Sleeping and showering and eating and hanging out with the same people all day, every day, I am reminded how much I hate smalltalk. I go sit with Carlos at lunch. I hang my head over my same-iceberg-lettuce-ad-infinitum salad and ask him how his suite is. Good. He asks me how I am. Good. Leanne […]
I went rock climbing tonight, with Randy, for the first time in years. My arm muscles are in revolt now; they remember supporting my whole body weight off tiny little chips of bolted-on rock, and they don’t want to type. Don’t do that to us again, they say. We’ll give you the jo-jeezly-Barbie-arm rigor mortis […]
It is time to post this. I’ve spent too long on the draft, I’ve forgotten the perfect title I came up with for it, and the fire’s dying. In 1966 and 1967, Apaches at Cibecue portrayed “the Whiteman” as hippie — mumbling, awkwardly effeminate, and… “rich but pretending poor.” In 1970, VISTA volunteers descended on […]
Monday, December 18, 2000
Cleaning the house. Cleaning cleaning cleaning. Mixing Pine Sol and Windex and Drano and Kleen-King bleach-laden scouring agent without regard for my safety. There isn’t a drain in this house which isn’t clogged. Nothing like getting down there with a rag to remind me what a wreck this house is. Either the upstairs bathtub or […]
Monday, November 13, 2000
I finally got around to reading the article in the New Yorker about Blogger. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. In fact, it was kind of frivolous; felt like a return to the bad old Tina Brown days. I guess that was intentional. It was a light fluffy piece which didn’t come to a […]
I have been using chat rooms and other written forms of electronic communication for seven years now, but every now and again the openness of the medium makes me giddy. I enter a chat room: what does that mean? I can be connected to the forum for hours without saying anything. I can evoke images […]
the presidential debates, 10/03/00 I’d like to ask now why should the American public entrust the education of their children the stewardship of peace in Montenegro and their golden years should the economy fail to you see my suit my haircut years in the Ivy League a noble tremble standing as trained, I am the […]
Thursday, September 7, 2000
as the plumber I’ve been negotiating with so charmingly calls them. The seats of the toilets at work are invariably spattered if not flooded wwith urine. This is in the women’s room, mind you, not the men’s. Apparently it is the habit of the people who come through our clinic to suspend themselves above the […]
adapted from a paper journal, one of those things you should hunt down when I’m dead. Smalls. A basement jazz club somewhere down in the really expensive southern artsy part of Manhattan (10th st.) Not for nothing the name. Large photo of a smiling guy at the front of the room onstage, his knees hugged […]
(adapted from a letter I sent to my former roomie today) I went to a meeting of local parents about the school system today. It was, of course, infuriating. I found out that the school next door to where I’ve been working ranks 656th out of 677 schools in the whole city. And it just […]