Monthly Archives: April 2013

Be an adult, man

I can’t take it anymore. I want out. No more of this conventional life. No more going to work and paying bills and flicking my cell phone on and off, even though nothing’s happening, no calls, tons of emails, way too many emails actually, but all junk email, TV shows that I don’t watch anymore sending me an update about last night’s episode, and tonight’s episode, and tomorrow’s, shoe manufacturers letting me know every single day about new shoes on sale, even though I only buy like one pair of shoes a year, even though when I bought them online, and it showed me a little check box, it was already checked, and it said, “Please! Keep me informed about daily deals and specials! Yes!” I made sure it was definitely unchecked, but despite my unchecking, the emails started trickling in, those crafty little algorithms refusing to take no for an answer, maybe we’ll just send him an email a day anyway, maybe he’ll buy more shoes, come on man, how about just buying one shoe? Of course I won’t buy any more shoes, but I’ll rarely go through the process of unsubscribing to those emails, you always have to open the email to find the unsubscribe button, also, it’s never a simple unsubscribing, it’s always, you will now be redirected to our web site where, amongst other nonsense, you’ll be able to hunt and dig for option to opt out of these emails, and even on that unsubscribe page, there’s still an option to stay subscribed, and of course the default, “No! I don’t know how I wound up on this page! Please, keep me updated on daily deals and specials! Yes!” is checked, another little trick.

No way, I’m totally over it, tired of getting that tiny dopamine kick every time I’m just sitting here trying to write, “ding!” email, one time out of every two hundred emails it’ll be something worth reading, but most likely it’s one of five hundred political action groups that somehow got their hands on my contact info, all of them peddling the same progressive agenda, each one of them asking for twenty five dollars, thirty five dollars, come on, just click here and make it an automatically reoccurring donation, make a difference, man, come on, man, fight the system, bro, you won’t even have to think about it. It’s like, we’ll take your money, you’ll get used to living with slightly less money, you won’t even notice it, and then we’ll start asking you for more, and then Obama’s going to be done with his second term and somebody’s going to take the reigns of that behemoth online donation machine. Who’s going to be asking for fifteen dollars every day two years from now, Biden? Clinton? Somebody else? Come on, just ten dollars. Thanks for the ten dollars. Hey, I have something else to ask you. Can I have ten more dollars? I know you just gave me ten, but, can you make it twenty? Every time you give it’s just an escalating cycle, asking for more and more almost immediately after.

Thanks, but no thanks. The only online shopping I’m going to be doing from now on is for hobo bindles. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hobo bindle in real life. What’s the point? Why not a backpack? I guess if you’re really out on your ass, you might not have a backpack readily available, maybe just a long stick, an oversized neckerchief. What do you put inside? Is it really easier to carry everything if it’s balancing on your shoulder at the end of that long stick? Maybe if I were to show up on the streets, on the back of some slow moving cross-country freight train with all of my stuff warm and dry in a backpack, whatever, in some messenger bag, maybe I’d be seen as a phony by the larger hobo community, because there’s always a natural amount of sympathy for any hobo, however reluctant we are to give it, nobody likes to see anybody out there, in the cold, hungry, dirty, down on their luck. But if that lifestyle is a choice? Then sorry pal, no soup for you, backpack or bindle, pick one, because nobody’s inclined to give you any sympathy at all. Why don’t you get back to work? How about charging up that cell phone and checking those emails? Paying for that cell phone bill on that cell phone bill-paying app? Because what’s wrong with you man? What’s your deal? You know how many people would kill to sit here and have people sell them stuff on a smart phone? Do you realize what an entitled whiny little brat you sound like? Get yourself together man, be a man, man, be an adult, dude.

Movie Review: Oblivion

Didn’t Tom Cruise just make a movie called Jack Reacher? It came out a few months ago, right? I mean, this doesn’t have anything to do with Oblivion, not really, except that Tom Cruise’s character’s name here is Jack Harper, which is almost comically similar. In his old age, is Tom Cruise suffering from a classic case of Tony Danza Syndrome, having trouble embodying characters with different names?

Whatever. It’s the future. The moon is partially blown up. There’s a big giant triangle in the sky. Jack Harper tells us that the aliens came, that we won, but the planet got destroyed in the process. So everybody moved to one of Saturn’s moons. Harper is part of a two-person operation, the only ones left behind, the cleanup crew.

