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Saturday, April
19, 2003 at 01:46:08 (EDT) |
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Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Friday, April 18,
2003 at 12:24:21 (EDT) |
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Ain't nuthin' but a G thang ... eventually
Last night, M and I checked out Spider.
Quite a departure for Mr. Cronenberg, no drippy-organic-parasitic
evolutionary things, shuddering and pulsating along while the humans
wrestle with their ids. Yes, quite different than that. I'm starting
to think David Cronenberg is one of the most interesting directors
around, Crash notwithstanding. After the movie we spent a few
tense moments at the Kings'
Head Tavern, my first time really spent in a newly-nonsmoking
bar. Smelled better than Freddy's,
but it's gonna take me a long time to get used to not smoking at bars.
Despite the cold, several people braved it outside (not to mention
across the street at Beauty
Bar). The management thoughtfully provided a metal bucket of sand.
Then the real fun part of the evening commenced. We headed for
the L train and M noticed I was missing my bag. We went back to
the bar, but it was not there. We managed to catch some kid back
at the theater who let me in to find my bag sitting on a seat in
the third row. Oh, joy. Glad to know nobody got my lousy cell phone
and my copy of Invisible Man. We caught an 
train almost immediately; M headed home and I went to wait for the
 .
It sometimes seems like a joke when you wait a long time for the
train. This was no joke. Three trains and one utility transport
came through, heading to Queens while I waited to get back to Classon
Ave. The MTA guys, apparently with prior information, knew the train
would be a while, so they were down on the tracks, scooping up garbage.
My hat's off to those guys, that is not glamorous work. I was amazed
how close they came to touching the dreaded third rail, one guy
even hopping on top of the safety rail that covers it. Now, either
I've been misled about how fatal the third rail is, or these guys
are just that good to avoid treading on it.
These and other thoughts crossed my mind while I waited. I read
my book for a while, but standing still for so long was making me
freeze. I had to wander around to keep warm. After a certain length
of time, waiting for a train can have an intoxicating effect. You
can't stare down a tunnel looking for headlights that aren't there
for too long before psychosis starts to set in. Currently, the only
other thing of visual interest at the Metropolitan stop is the Rust
Wall. That's the space on the wall below a rusty grate through which
water from the gutter sluices through. The water carries the rust
over the once-white tiles, and voila! Modern art. Last night I saw
somebody had roughly scraped the rust of the centers of most of
the tiles, giving it a weird, purposeful look. I wish I had my camera,
but B borrowed it to record her Girls Gone Mild Rhode Trip. It is
of some comfort to think that there is probably no rush, since it
doesn't look like anybody will be cleaning it up anytime soon.
Relief swept over me when a train finally showed up. However, not
only did it NOT stop, the operator kept honking the extremely
loud horn as it went through the station. Why do they do this?
Do they think people are gonna fling themselves at the train if
they don't make these ear-shattering noises? That's not safety;
that's natural selection.
The train eventually came, I guess. My memories are vague. I got
home about an hour after getting off the
train. While Williamsburg is about 10 minutes away on my bike, by
subway it's an hour. I can't believe I had been getting sentimental
about the .
I must be out of my mind.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Thursday, April
17, 2003 at 12:29:51 (EDT) |
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Now I'm nothing but a G thang
Google has deemed
me irrelevant. I was just self-googling
(something one is wont to do when alone in the house), and realized
my site no longer shows up. Older entries from the days this blog
was hosted by Frognet
still get listed, but anything from the jimmylegs.com site had been
removed. This is terrible. What will I do if I can't check my stats
and see that people are coming to my site on the basis of search strings
like "masturbating
with female coworkers supplies," as some cubicle-Lothario
recently submitted? All that comes up is the old Frognet stuff, stuff
that I've been trying to remove from the web for some time. To get
Google to ignore pages, you have to put a meta tag into the code telling
search engines to ignore a page or even a whole site. I did this with
my old site, jimmylegs.8m.com,
so the splash page would stop showing up. But it looks like Google
went ahead and decided to remove all the pages it found connected
to it; hence I no longer exist.
There are good things and bad things about my new nonexistence.
I could dish about all the people I hate and know that, unless they
already know about this site, they'll never see it. On the other
hand, an old high school buddy or rich dying relative could be trying
to find me, and would only find information about the exuberant
kite-surfer who shares my name (then again I don't use my real name
on this site, but I still feel it could be divined by a motivated
Googler). I'm not sure if I have to pay taxes now anymore, since
Google says I don't exist. I may also be able to sneak into the
girls' locker room without being detected. I can most certainly
quit my day job, since not existing means not having to put up with
tedium. Not existing has already added heaps of insight into my
reading of Invisible
Man. Also, and I'll have to look into this, I may be immortal
now, since if I don't exist, how can I die? This is sounding better
all the time!
