An Ocean's Depth, Part 2

When I agreed to swimming lessons, I hadn’t reckoned on facing hazards other than drowning.  As it turned out, the road to aquatic independence would be fraught with trials and tribulations, and the biggest challenge would be faced before I even set foot in the the building, much less the water.  Since our memberships were good at any New York City pool, my girlfriend and I settled on Metropolitan Pool in Williamsburg as the most mutually convenient location.  Since the pool’s rules about alcohol and mesh-lined trunks would likely cut my encounters with ironic flannel and PBR to a minimum, I figured I could come to terms with being another indistinguishable face in a sea of failed writers wandering a hipster neighborhood, at least for a few minutes each week.

Aside from risking exposure to lethal doses of sarcasm and trucker hats, the biggest drawback to our pool was its close proximity to to Fette Sau, one of the most delicious barbecue joints in the city.  Every time we walked to the pool, I would inevitably find myself drawn towards the intoxicating allure of smoked meat and neon.  But as a child, I was always told to avoid eating for an hour before swimming, or in my case, before standing in the water pretending to be Aqua Man stuck in constant breach-mode, so it was easy enough to avoid a pre-swim snack on medical grounds.  But it was a lot harder to routinely convince myself on the way home that celebrating an evening of exercise by stuffing myself to the gills with pork belly was probably counter productive to say the least.

When I eventually managed to rip myself from Fette Sau’s doorway and reach the water with appetite intact, I was a little embarrassed.  Not only had I never learned to swim, but the better part of two decades had passed since the last time I’d made even the most halfhearted effort.  It’s never easy to admit that you don’t know how to do something, especially when it’s something everyone around you learned at such a young age, and catching up requires you to flail a bit too violently for your ignorance to remain inconspicuous. Plus, I typically reserve being shirtless in public for special occasions like midnight apartment fires and swingers’ parties.  It’s not that I have a bad body image, more that the people around me will if I show it to them.  And they are all but guaranteed to have better eyesight to boot.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of changing rooms, but there’s a certain special awkwardness reserved for changing rooms in Williamsburg.  There’s taking your clothes off with a stranger and then there’s taking your clothes off with an Hasidic stranger.  Whenever I find myself in the presence of devoutly religious people, I can’t help but feel like I should be apologetic for my decadent, secular lifestyle. Perhaps its being raised in a hippie town where we were raised to respect everyone, or just garden variety paranoia, but I always worry that people will mistake my failure to adhere to their beliefs as an intentional refutation of them.  But I’ve found that’s it’s not generally considered socially acceptable to say to tell a pantsless stranger that you really meant no disrespect to anyone when you selected your brightly colored underpants in the morning.  Plus, not to say that being religious blinds you to the basic facts of human anatomy, but I tend to assume that any group that discourages promiscuous sex probably has a few things to say about public nudity. But clearly they don’t share the deep-seated sense of bodily shame that I’ve learned from a lifetime of Pepsi commercials.  After all, if a man had the same kind of hangups about his body that I do, he probably wouldn’t be hanging around public locker rooms, or would at very least make a greater effort to keep his fly closed.

Once I’d figured out how to remove my clothes without making eye contact or conversions and made it into the water, learning the basics of swimming was actually fairly easy.  Within an hour I graduated from sinking to treading water for seconds at a time, and even moving forward a few yards. Most importantly, I had the motion down for the perfect Little Mermaid hair toss, and would only have to wait a few more months for the appropriate mane.

Over the course of my life I’ve tried to learn a great many things (most of them involving cooking, computers, or pretending to understand human feelings). But in all that time I’ve never tried to learn something where it took so little time and effort to get the gist as swimming. Sure, if you threw me in the ocean I probably wouldn’t last long enough to cry for help, but by the strictest dictionary definition, I could swim.

Rumor has it that practice makes perfect, so in spite of my irrefutable natural talents I figured I should keep up with the lessons for a little while, if for no reason other than to give hope and inspiration to anyone else who might sheepishly wander into the pool, their heads hung in shame.  Over the next few weeks I continued improving to the point where I felt confident enough to brave the deep end.  Or, to be more accurate, to brave the bit by the deep end where I can still keep my head above water if I stand on my tiptoes.  If you’ll forgive me for saying so, things were going swimmingly.

That is, until our pool closed for renovations.  This was little more than an annoyance since there are a good number of pools in the New York system that would honor our memberships.  All I had to do was find a slightly less convenient pool and fight my natural inclination towards grumbling, and we’d be all set.

We settled on a pool in Chelsea.  Despite the changing room being packed with an unnecessarily boisterous gang of youths who seemed unable to identify the aerobic difference between swimming and standing around with their shirts off, the facilities were a bit of a trade up; the changing room was larger, the showers were cleaner and had dividers behind which to hide my shame, and the pool was significantly larger.  After seeing the layout, I was ready for another amazing swimming experience.

The lifeguard, on the other hand, was less optimistic.  He interrupted us a few minute into our less to tell us I couldn’t go into the deep end because I’m “not a strong enough swimmer.”  He also said that I shouldn’t be there for lap swimming time, which is all the New York City pools offer in the evening, and should come to the daytime family swim time instead.  The normal embarrassment of having my swimming skills questioned was further compounded by the fact that he didn’t deliver his decree directly to me, he talked to my girlfriend as though I were an over-enthused puppy and it was her job to keep me off his lawn.  Under other circumstances, I would just write this off as Manhattan pool guards taking safety a little more seriously than Brooklynite hipsters who are no doubt guarding the pool ironically.  But it’s hard to believe that I was really the weakest swimmer in the beginners’ lane when my dressing down was being witnessed by a pair of tiny, old Asian ladies who were making their way down the pool by crawling along the wall.  Surely my swimming skills were superior to someone who had differentiate a body of water from a climbing wall.

