artholes: 2011

4/15/2011

Bullet Point Wednesday Apr 15

[ok, so it's Friday, fire me]

At Last!

[Game of Thrones on HBO]

This poor schnook has been wandering the planet dressed like this since he betrayed Frodo over a decade ago. I'm glad he's working again. All is forgiven.

Nice Job Frenchie!

[France Bans the Veil--http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/world/europe/12france.html]

We should now rightly heap all the enmity we wrongly heaped on them for not backing Iraq II.

Speaking of which, why did we heap all that scorn on the French and not the Germans who also didn't back Bush's folly? Why were people dumping their Bordeaux but not their Mercedes? Had we hurt the Germans enough with the whole frankfurter/hot dog thing back during WWI?

This is Why I Live Here

Russian Girls Rhythmic Gymnastic Team walking down 9th Avenue! I want my own hula hoop case!!

Global v. Local

We were planning a trip to the ballpark for four, and we had two days/times to choose from. I asked my associate which time she would prefer to see the game: Friday evening or Saturday afternoon. In lieu of reply, she asked:

Who's playing?
How much are the tickets?
Should I not go?

After a while I was able to return the conversation to the initial question, and she suggested a time.

Later I pointed out that I had learned through this question [more pointedly than ever] that she had a global approach to answering questions whereas I might approach the question more locally. She asked me what I meant by "global v. local." I mentioned her asking a series of questions around the initial question before she actually answered it. She seemed confused, "Well, how else should I have answered?"

"By telling me what time you wanted to go."

"Oh."

"Hero" Was Exactly the Word I Was Looking For!

[Non-Italics are mine]

...To many, Mr. Charney [American Apparel guy] is not only a somebody but even something of a hero: finding a new niche in a saturated market for cotton basics by refusing to make them overseas [or with actual thread] (despite other companies moving operations abroad); crusading for workers’ rights; and successfully marketing the idea that young adults should embrace their natural sexuality [yeah, that's it]...

---New York Times, April 13, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/fashion/14CHARNEY.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=dov%20charney&st=cse

Hey, dude, embrace this.

4/06/2011

Bullet Point Wednesday Apr 6

[a new weekly feature when I remember to do it]

Take a Walk, Zach

I just saw this pic of Zach Snyder. Surprised to find he's a normal/decent looking dude. Having previously only seen his films [300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch] and not his face, I was convinced that:

He’s never been outside, and
He’s never gotten laid

I was thinking that Mick Jagger is beginning to look like my grandmother, then I realized Mick Jagger could have slept with my grandmother.

Al Pacino Has Been Cast to Play Matisse

Now that he’s ruined blind people [Scent of a Woman] and Jews [Merchant of Venice] for us, he might as well go all out and ruin one of the two pillars of 20^th century art as well. Wait til you catch Russell Crowe as Picasso!

News Line of the Week

from the wires

“He was a loving, caring individual,” said an emotional Snoop Dogg (no relation), who reportedly got a tattoo of his friend’s face the day before.

Wait! Does that mean that Donald and Daffy aren’t related? Queen Elizabeth II and Godfather II also not?

Me sad. :(

Heads Up!

Just walked by a truck that had Acme Safe Co. written on it.

Fisher Stevens Directing John Leguizamo’s One Man Show

Here’s how they decided to work together:

Fisher Stevens

[in voice that mocks his repulsive nerdiness but is really very angry about]

...I'm an annoying twerp

John Leguizamamo

[in voice that mocks his Latino-ness but don’t you dare ask him to do it Seinfeld, you racist Jew you]

or alternately

[with a very cute lisp]

OMG…Me too!

FS & JL

[together]

Let's team up!

Lamest Cry For Help of the Week

AND
Lamest Excuse of the Week

Beth was out with Simon, and I was in the middle of preparing tacos for the six boys sleeping over for Max’s 11^th birthday [We couldn't just do pizza like everyone else. No….] One of the kids told me that someone was knocking at our door. It was our new neighbor, a mom of two boys:

Neighbor: Do you have mice?

Me: Occasionally.

N: What do you do?

M: Feed em. Kill em. Depends.

N: I mean what do you do when you catch one. We have one on a glue trap, and I can’t get hold of the super.

M: I guess keep trying him.

N: But it’s squeaking, and the squeaking is really bothering my sister. [?]

M: Sorry, but I’m cooking for six boys now.

N: But my husband isn’t coming home for an hour!