But alas, there is one thing that existence can get me that nonexistence
can't: attention. I need a steady stream of attention throughout
the day, and when I don't exist this drops to intolerable levels.
So the meta tag is removed, and now I must await Google's robots
to return and count me among the existent. I just hope it doesn't
happen while I'm in the locker room.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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HotBot
still lists me at least. What is going on? |
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Thursday, April
17, 2003 at 00:42:30 (EDT) |
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I Like You (A Lot): not just a Ralph Carney
song
So let's see, B is out of town, and my bachelor livin' has amounted
to running around the backyard and throwing rocks at cats. Due to
an unfortunate set of circumstance, Decatur
got outside while we were having band practice. This shouldn't be
a big deal, she's been outside before, but I always get overly-concerned
when this happens. This means I wander around the backyard (which
is not that big),
peering into the darkness and forlornly calling the cat's name. Meanwhile,
Freddie shows
up, once again proving how prompt and loyal a stray cat can be. This
other cat also shows up, this big male who has been terrorizing the
cat population of the neighborhood recently. I'm pretty sure he's
the bastard who bit Hubcap
and caused hundreds of dollars in vet bills. I also think he's been
eating the food I leave out for Freddie, an occupational hazard when
feeding outdoor cats, but it still pisses me off. The worst thing
is, unlike every other cat in the world, this one refuses to be frightened
by humans. When confronted, he slowly walks away, and sits just out
of reach.
So while I'm out searching for my lost little kitty, I have to
continually scare this big mean cat from the premises. The only
way to do this is to throw rocks at it. I don't actually hit him,
of course, not that I could if I had wanted to (I have a genetic
sports deficiency that makes me throw like a girl; a weak, weak
girl). Decatur is still nowhere to be found. I go back inside for
a while, long enough to hear bloodcurdling cat-screams outside.
The big mean cat is fighting with Freddie. Like a dope I run out
again and match wits with the cagey feline, who sits on a log and
stares at me condescendingly. I keep going outside for the next
hour until, magically, I enter the back porch and find Decatur sitting
there, eating Freddie's chow. She could have been hiding under my
bike the whole
time for all I know.
I'm a wild bachelor man, I tell you. I feel a little better about
this because my friend A
in Ohio called me the other day to declare that he too was a bachelor
for the week, since his wife and kids are visiting her parents.
"I fell asleep in front of the TV at 10PM last night,"
he said. I hear that!
Further distressing news for me: Friday night, at the lovely club
Tonic, Ralph
Carney is again performing. He's the guy who does horn arrangements
for Tom Waits, but he's also a fine, weird musician in his own right.
Plus he's from Akron! I've seen him before, and it remains, to date,
one of the greatest shows I've ever seen. I'm looking forward to
this show, especially because I have just been reminded that this
guy exists. At M's birthday party, I met Jeffrey, a performer with
the bizarre-music outfit Butz.
His band's music reminded me in description of some of the stuff
Carney does, so I am all rarin' to see him again.
Here's the problem: B will be in bucolic Providence on Friday,
nowhere near Tonic, M will be in picturesque Maine, A will be working
his night job in Williamsburg, J is in Ohio, his wife M is already
seeing a friend perform at Up
Over. This pretty much exhausts my supply of folks who might
be interested in this type of music. There's an outside chance that
the Butz guy might want to go to the show, but barring that, I may
have to go ... alone.
I can't even go to the movies by myself. B can do this, but the
only movie I have ever seen alone was Happiness,
which upon reflection, was a good thing. I don't like going to social
functions without a buffer zone of at least one person I know. I've
never been gregarious enough, and what little gregariosity I had
has dwindled since college. So if anybody out there is planning
on going to this, drop me a line, and I can attend will less trepidation.
My one condition: don't beat
me up. Unless I really, really deserve it.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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MP3:
Ralph Carney - March of the Puppets! |
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Tuesday, April 15,
2003 at 15:10:13 (EDT) |
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Stuck on a line
I'm sitting here with the phone stuck to the side of my head, enduring
an especially excruciating conference call meeting. The sad thing
is that this should be stuff that I want to be a part of, the corporate
intranet site is upgrading to a fancier content management application.