I was tempted to argue with the man, but I couldn’t see any good coming from my telling someone who held my aquatic fate in his hands what I imagined his mother was strong enough at, or questioning whether or not he was a strong enough heterosexual.  So I kept my mouth shut and continued to do mini laps in the shallow end.

Humiliation aside, this poses a very practical problem for a grown man of my statue.  Being freakishly tall, the shallow end doesn’t even come up to my waist, and it’s surprisingly difficult to tread water when extending your legs even the tiniest amount results in standing up. I wanted to call it a day and see if I could get a better workout by flooding my tub, but as a man I had to stay at least long enough to make a point of annoying the lifeguard.  Once that important task was dealt with, I was ready to head home and wait for my normal pool to open its doors and welcome me back to the world of aquatics with open, indifferent arms.

I was determined to show that life guard exactly how strong a swimmer I could be, and I left the pool that night with a new found resolve to excel at what had previously been nothing more than a hobby.  A few more weeks of training and I was sure my swimming skills would be on par with Johnny Weismuller, or at least Agustus Gloop.  So when our home pool’s renovations were scheduled to conclude, I marched in the door, held my head high, and was told that a pipe had burst and it would be closed for the next three months.  So I marched back to Chelsea, held my head low, and hoped that the lifeguard wouldn’t recognize the tall man flailing around in the beginners’ lane.

-TC

An Ocean's Depth, Part 1

My uncle has a saying. “If I fall overboard,” Uncle Michael says, “I’ll either drown, learn to swim real fast, or sink to the bottom and walk to shore.”

On the face of it this might not seem like the sort of thing that would come up often enough to merit an official saying saying. It would be little more of a comment or a quip for most people. What you have to understand is that my uncle lives on the Maine coast, where Posideon spends as much time expressing his dissatisfaction with summer people and their yachts as the locals do. He’s also the sort of guy who spends his spare time working with his hands, building, fixing, and tinkering with anything that might have - or have the potential to have - more than one part nailed to each other.

I’m not much of a man’s man, preferring a good picnic or a quiet evening in to hours spent coaxing engines to life or building furniture that doesn’t come with an Allen wrench. Despite his best efforts, my middle school shop teacher was barely able to instill enough technical knowledge in me to identify which end of a screw driver will most effectively drag my phone close enough on the coffee table that I can reach it and dial a repairman without standing up.

Uncle Michael, on the other hand, is a wonder with such complex man gadgets as shop-vacs, band saws, and hip waders. While his skills can be applied from any thing from lobster boat go-carts for the local parade or the most involved haunted house this side of Knott’s Scary Farm, Maine has an abundance of boats and rich people who don’t know how they work. So when someone has a boat and needs it hit with a hammer until it behaves itself, they call my uncle, which is how he regularly finds himself mucking about on half-working boats with no life jackets. But Uncle Michael can’t swim, which is why he felt the need to arm himself with a handy saying with which to dismiss the concerns of anyone who might find the sight of him cursing at a broken engine while paddling back to shore with half an oar to be an appropriate time to remark on his ill-advised safety policy.

I never learned to swim either, but being from a land-locked town where the local pool is closed for “fecal investigation” often enough to incite extended debates in the Letters to the Editor colum, I haven’t had to defend myself often enough to bother coming up with my own saying, and would just borrow my uncle’s whenever the subject came up. That all changed after I moved to New York. Somehow this city has attracted an oddly high concentration of people who would respond to my news with the same sort of look that I give people who have never seen Saved by the Bell. It’s not so much a look of judgment or pity as a look of utter bewilderment that says, “But…you’re alive, aren’t you?” As I started getting this response more and more frequently, I started looking on my at my lack of basic survival skills as a matter of personal pride, something that separated me from the pack. I’d drop this little tidbit at even the slightest hint of nautically themed party conversation, or woo first dates with it as part of the rather extensive list of things that I’m not good at. (Needless to say, I struck out a lot.)

Despite their incomprehension, no one was especially concerned by my lack of buoyancy, probably because I didn’t usually spring the news on them in close proximity to the words “women and children first.” Even my mother was more matter-of-fact than concerned. Once on a road trip to Maine, I voiced my concern that if the suspension bridge gave out and our car fell in the ocean my teddy bear would end up at the bottom of it. She simply said “It wouldn’t matter, because you’d drown too.” Which, to her credit, shut me up pretty effectively, which is usually the goal when you’re trying to merge in heavy traffic and a single-digit passenger thinks your attention should be focused on a stuffed animal.

But my life of quietly paying tribute to the invention of the lung was interrupted when I made the mistake of telling my girlfriend that I can’t swim. In all fairness, telling her wasn’t the mistake. The first time I brought it up, she gave me the “you don’t know who Screech is” look, but the matter was quickly dropped and we got back to discussing such important bonding subjects as which types of cupcakes we both liked and how wonderful kittens are. The mistake came when I decided to remind her of this conversation just before Hurricane Irene hit New York. While in hindsight the hurricane wasn’t any more remarkable than any other slightly rainy day, there was so much talk of flooding, power outages, second-comings, and not being handled like Katrina that concerns were being raised with eyebrows.

