the last 3 or 4 days. And on top of lame, poorly promoted shows, someone stole a bag containing over a thousand dollars worth of cables and pedals from us outside of a show in Hickory, NC. Unfortunately for that person we will be driving through the same area on the way back up north, and if we are able to identify the culprit he or she will most likely be severely beaten. Other than nearing the brink of financial ruin (and let's face it, I'm never THAT far off), tour has been awesome. Swallowed Up is awesome, our road crew (now also known by the name of our gang, Ruff Elementz) is awesome, and not having to go to work is really awesome. I still spend a reasonable amount of time stressing out about the amount of money I owe to Visa compared to the amount of money I can potentially make in the next 6 months without getting a regular job (which, since I have so far struck out in several attempts to identify irregular sources of income, is approximately none), but it's hard to be actively stressed about anything when one spends the bulk of one's day in a van full of one's friends, reading, listening to music, napping, and congratulating each other on how cool, handsome, and straightedge they are. Some highlights so far include the second show in Haverhill, MA, where I ran into some old scene-acquaintances; New Brunswick, where kids were fun, got way into Swallowed Up, and hung out at the merch table talking about how much they liked our zine distro and hand-assembled records; Richmond where the show sucked but Lee's roommate Paul baked us bread; Asheville where we hung out with ian; Savannah where we skated a backyard skate park, and Waldo, FL where we slept at Fiz' farm last night. Hopefully I will be inspired to write about tour so far in more depth at some point in the near future, but I have a lousy record with promising more detailed entries, so I'll keep ya'lls expectations low this time around.

Yay! Tour!

2009-01-21T22:59:00.004-05:00

I'm leaving for tour in two days. Fucking finally. Being on tour is always way better than not being on tour. I've missed waking up with no obligations, I've missed long half-asleep van rides, I've missed late-night silliness while cooped up with close friends, and I've really missed the south. Shorts and flip-flops here I come. You can check out my tour schedule on the website of the band I'm going on tour with, Swallowed Up.

When I get back from tour I will be unemployed. I saved up enough money to pay rent and minimum credit card payments until April, so I can coast for a while, but with several thousand in credit card debt looming over me I will need to get a job not too long after returning. I'm awaiting a response from Golden Voice, a concert promoter to whom I gave a resume, and from a college acquaintance that has some experience in the merchant marine world. If neither of those leads works out, I'll probably get all spiffed up and go door to door in SoHo looking for retail work in a low-foot traffic clothing store, relying on the appeal of young, hip, tattooed boys to the older gay customer base of stores like John Varvatos. And if that doesn't work out... I'll probably go back to couriering. But I'm seriously so sick of it, I hope something else does. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know. I need a job with minimal commitment and flexible hours because tour, traveling, spontaneous weeks off etc. are very important to me. Ideally I'd like to work somewhere that pays enough in a short amount of time that I can afford to work for a very intense month or two and then take off for several more months - the Ordinary Seaman gig is a perfect example. If you or anyone you know has ever worked on a ship, get at me.

Unrelatedly, I'm also looking for music recommendations. I've been getting into a lot of new punk/hardcore stuff lately but I've had a hard time finding out about new bands on the low-key side of things. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Appleseed Cast, Maritime, Pygmy Lush (Mount Hope), One AM Radio, Bon Iver, and, as always, shoegaze, and I'm looking for more stuff like that. Suggestions?

Resizing

2009-01-05T13:38:00.002-05:00

My dearest Welch explained to me in nearly incomprehensible tech-ese how to fix my image cropping problem, and gist of it is as I feared: either resize the photos or learn to program CSS. But I'm more of an outside of the box thinker, plus I'm lazy, so instead I'm going to leave them alone and suggest that if you want to see the photo full-size you can right-click it and click "view image" or your browser's equivalent. You can see everything you need to see in most of them anyway (bad composition notwithstanding), so the only ones worth viewing directly are the one of me moshing and the one of Chris cowering. Resizing them probably wouldn't be worth it anyway, since one of the drawbacks of fisheye photography is that everything looks smaller.

And while I'm writing, perhaps an update of the extended-break saga: my boss called today to tell me not to come in to work on Tuesday - which would have been my first full day since December 19th - because they over-scheduled, so it looks like I have until Wednesday to perfect the art of doing absolutely nothing worthwhile. Today is shaping up to be a productive day of not being productive, as I have already completed my entire to-do list as of 1:30pm. Unfortunately I will have to leave the house today for a tattoo appointment at 6. I will post pictures of my new blasphemous Buffy tattoo once I get home.

Boxing

2009-01-05T01:34:00.003-05:00

EDIT: all of my pictures are getting cut off a few inches from the right. If someone can explain to me how I can avoid this problem, I will mail him/her/hir a signed print of any one of the recently-posted photos. Leave a comment or email me at jackhsamuel - at - gmail - dot - com.

I worked a half day on NYE-eve and have not been back since, so this past week has turned out to be an extended Christmas break. Never fear, I've managed to stay busy with such activities as watching 9+ hours of Buffy and Angel in one day, sitting in my room alone and reading Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar while a hardcore show happened in my living room (I made an appearance for Surroundings' set and was rewarded with a Hatebreed cover to which I moshed like it was 2002), having a contest to see how many Cheerios Chris could stack on my face (he won), bashing holes in the wall with David's old golf clubs (and subsequently knocking the head's off against the second-floor supports, leaving us with formidable weapons in case of disrespectful show-goers/asshole 4th floor neighbors/cops, which we have so far only used to throw at Chris and Matt's wall in an attempt to play oversized darts), and mosh-boxing our houseguest/temporary roommate Kyle Bryant. The idea for mosh-boxing came to me in a flash of brilliance when Ben put No Warning on the stereo in preparation for the Weezy vs. Chris bantam-weight title match and everyone started dancing around the recently-cleared out living room. The basic idea is this: box while moshing. It turns out that mosh-boxing is far more tiring than moshing or boxing alone, and despite riding my bike 50+ miles a day for a living I am apparently way out of shape. Nonetheless, after taking a few taps to the jaw in the first several minutes, I managed to land a left cross that changed the tone of the fight in my favor and ultimately won. Pictured below: the devastating and fight-ending left jab a split second before reddening Kyle's nose, me moshing while Kyle (off-camera) recovers from an earlier and slightly less devastating right jab, Kyle moshing in a seemingly-celebratory fashion while I square up, and Chris looking terrified by Weezy (their fight was a draw because Chris accidentally nailed Weezy in his little man parts several times in a row). There are several equally good pictures that don't make Chris look like a coward, as well as a few of Kyle not about to get punched (to be fair, despite ultimately winning, I far from dominated the entire fight), and a couple good ones of Benny - the referee - moshing in between fights, possibly while listening to the bad Death Threat, but Chris didn't email them to me. Perhaps I'll make an additional post once I have them. You will notice Benny in the background of the third picture moshing the shit out of our wall (yes, he is wearing bib-shorts underneath camo shorts).

Sweatpants

2009-01-05T01:14:00.003-05:00

This year I've made several resolutions. Mostly the usual types of things: learn to stop stating my opinion as fact, start doing BJJ again, write music, read The Brothers Karamozov (this will be the second consecutive year I've made this particular resolution, but I feel good about it this time). However, in addition to resolutions, I've also made a New Year's bet with my good friend and new roommate, Chris Garnett of Swallowed Up fame. As of midnight on January 1st, we are both wearing sweatpants every day. Exemptions are allowed for work or extenuating circumstances that involve externally imposed dress codes (going to the ballet, being the best man at a wedding, etc.) but otherwise, only sweatpants, underwear, and PJs allowed. The idea came from a conversation concerning the inability to look cool while wearing sweatpants, and we decided that it would be a fun excersize to pit our stubbornness against our shallowness. The loser of the bet can chose one of the following punishments: getting a sweatpants-related tattoo from the winner or playing off-key Nirvana covers with a ukelele in the Union Square subway station for an hour. Though it started as a competition, it quickly became more of a supportive partnership in which we encourage each other to stay strong and not give in to our superficial tendencies to care whether or not we look like complete schlubs.

At midnight everyone else at the Stronghold's pizza party was on the roof watching out for fireworks (which I'm told never materialized), so Chris and I were forced to shoot our ceremonial donning of the sweatpants using the self-timer on his camera. Continuing to work under the theory that fisheyes make everything look more exciting, we used the fisheye lens that Chris Riot (not to be confused with Chris Fuck Yeah AKA Chris Garnett, Chris from the Bone Yard who now lives in 210 and whose last name I don't know, or Chris French from the Stronghold AKA 206) taught us how to attach to the camera. Below are the last photo taken of me looking good for a while, and a photo of my caterpillar-like transformation. If you want to see the whole series of me undressing, they are on my myspace.

Life is more dramatic with a fisheye

2008-12-29T18:19:00.004-05:00

Having a job is such a bummer. I can't even enjoy my days off because I spend all afternoon thinking about how much I don't want to go to work tomorrow and I get nothing done. Whilst procrastinating on the couch this afternoon I commented to Chris that one of the drawbacks to getting tattooed frequently is that pictures become out of date very quickly. He offered to take some faux-candid shots of me lounging on the couch, accidentally displaying my recently completed sleeve from its most attractive angle, with his new fisheye lens that he got for Christmas. Unfortunately he couldn't figure out how to affix it to his camera, so instead we spent the next half hour following each other around the house, holding the lens up to one eye and keeping the other closed, because everything looks cooler and more exciting with a fisheye. The highlights included Lucy (the dog, not the sister) scaring the shit out of me when she jumped up at me, Chris' muscles (and presumably mine as well) looking great while he hit the punching bag, almost falling through the gap in our second floor, and running into assorted tables, chairs, and people. Sadly, once I returned to normal vision I was reminded that I've accomplished almost nothing today, that I have to go to work tomorrow, and that my life is actually not very interesting, plus the edges of my vision were kind of blurry.

On-The-Job Celebrity Sightings and The Future of My Acting Career

2008-12-17T09:47:00.003-05:00

Before I get started, I have an announcement regarding my building:

A unit opened up in my building down the hall and the landlord offered us a chance to fill it with friends before they take it to a broker, so for everyone who has asked me if we have space, this is the time to move in! The total will probably be around $2400 and I don't know how many rooms are built into it right now but it's about he same size as mine and we have 10 people living in our place very comfortably. Let me know if you are interested.

Ok. Yesterday morning I finished typing, threw on pants - and then gore-tex socks, rain pants, gloves, my ear-warmers, and gloves, because it was cold and raining/snowing all day - and headed into the city. It was a pretty busy day and I pulled in about $150 between 10 and 6:25, when I was almost late to my last acting class. Yes, that's right, I took an acting class. After I booked a commercial at an open call a couple of years ago I went out on a handful of auditions and got one callback but no jobs, so I asked the agent that was freelancing me for suggestions and he told me about this class, and, given that if the class got me one day-long job it would pay for itself, I figured why not. Last night was the last class, so they had two agents from top agencies come in and watch us get interviewed and read copy; I think I did pretty well and one of them seemed at least marginally interested in me. I have no expectations, so if something happens, great, if not, whatever.

But back to my work day. We have this client, Scott Cooke, and I have no idea what they actually do. I know it is something involved in entertainment, because we often take out mailings to various media outlets, but we also sometimes do seemingly random jobs like, for example, the day before thanksgiving when I picked up two pies from a bakery, wrapped them in wrapping paper Scott provided, affixed a gift note to Katie Holmes from her manager (John something) and delivered them to the theater where Katie is doing a show. Unfortunately I only got as far as the stage door security guard. So why was Scott Cooke hand-writing a note on behalf of Katie Holmes' manager? Are they personal friends? Or was it business? The plot thickens! Yesterday I picked up a garmet bag from Scott Cooke and delivered it to Emmy Rossum, Golden-Globe nominated actress, and, more importantly to me, co-star (with Jake Gyllenhaal) of The Day After Tomorrow - my favorite natural disaster movie. She lives in a smallish building in UES with no doorman, so she buzzed me in and signed for it herself. As I handed her the cold garment bag, she smiled and made some comment about how it was cold outside. I said something to the effect of, "summer yesterday, winter today, it's crazy out there," thanked her, slid the slip into my clipboard, and headed back to the elevator. I don't really get starstruck, so I wasn't nervous or excited or anything, it was just kind of neat. I only wish I was more clever on the spot, because I would like to have stories not just about delivering things to celebrites, saying thanks, and walking away, but about chatting them up, if for no other reason than to prove how cool I am. And the real bastard of it is that I thought of a great response as soon as I got outside. See, when I mentioned the bizarre weather, I should have followed it up with, "let's hope tomorrow New York doesn't flood and freeze over," and maybe even run with it and say, "because my dad isn't an arctic researcher and climatologist plus I'm not as good-looking as Jake Gyllenhaal." Ok, maybe it would have been better to leave the last part out. Here's to fucking staircase wit.

I haven't been writing because I don't have much to say, but then again, has that ever stopped me before?

2008-12-16T08:41:00.002-05:00

I would like to say that the computer fast was so effective at breaking my bad habits that I have spent the last two months reading literary classics and philosophy papers, writing papers, composing all of the music for the first 7" of my new hardcore band, and making Galcéau stock skyrocket. The reality, however, is that I haven't been too busy being productive to write in this thing but that I just haven't felt like it. The computer fast (which ended over a month and a half ago) wasn't a total loss; I figured out some interesting things about my work study habits and broke my addiction to Gilmore Girls. But the Searle paper is still not written (in fact, I kind of stalled on it when some complications arose in my argument), I still take forever to finish books because I read them a couple of pages at a time, and my imaginary new band hasn't yet gotten off the ground. My life is so hard, you have no idea.

Speaking of bands though, I do have some good news: I'm in one again! It's not the hardcore band I've been conceptually working on for a while, it's the indie-ish post-hardcore post-attrition band with Welch, Mikey, and Benny. This past weekend most of my close friends in DC visited so that Breathe In Breathe Out could prepare for our imminent reunion show and the new band (recently named Remainder) could prepare to be awesome. We were successful on both counts. I'm really excited about how Remainder is coming together, and I'm looking forward to our first show - the ever-controversial Positive Youth Fest V (we are listed as Breathless because that was the tentative working title at the time we submitted our demo). We've tried describing our sound using sub-genre names and band comparissons (Unwound, Stop It!!!, Cursive...) but I'm finding that the only thing that really gets the point across is the following: the dudes from Attrition playing music that doesn't involve [much] screaming. We do not have a myspace or anything recorded so you'll just have to take our word for it that we are awesome and come see us at PYF.

So finally, after a two-month hiatus during which I received a surprising amount of criticism for not updating my blog (and a ton of hits from dissappointed readers of I Could Die Tomorrow hoping for music reviews and download links but finding instead ramblings about my boring personal life), I feel inspired to write again, and about five minutes into this entry I got a call from work telling me that they need me in early. See, I've been working Tuesdays ever since I mentioned in the last entry that Brad asked me to, and I hate it. I'd gotten so used to three-day weeks that four days became too much to handle. I don't have enough time to get stuff done, and, more importantly, I don't like spending that much time riding around the city. A partial solution I came up with last week was to come in late - around 10:30 - Tuesdays and Wednesdays, since there are now three people per day and I was less needed. However, Willis, my accident-prone co-worker, crashed his bike again last night and Patty told me that she needs me to pick up cupcakes from LES and get them to 622 3rd ave by 10, so I guess I need to put on some pants. Maybe I'll still feel like writing when I get home...

The Rest of Week One and Week Two, or, Yes, Apparently He Is

2008-10-06T11:35:00.000-04:00

After a nearly perfect Day one, the rest of the week was too busy to be a useful test of the effectiveness of my computer fast.

Though Tuesday is normally the last day of my four-day weekend, I agreed to work for Brad in the morning, and because I had scheduled a meeting for later that afternoon I stayed in the city in between. After work I sat and ate a lunch from Whole Foods salad bar while sitting on a ledge on the 200-block of W 27th, which is the de facto campus of Fasion Institute of Technology. I often eat there because it contains guaranteed ledge seating two blocks from Whole Foods and the people watching is excellent. Crihs joined me for a bit and we talked about, surprise surprise, bikes.

At 5pm I met with Matt Evans - my former professor - and discussed my potential future as a philosophy graduate student. I won't bore you with the details (because obviously avoiding boring details has been a high priority thus far), but I received some encouraging and some discouraging feedback, leaving me still in the position of not being sure what to do. I do know, however, that the next step is to read more Donald Davidson and Jaegwon Kim and to write the paper I've begun to mentally outline based on Searle's idea of biological naturalism as a means to collapse the intuitively dualist framework with which most people look at the mind.

Later that night I saw My Bloody Valentine with Adam, who managed to find tickets on the internet the day before the show after his dad lost the ones he bought months ago. It was very disappointing in a way that I probably should have expected: I couldn't see anything, they sounded just like the record only louder (and with the irritating addition of a high-in-the-mix kick drum that ruined the shoegaze vibe), they didn't move around at all (hence the name "shoegaze"), and I paid $65 for 50 minutes of music and 20 minutes of feedback. I do not, however, regret going, because they have been one of my favorite bands since high school and at least now I can say that I saw them.

The next night I went straight from work to a date, and since I'm not in the habit of writing about my personal life in this, it will suffice to say that it was really good.

Thursday, Sean and I saw Built To Spill play Perfect From Now On at Terminal 5, after riding a car service to Queens and back for a very expensive delivery, and it was way better than MBV. I could see them, they put on a very entertaining show, and they sounded amazing.

On Friday I took a Metro North train to Bronxville, home of Sarah Lawrence College, and spent the night, returning the next morning just in time to wait through several bands and then to finally see Write Back Soon - a band consisting of several old friends who, perhaps due to their anti-civilization political stance, do not have a myspace - and Swallowed Up - my roommates' new band who, despite a slightly more vague but still distinctly anti-civilization sentiment (if not actual stance), have a myspace. It was a good show. Look out for Swallowed Up playing with End of a Year and Defeater at my house, self-releasing an overly artisticly packaged 10" in the next few months, and going on tour in late January with me as band manager, merch manager, band financial adviser, and life coach. My duties will thankfully not include paying for stuff, booking the tour, or carrying anything heavy.

I spent the rest of the weekend with my roommates and the nameless person from my date on Wednesday and didn't have a large enough chunk of free time to explore the efficacy of entertainment-asceticism again until Monday afternoon. And that's when things took a bit of a downturn.

