I’m at my office, sitting in the dark. Earlier today, we were told that our neighborhood was being evacuated (with the added bonus of a police escort, should we refuse), I guess so that the electric company can shut down our area in Manhattan, thus taking some stress of the power consumption. Within a minute or so, that order was rescinded, but we were asked to turn off all unnecessary electricity usage. So, here I am, typing in the dark. I just finished reading an email from a coworker’s friend whose father works for ConEd. Here’s what I have to look forward too:

From: [redacted]
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2006 2:05 PM
To: Music - New York
Subject: FYI TO ALL

THOUGHT YOU ALL MIGHT WANT TO KNOW THIS INFO…

All-
My friend’s dad works for ConEd - he just called and told her not to ride the subways any more today, as we will likely have a blackout. ConEd is sending all non-essential employees home right now so they can shut down power to their building. From yesterday’s heat, Manhattan has 4 feeders out, putting a big strain on the system. He said in his 30 years working there, he’s never seen ConEd act like this, especially at 10:30 in the morning. He said not to panic, but not to take a chance if it can be helped - avoid riding the subway if at all possible.

Now I’ve lived through enough bullshit in New York to take all these emails with more than a grain of salt, no matter how many people say they know the person who knows the deal and whatnot. I’ve had a slew of imminent terrorist bombing/blackout/dirty nuke “get the fuck out now” emails come across my desk since I’ve been working in Manhattan and not one of them has ever amounted to anything other than wasted stress.

So here I am. Typing in the dark and waiting to go home, be it by train or by foot.

After years and years of mild toe and ear frost-bite, below freezing temperatures, snow up to my ass and an omnipresent state of moist, damp socks, I thought I would never reach a state where I would long for winter. Well, fuck it. Give me snow. Bury me in permafrost. New York City in the summer is twisted form of Hell and I’ve fucking reached my boiling point. I’m ready to go rabid shih-tzu on something.

I’ve dealt with 100+ degree days many times before in Vermont, but there you have the benefit of clean air as well as much less congestion and grime. Here in New York, stepping out into the street feels almost like slipping into a hot bath. Hitting a major street is like having wool blankets thrown over your head, while is this same bathtub. The heat coming from all the cars more than noticeably jacks up the discomfort. It’s nasty, but not half as bad as going underground to take the subway.

Subway platforms are the single worst place to be in New York during a heat wave. Above-ground is hot, dirty and disgusting. Beneath the streets is worse—concentrated heat and grime, coupled with screeching train noise and crowds of moist assholes. I’ve always heard that violent crimes jump during heat waves and I’ve never doubted it.

Standing in the dead heat, with my clothes sticking to me as a dirty ceiling fan blows oven-hot air about, I want to kill everyone. Luckily the reality of exerting myself to commit mass homicide is too much to bear. It’s too hot to go postal and I’m far too pretty for prison. Those people that are responsible for the crime rate jump on these hot days must have balls of ice, because for me, just walking from point A to B is hard enough.

Last week, I bought a new laptop. It’s a great machine and I was able to get Kubuntu running on it with nearly zero hitches in the time it took me to ride the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I may be the first person ever to install Linux on a subway train—I’m not sure. I figured that since this new machine was fully pumped and equipped with a graphics card, I’d keep a small windows partition for the occasional video game quickie.

It’s been about a week and yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I decided to futz with Windows, which is something I usually loath doing. I booted into that nasty soup of unneeded and bloated programs and started uninstalling all the stupid free shit that came with my default install. It’s amazing to see the first boot difference between a fresh Kubuntu install and my fresh from the factory Windows install. Kubuntu is blazing while XP, on a dual processor with a gig of RAM and a 128 meg Nvidia card is slow as fuck, bogged down by a ridiculous mess of programs all set to run automatically. Nearly all of these programs are crap to me. You’d think they’d want to show off how fast their machines are by not crippling them at boot. I just don’t get it.

(more…)

I’ve been bed-ridden, sick as fuck all day long. After sleeping for far too much, I started going through some old archive discs from years ago as I sweated out a fever. Most of them were damaged or corrupted, but I did find some shit I’d pretty much forgotten about.