I was a bit hesitant to agree at first. With thirty rapidly approaching, I’m probably getting dangerously close to the point where I can round up to being an old dog as far as new tricks are concerned. I already harumph at the mention of 3D televisions, dismiss tablet computers as ever being able to rival a good old fashioned laptop, and regard twitter with the same sort of derisive suspicion that my grandmother once gave to cordless telephones and polio vaccines.

But I eventually agreed to the lessons, though not out of any concern about drowning in the streets of Queens. Rather, I’ve been trying to combat my own laziness by finding something to do in the city that’s physically active but doesn’t make me the sort of person who goes to the gym. Somehow swimming felt less like a less soulless form of exercise than running on a treadmill while flirting with spandex-bimbos by telling them about my screenplay. Plus, if babies and moose can do it, how hard can it be? So I agreed to give swimming a very tentative shot.

-TC

Steve Jobs

The tech world lost a visionary figure this week with the passing of Steve Jobs.  His illness was common knowledge, and his deteriorating health wasn’t hard to deduce as his once taut turtlenecks started to sag on his slender form.  Even so, he managed to keep the exact details of his condition quiet enough that the actual announcement of his death came as a bit of a surprise. While I’m a dedicated consumer of Apple products and eagerly await the live blogs chronicling the announcement of their shiny new gadgets, I can’t claim to have known the man outside his role as Apple’s spokesman.  Still, it’s hard not to feel a little touched by his loss when I reflect on the ways his technologies have changed my life, and run down the staggering list of his life’s accomplishments.  He may have left this world, but his greatest achievement will continue to live on in our collective memory.

I don’t mean revolutionizing personal computing with the Macintosh, or changing the way we think about music with the iPod.  I don’t mean taking the telephone to the next level with the introduction of the iPhone, or magically creating a new class of device with the invention of the bigger iPhone.  I also don’t mean taking the guess work out of the Academy’s Best Animated Feature category with Pixar or turning the fashion world on its head by finding a way to make “business casual” look over dressed.  Rather, I mean his single most impressive feat, the one that best defines his life, his legacy, and his place in history: sleeping with Joan Baez.

Of course, a big part of what made Apple’s business strategy was implementation rather than invention.  After all, Apple didn’t invent the smartphone or the touchscreen, but they utilized them in a way that set the standard for mobile communication, and in doing so ensured that every knockoff that came after would be relegated to the newly minted category of “iPhone killers.”  Similarly, Bob Dylan may have had the idea of sleeping with Joan Baez first, but Steve was in a position to observe his methods, avoid his mistakes, appropriated the most crucial elements, and refine them into what I can only imagine was a superior user experience.

Billions of dollars, legions of fans, and enough unproduced iPhone prototypes to make the entire tech blogosphere foam at the mouth, they’re all great in their own right.  But they will never buy you a night alone with the queen of the coffeehouse vibrato.  Credit where credit is due, Steve. We’ll never see another like you, and you will be missed.

-TC

Midnight in Paris in New York

I don’t get out to the cinema quite as much as I might like.  But after months of hearing endless praise from everyone lucid enough to express an opinion (informed or otherwise), I finally found time to sneak in and see Midnight in Paris before it was yanked from the few remaining theaters in New York.  While I am a die hard Woody Allen fan and will defend even his most hated works as having at least some merit (Celebrity, Hollywood Ending, the one that unfortunately involved Will Farrell), I went in with pretty low expectations.  After all, few of his films from the last couple decades have been easily defensible, and fewer still have been remarkable. I knew I couldn’t quite bring myself to hate this movie, but as soon as I saw Owen Wilson’s casual, almost lifeless face on the poster I resolved to give it my best shot.

But my resolve was all for naught, as I was met by a formidable adversary in the form of one of Allen’s finest films in years.  I knew nothing of the plot and went in completely blind, which was a refreshing change of pace in this modern world where the latest Hollywood board game adaptation’s trailer is just a few clicks away, even if the actual film is a good year off. (Well, maybe not good, but at least better than the two hours we’ve been waiting for.)  While I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen the film and is equally oblivious that they stop reading now and let the film wash over them like it did me, here’s the basic gist for anyone who doesn’t doesn’t have time to waste on surprise.

Midnight in Paris revolves around a struggling writer (surprise, surprise) on vacation in Paris (quelle surprise) who is a little neurotic and occasionally twitchy (please don’t surprise me, my nerves can’t take it) and inexplicably time-travels back to the 1920s every night at midnight to cavort with most of the major creative minds of the day (…okay, didn’t see that one coming).  In tone, the film is very similar to some of his more whimsical works, like Alice or The Purple Rose of Cairo.  It’s a lighthearted affair where emotions rarely run high or low, the nature of magic is never explained (or even really examined), and everyone learns an unsubtle lesson about themselves and their real desires.  It’s fun, it’s silly, and it doesn’t make you think particularly hard about your own impending mortality.

I’m not as well-read as I would like to be.  A few presumably famous people who I’ve never even heard of pop up now and again.  And as for those whose I am at least passingly familiar with, I’m completely ignorant about their personal lives and mannerisms, so I’m not in the best position to judge whether they are accurate portrayals or just rough caricatures extrapolated from their works. That being said, the acting and dialogue were superb, and whether or not Salvador Dali really went about exclaiming “rhinocerouses” in Parisian cafes, I still giggled every time Adrien Brody did so from behind a mustache as surreal as his personality.  The image of an inebriated Hemingway seducing a woman by a carousel with pickup lines like “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” will inspire every barroom conversation I’m ever forced into. And my inner film geek was absolutely delighted by little inside jokes like Luis Buñel asking “Yes, but why can’t they leave the room?”

