July 2011
1 post
CAT STUFF/TIME STUFF
Got my dad on the horn the other day. He described a scene from the previous day wherein he’d been “Window Shopping for Motorcycles” and on the way home he’d witnessed a horrific motorcycle-related wreck unfolding, why, not six feet from his very car. A man in a leather coat flew over handlebars and smashed himself right the fuck into oncoming traffic, making all kinds of...
February 2011
1 post
Becomeable Grownups
There’s a definite “SPRING HAS SPRUNG” feeling in the air today – windows open, dog asleep under the coffee table, wife on the computer, me sitting at the ALL PURPOSE MEAL TABLE examining my shoes. ”Whirring Domesticity,” as it’s called. And what it’s also called is: “FULL-ON, BALLS-TO-THE-WALL GROWNUP LIFESTYLES”.
Personal childhood projections of “WHAT GROWNUP LIFE...
October 2010
1 post
Hotel for Dogs
Walking the dog around the neighborhood at nighttime, it seems like we’re taking a tour of a Mental Institution for Dogs – a wild assortment of insane howls, yips and shrieks. A real Halloweentime Horror Show. Imagined by me then are the countless dogs that make these sounds: their names, much like those certain birds, are comparable English transliterations of their spoken call.
List of Dog...
June 2010
1 post
Graduation Robes
Looking out the office window on Graduation Day, the whole campus is all peopled with black-robed scholar types posing for photographs alongside their big-grinned parents, all of them making sure the insane fountain outside my office is in frame. I haven’t learned the official title of this fountain, but in my brain it has been nicknamed, “The Fountain of Supreme Aquatic Chaos”...
March 2010
1 post
WHEN WE ARE REALLY OLD
Today a man who is 81 years old cut my hair using a straight razor that he first sharpened with a leather strap. Then another man came into the haircutting store wearing a baseball cap. It seemed that he probably did not have any hair to cut under that baseball cap and thus probably had very little business hanging around the haircutting store. He did not sit down or request to be next. He simply...
February 2010
2 posts
SINGLE DAD
A strange thing, brewed in a perfect storm of Technology and Late Middle Aged Divorce: Facebook has let me know that my father has updated his ‘status’ to ‘single’. My parents now still live divorced together in the big house where they taught Lauren and I to be the stellar, heavily character flawed adults we are today. Sweet, raving Lord, is there anything weirder than...
AND
Today there are two warring factions on campus: The Bible Givers and The Condom Givers. Who will win this age-old battle between Pushy Religion and Meaningless Collegiate Sex?
There was a certain time for me (late high school/early college) when I would mostly just trundle around old Nazareth PA with headphone on, listening to sad music and feeling panging sad sack feelings about something I...
June 2009
1 post
Fence Staining, Lunch, and Chechen Refugees
I. Over the past few weeks I’ve been staining a fence for Jeff – a professional person with a wife and two dogs, who works (Jeff does) as an Art Director for big time Hollywood type movies. Let me just say that this was a pretty serious fence I’ve been staining – the kind of fence that perhaps nearly justifies an inquiry by the police, who want to know if the owner has been stock-piling...
May 2009
1 post
Genuine Werewolves
Jim, Andy, and I borrowed some mountain bikes and made our way to the State Park in the middle of the night. We rode through industrial parks and street lights and empty roads and wooded thickets until we came to a water fall and rock formation. After sitting for a long old sit under a real crescent-moon with real and awful wolf howling, Jim and Andy decided they wanted to do some rock climbing....
January 2009
2 posts
THAT'S THAT MATTRESS MAN
The job I’ve been working at the Michener Center will be through on Monday. So of course I have donned the ole sandwich board with front and back that read: “Will Work For: Rent, Utilities, Groceries, Occasional Dvd’s or Cd’s, Etc.”
I applied for a job called “EDITOR I” on the job board at the University. And because this is a professional-type grownup-type job, I had to appear in person and drop...
HOME IMPROVEMENT
I. Before Christmas time, I flew on an airplane via Chicago back to Pennsylvania, sitting next to an Indian woman and the toddler-aged girl she possessed. At the outset of our flight, I intuited that neither woman nor baby could speak English all that comprehensively. The mother sat on the aisle and I sat near the window, wailing baby between us. The mother would apologize each time her little...
December 2008
3 posts
Mother Bears
As a consequence of my being an employee of the University of Texas, I now receive complimentary emails about local “Cool Happenings!” So Andy and I found ourselves at the Lady Bird Johnson “Luminaries” exhibit where the Austin Philharmonic Orchestra played traditional Christmas music and, following a long, candle-in-a-paper-bag lined trail, we found an outpost where young girls played the harp....
