On the Blue Stone

Sometimes, on late nights when I’m propped up on two pillows, hearing the city outside and already feeling my feet slapping the pavement on the way to the subway tomorrow morning, I put myself on a tiny island in the middle of a northern European sea. A Hemingway-esque ramshackle shack on a night brighter than most, the full moon sagging low enough to feel splashes by the churning, frigid ocean.

I hear nothing but the soft lap, lap, lapping of the sea against the rocks that surround my tiny home. Every few minutes I stir, my subconscious blinking as it senses the beams of the lighthouse on the far shore. A better-than-your-average splash and I feel the air dampen as the salty tang of an ocean breeze hits the back of my throat.

And I roll over and continue dreaming of taxicabs and all-night diners, of public transportation and the ultimate in convenience.

Strike me a balance, and you’ve done the impossible.

Sorry I’m late; I was out spoiling my liver.

What movie is it in which a character says something along the lines of “That’s what life is, it’s a series of moments”?

I don’t quite remember right now, so pretend I made it up.

What kind of big picture are we striving for? What’s my goal? Are all the people who wish for happiness and success only meaning that they want a loving family and lucrative career? Are we losing sight of the fact that the big picture is but a collection of little pictures?

A sunny Saturday in the park with a bottle of wine; a flirty smile on the subway; a serious hurt to the jaw at one of your favorite bands’ live shows; a Monday night serving dinner to the homeless; a lengthy happy hour standing on furniture and screaming bar songs. How can we end a day that features any one of these things and not think our life is worth living?

Not everyone’s going to make a Miss America difference in the world. Or in the state, community, household. If we just exist, if we just take the time to hold on for an extra minute to all the seeming futility that we walk past on a daily basis, we’ll meet these moments that make up a life.

It’s like my dear friend Mr. Vonnegut says — every now and then, we need to stop and look around and think to ourselves, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” Not only did he give us the best mid-makeout line ever, he gave us a prayer, a word of thanksgiving, to mutter at every waking moment.

I’ve got so much more to say, all of which I logged in my broken cell phone notepad in.this.format.since.my.space.bar.broke, but I must admit I’m exhausted. I spent my evening eating food from a street cart, drinking cheap beer, having said beer poured through my hair & down my front — even into my pockets, getting a headbutt in the jaw from standing too close to the mosh pit..all the while next to my best friend, singing along to one of the most nostalgic and feel-good (as much as you can get, singing about blood and murder and Manson and other morbidities) bands of our lives together. I’ll sleep well tonight.

So it goes.

Tiding us over.

Went missing for a minute. Will return between tonight and tomorrow to wonder why my desire for Buffy characters has transitioned since I was 13 (from Spike to Xander), what I’m reading/dreaming about (zombies), why living in TV Land is a good idea from my BFF (Liz), why I’m not ashamed to love American Idol (Anoop), what I’ve been eating (peanut butter sandwiches & tomato soup), what shows I’m seeing (Midsummer, Alkaline Trio, Kevin Smith), where I’m dancing (McFadden’s), and who I’m making friends with (everyone).

Until then.

When we were sixty

Riddle me this:

A coworker tells a story of putting Ex-lax in food as a prank. Said coworker asks if I’ve ever done that. I say, “Um, no.”

The response?

“Oh, I always forget, you’re young.”

Will I have desires to perform these acts when I grow up? Or was “my generation” not fluent in pranking? I’m just failing to understand how my age implies an obvious lack of understanding the hilarity of an Ex-lax prank.

Blog of the dead

Before bed, I’d like to share that Mr. George Romero has signed on to publish two zombie novels with Grand Central Publishing, set for summer 2010.

This is good news for:

a. Zombie fans, because no one tells a better zombie story than Romero.

b. The Media, who will certainly capitalize on the zombie trend that’s been building for a few years (since around 28 Days Later and World War Z). If 2008 was for vampires and 2009 is for werewolves, it only seems logical, right?

c. Me, who has to go into a marketing meeting tomorrow and plead my case for why we should push our new zombie romances hard.

I do believe this is what we call a win…win…WIN.

Self advERtisment

That’s how I’m saying advertisement from now on. Like the British. Also saying zebra like “zebb-ra.” This is simply for my own amusement, and I hope I don’t annoy people too much.

Anyway, for full disclosure of the Easter feast, for as long as you can stand my gushing about food, check out the Universal Experience tab above.

You do that, I’ll be here, in bed, hearing giant raindrops bounce off my air conditioner and the wind run full force into the side of my head.

Goodnight.

May be magical

It’s 1:38 on a Saturday night, I suppose we’ll say Sunday morning, and I’m not by myself half asleep on my living room couch, nor am I being lulled to a fitful rest by the wind whaling on the walls of my hallway bedroom. I’m happily — elatedly, triumphantly — on a couch in a New Brunswick living room, not alone but with six, seven other real, live humans. We’re laughing, we’re drinking, the whole room smells of melon hookah tobacco and every now and then we all fall silent to quote Mean Girls, since it won the bidding war of best films to watch at this particular time.

Not like a puzzle, because it was complete before, but maybe like a new drink, like a new squeeze of citrus in an already delicious cocktail, I fit into a new niche, complete with a cat and a dog. Nothing like one perfect lifelong friendship to pull two worlds together.

So on only the second major holiday I’ve ever spent away from my family, I deem the company, cooking and cocktails a fantastic success.