M: Well, I guess you’re going to have to woman up and kill it yourself.

N: Oh, I can’t do that. I teach yoga.

NY Times 3-31 The Good & The Bad

Oh Goodie! Another Thing To Be All Retro About: Typewriters!!

[The reason this piece is late is because I wrote it on a wonderful old Remington. Then retyped it because of typors. Then had it set in type face, printed, and fed manually into the interweb]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/fashion/31Typewriter.html?ref=fashion

What’s going to make a comeback next?

Slide rulers? -- just love the feel of the wood, the incomprehensibility!
Beepers? -- need I say more?
Belted sanitary pads? -- I really like to feel protected
Pogroms? – veiled anti-Semitism is so done. I want to be hated to my face, have my home trashed, really feel the loathing.

Kids Doing Real Woodworking

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/garden/31kids.html?_r=1&hpw

I’ve tried for years to get my kids in actual cooking classes not the only kind you can actually find in New York City, the pudding-stirring-stay-away-from-heat-and-sharp-objects-you-precious-little-idiot-you classes. It’s like the first thing a seven year old would do in front of an open flame is put his face on it because it’s so bright and colorful. As if even if kids were that stupid, then all the adults present supervising would somehow be so inept or inattentive that they would let them.

Sorry I have to go now, Simon just flipped the steaks on our hardwood charcoal grill with a pair of tongs more than half his height, and I have to stir the pudding. [Actually Simon did that two summers ago when he was six. The following fall he got to chop celery with a plastic knife at the JCC].

I never did find a decent cooking class, but at least these dudes have stepped up with real tools!

3/23/2011

Dear Whitney:

I am a parent of a student in Ms. F.'s third grade class, and I accompanied the class on its visit to the Edward Hopper exhibition today. I want to thank the museum for accommodating us and for giving the students the opportunity to see the work firsthand and in an uncrowded setting.

Edward Hopper, Barber Shop (1931)

I know that the Whitney has always placed great import on arts education and for that I am also grateful. Because I know the high value you place on education, I am moved to write to implore you to reevaluate some of your approaches. Today's guide was a sweet person who clearly valued her charges but also did them a bit of a disservice in her talk.

On the first painting they looked at, my son mentioned that the bridge in it was the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the Queensborough Bridge. Rather than correct him, the guide praised him. This set the the tone for the talk. Her theme was that Hopper was intentionally ambiguous in his paintings to leave interpretation open to the viewer''s imagination. While mystery and ambiguity no doubt play a large part in Hopper's work, there are certain clues in his paintings that are incontrovertible. Allowing kids to miss those clues grossly undersells the work and underestimates the students.

Since my days as art critic, I have been teaching a good deal of art and English literature. I find that many students seem to deplore both. I believe that a lot of this loathing stems from students being taught that any interpretation is valid. Instead, it would be far more beneficial if students were taught that artists and writers often make choices for very specific reasons and that those choices suggest meanings that could take students beyond their own subjectivity [even eight year olds want to learn something more than the contours of their own minds].

After many years, the self esteem movement at large has taken a few steps back. It is time for it to do so in arts education as well. It is all right for children to lose occasionally and it's also all right for them to be told that the Queensborough Bridge is not the Brooklyn Bridge or that a painting called Barber Shop is not set in a science lab. Instead of leading the students to see that masterpiece as a character study of a manicurist in repose, a minor character idle in a busy barbershop elevated to heroic stature by her central placement in a shaft of brilliant light, our guide let the students go on about her being a painter, someone waiting for a haircut, etc...

Ugh.

Thanks for your time and efforts.

3/17/2011

Atomic-holes

Flint & Frum -- Complicit A-Holes

Lobbyists, pundits and think-tank shills routinely escape taking responsibility or paying the price for either being obscenely wrong or for pushing for causes they know to be obscenely wrong [“Free markets will regulate themselves!” “Once we invade Iraq, democracy will flourish!”]. It is galling that these people are allowed to spew their toxic propaganda with impunity especially when it is hard to believe that they are not aware of the criminal negligence inherent in their words. On the heels of the snowballing nuclear disaster in Japan, the atomic lobby has released a rapid response team into the media and the halls of Congress with a fervor usually reserved for fighting actual nuclear meltdowns. These creatures however, are not fighting to save lives, but to save $360 billion in Federal loan guarantees.