In high school, I rarely read the assigned material and copied homework, did a rushed job on it in the last moments before class started (often during prior classes in between naps) or simply didn't bother to do it. I put more effort into learning how to avoid doing work than it sometimes might have taken to just do it, and I became an effective efficiency expert. These habits continued and even worsened (or improved, depending on how much you value efficiency) in college. However, had I not figured out a way to be so high-functioning in high school, I think, looking back, that I would have been diagnosed with ADD. Not that I put a whole lot of stock in such diagnosis; who hasn't been so described? We grew up around computers and video games and internet shopping and if I waste another sentence ranting about what technology has done to the attention spans of our generation (or, for that matter, our sense of community and connectedness), it will be at the risk of banality, so I'll allow what I've said thus far to suffice in introducing my recent self-discovery: I have no ability to focus whatsoever. If I'm engrossed in a book or am in an unusually clear-minded state of concentration (as I was last Monday when I developed the foolish belief that just by promising myself not to watch TV anymore I would revert back to my pre-high school interest in reading as a necessary and sufficient pastime), I have no problem sitting and reading for hours on end. However, if the reading material requires even the slightest amount of discipline to stay focused and I have anything else on my mind (which I nearly always do), I can't read for more than 2 minutes without my mind wandering in a million directions and before I realize that I've stopped paying attention to the book I find myself staring at the ceiling pondering the meaning of life, my financial situation, a city that I'd like to visit or revisit, and what I'm going to eat for my next meal. It never occurred to me in the past that my lack of focus was a problem because as soon as my attention drifted away from reading I would start watching TV instead, but on Monday and Tuesday of last week I was stressed out be the results of recalculating my budget and a whole host of introspective issues raised by being recently involved with someone new and I got almost no reading done. Black market Ritalin is too expensive and I don't have health care, but taking up meditation and yoga to improve focus and clear-mindedness seems like too much work, so my plan is to start drinking more Focus flavored Vitamin Water.

The rest of the week was the usual work, come home, try to read, hang out with roommates, go to bed routine (with a couple more visits from a certain Sarah Lawrence student), and the weekend was similarly unproductive. Last night, however, I decided to do something radical and leave the house. I took the subway to Bedford and met Andy at Blackbird for tea. The interior of Blackbird is nice but contrived and the tea is $3.50 for a small pot that contains about two small cups' worth, but it's as good a place as any to read, write, think, and discuss. We mostly talked about his thesis, including some discussion of what role political/social/existential philosophy might have in it, which lead us in a very interesting discussion concerning the synthesis of our respective disciplines. After an hour or so there we set out to find a coffee shop to which I'd delivered Vegan Treats in the past which turned out, after a several-mile-long walk up into Greenpoint, to either not really exist or to be somewhere else entirely. The evening ended up being intellectual stimulating nonetheless and left me feeling inspired to get back to work on my various academic projects.

If you haven't heard the new Slipknot record, get it. In the meantime, listen to the second track, Gematria, on imeem or whatever because it is way good and the lyrics are totally righteous. Some examples:

What if God doesn't care?

America is a killing name
it doesn't feel or discriminate
life is just a killing field
it's all that's left - nothing's real
throw away your disposable past
and fall apart like cigarette ash
we are the fatal and vital ones of the world
and we will burn your cities down

Feed the Hungry - Feed them shit
Feed them BONES and POLITICS

etc.

Week One, or, Is Jack Really Going To Write In Excruciating Detail About His Mundane Daily Activities From Now On?

2008-09-28T21:57:00.003-04:00

Monday was exactly the kind of day I was hoping to have when I decided to quit watching TV and movies. I woke up around 9:30 and picked up the book that was sitting next to my bed - Everything Is Illuminated. I bought it at Powell's last winter because they had a copy for $5 and I had heard good things, but I hadn't picked it up until recently. As of Monday morning I had read about 50 pages and not been particularly impressed, but I promised myself I'd read at least a third before I gave up. I read about ten pages and started to feel a little bit more involved in the plot, but took a break that turned into a nap. I woke up again at 10:30, and, angry with myself for having slept so late (for no good reason), quickly got out of bed and got dressed to go jogging.

A few weeks ago I had a fitness-related freak-out and decided to start jogging again when I was at home staying with my parents. I drove to Blair (my high school) and ran two miles around the track. It took me longer than it should have and I felt wrecked afterward, so I resolved to get back in the habit that I had discarded years ago when I started riding my bike. My route in New York takes me through industrial Bushwick, across Flushing into residential/commercial Bushwick, up to Cypress, which is the border between Brooklyn and Queens, and back home through Ridgewood. The first time I ran along that route I was shocked at how suburban - and, most conspicuously, how green - Ridgewood Queens is. There are trees along the street and yards in front of the old brick row houses.

On this particular morning, the run took a little over 20 minutes and I felt pretty good afterward; it's encouraging how easy it is to get back in shape when you have been in the past. When I got home I did the rest of my workout, which lately consists of three sets each of push-ups, verticle push-ups, and chin-ups, as well as a single set each of three different types of ab workouts. It took longer than it should have but less time than it often does. My goal is to reach the point of being able to do a certain amount of each exercise and then to stop increasing the number of reps and get really good at doing that amount quickly, efficiently, and with good form. Ultimately, I'd like to end up one of those crazy old dudes who is in too-good shape for his age because he has had simple but consistent fitness habits throughout the last three decades of his life, so I'm shooting for a two-mile run, one hundred reps per set of push-ups, twenty five for chin-ups, twenty for verticle push-ups, and an as yet undecided number for various ab workouts, and to be able to do the whole thing in less than 45 minutes without exerting myself so that it will become feasible to do it first thing in the morning every morning.

In between my first and second sets, I went out to breakfast with Tamara. We rode to Bogart street looking for a vegan cafe that I found on the internet, but which turns out to no longer exist. We opted for Life Cafe as a backup plan, and I had a decent tofu scramble over a bagel for $6, which is more than reasonable. We had a very nice conversation about, among other things, print-making. I really enjoy her company and I'm always very glad for the occasions when we talk one-on-one because I've always felt that we have certain perspectives in common that come out only when no one else is around.

I returned home, finished workout out, spent 20 minutes on my knees in the shower scrubbing the mildew, and then washed myself. And here is where it gets really good. I spent almost the entire rest of the day on the couch reading. Page 70 is about where Everything Is Illuminated starts to get good, so as soon as I sat down to continue reading I was hooked. I read the remaining 200 pages in practically one sitting, finishing just in time for Julia's birthday dinner down the hall in apartment 201.

What a fucking perfect day. To recap: running, working out, breakfast with good company, house cleaning, and reading a book nearly cover to cover in one long sitting. If I could spend every day of my life that way I probably would. I am actually that boring. Unfortunately, I agreed to work for Brad the next morning instead of enjoying my usual second day off of the normal work week, and the rest of the week was much busier.

Computer fast

2008-09-22T00:42:00.004-04:00

While sitting on the toilet I came up with a great plan. I was going to sell my computer and use the money to buy a record player, a bunch of my favorite records (which until this point I'd only had in digital format), and a typewriter. I'd become too addicted to serial dramas and lowbrow flicks. Every time I sat down to read a book if I didn't find myself enthralled within minutes my mind would start to wander, resting, eventually, on the enticing path of least resistance: the episodes of Gilmore Girls I'd downloaded. I have perhaps the typical attention span of my generation. I lack intrinsic motivation and discipline. And I was sick of being unproductive.

Realistically, however, I needed to consider the practical pros of the computer. I'm in the middle of booking several shows, and myspace is the de facto medium of communication for all parties involved. I also couldn't possibly afford to buy all of my favorite records, even if I sell my laptop, and iTunes is damn convinient. And I don't want to never be able to watch movies - sometimes it can be a fun thing to do with company.

So here's the new plan: one whole month without using my computer for entertainment purposes. A detox. No TV, no Movies (unless I have company), no "surfing" the "internet", and no gchat. I will come home, respond to my email, choose a record or two, and close the lid. Maybe I'll read, maybe I'll write, maybe I'll write music or lyrics, maybe I'll go jogging or do some push-ups. Another approved use of the computer is writing in this blog. I need the mental exercise, I need an outlet, and I need the practice. I've been intended forever to start writing regularly - and not just when I'm traveling. My life has it's interesting moments, and it's bound to be more intellectually productive to document them than to mediate on them while eating Tings and watching Firefly.

I bought a record player anyway. It was only $30 on eBay, and it's something I've been meaning to do for a while. I'll spare you the spiel on why I used to hate record collecting and why I've started to see the merit in, if not collecting records per se, owning them. It's not a very interesting argument.

Tonight I watched Wonder Boys, partially because I was bored, partially for inspiration, and partially for one last hurrah with my old pal Windows Media Player. The book was better. So, here it goes.

Home (for real this time?)

2008-08-10T22:40:00.002-04:00

By the time I realized there was no 2:00 Chinatown bus it was too late to make the 1:00. I had intended to be back in New York early enough to get settled in before the show, but because I had to take a 3:00 bus, and because it was the one that went through Philly, when I turned the corner into the second floor hallway of my building for the first time in 2 months and 3 days, I was greeted by a mob of people standing outside of my door. I made my way through the hey-how-are-you's, into my loft, and up the stairs. I had to lift my bike over the heads of 2 girls, one of which turned out to be a friend from Amsterdam, in order to stash it by the new A/C in the back. Within an hour of getting off the bus in New York I was watching Tides play to a living room full of my friends - and a handful of strangers. It was a bit overwhelming.

So now, 5 days and 3 shows later, I'm back in my own bed, listening to music through my own speakers, writing this by the light of my very own bedside lamp, and attempting to steel myself to my first day back at work. I don't remember feeling this defeated in a long time. I've gotten so used to not working that I've forgotten how much I hate knowing that I'm at the mercy of someone else's schedule. I can't stomach the idea of waking up at 7:30 tomorrow morning and spending the better part of a day doing the same thing over and over, punctuated, if I'm lucky, by almost getting killed, which is the only exciting thing that ever happens at work. And the best part? Business has slowed in my absence and they can no longer afford to pay me a guarantee. Being back on commission means fighting for jobs and still ending up with a little over half as much money at the end of the day. I've spent most of today trying to think of a way out of this. Ben gave me a well-meaning philosophical diatribe about doing what you need to do in order to facilitate being able to do what you want (which was largely invalidated by his admission that he really likes work), Sean tried to convince me that I should just learn to live with less money (which, given how much less I'll be making now that I'm off the guarantee, I'll be doing anyway, but I'll still have to work full-time). If I continue in this direction, this post will devolve into a whiny appeal to the universe to just give me a break from the slow death of privileged, middle-class expectations (if it hasn't already), so I'll leave cut it short here.

Home (sort of)

2008-08-04T01:19:00.002-04:00

At about 7:30 on Tuesday evening (eastern standard time), my plane touched down at Reagan National Airport in VA. I turned my cell phone back on, texted my dad to let him know I had arrived (he was, naturally, stuck in traffic and not quite there yet), and bid farewell to my new friend, an electrical engineer from Phoenix with 3 kids (one about my age from a previous marriage and two youngsters), whose name I forgot as soon as I stepped off the plane. I've never traveled first class before, and for those readers that have not either, let me tell you, it's not really that different. But the seats are comfy. I spent most of the flight watching Definitely, Maybe, starring, among others, Ryan Reynolds (in his first serious role of which I'm aware) and Rachel Weisz. It was surprisingly good, and not just in the sense that makes movies appeal to me (ie. cheap laughs, sappy romance, and nothing too heavy). As my iPod is now in the hands of either a teenaged mugger from Oakland or a lucky ebayer, when my neighbor initiated conversation I was glad for the distraction from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and the limited selection of music played through airplane armrests. It's always strange to hear yourself describe your own life to a polite, interested, clueless stranger. If you've ever tried to explain why you get tattoos to someone who has none and isn't into punk rock, you know what I'm talking about. It's hard not to sound kind of foolish, to be honest.

So I've been home for almost a week now, and I have a handful of thoughts. Firstly, as much as I enjoy west coast weather, it's too perfect, and I didn't even realize it until I was back on the east coast. 80 degrees, sunny, dry, bug-free... BORING! Hanging out outside on the east coast is an activity in and of itself; it has CHARACTER for shit's sake. I hate mosquitoes as much as the next guy - probably even more so, as they seem to have a particular affinity for my blood - but just sitting on the back porch, sweating, listening to the cicadas... that's real hanging out.

Actually, that's really my only observation. I've been hanging out with old friends, staying up late talking about girls with my mom, and cuddling with Scout, my baby girl (see this post about Attrition's tour dog, now renamed after the protagonist of one of my favorite novels because it takes place in the very same state in which she was discovered). I've been having band practice with Welch and Mikey for our new indie band, which is coming along nicely despite having a part or two which sound a little more like mid-era Hopesfall than we were shooting for (as much as I've always liked No Wings to Speak of and The Satellite Years). And I've watched a lot of movies. I mean a lot. Why as I write this, I'm in fact watching the second one of the day. The first was a delightful Zach Braff movie co-staring Amanda Peet as his not-so-believable wife and Jason Bateman as his fake-cripple arch-nemesis. Whatever, I can feel your judging stars from here; I thought it was fucking funny, OK?

So that's DC so far. Actually, I may have skipped over some details, like the evening we spent eating at Sticky Fingers, driving around looking for an out-door movie screening on Georgia Ave put on by the SDS (which turned out to be canceled), and visiting a birthday party DJed by a meticulously assembled playlist of songs containing the word "boom" (over 50% of which, apparently, contain it in the chorus) which hadn't really gotten underway until at least an hour after we arrived. It sounds like more fun that it was, but a fun evening of mediocre activities improved solely by the quality of the company sounds like more fun if you summarize it briefly. Anyway, I head back to New York on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on Adam's availability to tattoo me, and I go back to work. I ran out of money around when I worried that I might, so the last few weeks I've been traveling on credit, and it's time to start paying down the debt. I don't really know what to expect; I hear there's been a bit of drama back home. And I'm not exactly enthusiastic about going back to work. I'm not making any long-term commitments, because this trip has opened by eyes to the fact that I've been living in New York for no particular reason and I need to find a reason or get the fuck out. I'm not sure what happens next, but I'm more excited to find out than I have been in a while.

As for the last 2 weeks of my trip, the computer where I was staying in San Francisco was really slow and had a busted "v" key, and in Santa Barbara I had no internet at all. Perhaps I'll find the time to update my loyal readership once I've settled back into routine life in New York. It will probably lack some of the punch, as I will have already told many of you about in person by the time I get to writing about it, but for the sake of posterity, I hope that I manage to get it done anyway.

Last night

2008-07-21T12:21:00.003-04:00

I've been living in Bushwick for almost two years now and the first time I ended up with a knife at my ribs was in Berkeley, CA. Figures. The only time I was sort of mugged in Brooklyn it was by a hysterical middle-aged man who told me that if I didn't give him $5 for toilet paper, diapers, and milk he would stab me with a knife I doubt he really had. I offered to buy them for him on my credit card because I didn't have any cash, but my bus arrived while we were walking to the store so I apologized, handed him whatever change was in my pocket, and got on the bus.

I guess in a wealthy, progressive, mostly white college town that shares borders with a historically poor, violent ghetto it comes with the territory (not that the Oakland of 2008 quite compares with the Oakland of yesteryear). Still, I never thought I'd say I feel safer walking home from the Jefferson stop on the L, but I guess I kinda do. Walking home from the Ashby BART station I look for all the world like a rich college kid who won't put up much of a fight, and if you thought so you'd be at least a third right. Why wouldn't you hold me up for my iPod and the $25 in cash I'm carrying; my rich parents will probably feel sorry for me and buy me a new one. Unfortunately, I actually do work for a living, but it's an honest mistake.

I thought they were following me but there wasn't much I could do about it. All of a sudden there was an arm around my neck and the business end of a cheap switchblade poking me right above the kidney. He didn't look a day older than 15. Guy #2 came around in front of me and folded his arms in a poor attempt at appearing menacing. He looked a little older but no less nervous. I couldn't tell what either one said because I still had my headphones on (although I got the gist of it), so I took them off just as he told me to give him the iPod. Like I said, I'm not the type to put up much of a fight, although every time something like this happens I walk away wondering how much pain and risk my self-respect should be worth. This time, apparently, my middle-class instincts took over and I did as I was told without thinking about it first. Next he asked for my wallet. I told him he could have the whole $25 I was carrying but I didn't want to give him my ID or credit cards, since I would just be canceling them anyway. While I started pulling cards out, preparing to hand him a wallet with nothing in it but a Starbucks card with $8.67 on it, an expired rubber, and a few phone numbers, he asked what was in my bag. I told him, truthfully, that all I had was a couple of books and a half-eaten falafel sandwhich. Guy #2 opened it up as guy #1, seemingly losing his nerve, started to skip away, having forgotten about the useless wallet (he already had the cash), and then they both took off, yelling something about how I needed my books for class on Monday. I'm not sure if that was intended as sarcasm or nicety, but for some reason I felt compelled to correct them lest they go home thinking that they had judged me correctly, and with my one remaining shred of pride I yelled after them, "I'm not in school, I read those for fun!" Within moments I was running over scenarios in my head that involved fighting back, running, staring him in they eyes and telling him to fuck off, and telling him that if he was interested in continental philosophy or feminist theory he was welcome to my books but that otherwise he should forget about the bag. In retrospect, I wish he had stolen my copy of MacKinnon's Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and given it a read, since I only paid $6 for it at Myopic Books in Chicago anyway.

I could give a fuck about the iPod, and the fact that all I need to do is go on ebay, authorize the use of my credit card, and a brand new one arrives within days speaks to the complicated nature of inner-city politics and race relations. This wasn't a random act of violence, if anything it was probably (whether directly or indirectly) a response to social and institutional violence, for which I have inherited some of the responsibility.

This represents another event in a series of reminders that I am not, as my upbringing may have suggested, at the top of the food chain by virtue of intelligence and education. Despite the fact that I was mugged once when I was in high school (it's a long story, but suffice it to say that, relative to your average mugging, it wasn't particularly threatening) and that a certain amount of violent crime managed to spill over the borders that Takoma Park shares with PG county and NE DC, I feel that I was raised in the delusion state of belief that the "real" world is the world of bourgeois concerns, career goals, and enjoyable pastimes, and that the Hobbseian state of nature that exists beneath it all is a distant memory. It is a jarring experience to be confronted with the fact that all of that can be taken away, all of the Liberal Arts education, material goods, the hobbies, the emotional struggles, by someone who lives outside of that paradigm, but it is even more deeply unsettling to be reminded of the fact that most of the people on the earth live with the threat of immediate physical violence looming over their every action. But I'm not in the mood for polemics.