And surprisingly, Owen Wilson was a much bigger asset than I would have expected.  For most of the film, his almost complete lack of range gives him both a subtle bemusement that sits well in the atmosphere of fantasy and prevents him from attempting too strenuous a Woody Allen impression.  Too many fine actors have grappled with the nervous ticks and stuttering of their muse and lost.  But Wilson only occasionally breaks his cool, and those moments are infrequent enough that you don’t too much time wondering who told this California goy that he’s a Jewish New Yorker.

The film muses on the nature of nostalgia, and I don’t think it would be much of a spoiler to say that in the end, Woody comes to the conclusion that life is in the present, and does his darndest to bring us along with him.  It is probably equally unsurprising to note that the woman the Allen surrogate ends up with is not his fiancé, but someone with an enchanting accent who has heard of Cole Porter.

But what the film lacks in subtlety or shocking conclusions, it more than makes up for in charm.  It may not be his most challenging movie, it may not rank among classics like Manhattan or Annie Hall, but it manages to do what Hollywood is supposed to do: it puts a 90 minute smile on your face and leaves you feeling a little bit better about the world outside the theater.  Plus, in keeping with Allen’s best work, there are plenty of attractive ladies to ogle.  And even in these troubled times, that still counts for something.

-TC

Happiness is a Warm Pen

We all have our personal shortcomings. Even the most noble of humans are inherently flawed, and we all fail to live up the expectations of others, or even our own. For some it’s arrogance, for others it’s greed. And every once in a while it’s a mixture of poor judgment, bothersome neighbors, and a an unusually large collection of bear traps. For me, it’s spite.

Mind you, when I say that I don’t mean open hostility. When I use the word spite, I mean a much more passive-aggressive sort of disdain. For me, spite isn’t fueled by the kind of anger that will manifest itself in screaming matches or fist fights. Instead, it’s a quiet, brooding contempt that involves going to extraneous lengths to prove someone wrong, or at least avoid proving them right.

On the surface, I’m just about the nicest and most helpful person you’re likely to come across. But under the surface lurks a bitterness of Loch Ness proportions and runner-up vindictiveness. If you cross me, I’d never dream of setting fire to your house, much less telling you how I feel.  Rather, I’m more likely to smile and nod while mentally cataloging the imaginary possibilities presented by carbolic acid and a turkey baster until I’m far enough away to stop taking your phone calls and wear my hat in a way you wouldn’t like.

While I like to think that that my passivity is at least in part due to a sense of kindness and respect for others, it’s probably equally the result of another shortcoming: laziness. Ordinarily, laziness is a vice that I will readily embrace, not just as a means to avoid confrontation, but also as a way to avoid such tedious, mundane tasks as doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, or putting on pants. But I do tend to rue my laziness when I let it stand in the way of activities that I actually care about, like buying cupcakes, seeing films with breasts in them, or, most importantly, writing.

I fell into a very bad funk a few years ago which left me unable to write for a very long time. And as someone who has never wanted to do anything with his life other than write silliness with which to bother others, this felt like a rather significant loss.

While the personal melodrama has long since come to a close, its lingering impacts still haunt me, and I keep finding it difficult to muster the mental energy for creativity or self-discipline. It would seem that writing is the same as riding a bike, in that once you’ve stopped doing it for long enough you forget how the baseball cards are supposed to fit in the spokes and until that’s sorted you can’t be bothered with the rest. Occasionally I come up with schemes to force discipline and spark creativity, with bouts of occasional success. I’ve written a few screenplays, even if none of them are quite developed enough to try to produce or even show to anyone without prefacing by saying “I had been drinking very heavily at the time.” I started to workshop a grammar textbook recently, and while I haven’t gotten all that far yet, I at least know enough rules of comma placement to realize just how few of them I observe. And, of course, I started this blog. But as my regular followers would have noted if not for the significant handicap of being imaginary, I update this page just often enough to keep it from developing World Wide cobWebs.

But all that is about to change, for today I learned that someone far less talented than me is about to become far more successful. This this discovery has ignited a fire under my creative cauldron in much the same way that learning your ex has married someone more attractive than you might result in a sharp increase in the number of informational pamphlets on the benefits of plastic surgery “accidentally” left in your wife’s car.

And my assessment of our relative talent isn’t meant to suggest that I possess any. I’m far too self-deprecating to ever dream of suggesting that I am good at something. If I by some odd chance I ever found myself scoring the winning touchdown in a football match, I would probably respond to the wild cheering of the crowd by finding Jesus rather quickly just so that I could have someone I could give all the credit to.  (Either that or by running for the exit before stadium security realizes that the real quarterback has been bound with duct tape and doesn’t usually come out onto the field looking like he’s missed every practice since Thundercats came on.)

Rather, I mean that the hack in question produces work so frightfully atrocious that I wouldn’t even dignify it with the same status as my own self-loathing. There are people whose talent makes you jealous of their success, and then there are people whose staggering lack of it makes you ashamed of your own failure. And the knowledge that this work will soon be unleashed upon the world fills me with enough shame to keep an entire continent from taking its shirt off in the high school locker room.

I once read a very good line in a not very good book to the effect that the human spirit is a marvelous thing, and there is little that it can’t accomplish if it’s out of spite. I’m hoping this proves to be true, because today I let my sense of bitterness and (extremely relative) superiority prompt me to make a pledge to myself: I decided that I’m going to write for at least a half an hour every single day, no matter what. (More when possible, of course.) This will be no mean feat, as lately I’ve gone weeks or even months without working that much (as the quality of this blog will verify). While I’ve made similar vows in the past and consistently interpreted them with the same sort of leniency as New Year’s resolutions about exercise and personal hygiene, my aggravation at the state of the universe is great enough at this moment that I feel like I could actually deliver for once.