Yesterday, I absorbed a fair amount of nuclear poisoning from both tv and the radio. CNN covered a day in the life of Alex Flint, a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute, as he ran around Washington putting out anti-nuclear fires. He held a closed information meeting which 150 members of Congress attended and spent the rest of the morning sitting directly behind Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu as he testified before Congress. One of the talking head type A-holes, David Frum, speaking on Marketplace, even used the conceit that he just bought stock in uranium shares on the grounds that, “If the danger from this shock is contained, nuclear will have passed its most extreme test.”

Frum’s commentary is not just wrongheaded but also criminal. Forget the growing fear that nuclear will NOT pass this test, and the horrible dread we are all beginning to feel that Japan will, literally, be living with the fallout from this catastrophe for decades. Even if all radioactive leakage were to stop this instant, there is no way to know that this will be nuclear’s “most extreme test.” Of course that is the biggest problem with nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy should not be allowed to continue as it is currently constituted precisely because the consequences of an accident at a nuclear power plant are so dire and because the world is fraught with so many “unknown unknowns.” What if instead of targeting the World Trade Center, the 9/11 hijackers had aimed their jets 70 miles north at the Indian Point Nuclear facility? Or what if, oh I dunno’, there’s an earthquake in California [that’s kind of a known known]? Or what if....well, you get the idea.

Later in his chat, Frum goes on to say that “the principal alternative to nuclear power is coal, and that the hazards of coal are less spectacular than the hazards of nuclear, in just the same way that the hazards of driving are less spectacular than the hazards of flying.” When Frum, a seemingly intelligent man [he used to write economic speeches for George W. Bush] starts tossing around such specious syllogisms, I begin to speculate that perhaps he bought those uranium shares with money from the uranium industry and notions of true criminality dance through my head.

Freedom of speech is a hallowed and inalienable right, but you still can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater or, in this case, “No Fire!” in a nuclear meltdown.

2/25/2011

Oh Oscar!

Went to see The Fighter. Trying to fight my anti-stereotypical Boston film bias. It's a stereotypical Boston film (set in Lowell) AND and a stereotypical boxing film AND it looks like it was shot on a flip cam through a lens dipped in clam broth. However, Russell, as ever, has wrought great performances from his actors including Amy Adams who looks great with a tummy but gets lost in the final act, Mark Wahlberg who creates the strong backbone everyone gets to hang their ham on, Christian Bale who canned the ham and Melissa Leo who smoked the ham and nailed it to the screen. There is absolutely not one false note in her performance. It is truly remarkable. If Leo doesn't win Best Supporting Actress, the quintet who played her daughers should.

As for Best Film, I have seen seven out of ten nominated pics. I have not seen The Social Network [for reasons discussed here previously], The King's Speech [if you think I have a anti Boston film bias, you should hear what I think of small, well wrought Britishy oh Brit films], or 127 Hours [I know how it turns out]. Of course either Social Network or King's Speech will probably win, but I'm hoping that either The Black Swan or Winter's Bone wins. Winter's Bone has no chance, but wouldn't it be wonderful if, as Beth suggested the hill women from Winter's Bone slugged it out with the Ward women from The Fighter? The Black Swan is the most complete film of the lot save one, but it probably turns too many people off on its face. The one film that was better than The Black Swan and better than any of others on the list, is the most complete of all ten, the richest, and most fully realized. The film also contains the most enduring characters, some of the finest ensemble work you'll ever see in a movie and it was, by far, with only Inception [the boys' pick] coming in second, the most well crafted and visually stunning of all the Best Film nominees. This movie will NEVER win, but it should because the best film of 2010 was Toy Story 3.

Reposted by popular demand:

Ski Day with Beleaguered Dad in 82 Steps:

Wake up
Make coffee
Make breakfast for boys
Get boys dressed, loaded with gloves etc.
Get self dressed, loaded
Load car w skis, etc.
Forget lift tickets
Drive to slope
Park
Get Max in ski boots
Get self in ski boots
Carry skis etc. to slope
Take Simon to ski school desk
Get ski school pass
Go to ski office to get temporary lift passes for day
Wait for and get temporary lift tickets for day
Find Max give, him pass, send him off skiing w no rendezvous plan except the one he forgot from last time
Take Simon to rental place
Get Simon boots and board
Take Simon to ski school at foot of bunny hill
Go back to ski school desk to sign Simon up for another hour b/c he just missed first 15 minutes of 60 min lesson
Explain to guy at ski school desk that I’m the beleaguered dad
Go get my own skis on
Try to find Max
Give up and go skiing
After two runs, run into Simon getting onto the ski lift w his instructor: asks me “Where’s Max?” [he cares about his brother!] then tells me I was getting paged
Run into ski school desk
Ask if it was they who paged me [Yes and they knew it was me, beleaguered dad, Max was looking for, so after he waited around a while until they told him to go ski and meet up w me at noon when Simon’s lesson would be over]
Noon: all reunited at last
Back to lodge to eat lunch
Get table
Get food [one cheeseburger, two orders of French fries, a cup of cookies, two hot chocolates and a Diet Pepsi = $32]
Eat lunch
Take Simon back to bunny hill and leave him there, so I could ski w Max whom it turned out I had left alone for two hours
Do two runs w Max, drop a pole off ski-lift on first one
Pick up Simon
All take lift
Simon and I get off lift half way up hill, Max continues to the top
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall, board…until he gets tired of my watching him board, fall, board, fall, board, fall and sends me to the bottom to wait
Do it again
Meet up with Max and we all go to top of mountain
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall…
Using video cam on cell phone, I video Simon boarding while I ski with one pole. [Back in NYC, Beth disappointed I only videoed Simon]
Watch Simon board, fall, board, fall, board, fall…until he gets tired of my watching him board, fall, board, fall, board, fall and sends me to the bottom to wait
Do it again
Send Max to lodge to get himself hot chocolate
Simon and I return to rental place to return his board and boots
Go to ski repair shop to look for guy who sold us skis in November on the super cheap
Find guy
Ask for new pole and snowboard and boots for Simon [I realize now that Simon’s boarded twice, the skis I bought him will be useless]
Go outside to check my pole size [no jokes here please], second pole gone
Lewis [the ski repair guy] sells me used board and boots and set of poles
Cost of boots and board: $50 -- Not having to wait for Simon to get rental equipment next time and thereafter: Priceless
Get Max from lodge
Buy water for Simon and myself [flop sweating is really dehydrating]
Bring Max to ski repair shop while Simon is getting fitted
Listen to black guy make anti-semitic crack to Lewis
Pay Lewis
Bring gloves, hats, scarves, new poles, board, boots and boys out to pick up area in parking lot
On way out of rental place pass two guys dressed like they’re trolling for paparazzi at Sundance instead of for night skiing at Catamount
Almost get in fight with two guys, who are dressed for night skiing at Catamount like they’re trolling Sundance for paparazzi, because as I passed them I couldn’t help saying, “Really?"
Leave boys to get car
Take off ski boots
Bring car around
Load car with boots and boards and gloves and hats and scarves and boys
Leave mountain
Go to supermarket, leave boys in car listening to music
Buy food for dinner
Get home, unload car
Crack a beer and some pain meds
Make dinner
Eat dinner
Make the boys clean the damn kitchen
Nod off watching Monty Python w the boys
Wake up to put them to sleep
Put them to sleep
Tell them I love them to which Simon responds, “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Shower off flop sweat
Watch golf on Slingbox
Draw
Read Time and Again
Sleep

2/22/2011

Hey Charlie. I'll do it! I'll do it!

"Hur, hur, hur!"

from New York Magazine, Feb 13 article
Fight Like a Pretty Boy --
Where male models go to prove they’re not Ken dolls.

http://nymag.com/fashion/11/spring/71649/

“Rockstar” Charlie explains, “I’ve been fucking decked at these things, but I’m not worried about it,” he says when I ask why he’d risk those cheekbones now that his career is picking up speed. “I wouldn’t mind if my face looked more like a boxer’s. It would give me some more character. I’m just like, ‘Come on, break my nose!’”

2/16/2011

If This Is What You Get When You Put Up a Bird Feeder....

Good thing we didn't put up a cat feeder!

2/14/2011

The 23rd St. Doughnut Plant Has Opened!

The best thing to happen to the Chelsea Hotel since Sid & Nancy.

2/03/2011

Must?

Jerry Saltz recommended Christian Marclay's video in the listing section of New York Magazine this week. In about 50 words he described the piece [I can do it in 33: Marclay did a tour de force clip job and pieced together movie fragments that tick off every minute of the day in a video that is shown in synch with the actual time]. Saltz ended his description by calling it a "must see" piece. My issue with this piece and most concept pieces is: if they can be described thoroughly enough so that you get the whole schtick in 50 words or fewer, what in all that makes the piece a "must see" or even a "see"?