As these small groups filter through my every day — the potluck we had on Thursday that gave us stomachaches maybe from spinach balls but mostly from laughter, the comfort in nostalgia and well-constructed jokes with people intelligent enough to stay in college for years — I pick out bits and pieces and I begin to analyze, I question. I look into myself for the first time not for one-uppers, not for the miserable passive-aggressive questions that will make people aware of ME, but for the ability to see others as people rather than just fragments of things I like or dislike. This is making no sense, but I’m trying to silence myself more. To listen rather than anticipate.

That was a weird and sort of backwards digression.

I’ve been reading “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and I still can’t believe I hadn’t earlier. I read and reread this passage on my lunch break:

“These are real creatures with real organs leading real lives, one by one. I can’t pretend they’re not there. If I have life, sense, energy, will, so does a rotifer.“

It’s all fairly simple stuff. Water bugs, sunrises, snapping turtles. Writers can see things in ways others can’t. Annie Dillard can see things the way no one else in the world does — in words. Every page is a new epiphany. I’m returning this to the library and buying myself a copy to write all up in.

I feel good. The soul needs nourishing every now and then, and I’m pretty full.

Hittin’ the heartbrakes.

The day started out fantastically, at least if you’re the type of person who does a fist-pump when you can finally fit into the pants you bought last fall that didn’t fit and you forgot to return so you just had $30 of pants in your room until you tried them on last week and ZING! (I’m that kind of person.)

Tonight was The Black Kids and Mates of State at Webster Hall (11th St near 3rd Ave). I went alone, which is nearly one step better than my last trip to see Mates of State, when I was stuck in silence with my just-barely-boyfriend and I nearly fell asleep at the wheel on the drive from Cleveland to Erie because he wouldn’t talk to me to keep me awake. I digress, the past is the past. Hakuna Matata.

A slight drawback to going alone, though, is that once you pick a spot, you must keep it. That is, if it’s a good spot. If your vision is blocked or you’re standing next to an oversized sweaty dude who smells like the cheese aisle at Whole Foods, by all means, move.

I had a good spot though, with a place to set my purse and my jacket (this is huge) and see comfortably. So when I bought a Heineken (woo! it was 8-dollar beer night!), I sipped it slowly and made it last, because if I had to leave to join the bathroom line, my perfect locale would be no more. (This was also incentive to save my $16 on things that AREN’T overpriced beers, like, say, food for the rest of the week.)

The Sunbears! started their set around 8. From Jacksonville, these two guys were teetering on the edge of nerd rock, with long ballads & drony vocals like Ben Gibbard, but colorful graphics and lots of confetti (!!) like, say, Tilly. Four or five songs, decent set, I’ll dig up more on them soon.

Now, I hadn’t heard of The Black Kids before this tour, so a few weeks ago I downloaded probably eight of their songs, and they were catchy, and that was all. But you know that band who you don’t think twice about and then you catch them live and you can’t stop thinking of them? Ta-da.

Also from Jacksonville, they’ve got five members — two chicks, three dudes — of whom only two are actually black. Going to look up where the name comes from tomorrow so as to avoid making any inadvertent racist comments.

I had a group of big Black Kids fans next to me, and with the help of the bar, they danced all over each other, arms flailing, jumping, one girl with a neck like a heron standing in front of me for a while, so now when I think of The Black Kids I’m going to think of BirdNeck with the Glasses.

Just stopped by to see..

A day that started with the sniffles (which haven’t ended) and progressed slowly, every moment full, enriching, tasty, and — thanks to the wonderous sun — full of vitamin D.

That was a fragment.

For. Ev. Er.

Just would like to point out that Squints from the original 1993 The Sandlot is also in the 2007 straight-to-DVD movie The Sandlot 3: Heading Home. As Squints. Is this a bad career move?

Was there a career at all? He was on Boy Meets World for a few episodes in season 1, when the producers were trying to find a third friend for Cory & Shawn. Coincidentally, the other kid they tested was Yeah-Yeah. Obviously, neither survived beyond episode 6 of season 1.

Maybe the inclusion of Squints in The Sandlot 3 is to get people my age — who saw the original movie in theaters and still hail it as one of the greatest movies of all time — to watch it, just to see what he looks like. FYI, he looks the same. They put him in the same glasses and the same black hat with the elastic. It’s just now you can tell he has to shave. Which happens when you age beyond 10. But I suppose this worked on me, didn’t it? I refused to watch Sandlot 2 because they put a girl on the team. That would never happen. It was fine for The Mighty Ducks and The Little Giants, but the Sandlot kids wouldn’t have taken a girl. Save that for Tom Hanks & no crying in baseball, blah blah blah. But I watched The Sandlot 3 so i could see Squints — even though there’s a Final Four basketball game on right now. Also, I could not find a sufficient photo of current Squints on IMDB, so I forged ahead with the crappy-quality film that pits Luke Perry as an asshole ballplayer who gets knocked out, all the way back to the Sandlot. Where Squints Paladoris now coaches the Sandlot boys.

Nose a little bigger, voice a little deeper. A sad attempt to salvage something that can never be salvaged.

Stop trying to resurrect The Sandlot. It’s a legend. And as the Babe told Benny in his dream, “legends never die. Follow your heart, kid, and you’ll never go wrong.”

Appended: Squints and Benny (not played by Mike Vitar, which is a real shame) just made small talk about The Great Hambino, who evidently still wrestles. Benny also asked Squints how Wendy was doing. Said she was great, and they had 4 kids. As Sandloters know, that means there are five more on the way.

Shames me to think that there are children watching this movie will not understand these references.