A couple nights ago I dragged my still semi-sick ass out to BB King’s on 42nd Street to see a few bands. The main headliner was Nile, who I didn’t know too much about. Mainly I was there to see ChthoniC, the Melodic Black Metal band from Taiwan. Since it was primarily a Death Metal show, graphic band tees were in full effect, there was a hell of a lot of hair, as well as an extremely large representation in the crowd from the South American continent. Rock hard, my Spanish amigos. Eighty-percent of the metal acts on this planet would tank if it wasn’t for your die-hard loyalty to head-banging.

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I saw Unearthly Trance, Earth and Pelican at Luna Lounge in Williamsburg last night.

Unearthly Trance was annoying. I like their album, “In the Red“…not so much “The Trident“. Anyway, nice guys, but they took forever to hit the stage, preferring to hit the bar up for drinks and they only played a few songs. I just wanted more bang for my buck.

Earth was awesome. Mesmerizing, loud and droning. Worth the price of the ticket.

Pelican…whatever. I’m not into that kind of jam-band stuff. I gave them two songs and walked out.

Luna Lounge kind of sucks. First and foremost, by virtue of being in Williamsburg. I used to live there, but I can’t stand it anymore (or recognize it, for that matter). It’s like “Busch Gardens - Brooklyn” for trust-fund, up-and-coming douchebags. Secondly, the club has a kind of shit sound system.

It’s mid-January in New York City and my apartment, building and seemingly the rest of my neighborhood is infested with mosquitoes. It’s jacket and hat weather outside and I’m sleeping with a mosquito net over my bed so I can manage some sleep and escape the relentless dive-bomb buzzing of my ears. Still, they seem to find ways to get at me anyway, as my constant itching attests.

Nearly every evening, I find myself doing a apartment wide bug hunting expedition. Swatter in hand, I scan the walls of my apartment, squinting for a glimpse of the blood-sucking fuckers. I hate them. I bring death to them at every opportunity.

After over five years of living in the city, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a mosquito in winter, much less a fricking plague of them. I’m at a loss to explain why I’m getting molested by these fucking parasites when it’s thirty degrees outside. I kill them, but more appear. I see them in my building’s hallway. I hear people on the street complaining about them. Perhaps it’s the construction going on in my area. Maybe it’s global warming. Blood-sucking aliens from Uranus? Whatever the cause, it’s disturbing and highly annoying. I can only hope that is winter is a single exception to the norm.

The number one summer movie five years from now?

Snakes On A Motherfucking World Trade Center

I’m just saying…

I, for one, am completely sick of it.

Yes, it sucked—more than I’m going to bother to try and convey.

I was (and still am) in NYC. I had to live through that day, walk through that day (all the way to Brooklyn) and deal with the next few weeks of absolute discombobulation (which, to me, was the worst - that’s when everything sets in) as to what’s safe anymore.

I had to go to work the next day, convinced I was going to die. I rode the subways every morning and for the first two months, every time the train stopped in the tunnels, a cold sweat would kick in and I was hardly the only person.

It was horrible. I wish it hadn’t happened. It did and it’s certainly affected me, my decisions and how I view things.

But it’s been five years.

Still, every time I watch the news, there it is. 9/11 is invoked left and right. I see the plane crash or at least the smoking buildings in the media every day. It’s no longer a tragedy. It’s been co-opted as a tool for politics and media. It makes me sick.

This morning, I was reading an article about a CBS interview with “Tuesday’s Children“, a group to support and represent the children who lost parents that day. The reporter was asking how they felt now and the biggest complaint, round the room, was the constant barrage of imagery from that day. A quote:

The kids [..] told 60 Minutes some of the worst memories don’t fade because the media won’t let them. [CBS Reporter Scott] Pelley got an earful about showing those pictures of 9/11 over and over again.

“Even when you’re just sitting down like eating dinner and watching TV, you’ll just have a nice conversation and then all the sudden you’ll see like pictures of 9/11. You can’t escape it. It’s just like everywhere you go its always like you’re always reminded of it somehow even in the littlest thing,” explains Amy Gardner.

“They’re showing my dad’s death and everyone else here. It’s just really offensive. Every time I see it, it brings up so much and it actually really hurts,” says Erik Abrahamson.

That pretty much sums it up for me. Here’s the link that has video and a transcript.

9/11 is now a political tool. It’s a ticket-selling, ratings-boosting tool. It’s a tool for bloated, flag-waving idiots to show how patriotic they are to everyone else. It’s disgusting. It’s sad. It’s infuriating.

Happy 9/11, everybody.

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.

I’ve said it many times before—I hate flying. It fucking terrifies me and not in a distant, abstract way. Currently, I am aloft at 21,711 feet, somewhere over New York, partially through the initial ascent of a fourty-eight minute flight to Burlington, Vermont. Pure, gut-churning terror. No, I don’t want a bag of airline peanuts, thanks.

I find it ironic that in my life, whenever I take a vacation, usually in a state of just past bug-crazy, fully sick of New York City and all the human vermin that turn it’s wheels (myself included), that in order for to get away, to relax and do the things stupid people do when frolicking with the natives, it requires my ass to be hovering many thousands of feet in the air, traveling at 540 miles per hour as a preamble or perhaps as a penance for being such a horrid little man. Say five Hail Marys and then you can go play—something like that..

At heights and speeds such as these, I question the point of it. Five days ass-out, drunk and stoned out of my gizzard, surrounded by plants and barbecued meats for the price of slightly less than one hour of stomach-twisting terror at high altitudes, spiced with the chance of ending my life screaming incoherantly before being enveloped in a giant flaming ball of death. It kind of makes me want to stay home on the couch, safely fused with my PlayStation.

But no. Here I am, trying not to bleat like a baby goat getting castrated as the turbulence kicks the plane about. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn’t I take the train? Smart people who live long lives take trains. Personally, I prefer to live a long time and the closest I’d like to get to death by plunging fireball is watching it happen on television, laughing at the misfortunes of others.

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.

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In the past two years, I’ve gone from having a freak religious cult for neighbors to having a chicken waving, chanting, hooting and hollering idiot living next to me. Is it a case of “like attracts like”? Who knows? It just seems that my luck with neighbors in Brooklyn kind of blows hairy donkey balls.

I live on the third floor of my building and outside my bedroom window is a kind of a pit-like opening, made up of several of the surrounding buildings meeting up. It’s one long shaft straight down and all there is to see are the windows of other apartments in the surrounding buildings. The whole space is only about 12×12 feet and this shaft manages to act as a natural amplifier, bringing all kinds of interesting noises into my bedroom and blissful beauty rest at any odd hour of the day or night.

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