Other than some lingering questions about privilege and politics, the thing I've been left thinking about the most is how this sort of thing effects my sense of self-respect. The rational thing to do was certainly to hand over the money and electronics, and had I the presence of mind to carefully consider my options and do so, I probably would feel fine about it. But just like the time a schizophrenic threatened over and over to kill me - from a distance of no more than a a few inches - in retaliation for something he'd imagined that I'd done, and just like the time a truck-driver got out of his truck and grabbed me in the middle of traffic, I panicked and allowed someone to walk all over me, to own me. Maybe I could have taken them, maybe not. In this case, I'd say that the likelihood that if I managed not to get stabbed I still probably would have lost the fight and ended up losing my journal and cell phone as well as the iPod made compliance the smart move, but I didn't make it as a well-reasoned judgment, it was my gut reaction. To completely prostrate myself before anyone willing to make credible physical threats to my person. Cowardice. It's completely emasculating, and every time something like this happens my sense of self-respect dissolves. After the aforementioned incident with a trucker I was left thinking that with all those people around the worst that could have possibly happened would have been that I got hit a couple of times in the face, and I know my self-respect is worth at least that much to me. No matter how many fights I do get into or at least commit to (not that this happens all that often), or how many mirrors or windows I smash, something inside of me will always make me feel like less of a man because when push comes to shove my instinct is not to stand up for myself. How fucked up is that? I can read and debate all the feminist theory I want, but apparently I will always be controlled by the hegemonic concept of masculinity, and a part of me isn't so sure that's wrong. I believe that the state exists primarily to protect the property of the rich from the poor, and I'd be a lousy anarchist if I didn't have some faith that in a free society people would have more of an interest in helping than hurting each other, but unless you cede it to the relative monopoly of the use of force enjoyed by the police and military, self-defense is as much a natural right as anything else can be said to be (assuming that unlike me you believe in the concept of natural rights). Why shouldn't I value strength, so long as it's not at the expense of valuing compassion, why shouldn't I value the ability to assert oneself so long as it's not at the expense of considering the needs of others? I don't necesarily think that feminism asks of men (or women, or transpeople, for that matter) that we relinquish these values. Whatever, I guess I'm running out of steam.

Scared to death and scared to look
They shook...

Leaving Portland

2008-07-14T13:49:00.003-04:00

Ok, first order of business: whoever left an anonymous comment on my last entry without signing it, I don't know who you are. If you have stuff you want to talk to me about, you should let me know who you are. Or if you prefer to maintain an air of mystery, by all means change nothing.

With that out of the way...

I'm leaving Portland in less than 24-hours. Through craigslist, I found a ride with a man named Gary, who is concerned with environmental issues, has an unidentified accent that sounds sort of French and sort of Middle Eastern (not that I'm an expert my any stretch of the imagination), and told me on the phone that though he wasn't vegan he could imagine himself spiritually converting to veganism. Ooookay. Should be an interesting ride.

I've been here now for just over two weeks. In the post before my last I talked about some of the things I had done up to that point; sadly, I've done almost nothing worth mentioning since. Well, maybe it isn't all that sad, because I tend to enjoy sitting around a living room reading, watching movies, and talking with my friends. But the lull in activity has reinforced the feeling that it's about time to get moving again. Not that I'm getting sick of my very good friends here in Portland, nor of the city itself, but 2 weeks is a pretty good amount of time to spend in a city in which one has no projects, goals, jobs, or activities. I could just keep renting moves and reading books, but I can do that (and I often do) in New York, where I can also work and pay down my credit card debt rather than amassing even more whilst sitting on my ass.

But I haven't done nothing, just less than in my first week. So, here are a few things I've done in the last week:

-Played a lot more pool.

-Spent a few hours tanning with my feet in a public fountain, the likes of which I've never seen. There is a very fountain downtown with several levels and artificial waterfalls, and in which swimming is not only allowed but encouraged. The water in each area is only a couple of feet deep, so there are no lifeguards. Just a sign that advises the citizen to exercise caution. On a day as hot as that one, it is pretty crowded, but there is still plenty of space to sit in the sun with one's friends in naught but sunglasses and boxer-briefs. The real miracle is that no one has yet fallen and been seriously injured or killed. The upper-level pools are separated from the 15-foot drop to the lower ones by a ledge that stands about as high as the water level and is about half a foot wide. No railing, no pathway, nothing. Sitting on the bottom I watched 4-year-old after 4-year-old stand on a slippery ledge, back facing a potentially fatal drop, and jump into the pool. Perhaps Portlanders are more coordinated than the rest of us.

-Sitting in the cafe at Powell's, reading. Powell's, which I've probably mentioned in previous posts, is the largest used-book store I've ever seen. It occupies an entire city block and has 3 or 4 floors. I am somewhat of a bibliophile, and I could wander around the stacks all day thinking about books I'd like to have read, things I'd like to know more about, and how impressive my bookshelf could look. This time, however, after an hour or two of browsing, I made an uncharacteristically financially sound decision and decided to sit in the cafe with my friends reading the book I already owned - Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow - instead of buying several more. My reading queue is already miles long and getting longer. Some day I'll know everything.

-Wikipedia-ing rappers, housing projects, gangs, philosophers, and writers, for a total of 4 or 5 hours in 2 days. It all started with being curious as to the educational background of Lil' Wayne, but once you get started clicking links, you can go for days. Did you know that Lil' Wayne and Tupac were both drama geeks in middle school?

-Driving in Matt's car, running other peoples' errands, for 3 or 4 hours one day. I've always really enjoyed driving, and now that I do it so rarely it's even more fun.

-Celebrating my birthday. We bought Pizza dough from Hot Lips, Temptation Cheese from Food Fight, and Stewart's root beer from New Seasons. Jake made pizza sauce and Sean, drawing upon his previous experience at a pizza shop, spun the dough in the air. Justine topped everyone else by making s'mores cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. Excellent birthday.

Happy birthday to me (tomorrow)

2008-07-11T14:28:00.002-04:00

On the day I turned 22, I took the last ever final exam of my undergraduate career and said goodbye to a lot of people that I [correctly] expected never to talk to again (despite nearly universal insistence that we tooootally needed to hang out). When everyone found out that it was my birthday, they promised that we would all go to dinner or a bar or whatever to celebrate, but I knew that they would all forget because it was the last night in Madrid for most of them and they had more fun things to do. The only person that remembered was my friend Stephanie - incidentally the only person to whom I ever spoke again - and we went out for dinner, her treat. I didn't hold it against anyone; I didn't make a big deal out of my birthday and told people that they didn't need to either. I ended up being very thankful, however, that Stephanie was concerned, because it turned out to be a really nice way to spend a birthday. After we ate, we wandered around old Madrid, stopping occasionally to sit on a bench or ledge for a bit and running into odd packs of drunk NYU kids, until 7am. The next day I left for Barcelona.

This has been an interesting year. Discounting the semester I took off between Vassar and NYU (during which I claimed not to be sure whether or not I would go back to college but knew all along that I would), this year has been my first without any externally imposed structure. No more parents paying rent, no more excuses for putting off making decisions (not that that stopped me), no more health insurance, no more assigned reading or homework. In the immortal words of rock god Tom Petty: into the great wide open; a rebel without a clue. And I choked big time. As soon as I returned to the gleaming alabaster city of all gleaming alabaster cities, I plunged headfirst into what I'm starting to now realize was a serious rut.

To clarify, I did do a lot of awesome stuff this year. I built my own bedroom in a new intentional living space, got overpaid to work full-time as a courier for a company that is hemorrhaging clients like a beeper service center, got a bunch of bitchin tats, embarked on a cross-country bike/greyhound trip, made a lot of new friends and strengthened relationships with others, and, in all of the confusion, managed to misplace my v-card, shortly before what would have otherwise been yet another in a long string of depressing New Years, insofar as I tend to view most chronological milestones as opportunities to reflect on my failures (I've been accused of being a pessimist).

But this trip has helped me to realize how fully in a rut I was. I think I was dimly aware already, but a fresh perspective and a handful of reminders of things I used to care about have elucidated it further. If I had spent the last year hanging out, having fun, working, and being creatively unproductive with the intention of it merely being a break before I got started on The Next Big Thing, there would have been no problem, but I've been stalling just to stall and that has facillitated the development of my nihilism. When I'm not distracted by projects and short-term goals I spend too much time stewing about my lack of long-term goals, which inevitably leads to the conviction that such things are illogical and that meaningfulness is an illusion. I'm not saying I'm wrong about this, but I hate to have been in a position to dwell on it so much. I haven't been writing music or devoted to an active band; I haven't been pursuing my academic or even intellectual careers (other than reading a lot more fiction than I have in years); I haven't been involved in political or social activism (even using the term loosely). The only venture into which I've been putting any effort is dating, and that's gotten me just a hair beyond nowhere. I guess I lost motivation when I lost momentum. I've forgotten what it felt like to really care about accomplishing something. I've convinced myself that nothing matters to me.

Tomorrow I turn 23. Hopefully this year I can find some of that motivation again - find a reason. Wish me luck.

Portland

2008-07-08T16:48:00.003-04:00

Other than the show that Attrition played on our tour 2 years ago, I'd only visited Portland during the rainy season prior to this trip, and my opinion of the city has done a 180 in the last 9 days. In the past I've always gotten the impression that Portland is pretty dead. I've never seen a lot of people out and about, nor did I feel the kind of energy that I look for in an urban setting. Granted, New York is a pretty unreasonable standard against which to hold anywhere else except maybe Tokyo, but Boston, Philly, and DC all feel more alive than Portland in the winter. However, in the summer Portland is a totally different story. People are everywhere: walking around, shopping, looking hip, riding bikes, discussing sustainable home gardening and green capitalism, and being white. Sardonicism aside, I like the vibe, I like the vegan food, I like the people I've met, and there are a lot of attractive young people just waiting for me to move here and sit inside reading instead of being social and meeting them. I've been taking considerably less thorough notes here than I did while on the road, and I have neither the memory nor the desire to attempt a meticulous play-by-play of my time in Portland. My noteworthy activities have included the following (in no particular order):

-Seeing Ruiner at a house show. I haven't been to a house show in a long time, and despite the fact that Portland has a reputation for having a lame hardcore scene, it was actually pretty fun. It's also nice to see people you know in different contexts, because when you are out of your comfort zone people that you only sort of know become really good friends. Also we got to hear the saga of Rob Sullivan and Justice's falling out, which took at least 15 minutes but was nonetheless engaging. We were expecting a shorter answer but it turned out to be quite an interesting tale. I love Baltimore drama... at a distance.

-Seeing On, Have Heart, and Verse at Satyricon. All the bands were raving about how much better that show was than any previous Portland show, so apparently the Ruiner show was no fluke. One of the opening bands, Life and Limb, had a really great set; their local fan base was enthusiastically participatory, their singer prefaced each song with a (verbose and unfocused but well-intentioned) rant about a political subject, and, unlike many of their colleagues in the world of political hardcore, they were technically solid and played a tight set. They sounded sort of like The Suicide File + Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent-era Refused, with a new-school melodic vibe. I don't actually like The Suicide File that much, and less so bands that try to sound like them, but Life and Limb was at least good at what they did, if not exactly my bag.
On's set was overall pretty solid, and punctuated by two songs which I thought were really good and a cover that I believe was Quicksand. I hope their next record is more along the lines of the two exceptional songs. Have Heart and Verse were pretty typical, with the addition of a lot of kids spin-kicking in a fashion I haven't seen at a non-metalcore show on the East Coast since around 2004. I wish Have Heart still played songs from What Counts; I think they were at their best when they were shamelessly ripping off Chain of Strength, because, as is indicated by the name of this blog, they are easily my favorite youth crew band.
After the show I had a nice time catching up with some more tour friends and then wandered around downtown Portland with On looking for vegan food, ultimately settling for VooDoo Doughnuts.

-Seeing Wanted. It sucked.

-Playing video games at a bar called Ground Control which, for those of you who have been to Brooklyn, is what Barcade wishes it could be, and then playing more video games a different day at 5 cent arcade called The Avalon. With his ski-ball tickets Ian landed a sweet inflatable baseball bat with which he promised to hit random passers-by on our ride home. He reneged on this promise, as he did on his promise to approach a stranger walking into the video store and recite the scene from Titanic in which Leo insists, while removing his boots and jacket, that if Kate "goes in" (referring to jumping off the back of the boat), he'll have to go in after her. YOU ARE ALL TALK IAN SHIVER!

Real talk: jklolz I love u bro!

-Going to Sassy's, which is a strip club, and the first one I've ever been to. One of my friends with whom I'm staying here works there, so Ian and I went to meet her after work last Wednesday and popped in for 15 minutes before she got off; I've been back to meet her after work a couple more times since. This has sparked a series of discussions concerning the patriarchal implications of strip clubs, none of which have been particularly conclusive. As far as I understand, feminist responses to strip clubs range from vehement condemnation to enthusiastic support, and even among the feminist women whom I know personally and whose opinions I generally respect there seems to be no agreement. I tend to think that if I were to reach a conclusion it would be fairly neutral if not slightly positive, but the bottom line is that I don't feel uncomfortable being there, so though I have no intention of becoming a regular, going by myself, spending lots of money, or EVER getting lap dance from anyone (because the very idea of it makes me feel awkward), I have no problem with going with a couple of friends 30 minutes before my friend gets off work, shooting a couple of games of pool, drinking a Shirley Temple, and watching girls dance naked to Dashboard Confessional, Pat Benetar, and Journey. If you have any thoughts on this matter, please feel free to make them known.

-Picking raspberries, losing the initial volley of a raspberry war, and then taking the fight to the ground, which resulted in a successful rear naked choke/raspberry smash on the bare stomach.

-Learning how to make Jam.

-Playing pool on a free table at a bar called The Mash Tun for almost 4 hours and ending up dead even. Phil, who insisted that he has only played pool a handful of times in his life, convinced me to give him 4:1 odds on $5 games, but the odds evolved as we played, ending up at 1:1 on $10 with me spotting him 2 balls (odds which I think he gave me because he knew it had started off in his favor and he wanted to give me a chance to win back my money). The final score was 11 games to 7, and we may have agreed on 2:3 with me spotting him 1 ball for any future games. I'm NOT a gambling addict, shut up.

-Discussing, at length, a reconciliation of a radical interpretation of the Christian faith, held by my friend Benny, with anarcho-primitivism, a political conviction which he holds and defends more admirably than most. He contends that a lot of the writings in the New Testaments are attempts to repair the patriarchal and homophobic tendencies in the Old Testament and the seemingly inconsistent ones which appear to support and uphold patriarchy and hetero-normativity are in place simply to pay lip service to the laws of the Roman Empire in an attempt to avoid religious persecution. He had a lot of other very interesting points in defense of his personal faith, which is Christian only in the loosest sense.

The [sort of] end

2008-06-30T01:06:00.004-04:00

After several hours on the computer trying to find a good bike route to Olympia, we determined that we were probably not going to do any better than the google maps directions which included 30 or more directions and took us entirely through suburban sprawl, mostly on roads which looked like multiple-lane roads with no shoulders. Ok, fine, we could have ridden that way anyway, but it just looked like it wasn't going to be any fun. So, when we found out that we could take a train and bus for around $5 each, we took the easy road again. Having reconceptualized this trip as a general traveling adventure rather than a bike-specific trip, it didn't really bum me out.

When we got to Olympia, we rode to my friend Ashley's house to meet up with Amina - a very close high school friend with whom I haven't been very close in the last several years - where we witnessed a cake-related crisis and its resolution. It was inspiring. After assorted hang-outs we ended up at an acoustic show which was described to us as "very Olympia". The music ranged from decent to really good, and the vibe reminded me of when I visited Oberlin College as a high school senior. Sean and I shared Amina's very small bed that night and his knees kept forcing me closer and closer to the wall.

The next morning we went with Amina, Ashley, and their friend Elenore to a Korean place to get tofu sandwiches and then walked around downtown Olympia, such as it is. While sitting around discussing our trip earlier, Sean and I had come to the conclusion that, as much as we felt ready to get back on the bikes, we were getting anxious to get to Portland, as we both had people there we really wanted to see. We talked about changing our route and biking as quickly and directly as we could to Portland, and then it occurred to me that my friend Matt, to whom I'd spoken on the phone earlier, just might be into driving up from Portland to pick us up. As it turned out, he was looking for an excuse to get out of the city for the day. He drove up to Olympia and we had Thai and went on a nature walk through some forest or something. It was actually pretty cool. He had recently been on a similar nature walk which included learning about edible plant life, so he dropped a bit of that sort of knowledge on us along the way. We spent a long time sitting on a beach of rocks and mud and trying to skip poorly-shaped rocks along the Puget Sound. When the sun started to go down we jumped in the car and headed to Portland.

Sean and I promised each other that we'd ride out to the coast and go camping, and I'm considering riding from SF to Sound and Fury Fest in Santa Barbara at the end of July, but I guess the trip is pretty much over, insofar as it has been defined by getting to Portland. I'll be here for the next couple of weeks, then the Bay area, then Sound and Fury, and then, unless something comes up giving me a reason to stay out west, Back to the east coast. Perhaps some reflections on it all later.

Seattle

2008-06-26T14:01:00.003-04:00

For those considering a 2-day Greyhound bus trip, allow me to advise against it. The boredom didn't bother me; I read, I listened to a lecture series released by the Teaching Company about Nietzsche, I napped, and I contemplated. The physical discomfort, on the other hand, is a severe bummer. My legs cramped, my knees became sore, and sleeping for any length of time required Nyquil, which I hated. I rarely take medicine designed to treat symptoms (other than for allergies), partially because I don't like the idea of it but mostly because I prefer to try to listen to what my body is telling me and address the underlying cause. I rarely get headaches, but if I do, it probably means I haven't been eating right, sleeping enough, or doing enough to relieve stress; if I can't sleep, I get up and do something else for a while until I feel tired, and, for the week or so each year that I have insomnia, I try to really deal with whatever emotional issue is getting in the way; if I'm tired, that means I need to sleep more or get more exercise while I'm awake, so I don't use caffeine to artificially wake me up. But on the bus if I didn't use Nyquil, I would have slept in shallow 20-minute intervals and been a total wreck. But perhaps the most bummerific consequence of the long ride was that after spending 2 days sitting down, our ankles and feet were disgustingly swollen. After the first few weeks of the trip, Sean and I were pretty psyched about our legs. Sean, particularly, takes his lower-body physique pretty seriously, and my personal theory is that vanity is more often the reason for leg-shaving among cyclists than performance. So I was upset and Sean was crushed to see our fat ankles, the tops of our feet spilling out of our shoes. Luckily, after several nights of prone slumber, our pedial shapeliness has returned.

