I broke down and have begun using the tumblr I’ve been squatting on for a year: Too Sweet to Die: The Runoff. For the more pithy stuff. I’ll continue to post the long-form shit here.
Why? I’m lazy.
My goodness, it’s been awhile. I admit, I kind of enjoyed my sabbatical but now that I no longer have the excuse of being occupied with unpacking all our belongings (a process which still isn’t finished, by the way — it’s nice how austere our living room looks without books on the bookshelves*) I guess I should write something. Comin’ at ya big dick style!**
Yeah, we moved again. I don’t think I mentioned that. Yes, we moved further into Queens and are now paying *more* than we did in LIC, but now we have a yard and the most beautiful, brand-new bathroom you’ve ever seen.*** It’s also not a soporific 80 degrees all winter. In fact, we have a high-tech thermostat with four different settings! Incroyable!
And, not to brag, but we now have four (equally sketchy) laundromats within a block of us.
It wasn’t all so bad in our old place (our neighbor had it worse — at one point she had a bee infestation) but it was, you know, a crumbling prewar apartment complex maintained by a shambolic former death metal drummer.
I have two Savannah anecdotes to share, both of which came up this week for unrelated reasons.
Pinkie Masters [sic] is The Greatest Bar in Savannah and possibly the southeast United States. (Murph’s would be a close second, but it’s changed hands since we first went there and the jukebox is one of those electronic abominations and there’s no more talk of spoons players. The pool table with the bullet holes remains. Also, another runner up is Jim Collins, another bar in Savannah, but that closed eons ago.) Anyhow, there was a totally unsubstantiated rumor (related to me as fact by one of the bartenders, as I recall) that during some renovations, contractors discovered a human skeleton buried underneath the concrete in the bathroom. As you know, I have exemplary investigative skills — if you want to find out the dirt on someone, give me 24 hours and I’ll tell you what color their toothbrush is — but I’ve researched the hell out of this story and I have found squadoosh. So it’s almost certainly apocryphal. Anyone who knows otherwise, please feel free to email me.
So this week I came across a WSAV news story about Obama visiting Savannah earlier this year:
A lot of politicos hung out at Pinkie’s in its heyday, particularly democrats — there’s a plaque on the bar where Jimmy Carter stood in 1978 — so naturally everyone at Pinkie’s wanted Obama to come by during his visit. I don’t think it happened. (I’m sure he’d have felt really welcome, what with the Dixie flag above the bar and all. It would have been nice to see that come down before the end of the 20th century — or the Carter administration, for fuck’s sake, but shit in one hand and wish in the other, I guess.)
I saw a number of famous people in Pinkie’s. It sucked when a film shoot rolled into town, because it meant you couldn’t get a seat at the bar. I met a number of (quasi) celebrities. I had a conversation with Jude Law one night. He seemed like an idiot, although to me everyone seems like an idiot.
My favorite Savannah celebrity encounter didn’t take place in Pinkie’s, though. This was the mid-90s, when ironic t-shirts were beginning to become wildly popular, and I was wearing an AWESOME gray t-shirt emblazoned with It’s Miller Time! in red letters. I was walking up the stairs of the downtown post office and this little guy was coming down the stairs, and he pointed at me and said, “It’s Miller Time?” And I’m thinking, this guy looks familiar. And so I said the only thing I could think of, which was, “Yeah, and I’m late!” And we smiled at each other and then I realized Holy shit, it’s Miller from Repo Man! And then *he* realized that *I* realized and he smiled and winked at me.
Miller, of course, is the best character in Repo Man:
So that’s it. THE END.
Oh wait. Since I have no idea how much time will pass before my *next* dispatch, I give you this: BEES!!!. [NB: I did not create this masterpiece -- my office mate did. ENYOY!]
*However I trust no one whose living room lacks books, because it’s generally a condition concomitant with specially designed shoe closets and ironed hair.
**And in this instance, “big dick style” means “totally rambling, unedited, and trailing off at the end.”
***In a Queens rental apartment. After enduring nearly seven years of what I will charitably term “substandard” bathrooms, N and I decided that we’re not students and as people firmly situated in our mid 30s, we deserve a tub that we are not afraid to sit down in. My only real complaints are that the toilet a) is a little tall and b) has a square base, which makes me far more likely to stub my toe on it in the middle of the night. Still, it beats black mold.