I hesitate to say too much more about the plot, because it’s actually a pretty cool story, one that almost necessitates the viewer not knowing anything about it beforehand. If I had to describe it like something else, I’d say it’s about one cup Vanilla Sky, sifted with several heaping teaspoons of The Matrix, with a pinch of Star Wars fight scenes mixed in. After all of these dry ingredients are blended thoroughly, the whole mass is then combined with fifty percent … well, I’m not going to tell you which movie, because again, that would reveal way, way too much. But once you see what they’re doing in Oblivion, it’s obvious. (If you want to be spoiled, just read the New York Times review.) In fact, if Oblivion weren’t actually a decent film, I’d kind of want to call it a rip-off, not entirely, but yeah, fifty percent.

But Oblivion is a pretty good film, which kind of took me by surprise. I guess it’s Tom Cruise’s fault really. The man isn’t even a man anymore, he’s something post-human. He doesn’t age, he’s done like a million huge blockbusters, and he’s sitting in the cockpit of Scientology Inc. When I see Tom Cruise in a movie, I don’t see Jack Harper, or whatever role he’s trying to play, I just see Tom Cruise, jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch, scolding Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants.

And so before the plot really gets going, before we start to figure out exactly what’s going on, Oblivion doesn’t feel like a real movie at all. You know when you’re watching a TV show, and the characters are watching some over the top sci-fi movie on their TV? That’s what this feels like. It feels like you’re watching Ted, but instead of just showing five seconds or so of that Flash Gordon movie, you wind up having to watch the entire thing.

But, and again, I felt the same way watching Vanilla Sky, once you get past Tom Cruise, once you start to look at what’s going on, why the characters are doing what they’re doing, why Jack Harper wears an old Yankees cap every time he descends to the planet, why Morgan Freeman gets prime billing even though his Morpheus-lite character only plays a somewhat minor role, what you’re left with is a nice little film.

It’s everything that I love about sci-fi as a genre. You’re treated to visions of how tomorrow may or may not look. You’re presented with themes and concepts that at once incorporate while at the same time transcend the futuristic technology that paints the backdrop of the story. You’re constantly questioning everything, motives, relationships, the very essence of reality.

Which isn’t to say it’s a perfect movie. There’s a fair share of cheesy one-liners. Like a lot of non-franchised sci-fi, the costumes and settings have a hard time trying not to evoke Star Wars and Star Trek, and as a result, sometimes the future winds up looking a little too boring, a whole quart of plain nonfat yogurt, and not even the trendy Greek kind, just regular Dannon.

My advice: don’t read anything about the movie, you know, aside from this review which, if you’ve made it to this last paragraph, you’ve already read all of it. But that’s fine, because I didn’t tell you to abstain from reviews until right now. Self-serving? A little, yeah. But seriously, just go watch the movie. Don’t question anything until the end. It’s actually kind of cool.

Look both ways

This morning I went for a run. In an effort to keep things interesting, I have a few routes that I like to take. I was on what I guess would be Route C, and there was this one section, two blocks long, where I had to cross over from one side of the street to the other.

It’s always a challenge going for runs in the city. You want to maintain some sort of a rhythm, but it’s kind of hard with traffic, with lights that don’t always synch up with what you’re doing, your pace, plus the other eight or so million people living in this city, some of them out, some of them on the same street that you are, everybody jockeying for space, trying to just go about life with as few collisions as possible.

I ran by the first corner but the light wasn’t on my side. About halfway down I noticed that the light up ahead was good to go. But I wasn’t going to make it all the way there in time to catch it. So I figured, OK, I’ll just cross right now, right in the middle of the street. I do it all the time. It’s New York. You cross when you have to cross.

Only, and I’ve heard of stuff like this happening to other people, but I ran into the street to find myself directly in the way of a bicycle delivery guy. There was no time to react. I just stepped in the street and found myself exactly in his path. He didn’t even have time to swerve, he just kind of shouted something, I think I shouted something, although I might not have, it’s kind of a blur.

Incredibly, I was able to maneuver my torso, like a matador taunting a charging bull, in such away that I made very minimal contact with the bike as he came at me from my left. I turned to the right to see everything play out. The bike kind of wobbled, and I thought, he’s going to fall, but then he managed to correct the imbalance. For about a quarter of a second, everything looked like it was about to be OK. But then whatever grip he tentatively regained slipped away again and he tumbled off and over the bike.