The next Greyhound-associated snag was the fact that our bikes did not make it to Seattle as quickly as we did. In the middle of the night in Billings, MT, there were too many people waiting to get on the bus so they split up the group and added a second bus. We stayed on the same bus but our bikes didn't. We were told that our bikes would arrive on the next bus, so, per the suggestion of my buddy Vibe (Jennette, if you are reading this, I'm sorry), we wandered in the direction of Capitol Hill in search of vegan food. We had some pretty decent pizza and met up with Vibe, who generously walked us back to his swanky, kitten-filled apartment where we showered, did laundry, and watched TiVo with him and his girlfriend, both of whom were very gracious hosts when it turned out that our bikes were not on the next bus and we decided to stay there for the night instead of heading up to the U district, since they live closer to the Greyhound terminal.

The next day we walked back to the dirty dog where our bikes had finally arrived, re-assembled them, and rode to Hillside Quickie's where we enjoyed sandwiches and the company of Danny and his badass car from the late 1950s. Danny has seen better days, and it's always a bummer to run into a friend who is not at his best, but it was still nice to catch up. Not being able to immediately cure my friends' emotional ailments has always made me feel like a terrible friend. If you've ever gotten unsolicited advice from me, now you know why.

After a few hours of killing time in the U district, we rode to the screen printing shop where the merch magic happens for every hardcore band in the northwest and folded shirts late into the night with Ace and assorted cameos by legitimate bros allstars, all of whom have nicknames that are similarly idiosyncratic to NW hardcore. Ace claims that he is not in the habit of waiting until the night before tour to print several hundred shirts, but being no stranger to the concept of punk time, I suspect that this was not the first time things have been pushed to the last minute, nor will it be the last.

We slept that night at the Bro Dangler - an historic punk house known (by me, at least) for the prolificness (prolificity?) of its hardcore-playing inhabitants - and spent the next day getting in the way of On's tour preparations. I ran into a handful of tour-friends, which is always a good time, made a few new ones, and ate too much food. After On left and Roger and RJ returned to their respective homes we found ourselves alone at the Dangler with an evening to kill and a sizable collection of VHS tapes. I'm not generally the type to speak celebratorily about the wonders of punk rock and hardcore, but I must say that you don't tend to get this kind of treatment in many other circles that I've experienced. This was, in fact, exactly what Chicago was missing (although it turns out that we had a contact of this sort in Chicago, we just didn't get in contact with her until it was too late). I'm used to showing up in nearly any major city and having a friend of a friend who is not only willing to let me crash on the couch but actually treats me like an old friend upon first acquaintance, and as thankful as I am for the hospitality of Bill and Ben in Chicago, there is a unique character to the welcome you tend to receive at a punk house. Though I've known Ace for several years, we don't know each other especially well, as our friendship, if it can be called that, has consisted mostly of running into each other at a handful of his band's shows, and I had never met any of his roommates before yesterday. Nonetheless, when 3/4 of the house left for tour (including Ace, the only person who actually knew who I was), Beej showed us where a key was hidden and we were welcomed to stay as long as we wanted. This is pretty much the usual treatment in my experience, and it's pretty easy to take it for granted.

Leaving Chicago

2008-06-21T19:18:00.002-04:00

Another round of french toast at Pick Me Up this morning (which may have been the non-vegan one; it started to taste weird after we were more than halfway through but we weren't sure and we figured that if it was the non-vegan one they would probably just end up throwing it out), Whole Foods to pick up some snacks for the next 2 days, and a bike shop to get boxes for our bikes. After a series of conversations about our plans and goals, at which I've hinted a couple of times, we decided to ride to Milwaukee, which is about a day from here, and fly to Seattle. However, the day after we decided not to buy $150 tickets because we wanted to think about it more, the prices went up by more than $100, so I ended up buying $180 Greyhound tickets and we are now poised to spend almost 48 house on a bus, starting at 10:30 tonight. After I leave here we are going to eat one last meal at Chicago Diner (of course), pack up our bikes, and take the train (what do they call it here? the "L"?) to the bus station. Once we make it to Seattle, we'll hang out there for a couple of days and then ride, at a much more liesurely pace, to Olympia, then out to the coast, and, finally, to Portland. I sent an email to a friend yesterday explaining why we decided to take this route, so rather than retyping more or less the same thing, I'll just paste it below. If you live in Seattle, get at me. If you live in Portland, I'll see you in a week or so.

For my non-cyclist readers, the following is borrowed from Wikipedia:
Drafting or slipstreaming is a technique in sports racing where competitors align in a close group in order to reduce the overall effect of drag or fluid resistance of the group in a slipstream. Especially when high speeds are involved, drafting can significantly reduce the average energy expenditure required to maintain a certain speed.

To Dan:
So Sean and I managed about 90-100 miles for the first leg of the trip (not counting the day we took off in Scranton, PA), pus a 130 mile day at the end. We stayed in Cleveland for 3 days, and then did about 100-110 for a couple of days, two 60-70 mile days, and got to Chicago. We realized a couple of days in that if we kept the pace high, drafted, and didn't stop too much, we could keep up 100-150 a day for the next 3 or 4 weeks (with a day off once a week or so and varying with the headwinds and terrain), sleeping wherever we ended the day and eating whatever we could find along the way, and make it to Portland in a litle over a month. We also realized that this would be no fun at all. That kind of pace leaves no time for the things about traveling that I really enjoy: exploring new towns, checking out local vegan food, meeting people, and generally having adventures. Those were the reasons I wanted to do this, not just to prove that I am a really hardcore cyclist (because let's face it, I'm not), and they were being totally eclipsed by the pressure to keep going. Additionally, for me, at least, riding 15-20 mph on a loaded up touring bike requires a lot of mental energy as well as physical; I found myself spending most of my riding time just thinking about riding. If I'm leading, all I can think about is push push push keep up the pace don't slow down, and if I'm drafting I'm just staring at Sean's rear wheel desperately trying not to let it get any further from me. In New York I've gotten so accustomed to traffic that if I just ride 12-15mph and find good lines, I can zone out and think about other stuff, and I was hoping that this trip would give me a lot of time to get some good thinking done. It hasn't. I don't like riding enough to enjoy riding for most of my waking hours, thinking about nothing but riding, and having no time for anything else, and Sean likes it only a little more than me. So the revised plan became: take it slow, stop often, explore, have adventures, and enjoy ourselves. We made it to Chicago in about 4 or 5 more days than it would have taken if we hadn't spent 3 days in Cleveland and taken a few slow days, and we've been hanging out here for 4 days already. If we had all summer, we would just keep this up and make it to Portland eventually, but since Sean needs to be back at work on july 21st and wants at least 2 weeks in Portland, we are going to probably fly from Milwaukee, which is a days ride from here, to Seattle, hang out there for a few days, ride to Olympia and then out to the coast, and finally down the coast to Portland, for a total distance of around 1300-1500 miles.

Chicago so far

2008-06-20T14:10:00.004-04:00

If I ever bother to sit down and make a list of my top 10 regrets in life, not seeing Fugazi will be on it for sure. They were still playing for the first 6 or 7 years that I was going to shows; in fact, my friends often went to see them and I didn't bother because I didn't like them. I guess it was just a matter of timing. Sometimes you need to hear a band at a certain point in your life for the music and the ideas behind it to resonate with you, or maybe I just wasn't a sophisticated enough music listener until more recently (when I was 14 or 15, I think I remember believing that everything except skate punk and youth crew hardcore was "gay") to appreciate it, but for whatever reason it wasn't until just after they stopped playing shows that something clicked and I started to realize why everyone liked them so much. In the several years since, my appreciation has grown with every listening, and I think the only thing that could really deepen my relationship to the music would be seeing them play it live. Their songwriting relied so heavily on dynamics, and the production on their recordings downplays the dynamic effect for me. I've seen the Instrument dvd, which corroborates my suspicion that the live show is way better than the record.

Anyway, all of that is by way of introducing my activity for last night: seeing Mike Kinsella and some of his friends play a set of all Fugazi covers at a bar. It was awesome. Though their stage presence was poor (Mike looked like he was just hanging out, having a good time playing his favorite tunes, and his backing band looked like they had never played for an audience before in their lives), their musicianship was exactly where it needed to be. The guitar tone was straight off the record, the drummer played everything fill for fill (at least, to the best of my memory), and Mike even did a pretty decent impression of Ian's voice, though not so much with Guy's. They played all of my favorite songs except Blueprint, including Sieve-
Fisted Find and Smallpox Champion, although the latter was probably the sloppiest song of the set. Other noteworthy aspects of the show:
-Mike is way better looking than I had ever suspected and has fantastic hair.
-The show was a benefit for CAASE - the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, an organization that seeks to eliminate the demand for sex work. They cage it in almost pseudo-feminist language, but it sounds suspiciously puritanical to me.
-The opening band, The Beauty Shop, was a pretty decent trio that had songs ranging from mediocre alt country to pretty solid indie rock, with a singer that sounded like a cross between Johnny Cash and Mike Ness and a really solid drummer.

A play-by-play of my activities in Chicago would be pretty boring to read, because it would consist mostly of eating. We've eaten at the Chicago Diner 3 times now, which is by far my favorite, as well as twice at The Pick Me Up (also in Boystown), which has amazing french toast and a great jukebox, once at Earwax Cafe in Wicker Park, which makes an extremely flavorful jerk seitan sandwich, once at some Mexican place that made the best burritos I've had outside of southern California, and once at the Handlebar where the biscuits and gravy are phenomenal but the breakfast burrito unimpressive. We've also done a lot of wandering around, sitting at Starbucks reading the Reader (the local equivalent of the Village Voice), and sitting at the "beach" by Lake Michigan. We stayed at a hostel the first night, which reminded me of living in dorms, at a friend of a friend's very spacious apartment the second night (Sean was convinced that he was actually Thurston Moore), and at a courier's apartment last night, where I watched Hollow Man on On Demand. We went to a meeting of the Chicago Couriers Union, which was impressively well-organized if poorly attended, and spent an evening playing free pool at a bar called Ronny's while watching World Extreme Cagefighting on tv. That pretty much sums up the last few days. I really like this city.

Famous

2008-06-19T20:53:00.000-04:00

Article about us in the Northwest Indiana Times.

Day 2

2008-06-19T16:01:00.005-04:00

Having fallen asleep much earlier at the end of our first day of riding than we had on the night before we left, we woke up around 7:30 on the morning of day 2. In the middle of the night a light rain had forced us to wake up and put the (not actually waterproof) cover over the tent, so we were not only sore from having ridden almost 100 miles the day before but a little damp as well. At that point my pollen allergies were starting to remind me that I was no longer in the city. Nonetheless we were in pretty good spirits as we ate the remainder of the box of pop tarts and broke camp for the first time.

The first 45 minutes of the morning was 90% climbing, at an average speed of probably 7 mph or so, and I remember thinking to myself as I bent my head down into a steep climb, "fuck, I could be at home watching Gossip Girl." By 8:30 we were ready for our first break. Just as it started to rain again, we stopped inside a"safety booth", which was sort of like an old wooden bus stop but in the middle of nowhere, and Sean promptly fell asleep.

Around 9:30 we started again, this time with a bit more enthusiasm, and spent most of the rest of the morning climbing Moosic Mountain (elevation about 2000 feet). 20 Miles into the morning we took a second break by the side of a lake in the woods. The rain had stopped but the lake was covered in a thick mist which added a mysterious quality to its in-the-woods-in-the-middle-of-nowhere charm. I sat next to Sean on some rocks and we shared a bag of potato chips. After a few minutes I noticed that there were ants crawling all over me, and no sooner had I surmised that I must have sat on their home than they began biting. I jumped up and began swatting at every little spot where I felt a pinch, on my arms, legs and back, and even a few down my pants. For the next half hour or so every little inch and pinch felt like another ant. What a stupid evolutionary defense mechanism. If they hadn't started biting me I would have brushed them off and moved to a spot that wasn't their home, leaving them in peace, but as soon as they started biting I freaked out and killed as many of them as I could. Nice going, guys. At that moment, I really hated nature. Living in the city it's so easy to forget how close we are to predators, parasites, allergens, and mysterious rashes that we never even think about. In Brooklyn the most we have to fear from nature is mouse poop and roaches, but you don't have to go very far to be reminded of what's out there. For the second time that day, I missed television.

We rolled into Carbondale - a small coal-mining town - around lunchtime, and sat down at a diner called Pinkey's that appeared to be the only option in the vicinity. As we expected from the typical diner menu, the only vegan food available was french fries and salad, but we were hungry enough that we didn't complain. Our waitress was very pretty and had a midwestern-sounding accent, which surprised me since we weren't that far from the east coast. I correctly guessed her age to be 21, but despite having lived about 2 hours from it for her entire life, she had never even seen the ocean. She told us that she had been to New York once to go shopping with her sister, but other than that had done very little travelling. I insisted that she visit the ocean as soon as possible; who knows if she'll keep her promise.

After some confusion about where US 6 picked up again, we continued onward, passing over the top of Scranton, and around 70-miles, just outside of a small town called Tunkhannock, I got another flat. As I began replacing my 3rd inner tube, Sean wandered across the street to an auto shop to see if they had any tools that would be useful in diagnosing the friction coming from his bottom bracket, which he had begun to notice a dozen miles back. Not only were they no help, but they insisted that there was no bike shop anywhere in the area except Milford, the town in which we had slept the night before. We decided to soldier on to the next town, despite the growing resistance in Sean's drive train, with the intention of stopping there to evaluate our options. At 5:30 and 86 miles, we stopped and sat at a bench in downtown Tunkhannock (such as it was), and had what turned out to be the first of many conversations about what we were doing on this trip. Afraid that if we kept going without addressing Sean's mechanical problem it could worsen, seize up entirely, or, worst of all, strip his bottom bracket shell, we considered taking a bus from Scranton to Cleveland (where there was sure to be a decent bike mechanic) and just forget about the rest of Pennsylvania. We agreed that neither of us cared that much about the bragging rights associated with having biked the entire way across the country and that taking a bus for part of the way once or twice would most likely not get in the way of having the adventure we were hoping to have.

We went into a nearby hotel to ask about local ground transportation, where the friendly, lazy-eyed front-desk clerk let us use the computer. Finding that the nearest bike shop was 50 miles ahead of us, and not wanting to risk an even more dire mechanical failure on the way, we settled on the greyhound option and asked at the bar about nearby campsites. After explaining our situation to the bartender, she asked the crowd if any one had a truck and wanted to drive us to Scranton for a few bucks, but apparently no one did, so we started riding in the direction of a free campsite a few miles outside of town on the way back to Scranton.

Having spent the last few hours off our bikes, my already sore left knee had stiffened to the point that riding again was extremely painful, so we stopped after less than a mile at a gas station across the street from a high school baseball stadium, waited until the families drove away and night began to fall, and spread out our sleeping bags on the grass next to home plate, thinking that if it began to rain (which it did) we could relocate into the dugout to stay dry (which we did).

Cities

2008-06-19T13:29:00.003-04:00

I don't know what it is about certain cities, but I just dig the vibe or something. I really want to fall in love with Chicago, and I feel like almost all of the ingredients are here. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been in rural Pennsylvania and the midwest for weeks, and maybe it's just because this is the first place I've been since New York where I can get good vegan food, but just wandering around I've found that there is something really appealing about the way this city is laid out and the way the neighborhoods feel. So what's missing? Friends. Every other major city I've been to I've been able to find people to hang out with through friends of friends, but for some reason no one seems to know anyone here. We've found just enough contacts to have places to stay (and by the way, thanks to everyone that went digging through their metaphorical rolodexes), but I haven't really found people here to hang out with during the day. I guess this isn't terribly surprising, but I feel like if I met one or two really cool people here with whom I really clicked, that would seal the deal. We've got a few more days here, so I suppose anything could happen.

McDonald's apple pies

2008-06-17T21:09:00.002-04:00

Right before I left I had a conversation with someone about McDonald's apple pies. Whoever it was (and I've now forgotten) seemed surprised that I wasn't aware that they are vegan, and the other person present spoke up in agreement. Was this you? I looked it up, and they have L-cysteine, which I thought was made from animal or human hair; does anyone know anything about this? There is nothing I can do about the dozen or so apple pies I've already eaten on this trip (out of desperation, believe me), but I'd like to know whether or not I should continue doing so.

Chicago

2008-06-17T20:51:00.003-04:00

Chicago is one of the few major US cities in which I had not set foot, and now I can cross it off the list. So far, my impression has been largely positive; I like the landscape, the people seem interesting, and the Chicago Diner serves vegan American food that is better than any I've ever paid that little for. For you New Yorkers, it's nearly Counter-quality food for Foodswings prices, I kid you not. And to top if off, all of their cheese stuff is made with Temptation cheese (which stands to reason given that Temptation is made here in Chicago), and if you've never had it, trust me when I saw that it is a bona fide vegan miracle that this stuff exists. It melts. It tastes like cheese. It will knock your socks off and you'll never want Follow Your Heart nor Toffutti as long as you live. The disadvantage is that Temptation only sells it to restaurants so you can't buy it for your home cooking. If you live in New York, Vinnie's Pizza will sell it to you (and if you don't already know Vinnie's you are no friend of mine).

We woke up in Portage, IN this morning, in the grass behind the local newspaper building. As we were leaving, a woman noticed us and, after finding out that we had slept the night there and were on a bike trip from New York, asked if we had had a story written about us yet. We replied that we hadn't, so she went inside, grabbed a reporter, and we're told that we will be up on www.nwi.com in the next day or so.

After being interviewed, we rode 50-something miles straight to the Chicago Diner - up through the entire south side and into Boystown - ate until we thought we were going to explode, and then sat in the diner booth staring into space while we developed diabetes from the two desserts each that we had just eaten. The shock of being back in a real, vegan friendly city is a little much for me, I must admit. After we recovered from our respective food comas, we took a walk around the neighborhood to get a feel for the town, which included stopping at American Apparel to pick up a couple of shirts (neither of mine have been washed since Cleveland) and wandering around for a bit in search of this very internet cafe. It's pretty cheap, so if I don't end up finding a place to stay with someone that has a computer I'll probably be back here for the next few days filling in the large gap starting in Milford Pennsylvania on the 4th and ending in north western Indiana yesterday.

Speaking of finding a place to stay... it turns out that no one knows anyone in this city. We have found 3 different friends of friends who are willing to let us stay with them, but in all 3 cases it will be inconvenient for the host, and I hate being a burden, so if anyone reading this knows anyone in Chicago that would be happier about having guests, please pass that contact information along to me via text message or phone call. 301.602.1706.

Last update from Cleveland

2008-06-12T23:26:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow morning we are leaving for Chicago, and I didn't end up having as much time as I would have liked over the last 3 days to write about the first part of my trip, largely due to m y preoccupation with television watching and loafing. Rest assurred, however, that I have taken good notes and will eventually do so.

