Workplace vignette
We’ve recently started allowing patrons to check out DVDs. We’ve got a weird mix of arty Criterion Collection movies, middlebrow “classics” like Star Wars and Chinatown, and then a bunch of vaguely sex/gender/New York themed stuff. I’m guessing as to the philosophy of our collection, but there is definitely a focus on films portraying homosexuality, running the gamut from The Cockettes to Queer as Folk to After Stonewall to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Anyway, all of the movies are very popular. Considering school’s not in session right now, I think probably fully half of the checkouts I process are for DVDs. While checking in some movies the other day, I cracked open the DVD case for Jeffrey and was confronted with the unmistakable smell of amyl nitrate: if not the actual substance, than one of those dirty analogues they sell as ‘VCR head cleaner’ at porno/head shops. Given the movies available to our patrons, and given the generally accepted utility of poppers, this is a baffling combination. The only conclusion I can draw is that somewhere in the stacks of Fogelman, there lurks a Jean Luc Picard fetishist.

Minor Celebrity Sighting Vignette
The Corner of 13th Street and University is now officially Minor Celebrity Corner. In addition to seeing comic book writer Garth Ennis (buying comics) and Interpol bassist/herpes transmitter Carlos D (picking up dry cleaning, sans holster) last semester, the past week has revealed unto me a forelorn Dave Attell, standing outside Starbucks smoking, drinking an iced coffee and looking as lonely as Charlie Brown on Valentine’s Day, and the next day Target.com star Craig Finn was walking along the street talking on the phone.

I normally don’t have the slightest urge to talk to any celebrities, minor or otherwise, but since I am so head-over-heels for the Hold Steady and I have a vaguely amusing anecdote — that I was mistaken for Finn’s father by someone at their last Bowery show — the urge rose within me, but he was talking on the phone, and the moment was lost forever. Until, like, this weekend at their show, I guess. But still, this is a weird concentration of vaguely famous people on a single block. Although Craig Finn sort of kills my “Minor Music Celebrities on the F train streak”, which was going so well with JD Samson and Jon Spencer. I hope I don’t come off as self-satisfied or starstruck here, it’s basically just trainspotting. Like trying to keep track of how many times I see a certain graffiti tag.

Graffiti Tag Vignette
What is up with the seemingly burgeoning trend of Compl[i/e]mentary graffiti on the subways? I always thought I understood the motivations of graffiti taggers:

1. They are vandals who are subverting the commercial messages — THIS MOVIE SUCKS, BOBBY BROWN IS A CRACKHEAD, MEAT IS MURDER GO VEGAN are all messages put with clear motive and malice aforethought. Sometimes it’s not malice as much as a certain puckishness, promoting a pet cause like smoking weed, or putting balls in your mouth. But clearly it’s some sort of message that the taggers with to impose upon the pre-existing one.

2. Some taggers have a message that is not directly related to their canvas, but is still a clear message. Often it is as simple as HEY LOOK AT ME HERE IS MY TAG, other times it’s someone meticulously writing FUCK THE MTA on every single poster at a station. Either way, neither of these messages are being broadcast by an unmolested Coors Light ad. Again, I can understand this.

3. The bizarre new trend is for graffiti that simply affirms or bolsters the pre-existing message. I first noticed this when someone wrote in small ball-point-pen block letters on a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy poster the words of encouragement “YOU GO JAY! MAKE THAT MONEY!” I suppose this, at least, was a message complementary but external to the message of “WATCH THE NEW SEASON OF QUEER EYE” but it was still strange.

Not long after someone started writing further information about the forthcoming PSP video game system onto Sony’s austere advertisements, including useful info such as its MSRP and release date but also filling in strange technical details about the processor and monitor built into the PSP. Either there was a very strange street team assignment at work, or someone was a big fan.

The latest spate of this has been someone writing RIP JOHN LENNON 1940-1980 WE MISS YOU on posters which promote a museum exhibit whose subject is a tribute to John Lennon. Adding that legend to the top of a poster encouraging people to go see a museum exhibit dedicated to celebrating Lennon’s life and career seems to be a completely superfluous gesture, one hardly worth the infinitesimal chance that you’ll get ticketed for vandalism. Did the vandal in question get worried that without their own emphasis, people would look at the posters and think that the museum piece is dedicated to saying “Thank god that Lennon motherfucker’s dead”?