It wasn’t the worst crash in the world. It was a relatively low-speed affair, but still, I’ve fallen off of my bike plenty. He was probably a little banged up. And what about his bike? What about the delivery? I went up to the guy and started apologizing immediately, “I’m so sorry,” like that’s going to do anything.

I gave him my hand to pull him up but he just kept shouting something in what I’m assuming was Chinese, just a snap judgment based on the Chinese restaurant logo on his delivery vest. Through his gesturing, I figured that he was worried about his bike, it was one of those new electric models with an engine and everything. I pulled it up, steadied everything out, turned off the motor.

Then he just kept saying stuff in that different language. I was asking the basics, “Are you OK?” telling him I was sorry. He kind of looked through his merchandise, everything seemed to be salvageable. He pulled up his pant leg but there wasn’t any noticeable damage. We made eye contact and he just kind of kept muttering something before making a gesture with his arm, like don’t worry about it, get out of here.

And then he got back on his bike and took off. I felt really bad. I felt like I should have done something else. But what? What was to be done? All of these things flashed through my mind. About how I always complain about my job, about how I hate going to work. I tried putting myself in his place, delivering takeout on a bike in the cold in a country where I don’t even speak a single word of the language. And I get hit by a runner. And maybe my leg does hurt. Maybe I have to go back to the restaurant and get new food, and the boss will chew me out for poor bike riding skills. Maybe the restaurant owns the bike, maybe the owner is a real dick and makes me pay for any scratches or superficial damage.

Man, I just try to be a good guy, so it stings especially when I make a stupid careless mistake, one that has actual ramifications on somebody else. And I had no idea what I could have done differently, you know, expect for looking both ways or waiting to cross at a corner, or just having a clue about my surroundings, not stuck in my head, unaware of the rest of the world, all of these eight million people with whom I’m trying to peacefully coexist.

We’re all doomed

I get so paranoid sometimes, like way too paranoid. It’s overwhelming, crushing, really. It’s all stupid crazy stuff, and it sounds just like how these blog posts sound, only out loud, in my head, with no word limit, just this constant stream churning a million different detailed scenarios about how I’m going to die, how, yeah, things are going pretty well right now, but it’s just a matter of time before everything takes a sharp and dramatic turn for the worse.

Like this morning, I was feeling especially on edge, I couldn’t find a comfortable spot, not sitting down, not lying down, not standing up. So I thought I’d go for a long run, get into that soothing rhythm where I focus on my breathing. Only this backfired. As I got maybe a quarter of the way over the Queensboro Bridge, I noticed how windy it was.

Specifically, I could feel the wind coming at me from the other side of the bridge, taking all of that gridlocked traffic, accumulating all of that slow, idling exhaust, and shooting it straight into my lungs in concentrated bursts. I tried to ignore it, to just deal with it, to tell myself that, hey idiot, you live in a big city, this problem probably isn’t limited to being on a bridge.

But then I started thinking about all of the bridges and tunnels in the city. I started thinking about all of those bridge and tunnel workers, the cops that stand there and do whatever it is they’re doing, the maintenance guys, the toll collectors. They always have these crazy World War I style gas masks on. And here I am like an idiot running across the bridge, getting my respiratory system into such a state that I’m actually taking in more air than necessary, I’m taking in as many large gulps of pollution as I can.

OK this isn’t helping. I needed to put that out of my head also. What am I going to do, never go outside? Never run across the bridge? It’s not always this bad. Sometimes the wind comes from the other direction and I get to enjoy what it feels like if there were no cars around. But that taste. I could taste exhaust on my tongue. And I wanted to wipe the taste off somehow, but there was nothing to do, I kind of just moved my tongue around, rubbed it on my teeth. And now I was totally going crazy, because I swear I could feel like a film on my teeth, like the inside of my mouth was just covered with this grime.

I was getting out of control here. Clearly this had to be at least somewhat in my head. New York isn’t that dirty. It’s not like how people describe Los Angeles during the eighties, or Beijing right now. All of those other human beings are making it through OK. I’ll manage just fine. And that calmed me down for a second, but then another image flashed through my mind. I remembered I went for a similar long run like a year ago, the same route, the across the bridge, but it was a little longer, I ran along the East River and down the to the Brooklyn Bridge before turning around and heading back to Queens.

And when I got home and collapsed and took off my sneakers I could see it, a clear line in my socks, white below the ankle line, but above? Where the sock didn’t have any sneaker to cover it? It was stained, browned, just being exposed to this city for a couple of hours had somehow done actual damage, like there’s enough dust and grime at the foot level to somehow make its way into the fabric.