One of the discs I found was an archive of photographs I’d taken of the World Trade Center area on September 27th, 2001. Some of the photos had been corrupted, but I was able to recover the majority of them and post them to my flickr account.

It was still a complete and total fuck-zone went I first went down there and I remember walking around with my camera, everything around me covered with a thick layer of ash and feeling like I was walking through a ghost town in winter only in reality it was September and the “snow” was actually pulverized concrete and God knows what fucking else. It’s disturbing to think I inhaled some of that stuff.

All kinds of items, hats, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases and other sorts of things were lying around, neatly stacked and out of the way, in case someone might return to reclaim them. Messages were written in the dust on the walls and everywhere possible were notes scribbled on paper, photos and desperate pleas for information on missing people. It was an extremely surreal experience.

When the planes had hit the towers, I was working on 28th Street. After watching from the roof of my building, I’d headed straight down there, mainly because I had nothing to do and didn’t know how to get home, having lived in New York for only a couple of months, but I was turned back at Canal Street by the police. I was living in Williamsburg at the time, but aside from the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, that was about as much as I knew. It took me six hours to walk home. I crossed the Manhattan bridge on foot with thousands of other people. I was hot, tired and hungry. I had no money and could find no working ATM. My cell phone didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked except my feet.

I’ve been back there several times since but I’d almost forgotten that first visit, alone and pretty fucking bewildered. There was this one jewelry store, completely abandoned and trashed. The doors must have been open when all the shit went down, because inside the place everything was covered with almost two inches of ash. Peering through the store window made me feel like I was looking into a crypt.

Anyway, here’s the link to the images:

World Trade Center photo set

Have a peek.

This morning, I left home in Brooklyn at seven-thirty and started walking to work. My office is right by Madison Square Park, so the distance I needed to cover was about 5.7 miles. I slapped on the hat and gloves, screwed the mp3 player to my ears and started moving.

I hadn’t been to work since the transit strike started, spending two days as a shut-in with my eyeballs stapled to video games, mumbling to my cats. One can only have so much fun, so I decided that I’d best make some effort to get in to work.

I crossed over the Manhattan bridge, walking through Chinatown and Little Italy till I hit Union Square and finally Park Avenue. I’ve never done the walk in before and while it was interesting and fairly picturesque in an ugly, New York way, it sucked fucking donkey ass. It was really cold. I would have taken pictures, but my hands were freezing and I didn’t want to take them out of their gloves.

It took me two and a half hours to get to my office. I froze my ass off and really wanted to stop in Chinatown for Dim Sum, but was running late as it was. Faced with the probability that I will have to walk back the same way at the end of the day, it is completely not worth the trouble to come in.

I’m at a slow point the year for my production schedule, so technically, I’m fine to not come in till Tuesday, but I felt bad missing so much, so I figured I’d do the walk at least once. I sure as hell will not be doing it tomorrow. I’m done.

This transit strike seriously blows. I don’t care what happens or who gets fucked in the ass over it, but those trains need to start running again. It’s ridiculous.

On Friday, I left my office and hit the street, heading for the subway station. As I approached the corner of 27th and Park Avenue South, I noticed a white van, stopped at a red light. The door opened and a man jumped out to the curb, whipped out a digital camcorder and started filming the vehicle.

The guys still in the van screamed and pumped their fists as the driver started spinning the wheels in place and burning the rubber as hard as he could. The squealing of the tires was quite loud and within a few seconds, thick clouds of white smoke started pouring out. Still, this guy wouldn’t stop. The wheels kept shrieking and the smoke got worse. Soon the entire car was mostly hidden inside a thirty foot column of smoke. Cars stopped along the street and people got out, thinking there was a fire or a bomb. Crowds started forming while others quickly decided to get the fuck away as fast as possible. Me, I whipped out my cellphone and snapped this shot.