There are other examples but I’m blanking. What motivates people to do this?

I am poised to spend a significant amount of time socializing with not one, but two people that are not Ian, Jessica, Miles or a family member within the span of seven days. For me, this is a nearly unprecedented level of social flightiness!

This past weekend, Shena (Shena has a livejournal too!) came to visit. She read through and gave me the highlights of the awesome box of Blue Ribbon Digests I recently received in the mail, and was sometimes-frustratingly relaxed about what to “do” over the course of the weekend. We made it to Coney Island, a delightful Malaysian restaurant, a disturbingly Gene-less Burp Castle, and a night of drinking with Ian and Jessica (Jessica also has a livejournal!). It was good to see Shena, and to have new people to participate in super-familiar settings such as “Ian, Jessica and Chris drink in a L.E.S. dive bar” and “Chris and Miles discuss the news of the day”. Not to mention uniquely Shena-related activities, like Malay cuisine, comic strip gossip and an indulgent ear for discussions of old and obscure science fiction and comic book errata.

With Shena safely returned to the bucolic plains of Kansas, I have but a few days of workaday sameness before Liz (holy crap, who doesn’t have a livejournal these days?) arrives from the A-T-L. She will be engaging in some degree of Catskillery, but will still hopefully be on hand for a little celebration of our Flag and Country and Bootleg Fireworks and Charred Meat.

Plus — Explaining to Extended Family What Exactly a Degree in Media Studies is, Round 2! I need to remember to print out a few papers so everyone will realize that it isn’t just TV Guide Cheers & Jeers style reviews.

In camera phone news, behold these photographs!

It’s hard to see from this low-res picture, but this is a kicky, slightly trashy cocktail dress on display at a boutique just a few hundred feet from my home, with a crudely reproduced likeness of MF’in HONEST ABE LINCOLN on the hip. When I saw this, a single thought consumed me — I would adopt a daughter, and upon her reaching the flower of adulthood, she would be married wearing this dress. I am contacting the proper social services tomorrow.

Speaking of adoptions, my brother recently became caretaker to a Great Dane puppy named Mickey.

Mickey has reminded me of what it is like to have an actual dog around. Yes, my family has had Cassie around for over a decade, but she is a tame dog in her twilight; so long as you do not perch your food on top of her muzzle, she will not go after it. And she’s certainly not going to just randomly decided that it is time to eat your shoe.

Mickey is a dog. He is also about 95 pounds, able to reach pretty much every counter, table and shelf in my parents’ house. Oh yeah, and he’s still a puppy. If he can manage to put his mouth on something you leave lying around, odds are he will. This is a major adjustment. My father works in the shoe business. Since Cassie was a puppy, he has picked up sample slippers for Cassie to use as her ‘babies’; she devotedly totes them around with her, offers them as signs of devotion, arranges them around her bed. It is a familiar tradition around the house, one that makes you feel almost guilty about having Cassie spayed, until you remember her running out to meet you getting off the bus, wearing a menses-stained pair of Fruit of the Loom briefs. But regardless, Cassie’s babies are an adorable if spittle-flecked part of my parents’ household.

This is what happens when Mickey gets a hold of one of Cassie’s babies.

I guess we should be grateful it was not an actual baby dog.

So I finally get things up and running for 2004 on monkeypomo.com and I find out my web host is MIA and someone has hacked the server or something silly like that.

However, literally hours before this dastardly malfeasance occurred, I got a look at the search strings that brought people to my site in the past few months:

460: uncut
396: bet
137: videos
73: booty
73: poppin
62: ludacris
39: bet/uncut
27: b.e.t
18: www.bet/uncut.com

Clearly, the public is clamoring for more coverage of BET Uncut! I have been focusing my efforts down the wrong avenue. If the site does not fall apart in the next couple days, I shall endeavor to speak more on the sad state of Uncut in the new year.

Within my sliver of the world, there are fewer than 21 hours left in 2003.

I’m still pretty shaky on what my New Year’s plans are outside of going into New York at some point with vodka strapped on my person like an ammo belt.

I just finished watching Lost in Translation a couple minutes ago.

I am profoundly depressed that this jerkass’s profile is the only contextual instance of Cool Clyde’s Water Slides on the whole of the internet.

I can’t stop clapping my left hand to the beat of a fucking White Stripes song I heard in some store in the mall.