And I run a lot, over and over again, back and forth across that bridge, I’m breathing in and out. All I can think of is tiny micro-particulate, the smokestacks to my right in Long Island City, the smokestacks to my left by the FDR Drive, all of that exhaust, the kind of dust that’s so small it takes decades to float down to the earth’s surface, and I’m breathing it in, giving it that powerful inhale, letting it get all the way inside my system, deep in my lungs, into the tiniest crevasses of my alveoli, accumulating run after run after run.

And someday ten, twenty, thirty years from now, I’ll develop this weird post-post-post industrial cough, and the oncologist will be like, “Yeah, we’re seeing that from a lot of guys your age. Nobody really knows any good answers, but here, we’ll give you a bunch of chemotherapy and hope for the best.”

This is crazy. This is a crazy way to spend a Wednesday morning. It’s too much for me. I need a drink. I need some more coffee. And another drink. We’re all doomed.

I’d just hate to trouble you

I really must be going. I … I left my fridge … unattended. I mean, it’s my dog, he really needs a walk. And, please, I wouldn’t want to put you through any more trouble. It’s just that, I’m unused to such hospitality. No, I loved the appetizers. I felt bad eating any more than I’ve already eaten. You see, I … my grandmother is Norwegian, and she instilled upon me at a very early age how important it is to never go over someone else’s house and eat a lot of appetizers. I know, I know, it really doesn’t apply here. It’s just that, you know, it’s in my DNA now, it’s like a reflex. Please, OK, I’ll have one more appetizer. See? Mmm. That’s a good appetizer. What is this, salami? Mortadella? I can never really tell the difference between all of those cured meats.

No, I don’t want your son to walk to my house to take my dog out. That’s crazy. I mean, it’s a very nice offer. I just … how could I accept such generosity? And what if your son gets kidnapped on the way over? It’s too late for such a little guy to be out walking around by himself. Sure, yeah things were different when we were little kids. There’s like a lot more predators out there than there were back then. A lot of wackos. Plus, my dog, he’s not good with kids. And I don’t think he’s had his shots. I mean, I don’t think he’s rabid or anything, I hope not. It’s just that, I got one of those cards from the vet last week, I think he’s like a month or two overdo. And you know, better safe than sorry, imagining your son were to make it to my house without getting abducted. Look, I’m just saying, there’s a lot of potential for danger, and I couldn’t live with all of that guilt, not on my account, not after you’ve gone through such trouble here, what a lovely spread. What delicious sopressata.

You’re sister-in-law is a vet? That’s terribly nice of you to recommend her services but … no … please, Jerry, put down the phone. No, look I have a vet. I’m very happy. Well my vet’s a family friend also, or a friend of the family, a different friend, but yeah, come on, put down the phone, don’t bother your sister-in-law. What is she going to just drop what she’s doing and do a vaccination house call? That’s … it’s wildly unnecessary. You know what? Here, give me another one of those … mmm … I’ll just walk him a little later. Yeah, he’s good. Please, tell your son to take off his coat. Hey buddy, look, my house is locked. You’re seriously, you’re unbelievably kind, and it’s not that I don’t appreciate your going out of your way for me it’s just. It’s just … it’s my brother. He’s … he’s having a bit of legal trouble. I hate to bore you with any details. Let’s just say he’s hiding out for a little bit. In fact, I think I better check up on him. I was supposed to make sure he took his medication.

It’s just, he’s terrible with dogs. I have to keep them in separate rooms. And besides, if Junior were to knock on the window and scare my brother. He’s very easily startled. There’s no telling what would happen. You know, with the legal troubles and all. I’ve said too much. Which is why I hope you can understand, I can’t stay for dinner. I really … I’m so happy that you think so highly of me, but I was really just here to pick up these papers. I’m glad you had them on you. So I’ll just get them back to you tomorrow at the office, all right? Please. No, yes … no you’re brother doesn’t work for the DA’s office, does he? Oh yeah, I do remember you saying something. No, Jerry, put the phone down. Come on. All right, OK, I’ll stay. I’ll stay, yeah. OK. But I’ve got to get home and get to these papers. You know how it is, right? Jerry, no thanks, I can’t eat any more prosciutto. It’s not … no, I love it. It’s just so salty. I can’t even feel my lips anymore man.