Then, as strangely as it started, the wheels stopped. The side door was flung open and the guy with the camera jumped inside. The van tore off down 27th with both of it’s front wheels burned out. The smoke was disgusting and everything smelled like burnt rubber. As I continued to walk to the subway station, I passed the spot where the van was and saw a whole mess of melted rubber, still smoking. Nasty.

Lately, as far as I’m concerned, everything’s been all about the mad subway masturbater. A man, dedicated to what I envision as a insane, frantic and unstoppable pud-thwacking frenzy that was caught on a cell phone camera, spanking his monkey like there was no tomorrow. Not a man to be upstaged, nor crossed. It’s all over the news. It’s the topic of conversation. It’s the image that’s burned into the back of my retinas when I awake, sweaty and screaming for mother in the wee hours of dawn.

Few of us, here on this earth can reach such levels of social inappropriateness as a guy who likes whipping his junk out in public. It’s raw, it’s primal, it’s really bizarre. Most of all, after consuming a lot of alcohol, it’s really fucking hilarious to me.

Now I know, this guy is a serious pervert. He’s victimized a lot of people and he’s really bad and should be castrated with extreme dull-bladed prejudice, but fuck, I have brain damage, I come from a broken home and at this current mental state, the whole thing is looking kind of humorous to me.

I mean seriously, a mad, demonic subway masturbater. Just when you think it’s safe to take that 6 train… THWACK, THWAPPA-THWAPPA-THWAPPA-the demon wanker of the underground has struck! You look up from your newspaper to a grinning fiesta of greasy, meat-spanking weirdness and you ask yourself, “Who am I, really?” As a passenger here on Spaceship Earth, do I really know where I’m going in this life?” Some deep moments can be had when facing the leering mask of the Monkey-Spank God.

By whipping his johnson out and painting the ceiling, he has single-handedly (literally) shown the world that as civilized as it may look, underneath the surface, lurking around the corner is a crazy dude that likes beating it in public. You probably work with him and don’t delude yourself by pretending he washes his hands on a regular basis.

There’s something almost primal about a dude who sees something he likes and just starts punching that clown till there’s no tomorrow with total disregard for social norm and restraint. It’s totally fucking caveman and in that sense, is awesome. Unfortunately, there’s victims. But let’s pretend for a minute that there aren’t. Remove the victim and in my mind, the Mad Subway Masturbator is a hero of the times. A man that refuses to bow to society’s rules, who indulges in his animal roots and yanks it left and right, preferrably on public transportation. His rigid, grinning visage of onastic pumping joy serves as a beacon to shock us and remind us that we are human and not that far away from the caveman, whipping one off by the campfire.

If he hadn’t terrorized those girls, I would’ve felt a lot more support for him. I envision him pulling an OJ Simpson, riding the train into the sunset, cops on his tail, whacking that shit till it bleeds because he’s not jerking it for himself, he’s jerking it for the world. He’s whacking it for God, man. I’d be right there on the platform as the train would whip by at breakneck speed, with my cardboard sign that said, “Go Mad Subway Masturbater, Go!”

But reality is something I’m far removed from. This guy’s an asshole. He’s a pervert that needs to be someone’s ass-toy at Riker’s for a few months.

While watching a horrifying movie of a cockroach infestation in Tokyo this morning (it’s a bit slow to load, so give it a few minutes), I was reminded of a truly scarring New York City memory.

My first job in New York was located on the twentieth floor of an “office” building in the wholesale district of Broadway and twenty-eighth. For those of you not familiar with the geography of Manhattan, that area is a rats nest of shops and buildings, populated majoratively by Africans selling everything from perfume and costume jewelry to pirated DVDs on a large scale. It’s crowded, hot, loud, dirty and smelly. On top of this everyone smokes. It’s kind of like the essence of Manhattan hell, condensed into a few blocks.

My office building was no exception. From a major DVD pirating operation down the hall, to the thugs smoking blunts and pissing in the stairwell, my first job in the city was memorable. During my time there, two people were shot and one guy was thrown or possibly jumped out a third story window. I witnessed brawls, police stings, death threats and all sorts of joy. But, out of all this urban beauty, it was the cockroaches that I still can’t get past.