This could mean great things for my work, making things simpler and
easier to integrate, etc. But the problem is this thing isn't currently
meant for the site I maintain. My site is the forlorn stepchild of
the company, the last vestige of old-fashioned, manually-built web
pages. Every other thing on the web related to my company is handled
through an automated management system. My site is managed by me,
copying files from one window to another. And this isn't gonna change
any time soon.
So my being on this call serves only to irritate me. I already
knew that the company-at-large had a system I wasn't privy to, but
now I am hearing all the amazing features and timesaving devices
that will make their site the most fabulous piece of work in the
world of internal websites. My boss has me on this call because
he says we might join up with them eventually. Yes, we might. Whoop
dee doo.
I don't even know why I don't just put the phone down altogether.
In fact, I will. Ah, much better. They emailed me a Powerpoint presentation
about the new system; that's all I really need. But now I feel like
it'd be rude to hang up in the middle of the meeting, as the conference
function makes this little beeping noise when somebody disconnects,
so nobody can get away clean. Devious.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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Monday, April 14,
2003 at 14:40:03 (EDT) |
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Too many birthdays ... too many pills
Sorry to the 4Front folks, I will make it to your next affair. Instead
I spent the evening in Bushwick in a loft full of weird theater tech
people. There may have been a few actors there, but mostly this was
a crowd of lighting techs and stage managers. And one aspiring jazz
musician. I have attended parties with 'theater people' in the past,
and had always assumed it was the actors that made those gatherings
tense with their attention-seeking personalities. Apparently this
syndrome rubs off on the backstage crew, too. This is not to say it
wasn't fun; to be sure, a good time was had by all. I was just more
acutely aware of how difficult it is for a guy like me to strike up
conversations with strangers when they all know each other and seem
perfectly happy to just talk amongst themselves. M realized at some
point that if we just stood in the kitchen, eventually the people
would glom onto us. This worked and we were talking to a bunch of
people, and then the second crisis hit me: I was the oldest person
there. It wasn't like I was the lone adult in a room full of Pratt
students (like I often feel at the Alibi
on Mondays), these people were older, but I was even older. Eventually
some other friend-of-a-friend name Jake showed up and apropos of nothing
offered that he was 31. Hooray! What an old fogey!
M and I bought a small bottle of Bushmills and managed to drink
it all ourselves before everybody even showed up. This served as
a wonderful prerequisite for the next night, which was M's birthday
party at the Sardine
Can. I thought I'd be safe since they only serve beer, wine
and sake, and are supposed to close by 1AM. Alas, I drank just enough
Brooklyn Lager to think that "taking a walk round the corner"
sounded like a good idea. I know I am a terrible lightweight, but
I had no idea what I was in for. By the time we got back the only
thing I could do was mumble, "I am incapacitated" to anyone
who dared speak to me. And speak they did! People wouldn't leave
me alone. When I'm that screwed up, it's hard enough for me to remember
to breathe, let alone converse in any coherent manner. I didn't
wanna be rude, but people's concern for my well-being translated
at the time into sheer horror.
Things reached their nadir when some guy named Chris tried to help
me out by getting me some water. He then proceeded to jaw at me
for a while; I can't even remember what he was babbling about. At
this point, A leaned over the table and with a wry grin said to
the guy, "I don't know what it is, but right now I have this
visceral desire to tear you to pieces." Chris was understandably
confused and angered, as was I. What the hell was A doing? Was he
joking? Trying to pick a fight? Later he said he "just wanted
to see how he'd react to that." I coulda told him how he'd
react: he got pissed off. Chris started getting really mad, spewing
a lot of even more bizarre nonsense about how many gay friends he
has, and how he was gonna "tear [A] to shreds." Lucky
for me, Chris' car service had just arrived, so he was escorted
away, still fuming. The next day A called and thankfully apologized,
but the whole incident still makes my mind reel. It turns out that
some of my friends are, if not mean, then at least insane when they're
drunk.
I should point out that the guys at the Sardine Can were great;
they kept the place open until we were all too wasted to stay any
longer. The DJ even played some Laddio Bolocko off M's new CD, courtesy
of B.
Eventually I sobered up enough and went home, listening to the
guys debate why exactly they did not in fact end up taking home
two ladies from the party. Even in my messed up state, I knew why,
but alas, I could not articulate. Next time I'll have to be more
careful about leaving my colleagues bereft of my superior advice.
Posted By Jimmy Legs
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