Ultimately, that isn’t going to be enough.  It is of course crucial to develop technical skills, and it’s generally quite difficult to be successful in comedy unless you’re genuinely funny or at least capable of working the word “fart” into sentences that no one previously dreamed of.  But equally important is the business of selling yourself to others.  I’ve never been particularly skilled at hustling, networking, or completing the sentence “I’m quite good at ______” with a straight face.  And if there is one thing that my recent encounter with someone else’s success has taught me it’s that knowing how to market your work is what gets you success rather than producing work that deserves it.  But, like everything else in life, self-improvement needs to be taken one step at a time, so I plan to start furiously pounding away at the keyboard until I figure out how to start developing professional contacts or social skills.  Baby steps.

Of course, there are better things to write about than how I should or plan to be writing more.  Assuming I deliver on my promises, at least some of my attention will be focused on updating this blog with a little more regularity. That is, assuming anything happens during the rest of my day that is interesting enough to write about. Or interesting enough to write about on the internet, anyway.

-TC

Maple Soda

I was in Vermont a couple weeks ago, and I made plans to meet some friends at the Blueberry Haus, an ice cream stand in Guilford.  While frozen treats were every bit as delicious as you’d expect from small-town Vermont, I was more intrigued by a bottle of Maple Soda.  After all, we are no strangers to delicious ice cream in Vermont, home of Ben & Jerry’s.  But things unnecessarily flavored with maple, welll…okay, that’s not particularly novel either.  But having never encounetred a maple beverage before, and having served my time as a slave to Big Maple, I couldn’t help my curiosity.

Had I read the label, I might have been taken a moment to reflect on my impulse.  There were two ingredients in the drink: seltzer water and maple.  While I was reeled in by the promise of maple, I expected to find it used in a bit more moderation, perhaps in a soda sweetened with maple instead of high fructose corn syrup.  But instead of tasting something akin to Maple Coke, I was subjected to a bottle of frothy, watered-down, reduced-sugar maple syrup.  Which, I might add, is considerably less appealing than it sounds.  It was as though someone said, “I really enjoy seltzer water, but wouldn’t it be better if it was infused with the dark, bitter aroma of a tire fire?”

I hope I don’t run into Molasses Soda next time I’m in the farmlands.  Because deep down I know that my sense of adventure greatly outweighs my common sense.

-TC

Everybody Loves a Clown

My birthday present this year was a pair of tickets to see Cirque du Soleil at Radio City Music Hall.  While the various acrobatics seemed to be tied together with some vague, overarching plot, I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what it was.  As best as I could tell, the non-tumbling man in the cape was in love with a buxom space flower, so he decided to shoot clowns at her from a cannon until she got the hint. And, as she’s a bit slow on the uptake, he chose to occupy himself in the meantime by putting together a floor show that would make Ricky Ricardo hang up his bongos and weep.

I might have missed some of the nuances, but the show was fairly enjoyable nonetheless.  Juggling, tumbling, and spandex-wearing were found in plentiful supply, as were comic relieving clowns.  Though if there’s one thing more terrifying than a clown, it’s a French-Canadian clown.  As I’m sure they teach on the first day at Harvard Business School, never trust a man whose mustache matches his necktie.

-TC

Philadelphia

I recently returned from a short weekend in Philadelphia.  While the more devious parts of me are inclined to say that the highlight of the trip was making a vegetarian watch me eat a cheesesteak on her birthday, that wasn’t focus of the trip. Rather, I was brought to Philadelphia because the ever lovely Rachel G. had acquired a couple of tickets to see most of The Cars.  Benjamin Orr, their bass player and occasional lead singer, passed away a few years ago from pancreatic cancer, so it was probably for the best that they didn’t goad him into attendance.  It’s always difficult to focus on music when a ghost is trying to steal the show.

The concert itself was pretty amazing, if you like that sort of thing.  As it happens, I do, and as such, it was.  As the band took the stage with no introduction and the least bravado I’ve seen outside a funeral, the room went wild.  What The Cars lacked in antics (or, for that matter, dialogue of any sort), they more than made up for with spirited performances of some great classics, and a healthy mix of new material sprinkled in for those in the crowd that are unfortunate enough to not remember the 80s.  There were moments where Ric Ocasek literally dropped his guitar behind his back, slumped his shoulders, and stood motionless while the rest of the band rocked out.  If not for some awkward hipster robot dancing from synthmaster Greg Hawkes, you might have mistaken the show for a sound check.  But personally, I felt the lack of theatrics did only added to the charm of the night.  And even if the band had failed to deliver even the most mechanical reproductions of their work, it still would have been worth it just to stand in the same room as Ocasek, one of the best pop songwriters and producers in recent history.  Fortunately, The Cars delivered nicely, so I didn’t have to keep telling myself that on the way home.

In place of the departed bassist, the band largely made due with a pre-recorded bass track.  But on a few numbers, Greg Hawkes assumed responsibilities with Ben’s old bass.  As the set list went, they did shy away from songs that Ben sang lead on, with Just What I Needed and Lets Go as the only notable exceptions.  Some other personal highlights included Let The Good Times Roll, You Might Think, You’re All I’ve Got Tonight, Since You’re Gone, and the delightful new Sad Song.  A great show enjoyed in great company made for a great evening.