We had all sorts of roaches in that office, big two-inchers that made you want to talk to God, all the way to tiny ones. They were everywhere. On desks, inside phones, trust me— everywhere. While some of my coworkers were rabid roach killers, I being the Aikido freak hippyish motherfucker I was, refused to kill them, thinking instead, “Here is a form of life, long reviled and murdered by man. I will do this creature no harm and through some cosmic communication, it will understand this and do me no harm, nor disrespect my space.”

I know, you want to gag right now, but listen, I was smoking a lot of weed and who knows what the hell else. I was in an interesting mental space and seriously, we’ve had multiple millenia of roach smooshing. Has anyone ever just tried reasoning with them? I’m a motherfucking pioneer!

So, as my coworkers were swearing, slamming, squishing and splattering their way to their own karmic justice, I took the different route. Upon spying one of the little bastards, peeking out from under the CPU, dolefully eying my breakfast of champions, I would simply look it in the eye (or at least the area where supposedly the eyes are located) and mentally communicate a message of peace, safety and “Please refrain from munching or laying your eggs in my food, my six-legged brother“.

My method seemed to work. I swear it! After transmitting my message of universal harmony and love, the little fucker would almost nod back at me, like he got it and take off, leaving my space and my breakfast of champions unmolested. Okay, it might have been the weed talking somewhat, but I swear that I had only a fraction of the roach problems as “Vlad the Insect Impaler” sitting next to me had. I really touched on something!

My little agreement with my newfound insectoid buddies worked well, for quite some time, until one fateful day.

As was my habit at the time, before popping in to work, I grabbed a cup of that over-sugared, colored water that passes for coffee at the many carts in Manhattan. I’m the type of person who often lingers over coffee, taking several hours to consume one cup. The worse the coffee the longer I take to drink it, basically. So, I spent the first couple hours at the office, sipping and working.

At one point, pausing in the middle of something pressing, I took a big sip of coffee. Immediately, I noticed a strange wriggling sensation on my mouth and spit back out into the cup. Lo and behold, a big, fat and still living cockroach was attempting to dog-paddle it’s way to freedom having successfully surfed my molars.

Somehow, through divine intervention or perhaps just sheer pluck, I managed to refrain from projectile vomiting all the way to Jersey. There was weird insect grit in my mouth and I think I might have swallowed a leg or possibly an antenna. I tossed my coffee complete with the feisty little tongue-snorkeler into the trash and stifled what might have been one of the more girlish screams to ever issue from my lungs. For the rest of the day, night and well into the wee hours of the morning, I could not relax, sleep or eat. I kept hallucinating bug grit in my mouth, even after brushing my teeth well over ten times. I recall lying in bed, watching the sun come up through my bedroom window, gagging on phantom cockroach detritus.

Well, that was that. Fuck peace, those motherfuckers crossed the line! From that day onward I was the sworn enemy of the cockroach. I joined the ranks of mad bug squishers with a zeal rarely seen outside the confines of a Whack-A-Mole booth. I wanted payback, Rambo style. I stomped those little freaks every damn chance I got.

Of course now, years later, I no longer work in such ghetto confines. There’s a lot to be said for moving up in the world. The lack of pestilence is breathtaking. But, I’ve learned many an important lesson, down amongst the DVD pirates and roaches. To this day, I am no friend to the cockroach. My grudges run deep. It’s just how I roll.

Yesterday, I was doing the morning rush-hour commute to the city, hungover, late and addled with lack of sleep. A typical morning for me. I sat there in the subway car, shifting from position to position, trying to find the one magical contortion that would prevent me from blowing massive chunks all over my fellow passengers like a poor man’s metro rendition of “The Exorcist”. A warning to the wise: if you are riding the 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 trains in the morning on a weekday and you see a skinny, pale and sketchy looking white dude with glasses that keeps leaning back and forth, shifting from side to side, make sure to stay out of range. Possibly, you might want to switch subway cars because it very likely could be me, very close to painting you with the contents of my twisted and unhappy stomach. You have been warned.