I would like to take a moment to update the cyber world on the restructuring of our plans. We realized on day 3 that, though we found ourselves to by physically capable of maintaining the necessary level of speed for the necessary amount of time to make it across the country in our 4-5 week time frame, it wouldn't be any fun to do it that way. We've managed about 600 miles in 6 days of riding during week one, with no training or preparation, including 127 miles on the last day, and most of it through the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. We survived camping every night for a week except one day, when we stayed in a $40 motel room so that we could shower. And at the end of it, we felt more fit than ever. I feel satisfied that if I was determined I would make it in the time frame that we originally set, but I also discovered that biking 100 miles a day kind of sucks and doesn't leave a whole lot of time for anything else.

After Sean's bike sufferred a bottom bracket cup unthreading problem which forced us to backtrack 30 miles from Tunkhannock to Scranton and spend the better part of a morning at a bike shop, we sat and reevaluated our intentions, realizing that we had been trying to combine two endeavors into an impossibly short period, and that we could either commit a feat of athleticism and commitment by biking across the country in a little over a month, or have an adventure on the road that involved stopping along the way, hanging out in random small towns, and enjoying ourselves, but that the pace required by the first precluded spending sufficient time on the second. As a result, we opted for fun (perhaps slightly out of character), figuring that if we only biked a couple of thousand miles, had some new experiences and a lot of fun, without putting pressure on ourselves to go go go, we would ultimately feel better about how we spent our vacation.

The (tentative) plan we came up with is to bike to Chicago, hang out, bike to Minneappolis, hang out, take a bus/train/plane to Seattle, hang out, bike to Olympia, hang out, and finally, bike to portland. The total trip will probably end up being around 2000 miles of riding, which I still feel pretty good about since this is the first time I've attempted a ride longer than the 2006 Halloween Alleycat in New York which included checkpoints at 150th and Amsterdam, Greenwood Cemetary, and Bushwick, finishing in Bed-Stuy. Perhaps some day I'll attempt a cross-country bike trip on an expensive carbon road bike with no gear (ideally with a support van, but short of that, simply by staying in motels every night instead of camping), and make it in a month. Or some day I might try a cross-country bike trip at a more leasurely pace, getting a chance to check out small towns and do some soul-searching, and take 3 or 4 months to do it. This time, however, we've chosen option C: the old-fashioned American road trip but on bikes. Adventure, here I come.

I'll write again from Chicago in (hopefully) 3 or 4 days. Until then, enjoy this ridiculous fucking heat wave and trust that we will, too.

Day 1

2008-06-10T23:16:00.005-04:00

On Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008, at approximately 10 AM I woke up on an uncovered mattress on the floor of my loft, sweating and wearing only a pair of boxer-briefs and a few thousand mosquito bites. I fucking hate mosquitoes. I hate them more than I hate... pop country music. That's how much I hate them. I am a very light sleeper and being bitten by one is usually enough to wake me up, so the fact that I was covered in bites is an indicator of how well I slept. If our loft wasn't 90 degrees at night, I might have been able to protect myself with a cover of some kind, but then I would have been too hot to sleep at all anyway; you can see the predicament I was in. Of course, the last week or so has forced me to redefine my concept of discomfort.

The original plan was to get up before sunrise, ride to the southernmost point of Manhattan, and take a moment to contemplate the Upper Bay (which was the closest we could come to the Atlantic ocean without riding an hour in the wrong direction) as the sun came up. Instead, we left the house around noon after some hasty repacking and decided to skip the ceremonial crap and just start heading west.

We made it over the Williamsburg bridge and felt pretty good about our level of fitness (of course the Appalachian and Allegheny mountains proved to present some slightly more challenging climbs than the bridge). We stopped on sixth ave in the Village so Sean, having recently lost his fancy cycling glasses, could pick up a pair of knockoff designer sunglasses with white frames and ironically large lenses. Oh how I'll miss you, NYC. In a touching valedictory moment a not-so-unusually rude motorist in an SUV honked at me for several seconds while I was heading west on 14th, riding on the right side of the road, leaving, of course, ample space for passing. I yelled something to the effect of, "what the fuck are you honking at?", to which he replied, "you, asshole," or something similarly tender. Thankfully, we made it out of Manhattan without any incidents of fisticuffs or u-lock justice, and were not honked at again until we reached the outskirts of Cleveland 7 days later.

Our first serious challenge was finding the George Washington Bridge. The west side bike path ends around 120th, which is further north than I've ever taken it. We walked our bikes up a very long set of steps and then took Riverside Dr the rest of the way to 181st and then looped back around to 178th and Fort Washington, finally finding the stairs to the bike path tucked away on the side of a highway exit ramp.

Confusion becoming something of a theme of our tripe already, we found ourselves in Jersey with no idea how to navigate the clusterfuck of interstates and state routes spilling out of the bridge exit like the frayed edges of my extremely short cutoff jean shorts. The guy at the hotel desk nearby insisted that 46, the route we were planning to take, was an interstate with no shoulder and therefore not bikeable. I'll spare you the boring details, mostly because I've forgotten them, but trust that we eventually did make it to route 46 west and finally began to put some distance between ourselves and familiar territory.

After about 25 miles we stopped for the first in a long succession of gas-station breaks to refill our water bottles and cram as many carbs down our gullets as possible, mostly in the form of potato chips, the new, apparently vegan flavor of doritos, and nature valley granola bars. My diet has experienced better days.

While we were sitting outside of the BP on the curb, filling ourselves with heavily processed and almost nutritionally worthless foods, a strange man piloting a slow-moving motorized scooter (the wheelchair kind, not one of those hip, European thingies you see around New York these days) pulled up, executed a tight 3-point turn, and backed carefully into the handicapped parking spot. He was wearing sweatpants, a tank top, and a baseball cap, and did not appear to be severely injured or obese enough to necessitate the scooter, although some kind of chronic pain or joint injury may very well have justified it; he did seem to walk with a slight limp, after all. He came out of the store a few minutes later with naught but a pack of Newports and a Strawberry Yoohoo, fired up his whip, and scooted away at a brisk 5 or so miles per hour, whirring for all the world like an upset but slightly drowsy bumble bee. As he vanished into the distant sunset, he uncorked the strawberry milk and pounded the entire thing in a bottoms-up maneuver that would have made John Belushi proud. Sean and I were in stitches, and the thought of that image still makes me chuckle. I suppose you really had to be there.

Yikes, I'm even more long-winded than I thought. I've been writing for close to an hour now and I'm not even halfway done with the first day. I've been thinking all along that I might like to some day write a more substantial account of this entire trip, but since this blog exists mostly for the purpose of keeping my mom and grandmother updated, I'll try to keep things short from now on. Basically, we rode, rode, and rode some more. I got tired, but we kept riding. We rode up hills, and then rode down the other sides. As it turns out, riding close to a hundred miles per day can get pretty monotonous. The highlights of the first day of riding included me getting two flat tires within 15 minutes, the second of which left my brand new rear tire with an inch-long slash in it (which I patched with a folded up dollar bill), eating lots more junk food, listening to several chapters of a lecture series released by The Teaching Company which featured philosopher John Searle talking about the mind, and finally settling down for the night in a patch of woods next to the Milford Learning Center in Milford, PA. We did 96.4 miles at an average speed of 14mph, which is not bad for day 1. Then we ate pop tarts and peanut butter for dinner and fell asleep around 11.

Cleveland

2008-06-10T00:45:00.004-04:00

After our longest riding day yet (127 miles), scortching heat, torrential thunderstorms, sore knees, and my first ever energy drink, we made it to Cleveland around 10:30. I'll write about the first week in more detail tomorrow, but I just wanted to quickly update my reading public (yes mom, that's you), that I am alive and, well, not exactly well, but I will be after a good night's sleep.

The morning of

2008-06-03T10:37:00.004-04:00

I barely slept last night due to the flock of mosquitoes that spent the night bidding me a fond farewell, so we are getting a later start than we hoped. Now I need to repack my stuff and hop in the shower, and then I'm outta here.

Preparation

2008-06-02T13:53:00.003-04:00

Cleaning my room took hours. I packed everything I own other than my bikes, books, furniture, and what I'm taking with me into 4 small crates and stuffed them into the corner of the room. Coleman, Ben's friend and my subletter, moved his stuff in yesterday afternoon. Sean and I packed up all of our stuff, loaded up our bikes, and went on a test ride. There are a few kinks that need ironing out; I need a better way to pack my ukulele and I need to make sure that the bungee cords won't be rubbing the wheel, but overall I felt really good about it. Right after I packed everything I started to feel apprehensive about the load. A change of clothes, rain gear and a warm layer, a few essential tools, toiletries, and a sleeping bag don't seem like they'd weigh that much, but once it's all packed up on the back of a bike, it feels like a lot. Luckily, once I got riding - and got over the initial difficulty of steering a bike that top-heavy - it felt fine. So that's it. I have to buy some batteries, attend Trackstar's courier appreciation party at 151 bar (free drinks! yay!!!!), and have a goodbye dinner (courtesy of Tamara's fine cooking). Tomorrow, at the crack of dawn (or whenever we wake up anyway), I'm out.

Brooklyn

2008-05-29T21:51:00.003-04:00

I'm lying on my back on the lower roof of my building, my eyes fixed upon an imaginary point some distance from the ground. I can hear 2 different car alarms in different directions and the slow steady murmur of hundreds of industrial fans within a several-block radius, all of this punctuated by the occasional pop that could as easily be a bottle rocket as a gunshot. I can see very few stars, and almost as many airplanes; they fly by at a rate of about 3 per minute, some so low that I can hear the jet engines. This is the closest my life ever gets to silent. I'm typing on a laptop I bought with Christmas money, sitting on a couch I inherited from a college friend - practically the only one I made - who moved to California, inside of a room that I built with my own hands and my friends'. Said friends are in the next room, loudly watching Muppet Treasure Island, below me, typing on their respective keyboards, or sitting in the kitchen sewing patches that say "In Grind We Crust" into the seats of their shorts where the constant friction of bicycle seats has worn the fabric down to nothing. This is the city where characters in movies rush headlong into romantic destinies on the crowded grid of streets and sidewalks, the bourough where Paul Auster's smugly liberal figments read great works of literature and occasionally produce them and where Jay Z and GZA were born. It has a romance to it if you let yourself be duped, but really it's just a bunch of people in one place living, buying, fucking, and doing whatever it is that people do. New York will not change your life, make it more glamorous; destiny is not waiting for you around the next street corner. Sometimes it feels like home and sometimes the farthest thing from it. Right now, I know that I need a break. I need a break from car horns, billboards, models and fashionistas (that make me feel insecure). I need a break from bars (that I rarely go into), rooftop dance parties (that I never attend), and hip clubs (that I avoid at all costs). I need a break from commercialism, consumerism and Americanism. I need some time away from confusing people and confusing situations. I need some space. I need some time to think, to get my shit together and figure out what I'm doing. I need to figure out who I am and what I want.

I guess it's pretty foolish to assume that a bike trip will give me all of that, but if it just gives me some of that, if it just gives me a break, it will be worth it.

So here's the plan

2008-05-29T20:31:00.005-04:00

Tuesday I'm leaving to ride my bike across the country with my roommate Sean. The tentative plan (pending sufficient sleep Monday night) is to wake up just before the sun rises, ride to the bottom tip of Manhattan, take a moment to reflect on time, space, and all that junk (while gazing at the Upper New York Bay), and then hit the West Side Highway bike path. The longest I have ever ridden straight is about 40 miles. We are talking about riding almost 4000 in a little over a month. I honestly have no idea what to expect from myself, Sean or the trip itself. This is so much unlike anything that I have ever done that I don't know if I should be terrified, excited, both, or some other as yet unconsidered emotion. One thing is for sure: I need this. I've spent too many days inside my own head surrounded by flashing billboards and flashy people. I have a lot that I need to sort out, about my life, my goals, my desires. Not to be vague or anything. I need some perspective. I need some sensory and social deprivation. I need the open road. I know it's not particularly original, but distance has a calming effect on me, and I need it right now.

On the practical side of things, I will most likely only have computer access once every week or so from the time we leave until the time we reach Portland, and when I do I will hopefully have the motivation to write something, although I might be so busy responding to all of the myspace messages from people who miss be terribly that I might not get to it. When I'm not near a computer, however, it will be because I'm spending my nights camping, which means no electricity, which means that my phone will be turned off most of the time. I promised my mom that I would text her every night and let her know where we are sleeping, but other than that, I will likely have very little contact with the rest of the world, and I'm really looking forward to that. Wish me luck.

PS if you live in NYC and aren't coming to Ian's bbq this Saturday, call me so we can hang out before I leave for the next couple of months.

2007-07-16T18:48:00.000-04:00

"the future" demonstrated poor performance in round one, but seems to have made a pretty solid recovery since.

two trains and a bus later, i was on the side of the highway in the outskirts of madrid. unfortunately, the highway itself has no shoulder and no exits. the service road has exits, but they are very small, and it seems that all of the traffic on the service road is local. i walked around 12 miles looking for a good spot, and the best i could do was a gas station. every trucker i asked - and they were few and far between - was not going much outside of madrid. had i the patience, i probably would have gotten a ride eventually, but given that i had a plane ticket out of barcelona in 4 days, i figured i might as well cut my losses and take a bus, because i'd hate to waste the time i could be in barcelona on the side of the highway in madrid just because i was stubborn. oh yeah, the signs on the bus stops said that it was in the high 40s celsius, which is above 110 farenheit. it didnt seem quite that hot (maybe the bus station thermometers are too close to black metal strucutres and err a couple of degrees high or something) but it was hot enough that when i put on a light-colored long sleeved shirt i felt cooler than having the sun directly on me. and there was no shade.

so i got back into the city around 7, feeling sheepish, and got a 7:50 bus to barcelona. i watched angels in the outfield dubbed and was pretty proud to unerstand most of it, and got to barcelona around 4. julio came to meet me and walk me back to his place, and the next morning we took his scooter to the skate/nike store where he works. chad got there around 1 in the afternoon. so far: parc güell (the unfinished gaudi housing developement), the beach, lots of the closer on dvd, walking around, fantastic vegan food, good people, hanging out, and fucking transformers, which was awesome. today chad and i are going to find some more gaudi stuff while julio is at work, and then i think we might be going... out. to a club or something. we'll see.

2007-07-13T15:26:00.000-04:00

this is a quick one: took my last final (ever), turned 22, said goodbye to a lot of people i'll never talk to again (and a few who i hopefully will), stayed up too late with a friend, packed up, checked my email, and wrote this entry. im going to hop on a metro train to the highway, and hopefully be in barcelona before sundown (sundown here is at around 10:30, so if it takes long than that ill be sorta pissed). the future: barcelona, rome, prague, home (DC), home (brooklyn), work, debt, no more school, new roommates, and...? see you there.

2007-07-11T12:04:00.000-04:00

after getting locked out of paris and sleeping for the better part of an afternoon, stephanie and i got indian food and then walked around old madrid for a few hours. around midnight she decided that it was bedtime and that there was no way she was going to see 28 weeks later with me because she would not be able to sleep all night. so i went alone. in retrospect, maybe not the greatest idea, given how i tend to deal with scary movies. i would have been better off in a living room with someone willing to cuddle during the scary parts, and in the middle of the afternoon, than in a theater by myself at 12:30. but i had heard such good things about it that i was determined.

i dont remember being horrified to nearly that extent by the first one, although maybe its just been a while since i first saw it, but more than being scared the way scream did when i was a little kid (which was mostly about just thinking something was going to jump out at me from spaces that where sometimes so small as to make such a thing physically impossible), i was deeply shaken. when the movie got out at 2:30, i decided to ride my bike around old madrid for a while because i wasnt tired yet (having woken up at 5 in the evening). i have these in-ear headphones that block out most outside noise if the volume is turned up enough, so i put on godspeed you black emperor! and took off. the movie had me in a rather surreal mood to begin with, and biking around a city that is full of people (contrary to popular myth, new york is more like the city that doesnt sleep all that much, but on the weekends, madrid truly never sleeps) without being able to hear them only exacerbated it. in a good way though. with in-ear headphones on you can hear yourself breathing through your own head rather than through the air outside (like with earplugs), and it sounds the way peoples' breathing in movies sounds when they are running for their lives. i biked to the top of a very large hill behind a cathedral that overlooks what im told used to be the royal hunting grounds but is now just a part of the city. the hill is steep enough that it might be technically a cliff, and at the top of it is a parking lot with no lights, so it's quite a view. eventually i got bored, biked home, and spent 3 hours lying awake in bed, less scared than expected i to be but certainly feeling pensive. i had that feeling of intense emotion of some indeterminable type, and the presence of many important thoughts that were just below the surface of my consciousness. its a feeling of being very emotionally and intellectually intense but without the emotional and intellectual content. the last time i felt that way was in amarillo, texas, last summer. i didnt do a very good job of explaining it then, and i dont think i am this time either.

the whole evening i also had that in-a-movie feeling. since moving to new york, i finally gave up the romantic idea that interesting things just happen to you, the way they do in the movies. new york city is a place where you expect fate to be lying in wait around every corner, but it isnt. around every corner is just more road, and more life, the same as the one you just came down. if you want something interesting to happen, you have to make it happen. i know that sounds more like a motivational speech than a lament, but for me, that realization was one of the most disillusioning ones ive ever had to face.

my life isnt, by most traditional accounts, boring; touring in a punk band, working as a messenger in new york, living in a loft in bushwick, traveling europe solo, these things sound to some people like adventures. but the thing is that every step of the way, i had to make it happen myself, which takes all of the adventure out of it. adventure is what happens when you arent expecting it. it surprises you, and even if its mundane, the novelty is what makes it adventure. take wandering around an unknown city. if you get bored and take a train to a place you've never been and wander around, its just sort of whatever. but if you accidentally get off on the wrong stop and wander around because you have to, thats adventure. for so long i was waiting for interesting stuff to just happen to me like it does in the movies. turn the corner and bam! theres a natural disaster that forces the hero out of you, or the weirdo with the idea that changes your life, or the girl of your dreams. but if you turn a corner in new york, its just the same people. everywhere you go its just the same people. faux-hawks, crew cuts and euro-mullets, its the same fucking people. but that night, after the movie, i was expecting something to just happen. that was the kind of mood i was in. i thought i was going to get hit by a car, see an alien land or a bomb go off, get shot at, or fall in love. nothing would have surprised me because i was expecting to be suprised. by the time i woke up the next morning, it was gone.