I went to a mall today.

I went to a mall today.

2003, what the fuck were you thinking?

Okay, here’s a passage from an AMG artist profile:

In addition to overcoming drug addiction and beginning work on a second solo album, Doughty continued to do solo tours and was heard contributing vocals to BT’s club hit “Never Gonna Come Back Down.”

Wow, how does someone find the time to work on a second solo album and do solo tours in between “overcoming drug addiction”? And does Pitchfork review drug-addiction-overcomings? Because I hear Iggy Pop’s new one bloooooooows.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve listened to Soul Coughing in about three years, but I downloaded a concert of theirs from 1994 today while looking for something else – the new Dirty South Christmas CD, “Crunk & Disorderly”. I was only looking up their biography because I was going to make a “hilarious” “comment” about they were forced to break up in the fall of 2001 because of their, “A man drives a plane into the Chrysler Building” lyric. I was going to suggest that they were coming under a lot of criticism for being so inaccurate – the Chrysler Building is all the way up on 42nd Street, like two miles away.

Turns out that joke was ruined by them breaking up in early 2000. Dammit.

In closing, I wish to congratulate Mike Doughty on overcoming his drug addiction. But let this be a lesson to other victims of the Alternative Implosion; get a better street team when you overcome your drug addiction, otherwise people like me will never know.

Because Levi doesn’t believe me:

I have a new job. It is still in the retail sector, but not strictly in the “screaming children at midnight on a Saturday on Rt. 46 retail job” sense that my last two positions have been. I am finishing up the training to be an e-mail/phone representative for a large online book retailer that isn’t named Amazon.com. It seems remarkably tolerable so far.

PROS
1. I am working a regular Monday-Friday schedule, which allows me to plan things for evenings and weekends with impunity. This is a big improvement over the last couple jobs.
2. It pays more. This will be negated almost instantly by the fact that I have an employee discount on books. But even if I was being paid minimum wage, I would still blow half my paycheck on books.
3. I realize that I will be dealing with a great number of “where is my order, you jerk” inquiries. I am prepared to deal with irate customers. The fact that my new employer culls its consumer base from only the theoretically-literate, but also a nationwide demographic gives me confidence that I will be on the receiving end of fewer “where is my order, you fucking fuck, i will be waiting for you outside when your shift is over” inquiries. Which were distressingly commonplace amongst the clientele on Rt 46.
4. No company-issue douchebag-lookin’ golf shirts to wear. I get to look like a douchebag in my own personal way.
5. Computer records allow me to stalk minor celebrities. Sarah Vowell seems to enjoy reading.

CONS
1. The commute – a little under twenty miles – can run a little over an hour, thanks to Lincoln Tunnel traffic. Luckily I have a cache of Jean Shepherd and David Sedaris CD-Rs to listen to, but I worry that my vast stores may be depleted by late November. I guess I could dig up those Feynman lectures, but I don’t know if I can hang with that early in the morning.
2. Speaking of mornings, this may be the first time since high school that I have regularly woken up by 8am. Even when I took Chinese at 8:30am, I usually stayed up all night and crashed after the class. I appear to be hardwired so that I cannot fall asleep before 2:30 or 3:00am. I am starting to fall in love with minor-league sleep deprivation.
3. Yesterday I accidentally left the new(ish) (International) Noise Conspiracy EP in my bookbag. I also put my apparently empty travel coffee cup into the bookbag, and then carried it out with me on lunch. I was walking through the atrium when I noticed the wet spot on the bottom of my bag. Nothing was seriously damaged, save for the liner notes of Bigger Cages, Longer Chains. It’s coffee-logged and stuck together. The liner notes are RUINED. Jesus, what do you even do with one of their CDs if you don’t have the adorable stark photocollages and Marxist rants to look at?

So really, these aren’t even very major cons. Granted, I am still in training. Shadowing of an active sales rep begins tomorrow, with solo work starting next Monday. Perhaps I will crash and burn. I happen to think that my NPR radio voice will soothe even the angriest botched Finding Nemo pre-order. We live in hope.

I have a new job. I don’t hate it yet.