That morning, my voyage on the good ship nausea was not off to a particularly good start as I sat down in the one free seat in the car to a smell that made me think of the taste one might come up with after licking a few used ashtrays. Whoever had been sitting or had died there prior to my arrival was one hell of a fucking champion cigarette smoker. Perhaps it was the ghost of the Marlboro Man, come to haunt my morning hangovers, who knows, it stank like a motherfucker though.

So, up to my waist in stale cigarette stank, I held it down. Green in the face with a sweat beaded brow, I braved the bumping, the jostling, the screeching and the squealing, holding the lid down on my stomach with an iron will.

Finally, I made it to my last transfer. After switching trains, I only have a few more stops till I can hide behind my desk until death, or lunchtime releases me. I leaned against one of the platform pillars, proud that I’d made it so far without decorating some senior citizen or homeboy with hangover barf. The train arrived. The doors opened and I entered into the welcome air conditioning. Almost there.

Upon entering the car, I see this huge, black young man. He looks at me, smiles and says, “I’m on American Idol!” and proceeds to screech, not quite coherently, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, only just the chorus part, over and over, hanging from the bars in the train. As quick as I could, I made to back out the door, but I was too late. The doors shut and I found myself taking a seat, front and center for a one-man diva-thon without the medication.

This guy was clearly having a psychotic episode. Screaming, laughing, squealing his way through those four words much like the guinea pig at a “proctology as chainsaw art” seminar might do.

“Ladies and Gentlemen…I’m on American Idol! AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WIIILLLLLLLLL ALWAAAAAAAAAAYS LOOOOOOOOVE YOOOOOOUUU!!!! AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”

Over and over, this crazy fucking nutcase assaulted my eardrums. He screeched so high, it was actually painful and I swear to god, something inside my head ruptured. Fifteen years from now, as I sit on the edge of the exam table and the doctor delivers the bad news of an inoperable brain something or other and asks, “Were you ever exposed to any high-frequency sound?”, I’ll look back and it will all make sense. That nutty squealing bastard will be the death of me.

This morning, I had a nasty encounter with one of the countless sketchy, lunatic assholes that float the edges of society here in Manhattan (like yours truly). Every day after leaving the station at Park and 28th, I hit up the nearby Scarfucks for coffee. I hate Scarfucks, but everything else available in the immediate vicinity tastes like colored water so fuck it.

Anyway, as I walked up Park Avenue, pretty much tuned out with German death metal blasting my eardrums, I noticed a scuzzy middle aged guy, dressed sloppily and holding an odd looking camera. He seemed to be taking photos of people walking down the street, without their permission and he was trying to be sneaky about it. Looking at him I figured a couple things were going on. He was either a crazy homeless person with a camera that may or may not have actually had film in it or one of those sleazy scumfucks that use those special lenses that let you take psuedo “X-Ray” photos by filtering the light and causing the resulting photo to look like it’s possibly seeing through clothing in a lame kind of way. There’s sleazebags riding the subway, holding their cameras by the waist, using these filters all the time. In short, I immediately wanted to pummel this guy into a twitching bloody pulp, but this is New York and you never fuck with the crazy people unless there’s no choice. He snapped a couple photos of me, but I kept walking, crossed the street and went inside the Scarfucks. After I had secured some coffee, I stepped outside the building to find the guy right in my face taking photos of me. I made to push the camera away and said something to the effect of “Get that fucking camera out of my face, you fucking asshole.” He stepped back, smiled and I kept walking.

Now, that German death metal I was blasting was about as loud as my mp3 player would allow, but I could clearly hear him bellowing at the top of his lungs, “Go home and fuck your fucking whore, you fucking asshole!!! Fuck you and you fucking blah…blah…blah”. I and everyone else on Park Avenue this morning could hear him screaming all the way to my office which is three blocks away. It was a great way to start the morning. I should have dumped my coffee on him. Then, the over-roasted crap Scarfucks tries to pass off as good coffee would actually have some worth.