It would, however, be cool to play it instead of having a clock in your home

To be fair, I feel this way about many books [novels, non-fiction and academic tomes alike] and most films which are often sold on one line concepts. Once you know the premises of these works [people in Brooklyn have feelings, poverty is bad, Jennifer Aniston needs another paycheck], you can pretty much posit their entire scope and obviate the need to experience them.

Bullet Point Wednesday

Twitbook

As if to prove my point about having the whole social network thing shoved in my face like snow by a bully, when I woke up this morning and flicked on the clock radio in the kitchen the first three words I heard, swear to god, were "Facebook and Twitter."

I listen to a lot of radio; radio loves to talk about all the new media and the death of the old media. So much so that the words "Facebook and Twitter" have become linked like "salt and pepper" as the special flavor combo of newness and young-nocity. I wonder if the other old dying media talked so much about the new ones back in the day. Are there thousands of stone carvings fretting about papyrus? Were the telelgraph lines abuzz with talk of the telephone? Did lps devote cuts to discussions of cds? Did cd's have special bonus tracks that dithered about mp3s? Did horses chatter ceaselessly about cars?

Another Small Business Closes

It is sad, but if ever a business was asking for it, it was this one:

Curl Up & Dye has curled up and dyed

Buffalo New York

If New York City is going to turn into Buffalo, they could at least lower our rents and make us better bowlers.

Each morning I arrive at my office exhausted from getting the kids to school and then getting myself downtown. Today my sons argued over who held provenance over a chunk of ice. Today. The entire upper west side was a chunk of ice. Beth insists they're geniuses.

Anything But the Rand Paul Ads

Keep clicking. After four years of intermittent and now mittent blogging, my adsense dollars are up to $5.17. Google sends you a check after you've cleared $100, so at this rate I'll be receiving my first check in 2091. I promise, at that time, to give all the money to the committee to Landmark the Freedom Tower.

Catch

Now that golf Dave has one kid, he asked me what it was like to have two. I told him to imagine that having a wife and one child was like juggling a chain saw and a bowling ball, and then someone tosses you a cat....

1/26/2011

LA Diary

[More pics to come -- Camera on Hiatus]

Thoughts I Had Watching TV on the Flight to LA

The tvs on my flight kept needing to be rebooted, so JetBlue ending up comping all the movies. Even then I wouldn't watch Social Network. I love Aaron Sorkin even now that he’s sober, and I’m sure Jesse Eisenberg was great and Justin Timberlake can do no wrong in my book, but I still didn’t want to watch it. Later I realized why. Every day in every way I’m having Facebook pressed in my face like Aunt Ida's tits and not in a good way. The last thing I want to do on my time off is pay $20 or $0 to have it shoved in my face some more.

Instead of being cast in movies about accidental relationships brought on by the onset of an unexpected baby, Katherine Heigl should be cast as Wonder Woman. She has the boobs and hairline for it.

Outback Steakhouse is so fucking cheap they don't even hire actual Australians to do the accent.

Arrival

I know I’m somewhere radically different: the Long Beach baggage claim is outdoors. There not a speck of snow anywhere. Not even one of those residual snow piles that linger into May in NY.

Golf Dave picked me up.

Dave. I met him at the old Moshulu Golf Course in the Bronx. He was golfer who painted and I was a painter who golfed. Most impromptu golf partners are dicks or weenies, so our bond was instantaneous in spite of his being almost twenty years my junior. A few years ago he moved back to Cali, resurrected a gallery [http://raidprojects.com/], enrolled in grad school, had a baby, got married [Hello to Heather & Wagon Girl], and resettled in his native Long Beach. Tired of hearing about my desire to go to California to see Dave and meet the new fam, Beth arranged for me to get out there. Dave did the rest.

Most other motels only

advertise high ceilings

I'm staying right across the street from

combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell

After Dave checked me in and took me to meet Ryan. Ryan is a completely ür California experience in and of himself. He paints in a Quonset tower within an amazing little family courtyard [his dad and grandfather both worked there] that contains a beautiful old workshop and tons of surf boards. His work is a little bit like Alfred Jensen meets Ed Rusche, but he’s not yet sure where his own hand fits in. Time will tell. After the studio visit we settled into a bar on the main street drag of Seal Beach. We talked about a lot of things including my propensity for cursing in public [not a great idea in Cali] and Californians propensity for criticizing people’s life styles to their faces [not a great idea in NY]. Then Ryan mentioned that he was into guns and owned a couple. He wasn’t into guns for hunting [I didn’t so much as see a squirrel in my whole time in LA], or self-defense, as he was into having one in case of, “You know, apocalypse.”