From there, Rachel and I crashed the tail end of her sister’s barbecue, and the three of us spent the next day together wandering around the city.  We took a leisurely walk around the old Waterworks and the park by the river, eventually breaking so that I could make the vegetarian duo watch me eat the most unhealthy meat product I could possibly find.  Then after a brief furlough at Johnny Rocket’s for milkshakes, we met up with another local friend (who was also in the middle of a birthday) and went to Buffalo Billiards for a few quick rounds of shuffle board.  Good times and a few drinks were had by all.

A short bus ride later, we were back in the New York, ready to resume our normal lives of avoiding eye contact with people who want money.

-TC

Hat

A friend and I met for dinner this evening at DERA, our favorite Pakistani restaurant in Jackson Heights.  Everything was going more or less according to plan.  The night was cool, the food was excellent, there was consistently no aloo palak despite it being consistently on the menu.  Then about halfway through our meal, I suddenly became aware of a dirty old man hovering over my shoulder.

When I looked up, he started mumbling and making vague broad gestures at our table.  After a moment, my friend asked, “What do you want?” Our guest responded by taking our water jug and a nearby Pepsi can, and trying to pour the contents of the one into the other.

The man soon came to the realization that this operation was more logistically difficult than he had originally imagined, and set the items down, giving them a dismissive wave and vague yet unmistakable mumble of derision.  He gave another quick survey, then started reaching for my friend’s water glass. Despite my friend’s repeatedly saying “no” with increasing firmness, the man took his water glass and went about his pouring maneuver with greater success.

At this point, my friend decided that action should be taken before any of our food met the same fate.  After failing to signal to the waitress, he tracked her down and started explaining the situation. While I could not hear the interchange, it seemed that her less than precise grasp of English was leading to some confusion about why he wanted me thrown out after we had ordered together.  However, she eventually got the gist of his wild hand gestures, and came over to ineffectively ask our personal vagrant to leave.  Finally, the man behind the counter caught wind of what was going on, and ran over tour table, grabbing the shabby man and forcibly escorting him outside.

We dismissed the establishment’s apologies with “it’s okay, it’s New York” and returned to our meal.  But a moment later, the man wandered back in.  This time, however, the guy manning the counter caught sight of him almost immediately.  Pausing briefly to wrap up some food, he leapt into action once more, this time with a bag in his hand.  By all appearances, he was trying to bribe the man not to come back by offering him food. But, this self-serving altruism was to no avail, and we spent the rest of the meal watching random waitstaff members throwing him out every few minutes.  On the plus side, we were given two free DERA hats for our trouble, along with the check.  We tipped graciously for the food, the hats, the story, and the personal body guard service, which does not come standard with most meals.

There is a simple lesson in all this: like Malcolm X who would not sit with his back to the door for fear of his enemies, we will no longer take the closest table to the door for the fear of thirsty hobos.

-TC

Ray's

I was on my way uptown to attend an evening event at a gallery, when I suddenly found myself a bit peckish.  So decided to stop off for a slice at Ray’s.  I wasn’t sure if it was a branch of the reputedly good Ray’s, or just one of the many knockoff establishments that had figured out how to mix the words “Ray’s,” “Original,” and “Famous” into a healthy profit.  But at the moment, I was hungry enough that it didn’t matter.

I wandered inside and decided to take the obnoxiously long line as a good sign.  As I was waiting patiently, a man walked up behind me and said, “quality of life, huh?”  I turned around and found a man who didn’t look exactly homeless, but didn’t look exactly un-homeless.  After a brief staring match, he pointed at my bag, which was a free gift from an AIDS media company I once worked for, and I realized that he thought I had AIDS.  I didn’t feel like explaining that I don’t have AIDS, I just have a bag that says AIDS on the side, so instead, I said “Yeah,” and shrugged.

After I got back to pretending to decide what kind of slice I wanted, a few moments of silence passed.  Then the guy, still engrossed in my bag, said “Media!  You work in the media?”  I confirmed his suspicions, and he added “I read today that, uh, Apple can track you with, like, iPods.”  Accepting that this conversation wasn’t going away any time soon, I said “Yeah, I heard that, too.  It’s crazy.”  My new friend just stared at me for a minute, then very loudly exclaimed, “Whaddya think of that?”  But before I could give any insight, he immediately turned around and walked outside.

I really need a new bag.

-TC

Beard Wars

For those of you who have been instilled with a burning curiosity about the state of my facial hair, I thought I would offer a quick update.

Not only have I consistently avoided any upkeep on my facial real estate, but I have also decided to start wearing my long, luxurious woman hair in a ponytail.  While I am generally of the opinion that guys in ponytails tend to look like douche bags, I can’t avoid the conclusion that it is the easiest way to keep hair out of my mouth without breaking down and visiting a barber.  Besides, one of the nice things about New York is no matter where you go or what you do to yourself, you will not be the strangest looking person on the train.

This theory was borne out very quickly when I found myself on the Manhattan bound 7.  A couple stops in, a bespectacled older man got on, looking very respectable in a nice suit and overcoat, sipping a small Starbucks coffee.  Ordinarily, he was not the sort of man who would have attracted any undue attention, had he not been bleeding from the head.  Which, as it happened, he was.

Suddenly, my grooming habits didn’t seem all that suspect.