I wasn’t actually going to post about this brain trust examination of the “Sociological Investigation of the Hipster.”* Because really, who cares? I mean, I care enough to off-handedly dismiss it and all its nonacademic panelists as a covey of dipshits-qua-dipshits. But it’s impossible for me to pick out the comments or conclusions I take issue with most because I hate them all equally. After I read this article, there was almost not enough hate left in my heart for me to continue with my workaday hate. Also, my friend Tom put it better than I could:
Is it just me, or is this entire panel a waste of time/energy/thought on par with taking a cat to visit Santa or giving 18 year-olds the right to vote? How can hipsters be “the latest youth movement in the tradition of greasers, rappers, mods, hippies, punks” if no one would ever claim to be one? It’s something you call someone else, not something you purport to be. Unless you’re being ironic, in which case you probably ARE a hipster, but then you’re trapped in an asshole infinite regress, so the point is moot.
Thank you, Tom. I can now go back to hating all the things I usually hate. And McInnes and Lin can go back to merely being two of those things instead of being the situational Bob Grant and Chance of hipsterdom.
APPLAUSE.
Cranial Abuse, Blinded By Hate**
*What, no “Hipster-qua-Hipster”? Who vetoed that?
**Sidenote that runs longer than the post itself: This was an Albany (well, technically Troy-Core) band from the late 80s that later became Stigmata (who we referred to as “Stinkmetal,” because they did stink, and were way too metal for our tastes, but listening to this track now, it’s not 100 percent awful). “Troy-Core” was our shibboleth, but in fact was a term embraced wholeheartedly by its adherents, who enjoyed “absolutely abysmal speed-metal influenced hardcore with sloppy slow drumming and vocals that scream ‘thug’” and moshed with cretinous glee whenever fucking Leeway came to town. Come to think of it, I believe Troy-Core had its own special, especially violent version of moshpit behavior. God I hate hardcore. Why did I go to so many shows? Oh that’s right — there was nothing else to do.
So, another Brimfield Flea Market down. That’s it for the year.
I do enjoy being up and on the road in a van crammed full of shit that used to belong to people who are dead now, shit that we’ve appropriated, put a price on, and will unload on some other person whose express purpose is to start that cycle again.
Brimfield is fundamentally different from, say, the Winter Antiques Show (where I also work) because at its heart, it is a giant flea market and not some curated, vetted, swell-attended deal. Brimfield is like a Bruegel painting with chemical toilets and $5 parking. And if it’s old, or made to look old, you’ll probably find it there.
Fully half the dudes at Brimfield look like Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil could wander around all day and not even get hassled. The median age of the women at Brimfield is about 100, and the uniform is a giant floppy hat and a wire cart dragged in a way that leaves a path of destruction and dinged shins in its wake. The majority of attendees have a singular obsession*, and some even wear signs or t-shirts that proclaim this, like the guy with the t-shirt that reads “LOOKING FOR BOY SCOUT MEMORABILIA.” Um, ok.
And they all want it for less money. My dad is generally acquiescent when they ask. When folks try to haggle with me, I defer to my dad, but if I didn’t, I would not be as good-natured about it. I think I’d be more like, “I can’t do that” or “perhaps this isn’t the item for you” or “how about you kiss my ass in two places and dream about a third?” I’m not a nice person. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the whole experience.
And this morning, I came back. A surprising number of people in Hudson commute into the City for work via Amtrak. (By surprising, I mean like four or five. Still.) That is a long way to go and a spendy way to do it. So, on the 7:20 train this morning, I found myself among other people. At 7:20 am on most mornings I am in the presence of one other person, max, and a cat. Both are fairly careful to avoid me.
I am, in fact, a morning person. Just a solitary one.
*I picked up a couple old group portraits — my singular obsession — but had to pass up the best one I found, because it was lying on a table right next to a bunch of WW2 Nazi memorabilia. Y’know, it’s not just that it offends my sensibilities to profit from atrocities (and I will include in this category anything REM recorded after 1989)…it’s also that so much of that shit is fake. Just as there are enough relics of the holy cross to build an entire hillside of them, there is enough Nazi regalia to outfit the entire population of Europe. So it irritates me that these dealers are so craven that they’re willing to sell FAKE atrocity souvenirs.
Where did she go?
I am lazy. If you're bored, go visit my tumblr, updated daily with other people's witticisms and erudition.Also by me
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