2007-07-10T22:28:00.000-04:00

something strikes me as being somewhat comical about a 22-year-old who has just finished college (and i allow myself to cheat on that point a little due to the fact that on thursday afternoon, after my spanish final, both of those things will be recently true of me) writing a livejournal entry about the catcher in the rye, but i didn't read it in high school, so here i am. i decided recently that trying to force myself to read the brothers karamozov so as to better myself intellectually (and to give myself credibility when quoting the famous proto-existentialist line that says something to the effect of "if god is dead anything is permitted", varying somewhat with the translation) and in reality getting nowhere (im on page 80-something out of nearly 1000 after almost 2 weeks) is less productive than reading less ambitious books that i will actually finish. i've been trying to catch up on the classics that i skipped over so i bought a copy of the catcher in the rye yesterday afternoon and read it yesterday evening in a little over 2 hours.

i've been thinking lately about the mixed messages that a traditional american upbringing sends us (share and cooperate like a good kindergartener, but remember that the greatest good comes to the socieity in which each of its members acts strictly according to his rationally conceived self-interest), particularly in the form of literature. i bought a copy of to kill a mockingbird some weeks ago for the 13-year-old that i tutor (for the absurd hourly pay of 12€) because it was one of my favorite books when i was little younger (i think) than him. it turned out to be too hard for him - his english is a little worse than my spanish - and yesterday, after several hours of staring at the ceiling so as to avoid another dry dostoevskian sentence, i picked it up and read it cover to cover in one fairly long sitting. i still love it. certain parts made me hopeful (no small feat, as some of you may know), certain parts made me furious, and during certain parts i could hear my mom doing the voices, with their alabama drawls, and feel lucy curled up next to me on the couch (see my previous entry about the lost feeling of home), and i nearly cried. one line, however, caught my attention for the first time: "the one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." it made me think about the way that our culture's heros, the atticus finchs, are honored for denying the status quo in the face of tremendous popular opposition, but i find that when i defend animal rights activists who use extra-legal tactics i'm compared with abortion clinic-bombing christians and reminded that change comes from letter-writing, ANSWER marches, and, above all, voting. of course atticus finch, the law-abiding citizen that he is, fights his battle in the coutroom, but our founding fathers weren't afraid to shed a little blood, and harriet tubman does not appear to have been too concerned with what the then current administration and police force considered property. which founding father said the famous thing about refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots? jefferson? i have no idea.

this may appear half-baked and i suppose it is; i've only recently begun to think about some of these things and i haven't the head for facts, quotes, and dates. the point is that i wholeheartedly agree with the above quote (the one about majority rule, not the one about the tree of liberty) and in some ways, i dont mind the comparison to the fanatical right-wing christians because they believe so strongly in their principles that they are willing to do what they feel is necessary to see them put into practice, and damn the state that moves too slowly (or in the opposite direction). of course, i disagree with their principles and would rather bomb the churches themselves that spawn such ideals, but such, i suppose is the dialectic (i know that philosophy major was good for something!). no government, i've heard it said, can give you liberty (was that a famous anarchist writer or a punk band?), and no state that operates within the boundaries of this culture will ever give liberty to animals or the earth.

when i read animal farm in 7th grade, the overt message that we were to absorb was dictatorship=bad, but the implication hidden carelessly just below the surface of the curriculum was, "thank god our government is nothing like that" (thank him figuratively and literally, of course, as we are one nation under Him, having the life choked out of us slowly by the pillow that He has been holding over our faces for some thousand years now, sighing about what embarrassments we all are). somehow i doubt orwell would be too stoked about the state of things (pun intended), the same orwell who wrote, "every line of serious work i have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalinarianism and for democratic socialism as i understand it." no to put words in his mouth, God rest his soul, but i doubt that the same man who appears to have sided most strongly with the anarchists during the spanish civil war (the revolutionary socialists being a close second), understood "democractic socialism" to mean clintonian liberalism with a solid welfare system and high OSHA standards for the wage-slaves (not to suggest, dad, that these things arent good, just that they arent nearly good enough).

it seems like the only people who remember these books after graduating from high school are the english teachers, who, in my experience, tend to be an apolitical lot (not to mention beaten into submission by the hollow curriculums of no child left behind), and they often leave out that lee, orwell, and salinger might have been trying to make a fucking point. as with anything subversive, the powers that be have pulled off the time-honored "if you can't beat 'em, assimilate 'em" approach that reduced the entire black liberation movement, of which pacifism and civil rights were only a part, to the face of an uncontroversial martyr who had such a nice dream that one time, and which we celebrate once a year by congratulating ourselves on what a fine job we've done setting things right. luckily someone offed him before he had a chance to be disappointed by the ongoing, deliberate, urban racial segregation that the "success" of the 60s either failed to prevent or, depending on whom you ask, encouraged (this is a subject about which i know only a little, so if my timeline is off, forgive me, for i believe that the spirit of my criticism is valid), all of which resulted in the current state of affairs which most liberals seem to regard as basically a damn shame and some fucking worthless academics like samuel huntington have the nerve to blame on the defeatist, blame-shifting "political culture" of blacks in the contemporary urban ghetto.

the slave-owners got one thing right: the blacks were and are much like animals, as are all of us, white and otherwise, because we fucking are animals. of all the trite explanations i've heard for what seperates us from the rest of them (we learn from our mistakes? i call bullshit!), one of the few compelling accounts i've heard is that we apparently have the capacity to wreak obscene amounts of destruction upon the planet and everything else living on it, and, what's more, to rationalize it. lions, presumably, do not feel the stabs of a guilty conscience when they kill and eat their prey, yet the same people who are so proud of their consciences that tell them that there is something deeply wrong about taking food from a multinational corporation, nay, are ethically offended by it, will defend a system which, among other things, results in beagles being tortured in order to ensure the safety of consumer cosmetic products. you want an indictment of the way things are? i dont need theory: fuck the nation, fuck peter singer, fuck emma goldman for that matter. i contend that any cultural and philosophical framework that defends the rights and properties of these and other torturers against the peaceful (in the long and rich history of the ALF and ELF no human or animal has been harmed in the course of an action, yet they are the #1 domestic terrorism threat according to the FBI) liberators of these animals - many of whom are currently serving sentences of several years or more federal prisons - is FUCKED, right to its rotten idealogical core, QED! so head earnestly for the polls, and if you so much as even think about a molotov cocktail, you are as bad as the abortion clinic-bombers. well, than so i am.

now, a word of indemnification: many intelligent folks whose hearts, i believe, are in the right places (or close to them), have challenged my more militant sentiments on purely tactical grounds. i believe that there is a serious debate to be had about the usefulness of various forms of activism and resistance, and though it is probably obvious on which side i ultimately rest my convictions, i do believe that there are good points to be made by both sides. this... whatever this is, however, is not concerned with practical concerns, but with the ethics themselves of thinking outside of the traditional means of attempting to work for chance, thinking outside of the law (which is, according to the ideology underlying many of my politics, part of the problem itself).

"let the fires of justice burn away this plague" - 7 generations

2007-07-07T23:11:00.000-04:00

i tried to go to paris this morning, but to no avail. i took a nap and got up at 3am, took a bus to where i thought i could catch the bus to the airport, and was wrong. walked a couple of miles, found the bus to the airport, got on. turns out that it drops you off in the same neighborhood as the airport, but not at the terminal. followed a group of dutch travelers from the bus stop to the airport, getting to the checkin counter 3 minutes before they closed. got my boarding pass, feeling a little smug, and discovered that the plane was delayed and they were promising more information in an hour. fell asleep on the floor with one earphone in listening to the movielife. 6:30am: expected departure time 1pm. fuck that. i was only going to be there for a day anyway, and i dont fancy spending 7 more hours in the airport. they are refunding the money to my credit card, and i went home and went back to bed.
cooked some good pasta sauce from scratch, spent the day in bed listening to music and thinking. im meeting a friend for dinner in 15 and maybe seeing 28 weeks later. i guess ill have to go to paris next time im in europe.

2007-07-04T22:07:00.000-04:00

the show in hengelo was fucking amazing. it was a tiny club, capacity supposedly 125 but maybe twice the size of CCAS, and not even totally full. the first three bands were european youth crew hardcore, and not bad. the carry on cover was a bit chilly (has it been long enough? i dont think quite yet). eye of judgment played second to last and fucking rocked. they are so heavy and played pretty tight, plus they rock the over-the-top XVX. "I'm not saying we're better than you/I'm saying you're worse than us/Your lack of discipline/Is a disgrace to humankind". wow. then, earth crisis. holy shit. earth crisis playing on a stage about 2 feet high in front of maybe 60 kids, the majority of whom knew most of the words to at least the hits. highlights included the most ridiculous sing-along to firestorm ive ever seen, finally getting to see ultramilitance played live (karl dedicated it to me because i asked them to play it before the set, but i was much more excited about the fact that they played it than the shout-out), and mike raio dancing with his arm in a sling. it was crazy seeing them play on such a small stage, with so much of the right kind of energy in the room, and karl is not afraid to share the mic. jake, i wish you were there. the dutch are a tall people. seriously, everyone at the show was at least 6´2". the disadvantage was that i couldnt see the band if there was a single person in front of me; the advantage was that if i wanted to climb up on top of the crowd there was always a huge dude there to help me up.

after the show we got an international xvx crew to push the van up to speed so we could pop the clutch, and josh dropped gijs, satina and me off at gijs' friend's house in arnhem. the next morning the three of us walked to the train station, blah blah blah, and i was back in madrid. oh yeah, but the fuckers at the airport security checkpoint didnt let me bring my peanut butter (which is impossible to find in spain) or vegan nutella (which is hard to find almost anywhere) with me. its solid fucking food, but apparently it counts as a "gel" and could be a bomb. what the fuck ever. i was so blown, because i was really looking forward to eating that stuff when i got back. oh well, que pasó pasó.

2007-07-02T17:13:00.000-04:00

after antwerp, we drove to amsterdam to stay at the apartment of a vacationing friend of theirs named john. he lives above the healthfood store where he and gijs work. this store sells vegan smoked gouda. holy shit. it is made by the same brand that makes the mozzarella used by the vegan pizza pace in budapest which im told has the best vegan cheese pizza in the world. i dont think ill have a chance to check it out this time around, so i guess ill just have to come back to europe some time.
on friday, the show was in east germany and we didnt feel like making the drive, so we hung out in amsterdam. we ate maoz falafel, which is extremely mediocre, and i had hot chocolate which was fantastic. it rained on and off all day and was probably in the high 50s. apparently summer has not yet hit northern europe. right before it started to rain hard, we saw a belligerently drunk street magician. in the 45 minutes that we watched him try to draw a crowd large enough to actually start his show, we saw him do one coin trick (his french drop wasnt bad and drunkenness did not seem to impair his sleight of hand abilities), one cigarette trick, light a torch and then leave it on the ground until it burned out, try to light it again later and fail, spin a bullship around his head for a total of maybe 10 minutes (stumbling occasionally), and try to crack it twice successfully and once unsuccessfully. he spent most of the in between time muttering to himself, telling the same jokes over and over (to two guys walking together: "so when did you two get back together"), telling people to come up to the edge of his "stage" or fuck off, and calling random walkers-by "homos" and "dickheads". he eventually gave up, packed up his box, and went with a friend to get dinner at the marriot, without ever starting his routine. we were all laughing nonstop, and mike raio and i were particularly amused. it might have been the funniest thing ive ever seen, although im sure my retelling of it is unconvincing.
friday was randy's birthday, so once gijs got off work, we all ("we" at this point including 4 americans, one roman, one brazillian, two austrians, and gijs and his partner satina from holland) had dinner at a chain japanese place called wagamamas. it was the best meal id had in weeks, and i was so hungry that i ate one and a half entrees, two appetizers, and a bowl of rice, for a grand total of 20€. it wasnt cheap, but it was worth it.
randy, mike, and kelly were fixated on going clubbing, kelly reminding me that i promised her that some day i would and randy pulling the youll-ruin-my-birthday-if-you-dont card. i relented but when we got back to the van and discovered that it wouldnt start, i was relieved to be off the hook. we walked back 3 miles or so to john's and went to bed.
the next morning, some of us took a cab back to the van to meet the dutch equivalent of AAA, which satina had called pretending to be john's girlfriend (who was on vacation with him). in holland, they try to actually fix your car instead of just towing it, which is nice. the guy took a look and determined that it was the starter, so we got all set to push while he pulled with his little mini-minivan so that gijs could pop the clutch once we got up to speed. it worked, but in the process mike got his arm slammed in the door, and then it stalled. the repair guy called reinforcements, and this guy that i call the all-purpose dutchman showed up on a motorcycle (wearing fully terminator-esque futuristic motorcycle gear). he hit the starter with a pipe and make the van turn on, and then looked at mike raios arm and pronounced it broken. we were in awe, and i was temped to ask if he could help me with applied differential calculus or my plumbing, since i was convinced that he was the guy to call for just about anything. 4 hours of mike sitting in a hospital later, it turned out that he was wrong and mike's arm wasnt broken.

that brings me to saturday late afternoon, and i think ill pause here to reflect on some things that ive been thinking about since i got back.
first of all, i think that, as is the case with so many things, balance is important when it comes to addressing the issues that i was talking about before, RE: making connections with civilians/muggles/rando comandos (for the last term i credit katy otto). im often afraid of culturally ghetto-izing myself by spending too much time around people that i agree with. i dont like to take for granted that im right about everything or spend too much time nerding out about the handful of subjects that interest my peers, but too long away from people like that and i get very lonely. this weekend was good, and now im ready to spend the next two weeks around people that have no idea what "queer" means, why anyone would choose not to drink, or that there might be (notice my use of the word "might" as a hedge; im not trying to say that i know the right answers either) fatal problems with capitalism, patriarchy, industrial civilization, or what have you. some day, maybe ill commit fully to radical ideologies and the lifestyles they entail, get a throat tattoo (i really want one but am clearly not, at this point, ready to commit to looking like a weirdo to 99% of people, including potential employers/girlfriends, and bumming out my mom), and embrace the fact that i really only belong with a small group of people, or, on the other hand, nihilism could win out, and i might find myself living a comfortable materialistic life, eating brie, and reminiscing about my "anarchist vegan straightedge phase". right now, im stuck in between commitment and doubt, so ill keep trying to find the right balance to maintain my sanity (which sometimes feels like a much more pressing concern than figuring out The Answer anyway).

on that note, i had a really long conversation with kelly about the need for connection. some people can be not only happy but even productive on their own, while some dont have the temperament for solitude. i chose to come to madrid partially because i wanted to force solitude upon myself, without the distractions of television or the internet (at least, not at home), so i could catch up on my reading and learn to sink or swim - emotionally - on my own. sometimes i think im too dependent on my friends to feel ok, and sometimes i think that they arent even really enough, but maybe just enough to not totally lose it. i need to either find whatever it is that feels like its missing, or learn to accept that it doesnt exist and figure out how to go from there. so far, it hasnt worked, but talking to kelly gave me a lot to think about in terms of what friends can offer, the need for intimate contact ("intimate" not to be conflated with "sexual"), and a whole slew of related subjects. ill probably be thinking about some of this stuff for weeks.

gmap pedometer of my trip

the points are just the cities where i stopped, not the actual locations within the cities. i also skipped utrecht, NL, where i transferred trains en route from arnhem to eindhoven.

2007-06-29T03:20:00.000-04:00

i left school early on wednesday, and stopped at caprabo to pick up some apples, crackers, and a bar of chocolate. had i know that my next actual meal was going to be at 2am, i would have stocked up a little more. i got to the airport a little late and was worried about missing my flight. turns out that i was fine, because not only did i board 10 minutes before it was supposed to leave, but it ended up getting delayed. the shuttle bus from the airport in munich to the train station also turned out to be an hour longer than i thought, and then because i got to the train station so late, i missed all of the express rush hour trains and had to take a train to schweinfurt with an hour long layover in some city that starts with "w". i finally got to schweinfurt at 11:30, after 11 hours of travel. i had of course missed the show, but i didnt really care, because im here more for the company than the music. and what a relief the company was/is. being around friends for the first time in a month feels so good. we somehow arranged to be able to sleep upstairs in the backstage area with a carload of swedes. we walked upstairs into the kitchen, where earth crisis' leftover food was sitting out. the walls were covered with tags from mostly US bands that had being touring through there since as early as 98, including madball, agnostic front, the bouncing souls, boysetsfire, and hundreds of others. there were a lot of pictures of penises and really inane things written on the walls. im not sure why, but for some reason i expected a little more maturity from musicians mostly in their late 20s and early 30s. randy tagged "gather attrition invisible tour 2k7" and we decided to play our mp3s through the van stereo outside of the shows.
the next morning we drove to antwerp. it took about 7 hours and i spent most of the ride talking to kelly and randy. it felt good to talk to someone that makes me feel understood, and not just because we have a lot of politics in common. we got to antwerp and mike only had 2 people on the guest list, so we hung outside of the venue for a while while mike went and talked to bands, and eventually we got scott vogel to throw 3 more of us on the guest list because he knows kelly. the rest we just snuck in by reusing wrist bands. terror in europe is pretty insane. there were like 800 people at the show and people went nuts. earth crisis, on the other hand, only managed to motivate about 30 people to sing along and another 20 to dance. a third or maybe even half of the show left after terror. despite the lousy fan reaction (which i guess makes sense, because the broke up 6 years ago which means that anyone that saw them the first time around is probably at least 20 by now, and the majority of hardcore kids are younger than 20) they played really well and i had a good time.

2007-06-25T09:03:00.000-04:00

so there is another person here to whom i can vent. she doesnt drink and had a straightedge roommate at BU, so she gets the whole straightedge thing. i also checked my biblical facts against her knowledge - she is jewish - and in that passage in leviticus the orders are seperated by some other things. ok, so its not in the same breath. i think my point probably still stands.

so this weekend i did basically nothing. on friday night i saw pirates of the carribean 3, which was not very good and didnt make that much sense because i never saw the second one, and saturday i saw shrek 3. during the day, i read. i read terry goodkind's new sword of truth book, which came out last summer in hardback but i was too cheap to buy it, and homage to cataluña, which intensified my interest in both history in general, and, particularly, reading about revolutionary moments in history, eg. the spanish civil war, the russian revolution, etc. i remember reading a novelized version of a tv show called the young indiana jones chronicles when i was much younger, and in one of them he is hanging out in moscow during the revolution and spends time with bolsheviks, menshaviks, and people of all sorts of affiliations. i found it fascinating at the time to read about a moment when divergent ideologies had a chance of shaping the politics of a nation. and imagining anarchists practically running a city as large as barcelona, even for only a few months, is quite a trip. yesterday i read michael chabon's new novel, the yiddish policeman's union, which was quite good. some people have heard me remark lately that i would like to be a writer but lack the skill to produce anything creative. if i could write fiction, i would want it to be a combination of chabon's style and camus'; as bleak and philosophical as camus but with chabon's grasp of character and sense of humor.

ive started to try to tackle the brothers karamosov, but its slow going so far. im about 50 pages in and so far its basically a prologue to stuff actually happening and characters being developed. if the whole thing is this detatched and perfunctory, i wont make it into the three-digit page numbers. why do the people with the best ideas so often write the most boring crap? im not far enough into dostoyevsky to say if this is the case for him, but it certainly is with a good chunk of the philosophy i had to read in college. by the way, im really enjoying talking about college in the past tense. nevermind that im technically not done until 3 weeks from now.