-TC

Beard

I’ve long maintained the stance that the reason I never grow facial hair is that I’m incapable of doing so.  Or at least that I’m incapable of growing the sort of facial hair that anyone might want to look at.  However, after a year long silent, one-man boycott of The National Barbers Association, I’ve developed quite the mane of long, luxurious woman hair, which gives a kind of a “loner in the woods” look that I’m growing rather fond of.  And I figured that the addition of a patchy hobo beard would add a little something special to the effect.  Armed with a strong penchant for any goal that requires absolutely no effort on my part, I set about growing my very first beard.

A little over a week into the experiment, I went into a bakery in my neighborhood.  As I waited in line, I decided to peruse the contents of the pastry counter, which required me to bend down next to a child in a stroller.  After a moment, it’s mother looked at me and a concerned expression crossed her face.  She then began to slowly, discreetly pull the stroller in the opposite direction.

It was that moment when I decided that I’m keeping the beard.

-TC

Jazz

As a busy New Yorker, I know the value of keeping on the move.  And as a life-long devotee to the art of anti-socialism, I know the value of not talking to anyone who can possibly be avoided.  So of course I spend a good deal of my walking around time wearing headphones so as to give casual observers the impression that my mind is in places far too lofty and complex to be bothered with such petty, mundane tasks as eye contact.  It’s no secret that if anyone ever willingly speaks to you in the streets of New York, they’ll either want a dollar or a monthly contribution.  Or at very least they’ll want directions that you’ll be embarrassed by your inability to provide despite having walked past their destination every day for the last three years.

Thanks to a rather interesting definition of the words “intellectual property,” I’ve recently come into a sizable jazz collection, which is currently providing the majority of my life’s soundtrack.  As I work my way through it, I’m finding that the city really does look different when you have a constant stream jazz pumping into your brain.  It’s like putting on Woody Allen goggles.  Suddenly, the architecture seems majestically industrial rather than cold and indifferent.  The garbage-filled streets somehow magically transform into streets lined with garbage.  And instead of an endless parade of self-centered elitists who think they’re too good to give you the time of day, you see an endless parade of self-centered elitists who are too good to give you the time of day.  The city just becomes so alive and vibrant, I’d swear I even saw a homeless man delivering an improvised soliloquy about the beauty of the sun setting over the distant horizon and the tender breeze left in its wake.

But I couldn’t really hear him over the music, so he might have just wanted a dollar.

-TC

Black Swan

In the interest of having some pretense of a connection to popular culture, I recently decided to watch all the movies from 2010 that have been nominated for the best picture Oscar.  I figured that if nothing else, this would provide me with slightly more concrete grounds on which to say that the award means nothing when it is ultimately doled out to some hackneyed piece of tripe that can make no greater claim to artistic merit than the failure to cast any former Saturday Night Live alumni.

So it was that I decided to watch Black Swan the other night, and I must say that as excuses to watch chicks make out go, it was a pretty good one.  While the heavy-handed discussion of white swan/black swan dichotomy could get a bit repetitive, the characters and performances were enough to make some clumsy attempts at poignancy more palatable.

For me, though, the most indelible impression of the movie originated from one such discussion.  There is a scene where Natalie Portman, the newly ordained Swan Queen, is being lectured by her director on the nature of The Black Swan, which he is still unconvinced she can channel.  As a homework assignment, he instructs her to go home and touch herself, an act which she repeatedly attempts throughout the next hour.  However, despite some valiant effort, she consistently fails to see her assignment through to completion.  As I watched Portman’s masturbatory fervor interrupted time and time again, it was hard not to think that the struggle to find oneself has never been taken quite so literally.

-TC

Office

My company moved our office today.  While I would ordinarily prefer the task of cleaning a cage for incontinent ferrets to moving (a choice that I am rarely presented with in life), the process proved relatively painless.  This was primarily due to the fact that my bosses chose to forgo an exhaustive search for office suites in the city, and instead just move within the same building from the fifth to the fourth floor.  I can only assume that they wanted to enjoy all the fun of moving without suffering the indignity of van rental.

Whatever their reasoning, I can’t say that I feel good about this development.  After all, when you walk up to an elevator and press the down button, it’s difficult to argue that you’re moving up in the world.

-TC

Back to the Land of Dreams

Several years ago, people started suggesting that I write a blog. As I distrust any form of communication more advanced than the Dixie Cup telephone, I chose to ignore these people and occasionally give them dirty looks. However, when I moved to New York and found myself isolated in a crowd of millions, I grew weary of my anti-social tendencies, and in a momentary lapse of judgment, I decided to try nominally interacting with the world for a change.

Unfortunately, I quickly sensed a problem: I had nothing interesting to say, and unlike most people on the Internet, I was fully aware of that fact. So my blog quickly began to languish, with a bi-monthly, monosyllabic update seeming like a deluge of personal revelation. While I would like to blame the absence of readers for my lack of content, the real explanation is simply that the mixture of boring and lazy represents a toxic combination to the blank page, and I couldn’t be bothered to update the faceless masses on the inanity of my day.

Since almost everyone I know in the blogosphere tends to skulk around the virtual walls of tumblr, I thought I would start a new blog here in the hopes that doing so might somehow result in my being inundated with spontaneous ninja battles, depraved sexual escapades, or at very least the videos of kittens in paper bags that seem to pass for noteworthy events in the virtual world.

While I can’t claim that my life has become any more fascinating in recent months, nor that I have developed an unprecedented dedication to digital life, I can at least say that I am sufficiently bored to make a concerted effort to entertain those unfortunate enough to have stumbled across this page. I’ll also post the archives from my old blog, partly for the convenience of anyone interested, but mostly in the interest of mimicking the appearance of productivity. It’s the American way.