Maybe it was because it was 4am my time or because the whole Arizona calamity was fresh in my mind, but something crystallized for me and I had to respond:

The belief that having guns around to protect us from bad people is pure childhood fantasy and magical thinking.

If a burglar comes and knocks out Daddy, I’ll hide behind the door and jump on him when he tries to come into my room and I’ll be the one to save Mommy.

If there wasn’t anyone on hand in that Arizona parking lot to pull a gun and take down the bad guy, when and where will there be? In Arizona even concealed weapons are allowed to carry concealed weapons. But none of that matters because the chances of a civilian being in the right time and the right place and having the wherewithal to take out a deranged gunman in the midst of perpetrating a random massacre are even lower than the odds of the massacre occurring in the first place. As for all hell breaking loose, sure it could happen: civilization could break down. But as I told Ryan, “If the country really did go to hell, and I really did need a gun, I’m sure I’d be able to rustle up something.”

Living the Dream

Put palm trees around them!

[No one will ever noticethe oil rigs 20 feet of their shores]

Friday morning : I had the best breakfast burrito of my life.

Friday afternoon: I hit out of deep sand from 40 feet up a steep face to within 6 inches of the cup.

Saturday night:

I have now lived the social network in action. After a pleasant stroll through MOCA, I told Dave I had a hankering for sushi. He didn’t really know any places, so he did the text driving thing [we did a lot of the text driving thing – I felt like such an outlaw] and put the question out on Facebook. A young woman he knew, Dot Girl [she draws pics of endless color pencil dots], hit him back, and in 20 minutes we were in Little Tokyo eating really good sushi [http://www.sushigenla.com/]. Acoustic indie rock was playing in the background the whole time.

There was a couple seated next to us at the restaurant who were clearly on their first date. The man had those multi-level asymmetrical side bangs Japanese dudes seem to dig. The woman, super petite and immaculate, sat perched on the front edge of her seat, her large leather purse behind her. After they ordered, she took out an inlaid case. She withdrew pieces of wood and ivory, and screwed together her chop sticks like a pool shark would her cue. The woman’s order arrived all sea urchin and monkfish liver. She lit on each piece like an expert fly fisherman and slid her strikes into her mouth with deadly precision. She will marry this man and run his life and the lives of their children.

Later at the opening at the gallery Dave used to run, I saw a lot of girls with cute hats and complex tattoos including Dot Girl. The gallery is part of a complex called the Brewery part of which had been a brewery but was also composed of warehouses and office courtyards. Like LA at its best, it combined the inside with the outside in a sprawling open way that makes a tight assed easterner giddy in the dead of winter. There were giant studios and lofts and odd converted live/work spaces that made huge artwork make sense. We wandered and came back for the end of the opening and then wandered again through the warren of space, past a loading dock converted to a terrace and a back office space now a live/work space where Dot Girl was hosting a party with her roommate Airbrush Boy. It was a nice party, everyone was nice to me, and I was neither drunk nor stoned. Weird.

Sunday morning: We surfed.

Ryan lent me a board that was about 9 feet long and about as easy to maneuver as a garbage scow. Dave said it was better for me, but I think that after three days of putting up with me he was just looking to fuck with me. I did show Dave a little something by miraculously wedging myself into a wetsuit he was sure was too small for me.

The thing about surfing is it all looks so nice and bucolic until you try to get past the breakers without vomiting a lung.

I don't think any other person has ever said the word "paddle" to me as much in my life cumulatively as Dave did that one day. The only thing I succeeded at was not getting conked out by my own board as I was tossed like an overstuffed rag doll by the waves.

Eventually Dave tired of watching me and told me to try riding the whitewater. Eventually I got on top of a couple an almost got to my knees. I got a glimpse of the thing, and it was beautiful. Dave swore I did not look like a tool. He was lying.

Going Home

Living the Dream Part Two: I watched the Jets beat the pretty boy qb and the lipless sore winner/loser coach on the flight home via Slingbox and in-flight Wi-Fi. Not bad for a man who remembers the IBM Selectric as the height of technology. I managed not to cheer out loud both for the passengers on the plane who might have been taping the game and because I am, always have been, and always will be the guy stewardesses would most love to tase.

___________________