2007-06-20T08:55:00.000-04:00

on monday i was sitting outside at the patio with a bunch of kids, and somehow the conversation landed on craigslist sex-work, which several of my friends have done. the unanimous opinion of the table was that if a straight guy was paid to have a man go down on him, he probably wouldnt be able to finish, because of some kind of mental block. first of all, given that i have friends who have done this who qualify as something like straight, i know that isnt what happens. but regardless, to whatever extent that is true, its obvious to me that that is a socialized reaction; that straight men, even progressive straight men, are repulsed by the idea of another man's lips, hands, or naked body, appear to me to have their basis solely in culture. "yeah, im all for gay marriage, but i would never kiss a man, because that would be disgusting". im not saying that every man is actually attracted to other men, but how much grosser would that really be than kissing a women that you werent attracted to? its kind of frustrating for me to be in this summer camp bubble of people that have had no exposure to the ideas that compose the shared framework of most of the people i interact with. when i try to explain that many if not most of my friends are queer (according to some sense of the word, myself included, although i hesitate to self-identify as such because i dont want to appear to minimize someone else's empowerment), 9 times out of ten i get "wait, so he's bi?". or when i try to explain why i dont drink - which i hate doing and only do when people ask and then get offended that i dont want to tell them - if im in the mood to give them a more complete answer (ive taken to just saying that i dont like it, to avoid frustrating conversations), the part about how i perceive a relationship between drinking culture and certain abusive or dominant elements of our culture at large, people have no idea what im talking about. disagree with me, fine. debate me even. at this point, i almost miss being told that im offensively coopting someone else's struggle, because that rebuke contains the implicit message that my attempts to understand gender dynamics are aknowledged and understood. well, almost. and when it comes to sex work, forget it. i cant understand how the same people who participate in a culture that commodifies sex, replaces intimacy with conquest and domination, and in which all of the rules magically disappear after one drink, can really think that a consensual (or at least, as consensual as is possible when there is money involved) interactions with a sex worker can be unethical and disgusting. how can people take themselves seriously when clinging to puritannical moral systems so selectively? is like the passage in leviticus, in which god condemns men who lie with other men. he also condemns eating shellfish and wearing clothing made of mixed fabrics in the same breath, but you dont see too many protests that lobster and cotton-poly blends are responsible for 9/11. in this respect, my roommate, inti, is a godsend. he is a sex and gender studies major, and the only person in this program to whom i can vent.

this is not meant to be an indictment of drinking. i gave up that fight a long time ago. but my frustration with the college culture of drinking knows no bounds.

2007-06-19T08:47:00.000-04:00

ok, time to play catch-up. luckily, my memory is bad enough that i've already forgotten most of what i did last week, so ill just cover the highlights.

cordoba was much less interesting than grenada. the hotel was also not as fancy, but the tradeoff was that it had a pool. then the trade-back-off was that the pool wasnt heated and as soon as we got to cordoba it dipped by about 5 degrees (celsius). i and about 4 others went for it, spent a few minutes trying to fool ourselves into thinking that we were having fun, and then eventually gave up because it was freakin cold. i think jason was in the longest, for a total of maybe an hour.

dave and i decided to go for a walk to find food, and it turns out that the neighborhood in which we stayed is pretty dead. eventually we found a mall - thats right, an actual mall in spain - with a grocery store. we sat on the patio until about 1am eating sandwhiches that either consisted of brie, ham, and avocado or just avocado and salt, and argued about right-wing fiscal policy. it was probably the most good-natured political debate ive had in years, which is especially suprising given that, despite being socially progressive, he is a pretty hardcore neo-classical capitalist (or is it neo-liberal? von mises/FA Hayek? someone help me out).

the next morning we got up early to visit another mosque, this one gigantic, arcaded, and containing within it a cathedral that was build hundreds of years later by a king, i believe charles I, who didnt want to destroy the mosque because it was pretty. i guess he was happy to just kick out all of the people that might have used it.

we then walked around the old jewish quarter, which was small and kind of depressing, compared to the resplendence of the catholic and even islamic artifacts. but anyone that knows anything about history will not be suprised. i got lost, sat on a bench for an hour thinking, wandered around, and ended up eating burger kind fries for lunch because it was the only thing i could find that was vegan and not an overpriced salad without dressing.

on monday i went to the local velodrome with juan and his/my new friend pedro. a velodrome, for those who dont know, is a track for bike racing. it is relatively short and has very steep banked turns. it was a fucking blast. pedro won the first few races when we were just messing around because he has thighs like an iron man triathalete and a higher gear ration than juan or me. however, once we started taking it a little bit more seriously, i won the last three in a row by drafting off of him until the last bank, and sprinting down it to overtake him. each time i was able to hold onto my lead just long enough to finish first. now i see why all of my friends in new york are so into this shit.

sometime early last week, i finished the wind-up bird chronicle. the first half was probably the best book ive ever read, but then, about five minutes after i told dave that so far, it was the best book i'd ever read, murakami did that thing that i sort of hate where writers start skipping around with their chronology, and i lose my grip on the character. it lost a little bit of its mystery and cohesiveness, and by the end, i was re-attatched to the fate of the protagonist but a. not quite as fiercely as before and b. the end made only a litle bit of sense. im still not really sure what happened, or what about half of the charaters and sub-plots had to do with anything else, although im suspicious that it is something. still one of the better books i've read, probably better than kafka on the shore, and mom, i recommend reading it.

a few days later i finished love in the time of cholera. i had mixed feelings. marquez is a genius of description, very lighthearted with a good sense of humor, but i think his characters are weak, and seemingly deliberately so. i remember having a similar feeling about chronicle of a death foretold. it wasnt until the very end that any of that characters started to really take shape, and even then, only fermina daza and not the supposed protagonist, although the line is a bit blurry. still, it was a nice book with a very sweet ending, and had it been a little shorter, i think i would have been entirely content without there being any characters.

thursday night i went out to dinner with a friend of a friend, who, unlike the friend, is not a vegan straightedge hardcore kid but an air force pilot ex-hardcore kid. he was really nice and i had a good time, although i got a little tired of the conspiratorial bro-talk about that girl in that restaurant or whatever.

friday night was my first european alleycat. i followed juan and pedro and got third out of maybe 10 or 15. it was really short, basically a downtown sprint, and ended in the police chasing us with sirens on for going the wrong way. we lost them in the crowd of people in plaza mayor, though i did spend the rest of the night flinching at every flashbulb because the tattoo on my leg is pretty damn identifiable.

afterward we stood on the street in lavapies drinking beer or lemonade. i ended up talking a lot of the time to a spanish kid that was raised in australia and therefore speaks english. he is an ex-messenger turned boiler room stock trader (im not really sure what that means, but i know its not exactly legal) who is currently about to make an extra hundred K with some not so legal stuff involving diamonds. he does about a bag of coke a day and talks like it.

saturday night i went out to dinner with a friend and had a fabulous time. it was the first real vegan meal ive eaten in weeks, and despite the 20€ price tag i was stoked. we walked around for a while, met up with some other people, saw oceans 13 in english (i tried to read the spanish subtitles), and then walked in the rain for hours to get home. the metro is closed after 1:30 (at this point its about 2:30) and i am too cheap for a cab, so i convinced her and the guy we were with at that point to walk home a couple of miles away in the rain. it took about an hour, and i had fun. it took me another 45 minutes of walking about half an hour on a bus to get home.

on sunday i listened to music, took a walk, and read. all day.

yesterday i went to my first day of my new job tutoring spanish kids in english. ive thought of myself for years as someone who doesnt really like young kids. i never know how to talk to them, because i had a hard time wrapping my mind around someone not being intellectually capable to have a normal conversation with me, and i also dont like how rowdy they tend to be in groups. boy was i wrong. the two boys, 13 and 14, are totally sweet, good-mannered, and attentive. but the real treat turned out to be the 6-year-old girl, clara. she is the sweetest, most shy little thing ive ever met, and i want to adopt her and take her home and spend all day every day saying the names of colors and writing them in cursive with her. i very quickly caught on to how you need to talk to a 6-year-old, and i made up a game wherein we count to three in english together and then say a word, such as "yellow", that she is too shy to say to me by herself. i cant wait to go back this afternoon. and im also getting paid 12€ an hour (which is about $16) for this. what a deal.

2007-06-14T08:53:00.002-04:00

the bus ride from madrid to grenada is around 5 or 6 hours and there was some kind of weird rule that we couldnt use the bathroom on the bus because the trip wasnt long enough, so i spent a good chunk of the ride being extremely thirsty and not drinking anything, because, as those of you who know me are probably aware, i have a bladder like a 3 year old. we stopped once at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere for 40 minutes, and i got offered all kinds of plant-based table scraps from people who had just discovered that i am vegan. we got to the hotel, and inti and i went up to our room. i felt like an imposter, because it was hands down the nicest hotel room into which i´d ever set foot. or wait, did we go straight to the alhambra? maybe we did that first. no, thats right, we dropped off our stuff and then went to the alhambra. it was stunning. it turns out that i love arab architecture from the middle ages; the materials and designs are simple but somehow breath-taking. if im ever rich, ill have a courtyard built in my home like that one, because i swear it was the most peaceful place on earth.

our guided tour was only of the alhambra, so after it was over, we wandered around the other sites in a pack. i ditched the pack on the tower in the... shit. the something that starts with "a" and is across a courtyard from the alhambra. whatever. i was sick of being around people, and i had a hunch that the gardens of the generalife (i know what you´re thinking, its pronounced ghen-eh-rhal-LEE-fay) would be better experienced in relative solitude. i was right. turns out that the gardens are even more peaceful than the courtyard at the alhambra, and since i wasnt with a group, i managed to avoid seeing or hearing humans for stretches of up to 5 minutes at a time. i spent the latter half of my walk fantasizing about building a commune designed after the generalife in which talking was restricted to certain areas. yeah, when im a millionaire.

i found falafel on my walk back to the hotel, and while i was eating it, spotted the first south-indian restaurant i´ve seen in spain. i made a mental note of its location and promised myself that i´d return when i got hungry again. i spent a while reading, took a long shower, and then tried to walk back to the indian place. i got lost, realized that i had forgotten my map, wandered around a bit, then came back to the hotel and made a PB&J (bringing a loaf of bread and jars of PB and J turned out to be a very smart move). after "dinner", i went to a friend´s hotel room and sat in her bed reading while she watched a movie on her ipod. as far as i know, she was the only other person in the hotel that didnt go out that night. her friends kept telling her that she was missing out on the experience of grenada and that shed never have this chance again unless she came back. she replied that she didnt think that getting drunk at a club full of dancing tourists was really essential to the experience, and i think somewhere a straightedge band got its wings when she said that.

the next day we went to some old cathedrals and talked about gothic architecture. i was fascinated, since i never took art history, but i wont repeat the lecture.

the next stop was the alcazín (i probably misspelled that), the arab neighborhood in the hills across from the alhambra. of course it stopped being an arab neighborhood after 1492, but apparently it is starting to be repopulated. the tour ended at a little park with a great view of the city, where seemingly homeless men played beautiful classical spanish guitar for change, and stray dogs wandered around stealing hearts - including mine. there was this one dog... he was seriously the sweetest thing i´ve ever seen (except you, scout, you know you´re the only girl for me!). he was very mellow but a face-licker which gets me every time. unfortunately, he didnt try to follow me home.

we ate lunch at a super fancy restaurant in the hills. they made me a special salad without the cheese (delicious) and a plate of grilled marinated veggies (even delicious-er), and everyone else complained that there was too much fat in their steak.

next time: córdoba, el velodromo, and concluding thoughts on haruki murakami´s the wind-up bird chronicle

2007-06-05T15:07:00.000-04:00

in case you were in suspense, i did not get a job as a messenger here. im only in town for 6 weeks and i speak very little spanish. plus there are only 20 messengers in this town, so even if i was better qualified, the likelihood of there being an opening would be low.

so back to... where was i, sunday?
in the morning i walked to school to use the computers, but it was closed, so i walked back. i spent about 5 hours reading, and then went down to lavapiés to meet up with juan.
juan is a messenger here that i met while he was living in new york for three months and working there. he was following me during the haloween alleycat and we started talking. fast forward 8 months and im living in his city. given that the only other people i know here are nyu students, and im not going to learn to speak spanish by hanging out with them, it seemed like a good idea to get in touch.
i met him at his house, where, not for the first time, i had to explain that i dont drink without looking like i was refusing an offer to hang out. we sat on his deck and i drank pineapple juice while he drank beer and smoked cigarettes. you know that part of hanging out with a relatively new friend when you dont really know what to talk about? well its even harder in spanish. but i managed to deal with it. after a while we went with his girlfriend to a falafel shop so i could eat, and then to a bar where i had another pineapple juice and he had more beers.
i asked him to accompany me to the welding shop the next day to translate, and not only did he say yes but he lent me his spare bike to use in the meantime. it felt good to ride again.
monday was the first day of class. its long - 4 hours - but not that difficult. so far we have just been reviewing, but i already feel like my spanish is better than a good portion of the class, so i dont expect to struggle. plus, no one else (to my knowledge) has a madrileño friend to practice with. at least not yet.
after class i wrote my last entry, but had to leave in a hurry to meet juan at work.

after leaving his work, we biked back to my place to get my bike. we went to the welder, who said that his son, the one who did the welding, wouldnt be back until later or possibly tomorrow. he also said it would probable cost 15€. we went to a bar. more pineapple juice and beer. we nerded out about bike parts. ah, the universal language of bike nerddom! he knows a guy that is selling some old italian stuff and might have some cheap cinelli track drops for me. it then occurred to me that i could buy a regular seat collar from the bike shop and use that to keep my seatpost in place until i took care of the welding. that solution was perfectly serviceable and cheaper. plus i didnt have to wait.

we rode to a neighborhood in central madrid where are the young people hang out (up until now i had been wondering where the nikes where hiding). we found an italian place that would make pizza without cheese, and sat in a plaza eating and drinking... pineapple juice and beer. i swear the guy drinks like 15 beers a day - yesterday he drank about 7 over the course of about 5 hours) - and never gets even the slightest bit drunk.

i biked home, which felt fucking great, and finished what is the what. after an hour or so of feeling nihilistic and hopeless (the picture that eggars paints of humanity and civilization is not a positive one), i ate some food, took a shower, clipped my toenails and flossed. i sat back down at my desk wearing a bathrobe and realized that even though nothing matters and all of life is suffering, its not really so bad. then i did my spanish homework.

after class today, i walked with an nyu kid to a retrospective of the photographer sebastiao salgado´s work in africa, which, coincidentally, included a lot of photos of the dinka tribe, a member of which is the main character in what is the what. my mind is still spinning with questions about eurocentrism, paternalism/cultural relativism, and human "rights". im also very new at trying to appreciate visual arts, and im not yet very good at appreciating or criticizing documentary photography. if i have any great epiphanies later today, ill be sure to let you know.

in two hours i have to meet nyu for a mandatory visit to the prado. i think that until then ill sit on the patio and read.

2007-06-04T14:11:00.000-04:00

it appears that computer access will be somewhat sporadic in the coming months. the nyu computer lab closes early and is closed all day sunday, and ill be damned if im going to pay to write in this thing. thursday evening we had a walking tour of madrid, and afterward i ended up at a cafe with my new roommate, inti, and two other nyu kids. they had beers, i just sat. like most nyu kids ive ever met, most of the 66 kids in my program want to spend their time here "partying", think that being vegan is insane, are pre-med or business majors or are liberals majoring in humanities, and dont know anything about any of my interests or hobbies. that being said, they are mostly decent, reasonably intelligent people that i think i will enjoy taking classes with. this is an exercise in diplomacy for me, and so far i think ive done pretty well at not being an elitist prick.

on friday, we had orientation. it involved fewer ice-breakers than i expected (there were none). its kind of a blur by now. in the evening, we had a tour of the old stuff in madrid, which was quite interesting. i wish i had taken history classes, because it turns out that its something in which i am very interested. i guess ill just have to read actual books after i finish school. after the tour, i went to a turkish place and had this thing that they called a vegetarian pizza. it was sort of like a falafel burrito and was the first real meal id eaten, not counting the beans and rice that ive been cooking for myself.

the book stores here close really early, and on thursday and friday i was finished late enough with nyu activities that i didnt make it. i spend a couple of hours friday night working on a letter, and went to bed early.

on saturday, we had a day trip to segovia. segovia is fucking gorgeous, as are the castle and cathedral contained therein. more tours, more hanging out with nyu kids, and more allergies. for lunch, i split off from the group, because just about everyone wanted to eat the traditional segovian suckling pig at really expensive restaurants. i found a bar and got a lettuce, tomato, and asparagus sandwhich which tasted like nothing. the girl working at the bar was cute, but i didnt feel up to the challenge of flirting in spanish, so i started wandering to kill time until we were suppose to meet back up. i ran into another nyu kid who told me that there was a modern art museum nearby, so i checked it out. i still dont really get art, but some of it was cool, especially a piece which consisted of little kids´ stickers arranged to form letters which spelled "i love making cutting edge art". har har. after the museum i decided that i might as well brush up on my spanish, plus you only live once, so i went back to the bar, this time with another kid, to get some juice and talk to the waitress. i understood about 75% of what she said, including that she was from valencia but spending her summer in segovia, where there is nothing to do but hang out and drink (shocking), that valencia has beautiful beaches that i should check out if i have a chance, and that my spanish is good enough, albeit barely so, to have a conversation with a stranger, crack a couple of jokes, and give her my number. she blushed, but i dont expect a call, given that segovia is over an hour away from madrid.

we got back to madrid just in time to buy some books. the selection of books in english is rather small and they arent cheap. i bought 4 books for about $70: what is the what, by dave eggars; love in the time of cholera; something by margaret atwood (someone suggested that i read her books but i dont know anything else about her), and the windup bird chronicles by haruki murakami (im sure i just butchered the spelling of his name). i figured that with so much free time and so few distractions, i would be able to break into the classic literature that ive skipped over and dont have the attention span to read when there are alternatives, but gabriel garcia marquez was pretty much the only author i could find. they also had dostoyevsky, but not the brotheres karamozov, which is the one i wanted to read.

more beans and rice for dinner.

i need to go meet juan at his job and see if they have a position for an experienced messenger who does not know the city, speaks poor spanish, and is only free monday-thursday after 1:30. it seems unlikely, but this place is more expensive than i expected, so i could use the extra money. the rest of the weekend and day one of class later.