-TC

Mice

A few months ago, my household was blessed with the arrival of a new baby. I am of course using the word “blessed” in the loosest possible sense. In any event, my roommate’s “sister who isn’t his sister” (I have no idea) recently gave birth, and apparently decided that this event merited moving into my apartment four days a week. This then resulted in her “mother who isn’t really her mother” (still don’t know) telling her that if she was going to be gone so much, she could just stay gone, which she then promptly did. Or at least, from a certain perspective she did. From the vantage point of an irritable tall man, it would seem that she was instead staying put. After spending a further month helping my living room live up to its’ name, she and the baby finally managed to acquire lodging somewhere that wasn’t my apartment. Fortunately for all, her new home is fairly near my apartment, so she and the baby still come by every day to hang out, watch TV, and generally bathe in my sink.

I like to think of myself as a rather kind-hearted person, one who is generous enough in spirit to boldly declare that a single mother living on the street is a bad thing. I’d even go so far as to say I’m firmly in favor of offering someone assistance in their hour of need. However, I’m also a terrible human being, and firmly against babies being within shrieking distance of me. Lately I’ve been having some difficulty trying to reconcile these dual tendencies towards altruism and misanthropy. And when you come home every day to be freshly reminded of the fact that constant jet traffic from LaGuardia is not the single most bothersome sound you could have in your home, it’s easy for misanthropy to gain favor.

On a more positive note, the arrival of the baby came with the arrival of an unaffiliated transient cat. Unfortunately, this cat has also brought an as yet undetermined quantity of freeloading mice to our attention. He has caught two so far, and his continued infatuation with the scurrying sounds from the radiator suggests that there are more to come.

So I’ve decided to do what any reasonable person would do: I’m going to buy the baby a pair of Mickey ears and give it Pavlovian cookie every time it squeaks. Hopefully we’ll get at least one problem solved.
-TC

Diastema

I have a rather sizable gap between my front teeth. This gap is in fact so sizable that it is not unheard of for me to occasionally whistle as I speak. Growing up, I was mortified by the prospect of having to recite the tongue twister “Sally Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore.” This was not a result of the common concern that I would be unable to perform the lingual acrobatics involved in correct pronunciation, but rather out of a fear that listeners might mistakenly think that I had adapted the work into a musical performance piece for piccolo and voice.

Thanks to my recently kindled love affair with This American Life, I discovered today that my dental shortcoming has an official medical name: diastema. It is very reassuring to know that if anyone brings up the subject of my front teeth, I will now be able to say that I am a diastematic. Telling them that I suffer from Rescue Ranger Dale’s Syndrome is getting a bit embarrassing.
-TC

Dull, Dull, Dull...

When I first started this blog, I had intended to use it as an impetus to write on a regular basis. I figured that I might not have something interesting to say every single day, but that I should be able to come up with a pithy observation about life in big city (or how much I hate my own life in the big city) at least once a week. However, in making this assumption, I hadn’t accounted for one tiny detail: I’m an extremely dull person who thrives on a healthy mixture of monotony and tedium.

The other day, I called my grandfather to wish him a happy 90th Birthday. After the conversation had drifted to a lengthy analysis of which foods taste good with salt on them, it struck me that this was probably the most interesting discussion I’d had all week. The stage set, we upped the ante by moving on to naming states we’d driven through but not stopped in, and fans of witty banter everywhere rejoiced as the art form was was taken to a whole new level when my grandmother chimed in with an annotated oral history on how much more expensive onions are than they used to be. The riveting revelations just would not end.

I live in one of the busiest and most exciting cities in the world. I’m constantly surrounded by all forms of culture, debauchery, and insanity that the mind can conjure. You’d really think I’d have more to show for my day to day existence than the ability to avoid eye contact with performance artists. Perhaps I need to get out more. Or talk to strangers more. Or talk to people I know more.
-TC

Woodside Story

Something unusual happened the other night while I was enjoying a leisurely stroll home with some Pakistani take-out that I hoped to get very well acquainted with. As I neared my house, I saw a group of young, macho looking alpha male types moving rather boisterously in my direction. Ordinarily, I would think nothing of this. I’ve lived in the city long enough that such sights aren’t uncommon, my neighborhood isn’t a particular hotbed of violent crime, and I’m large enough to fool most strangers into thinking that I might not be the single biggest coward in the history of time. Plus, having been raised by hippies, I’ve had the importance of not judging people based on appearances drilled into me since birth, so I know better than to assume that someone is violent just because I can smell their testosterone-soaked energy wafting down the street.

However, in spite of all this, I suddenly found myself overwhelmed with the feeling that I was about to be mugged. I don’t know what made me so certain of the inevitability of my fate. It may have been nothing more than simple paranoia. In any case, in that moment, there was no doubt in my mind that things were about to get ugly. I didn’t know what to do, but I was relatively certain that dropping my dinner and running away as I shrieked like a schoolgirl with a frog in her dress would be at very least undignified, if not actually counter productive. So instead I decided to proceed to my front door as though nothing was wrong.

What felt like a very long, very tense moment passed as I walked on and tried to remember the exact series of muscle movements involved in looking cool. I was about to turn and walk up the front steps of my building when suddenly and without warning the gang linked arms and began Wizard of Oz-style skipping down the street.

At that moment in my life, I was emotionally prepared to be mugged, and I was logically prepared to not be mugged. But I was definitely not prepared to walk into an impromptu reenactment of West Side Story.

-TC