At my new job, and also in a brief conversation with Steven Pinker post-lecture, I became self-conscious about reference to my college education. Not any sort of bourgeois guilt, just confusion in terms of how to refer to it. To say “oh, I have a degree in English” makes the degree some sort of mark of prestige. When I speak of “my degree” with respect to a book list I was compiling at work, my giddy joy over corny irregular verb puns, or the fact that I have read through Infinite Jest more than once while Pinker just “looked through it to find [his] name”, I am not trying to exert any sort of authority over the other people, just trying to explain my predilections. No one would think it elitist for me to say that while they may not have enjoyed Larger than Life, I thought it was a fun movie, perhaps owing to me being a Bill Murray fan. But when you get things like “degrees” involved I worry that any mention of it becomes a dick-waving content. Kind of like me mentioning how I talked to Steven Pinker tonight. But if I really wanted to engage in a dick waving contest I’d mention how Ian and Jessica and I got photographed for Seed’s adorable little “science socialite” photo page, or whatever they call it. This is not about the waving of dicks, this is a sincere inquiry into social mores.

So, with these concerns in mind, my solution when talking to Pinker was to instead say that “I was an English major”, which seemed to sate his curiosity as to how I got through Infinite Jest not once, not twice, but thrice. It was only after the fact that I realized that by saying “I was an English major” that I may be opening myself up for the assumption that I dropped out of college before attaining a degree. Which shouldn’t really be something that I lose sleep over, that some of my co-workers and a world-renowned professor of cognitive science might surmise that I am a dropout. But it does bother me.

Speaking of lost sleep, I took a taxi up to my car this evening. It did make me feel quite bourgeois, but it was only about four dollars more than taking the subway, and it afforded me the opportunity to write this entry, and still get a whopping four hours of sleep tonight. I’d probably still be on the road right now if it weren’t for that taxi.

By the afternoon of 10 September 2003, the fire department’s sign had been expanded to

And then on the day in question, the sign maker got extra verbose!

…which pretty much sounds like something you’d put in a high school yearbook.

The sign now reads, “ARE YOU READY FOR ISABELLE?” which also sounds inappropriately flippant for a public safety organization.

We are entering into September. It’s my favorite season – the foliage, the smell of burning leaves wafting through the frosty air (seriously, possibly my favorite olfactory experience), the expanded wardrobe opportunities, the giant Sears Christmas catalogs of my youth, the selection of new school supplies… it’s really pretty awesome. And this year, with the firm resolution, the grand plans, the fact that I’ve got cohorts back in the same metro area as myself – well, I remain more cautious optimistic about 4Q2003 than I have about any quarterly unit in some time.

This means that my allergies, or some viral approximation of same, have chosen the perfect time to pounce upon my respiratory system; just as I begin to make plans that require me to be the sort of whirling productivity dervish that I have only pulled off a few times in my life. I needed to be at 110%! The extra 10% was to come from super-colloidal vitamins and a regiment of Page-a-Day vocabulary calendars, but the rush of filth bottlenecked in the Lincoln Tunnel of my sinuses have something to say about that, I fear. What did I get weekly allergy shots for, if not to prevent this? Is this karmic punishment for chronic Vapo-Inhaler abuse?

I’ve learned my lesson in years past not to overdose on allergy medication, but I am considering perhaps delving into the realm of homeopathic remedies, especially if they are inexpensive. I cannot become a substitute teacher and get into grad school and somehow finagle my way into doing a radio show and becoming the next Jean Shepherd if I’m leaky and delirious.

Another sign of autumn:

I imagine this is a result of recent belt-tightening.
“According to recent budgetary cuts, we’ve got to summarize our feelings about 9-11 on the lighted board in less than seven letters! The local Rotary Club donated the date.”
“How about, IT SUCKED”
“I said less than seven letters! LESS THAN! The crocodile eats the seven!”
“IT S-U-X”
“Not even grammatically correct!”
“SRY MAN”
“Not inclusive of women.”
“NVR FGT”
“Might be construed as homophobic.”
“TOO BAD”
“Might seem sarcastic…or that we’re even suggesting that the hijackers were ‘bad to the bone’. Unacceptable!”
“Maybe OTPAWU… it would be an abbreviation for ‘our thoughts and prayers are with you.’ We could put something in the paper explaining it.”
“We can’t afford that! BUDGET CUTS, GENTLEMEN. Now think!”
“HOW SAD”
“HOW SAD, eh? Hm…. that dog’ll hunt!”

Nearly three years after my last formal contact in regards to employment at McSwy’s, my name appears on their site for the first time.

My brain did not explode.