2007-05-31T12:56:00.000-04:00

a little before noon (your time) on tuesday, i hopped on my bike, carrying nothing but a backpack full of clothing and an ipod. as it turns out, clothing + ipod + random odds and ends = a relatively heavy backpack. im not talking copy-box-heavy, just kind of heavy for a 20-mile ride (ben, if you are reading this, which you probably arent because you dont have a livejournal, you are goddamn crazy to plan on riding across country without paniers because a 20lb bag starts to feel like 100lbs after about an hour of riding). after getting confused in rock creek park, back-tracking a ways, walking my bike up tilden and then riding the rest of the way to reagan national, my back hurt but i felt good. i figured that if i was going to be in an airplane for the next forever or so, a bike ride there wouldnt kill me. then things started to go wrong, as they often due for people whose attitudes about travel are as lax as mine tends to be. normally, i hate being rude to people in the service industry, but when the baggage people told me that i couldnt bring my bike on the plane without a box (which the website specifically said i could do, so long as the pedals were removed and the handlebars turned sideways), i had to make a bit of a fuss, and eventually they relented.

i enjoyed stranger than fiction, wrote a little, and slept.

at a little after 7am (my time), i got off the plane in madrid barajas, and began wandering around the airport looking for the metro. the next thing that went wrong was that i was told i could only bring my bike on the metro on weekends and holidays. ill be damned if was going to shell out for a taxi, so i started riding. i ended up on a highway where bikes were clearly not allowed, so i asked directions at a gas station. several gas stations later, i was on the main road towards town. i noticed that when i put my seat post back in after lending my bike to alexia it was still a little low, so i stopped and adjusted it. upon tightening the seat collar, it snapped. i spent the next couple of hours getting lost in a foreign city with no map (the streetwise madrid map that i bought at borders turned out to be useless because it only included the touristy downtown area) with the seat on my bike all of the way down, killing my knees, and a now even heavier backpack. but the weather was damn nice, so i wasnt too bummed.

then the atm wouldnt let me take out any more money. i called the bank less than a week ago to tell them that i would be in europe, and they still fucking cut off my account after i withdrew 20 euro for food. oh yeah, and i was supposed to give my landlord cash upon arrival. luckily, she was very friendly and didnt mind waiting until i straighened things out to get the money. i did the following things that day: bike (uncomfortably) to where there was supposed to be a bank of america a few miles away (there wasnt), bike another few miles to where the guy at the first wrong location said there was one (there wasnt), bike back toward my new place, take a detour to find a bike shop i was told about (coulnt find it), bought food (shitty selection but dirt cheap prices), nap for 3 hours, read the stranger cover to cover (looking back, i should have brought something else to read, but it was the only thing i had with me), eat, take the metro downtown, wander around, and pay 2.50 for a fucking soda so that id have an excuse to sit at a table outdoors at 12:30am.

now im at the computer lab at nyu. no one is here because the program coordinators are at the airport picking up the people that are arriving today.

to do:
-find bike shop
-borrow american cell phone and call bank of america, probably be rude to service worker again
-eat something
-find bookstore that sells american books and purchase new dave eggars novelç

highlights:
-ive only been asked to repeat myself once and the only person that has offered to speak english to me was the woman at nyu. my spanish must be pretty ok. nevermind that i only understand about 1/3-1/2 of what they say to me.
-nice weather
-nuria is really nice and i think she´s funny, although its always hard to tell in a foreign language.
-no jet lag

2007-04-15T03:22:00.000-04:00

so we hung out at josh's place for a while, waiting for sasha and violet to get back, because they had left bags there when they went somewhere else for the weekend. eventually they showed up, we hung out some more, and then we decided to go eat at some jewish pizza place that is apparently amazing. unfortunately, it was close. and so were the next 4 places we went. seriously. so after about 3 hours and maybe 6 different busses, we found a place that was open, and had the most amazing pizza, pasta, and bruschetta ive ever had. italian tomatoes make american tomatoes taste like cardboard, and the fresh local olive oil was incredible. i had a pizza and split bruschetta with josh, for about 7 euro, which is less than $9, and you dont need to tip here. during the 3-hour oddessey, we happaned across such landmarks as the forum and cat sanctuary. we didnt stop because we were hungry and on a mission, but it was kind of neat to be walking around in a city that is sort of like new york meets southern california, only the cars are smaller and people speak italian, and to run across famous old stuff as though it doesnt mean anything. probably because josh and evelyn are basically the same as the people i hang out with at home, and because sasha and violet are the people i hang out with at home, and because we were searching for vegan food at 9pm, it didnt really feel like i was traveling europe so much as just hanging out. but hanging out - oh wait - near the forum, which is like, a bajillion years old and people fly from all over the world just to look at it. after dinner we came back to josh's and watched second season friends dvds from midnight until 6 when everyone fell asleep.

we woke up at about 3, which infuriated cindy when i told her (her point is that i spent 1/4 of a day, which is 1/12 of my time in rome, watching friends, and then slept in too late to go sight-seeing, and shes not so wrong, but as i explained, it was bonding time with my new friends). i went with josh and evelyn to the print shop where he makes to kill merch and then we drove to central rome to get more food. for 1.4 euro, we got these delicious fried chick pea patties on rolls which were delicious and filling and fucking cheap. then we got soy gelato, which we also did the night before after dinner, though i forgot to mention it. then josh dropped me off at piazza di popoli where i met cindy. we walked to the spanish steps, then in the general direction of the trevi fountain. cindy got confused, and had to look at a map, which she was embarassed about, and then asked for directions. it turned out that we were about 2 blocks away. on the way there, we stopped at a stand where i bought two scarves for 5 euro each, and at this place called zara's, which is like a higher quality, sweatshop free h&m thats all over italy. i didnt buy anything, but if i needed nice looking jackets or clothing to wear when i dress up i might have. then we took a bus back to her neighborhood, got indian food with her friend sarah, and hung out at the bus stop until my bus came. taking the bus back involved transfering, and in rome, there is no indication of which stop you are at, so i had to keep watching the signs outside until i thought i was at the right place. i wasnt. more wandering. then i caught another bus back to josh's, where we ate more pasta and watched more friends. this time, however, until 4, which is a slightly more reasonable hour for bed.

this morning i got up around 1. we hung out at home for a while, then drove into central rome for food. we made it to the jewish pizza place that we tried to go to the day before, which was open this time. and delicious. after lunch, i walked to the coliseum to meet cindy. we walked around outside of the coliseum, which i was too cheap to pay 10 euro to go inside, and then attempted to go into the forum which is free, but closed. i need to work on this whole leaving-the-house-at-3pm thing. but hey, when in rome... we ended up just walking around some more in vatican city, buying dior knock-off glasses for 5 euro, getting food, sitting in a cafe (where cindy had espresso and i didnt get anything), and talking for a few hours. then we hung out at the bus stop for a while, and eventually i actually got on the bus. it was really nice just to hang out with her and talk. then i fucked up transfering busses again, and wandered around. when i got back to josh's we had some food and threw friends on the tv. after a while, we broke out the tattoo machine. josh's friend has a machine that he left with josh, so josh has been doing some tattoos on himself. we decided to do tattoos of each others' bands. he did an attrition lyric on his knee and i got "mosh to kill" on my ankle in cursive (his band is called to kill, and mosh to kill is what they put on their shirts). it turns out that i am as shitty a tattoo artist as i always assumed i would be, because i have a very unsteady hand. my tattoo looks terrible, but whatever, its only permanent. then josh did "god free" on her ankle with an upside down cross in the middle. now we are watching more friends, and i have to leave in 4 hours to catch my plane. that is, if the strike at fiumicino airport is over. see you soon... maybe? or maybe ill be staying on josh's flood for another few days, doing more shitty tattoos on myself. well, maybe that would be a lousy idea. anyway, here are some pictures. sorry, i dont remember how to do an lj-cut without using the client that i use at home, so they are going to just have to take up space all over your friends page. ok, nevermind, i just realized that id have to import the pictures and then re-save them in a smaller file size and that would take forever and i dont feel like doing it. ill put some on my myspace, and leave the tattoo pics for when i get home.

2007-04-14T00:23:00.000-04:00

i got to the airport 2 and a half hours before my flight. i didnt have to wait in any lines, so i just sat around at the terminal for 2 hours. this happens everytime i fly: i show up really early to be on the safe side and get through security in like 5 minutes. its not that i dont believe that sometimes you really have to wait that long, its just that i never seem to need to. so the flight was boring. i slept most of the way, and ate the food i brought because i hadnt ordered vegan food ahead of time. i got to fiumicino outside of rome and wandered around the airport trying to find the train station (note: wandering will be a continual theme here). everyone at the airport probably spoke english, but i hate feeling like a tourist so i tried to avoid talking to people as much as possible. i figure that if i act confident enough, people will assume im a local (especially since ive been told that i look italian). eventually i found the train to termini station, where i did some more wandering. 45 minutes later, i was on the 36 bus to piazza sempione. then more wandering. josh told me to call him when i got to the bus station near his house, but i couldnt find a phone. once you get that far out of central rome, people dont speak english, and all i know in italian is please and thank you. i found a public phone but i couldnt figure out how to use it, so i asked a cab driver for directions, and sort of understood his response. then i wandered some more. i looked up "how do i get to" in a phrase book, but despite the fact that josh says my pronounciation is good no one that i asked seemed to know what the hell i was asking. it turns out that his street is really small and no one knew about it. eventually, however, i found josh's apartment. so that takes care of the first 5 hours i spent in rome. all in all, wandering around in rome when its 65 degrees is not a bad way to spend the afternoon. im sick of typing, so im going to go eat (which is apparently all romans do) and watch friends with evelyn, josh's girlfriend (which is apparently all josh and evelyn do). ciao.

2007-03-20T18:01:00.000-04:00

this morning, in the minutes before waking up, i was dreaming. i dont remember what i dreamt before i started to wake up, but i remember that as i started to wake up, i was still dreaming. in the brief moments in between beginning to wake up and being fully awake, i thought i was waking up somewhere else. i forgot where i was, and my first thought upon becoming conscious was that i was in my bed in my parents' house. i could feel the sun hitting the side of my face the way it always did coming from my window, and i could see the reflection of it on the polished hardwood floors. i smiled and started to open my eyes. then i became confused. i didnt know where i was, but something didnt sound right. then it all came back at once: new york, college, growing up, living in bushwick, the thesis that im working on. my smile fell. for a brief instant, still not entirely awake and aware, i felt heartbroken. then i work up the rest of the way and resumed my real life. the feeling of heartbreak is just a memory, having been replaced by a dull melancholy, an existential funk.

this has happened so many times since i left home for the first time. its not quite a dream, but im not quite awake, either. its somewhere in between. its like living in a memory.

in that moment that im waking up in my old bed, all of the problems, stresses, and doubts are gone. its saturday morning, and im looking forward to the day. but its not saturday and they arent gone. its monday, thursday, sunday, or even saturday, but not the one that i think it is. and they arent gone, just hiding. its not even a real memory, my life was never that simple. its revisionist history to think that there was a time of innocence before i started to have real problems. its always been something. but that is the feeling of home. comfort, safety, familiarity. i miss it and im not sure if ive ever even felt it. i mean, i know ive felt it, for moments, maybe even periods of time long enough to be aware of it, but there was never a part of my life that was always like that. ive been trying so hard to find it for so long. ive looked in other cities, in music, in other people. and ive touched it in all of those things. there have been moments when i was singing or playing drums, biking around manhattan, or waking up next to someone. but they fade.

when i woke up this morning i just wanted to go home. to my parent's house. i wanted to fall asleep in that bed like i used to, and to wake up knowing that id spend the whole day with people that i cared about. but i cant. even if i go home to visit, the people that made that place feel like home are in connecticut, new york, oregon... they've grown and changed and so have i. sometimes i wonder if i still need them like i used to. or, i wonder if i still need the same thing, but they arent it anymore.

2007-01-12T13:30:00.000-05:00

so we picked up a hitchhiker. he was probably in his mid 50's. i think he just goes from town to town working at bars until he feels like moving on, like a christian jack kerouac thats not as smart. after we dropped him off, we saw a beagle on the side of I-65 outside of decatur, alabama. we turned around and pulled over, and three of us got out of the van and tried to go get it. it took us about 15 minutes to get close enough to touch her, because she kept barking and running a few feet back whenever we got within 50 feet. finally she lay down and let me go up to her and pet her. we carried her back into the van and started driving again. she had a collar with the name "gulley" and a phone number, so we called. it turned out that she was a run-away hunting dog and they didnt even seem to care, so we decided to call them back and tell them that she escaped when we pulled over. we felt vindicated when the owner said that she didnt care because they got a good year of hunting out of her and they were probably going to just let her loose anyway.
we drove the rest of the way to nashville, but we werent able to get on the show, so we hung out at danny's friend's house and made buttons out of random things we cut out of magazines. then we drove to bowling green to stay with nathan's friend. i like to town there; it has a cute town square and an organic fair trade coffee shop with delicious soy chai latte.
on to lexington. dirty punk house, rad kids. the kids there are sort of like hardcore kids that found crimethinc. or something, but totally legit. we played a rad show at an infoshop to a small but very appreciative audience, and then drove to louisville.
we built a fire and stayed up late playing uno and "never have i ever". the next day ben and i checked out the local skatepark and it was totally awesome. it was a free outdoor concrete park with lights at night. we both wanted to go back after the show, but it rained.
the show was ok, i liked the space and there were a few really cool kids there, including the ones that we stayed with.
we also got into a fight, which was about the most fun id had in years. this mall-metalcore band that played was drunk and acting shitty, and lee put a kingdom sticker on the back of one of their cabs when the house lights went out so they could do their light show. later on when we were packing up, one of them told davin that the person who did it had to come outside and apologize for being disrespectful or they were going to fight us. i mean, of all of the reasons to get mad at a show, a fuckign sticker. they peeled it off and it didnt leave a mark. shit, attrition and kingdom have done way worse to each other just about every night. i went outside with a big group kids and saw the singer of their band in a shouting match with ben. the details arent important, but it ended with ben telling him to go home, him telling ben to make him, and ben saying ok and laying him out with one punch. he could have said it to just about anybody else (if he told me, i would have walked away), but he picked the wrong guy. then everyone jumped on everyone else... it wasnt a big fight and it was over quickly. no one really got hurt. it was just plain fun, like a brawl in a saloon. i think we're going to put a sticker on the dudes car on the way out of town.

2007-01-09T15:08:00.000-05:00

after gainesville we played pensacola at this club called sluggos, which is a bar/vegan restaurant/hardcore club, and we had rad $1 burritos. the local band that we played with was a bunch of kids that recently moved from the dominican republic and played amazing fast angry punk. they threw tortillas at the crowd and talked about the way that multinational corporations have a monopoly on the world's supply of food and about the drug war. that night we stayed with our new friend ryan, who is totally awesome. hes an older vegan straightedge dude that apparently used to live in richmond and we played an epic 4-hour game of uno.
baton rouge sucked. some kid said that we were gay because we talked too much, which pretty much characterizes the experience.
we drove to new orleans to stay the night, where we played scrabble, watched hgtv, and stayed up late telling ghost stories and talking like a middle school sleepover party. the last of us to go to sleep were mikey, davin, shiela (kingdom's roadie with a wicked new england accent) and me, around 6:30am. the bands had some much needed bonding time together. i feel like if you go on tour with a band and dont become good friends with them by the end, you've done something wrong.
the next day we spent 4 hours trying to eat and it was really irritating. we walked miles down the road that we were staying on trying to find a place to get vegan po boys but everything was closed, so we drove downtown. we parked on burbon street next to about 30 topless bars and wandered around into the french quarter where, around 4:30pm, we found a middle eastern place with mediocre falafel.
the new orleans show was rad; we played at a collective art/punk space and ate the most amazing vegan chocolate cake (thanks jen!) and vegan gumbo, which i've never had before. the last band, we need to talk, was badass. also, this guy called jesse camp who i apparently should have recognize was there heckling, drinking, and loved our band. he was visiting from new york and promised to come to the show at my house in brooklyn. we took a group shot with all of the bands and jesse.
that night we stayed at the same house and again stayed up late talking about anarchist politics and sexism in the hardcore scene.
on an hour of sleep, i woke up at 6:30 to drive 9 hours to nashville, which was the first drive that really felt like being on tour, because we were in the van so long that i stopped caring.

in my next entry: attrition picks up a hitchhiker and steals a beagle. to be continued...

2007-01-05T01:52:00.000-05:00

charlotte, charleston, daytona, gainesville. we've only played one show since i last wrote, but we've been skipping from town to town. nothing interesting to write about. just hanging out, seeing old friends, eating vegan pizza on the beach, and driving. this tour has been much slower than last one, with more time to hang out and more asking the question, "so what do you guys want to do?", which we didnt really have time to do last time. the frenzied pace combined with the newness of it all made for an experience that was too much for me to keep up with, but this time it feels different.

2007-01-02T13:57:00.000-05:00

so its day 4, our first day off. like last time, i had pretty low expectations about a lot of these shows, and each time ive been completely wrong. we were 4 hours late leaving for richmond, but it turned out that the permanent, army of fun, how we are, blacklisted show that we wanted to go to started late and the first band was going on right when we got there. lee and i watched the first band, the name of which i cant remember, and permanent, while the rest of the dudes made themselves sick eating at panda veg. then we got a call that we were wanted at the house where we were playing. 4 hours later, it was finally time to play in a beer and mud soaked basement. my shoes and drum rug will never look/smell the same. still, we played pretty well, and people were into it. we got some donations from the door and sold a few things, so we still had enough to pay for gas. house show in greensboro on new years: rad younger vegan straightedge kids played political hardcore, lots of root beer, and the first new years that i actually enjoyed in a long while. charlotte suprised the hell out of me, because we were expecting the house show to be full of conservative hardcore kids, but it turns out that people were really into what we had to say, picked up a lot of zines from our distro, bought merch, and actually moved around for our set. also, it was the first show in a big enough space that people were really moving around for kingdom, and i had a great time.
we were worried about having to pay for gas out of pocket to get down to daytona because we were only playing 2 free shows on the way down and had 2 shows cancelled, but it turns out that we are doing really well.
there is something relaxing and theraputic about sleeping in the back of a moving van. the motion of the van calms me, and the knowledge that with each second im putting more distance between myself and the last place i was is meditative.
unfortunately, i still have a thesis hanging over my head, and reading that i should be doing. man do i not want to worry about that shit. i want to stay on tour. i wonder, however, if i will eventually catch up with myself, because as fun as this is, i think part of the allure is that everything changes so fast that i dont have time to feel stagnant and bored. as quick fixes go, this one is pretty rad.