I HAVE A COOL HAT
Josey got it for me in Montevideo. I think it resembles a Sherpa’s hat. So when I don said hat, I feel like an ancient man. I stop speaking English both aloud and in my brain. I can be the Sherpa of Austin, Texas. We are a proud people. We are the mountain climbing, mule hauling, guides not unlike the ones who directed Television News Anchor Ann Curry out the doors of the Today Show studios...
Work-Related Fiascos
I. Tedium
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working in the office of the University’s MFA creative writing program, mostly tearing old manuscripts into peices or using a black sharpie to redact social security numbers from antiquated documents. The job is tedious at times, but I have a special knack for accomplishing monotonous tasks at a breakneck speed. At once, surprising my...
November 2008
6 posts
Collisions with Animals
Incident I:
I was riding my bike to work yesterday when a wild turkey appeared, bolting into the middle of the street, darting and gobbling and nearly colliding with the wheels of my bike. My first instinct was not to swerve out of the way, sacrificing myself into oncoming traffic, but instead to hit the turkey head on like a motorist is supposed to do with a deer in his headlights, destroying...
TODAY, TODAY, TODAY
Today was a JOB SUCCESS for me. More on that later. Tired now. Special thanks to RAMPAGE for mail:
(WEIRD EAR CREATURE. PROBABLY HANGS OUT WITH WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS TYPEWRITER.)
UPDATE
PARENTS RECOVER DOCUMENTS! REJOICE!
"HIPPIES MUST USE BACK DOOR"
It’s a novelty road sign I’ve been seeing with some frequency inside the city of Austin, Texas; specifically in Austin’s Kooky Beatnik Pizza Joints. The anti-hippie sentiment implicit in the sign seems so incongruous with the city of Austin’s self-imposed WEIRDNESS MYSTIQUE. Is this city not the Hippie Mecca, an oasis of liberalism ensconced in a desert of its own...
MURDER
Here’s a fun factoid I should have used around Halloween. Why? I’ll tell you what, IT’S A REAL BONE CHILLER! AHAHAH. When I moved in to my current home, the grass was almost entirely dead. But a few weeks ago, the Land Lady started appearing daily, watering the dead lawn and running up the water bill until an unruly ecosystem of weeds sprouted. This, of course, attracted...
OH MY FUCK
I just received a formal rejection letter in the mail from a GROCERY STORE I recently applied to work in. Doug Snyder, the General Manager of Central Market, mailed me a very formal rejection on recycled paper with fancy company letterhead. Here is the slogan for Central Market, a grocery store marketed to fancy people: “CELEBRATE FOOD. CELEBRATE LIFE”.
This letter would be the letter...
October 2008
7 posts
ALSO
AND
I would also like to advertise Michael Gerkovich’s list of new Septa slogans:
Canoe
Perhaps if you were to come over to my house for dinner, and you asked, as we were smoking cigarettes and finishing up our coffee and pie, about whether or not things were okay at work, I would probably stare despondently into the middle distance, puffing with great torpidity on my flaccid cigarette and sighing deeply. My wife (I am a married suburbanite in this scenario) would appear, press her...
Big Dreams
Last night I was home alone, pacing around in my slippers and thinking about a number of people, places and things. Nouns. I was mostly thinking about Nouns.
Pacing is something I have always done a great deal of. This is something that people don’t normally like. My girlfriend will say, “SIT DOWN YOU MAKE-A-ME-NERVOUS WITH ALL A YOU PACIN’!”
But, pacing is not an...
Field Dressing Garfield
The drive between Abilene, Texas and Austin, Texas is a long diagonal lined with cow pastures and Dairy Queens and tiny towns. You would imagine Anton Chigurh, the villain from, “No Country for Old Men” to be stalking about, turning on the hissing air supply to his weird pnematic gun whenever someone’s pace slows in his facinity. While riding back from Abilene to Austin I looked...
ALSO
I AM SORRY FOR THIS
I recently paid a surprise visit to the North East. This visit was not of my own design, it was a surprise schemed by the Good Lord when he sucked my grandfather back into the great big somewhere. I was told, by my father, that they had all been in the room and that my grandfather had been complaining all day, pointing at the door of his hospital room shouting, “The light! the light!”...
September 2008
4 posts
PLUS:
Dear Uncreative Metal Band,
Here is a great name for your newest album. “Welcome to my Knife-Mare”. Please now pay me with an enormous check stencil spray-painted on to piece of old cardboard.
AND:
Dear Post Feminist Literary Theorist,
Here is a great name for your graduate dissertation. “Welcome to my Wife-Mare.” Please now pay me with a check that is printed in...
AND
A NAKED WOMAN (WARNING)
In the book I am making, there is a character who charts the first time he realized he loved women. I will paraphrase it for you here: As an eleven year old boy, his grandmother would drop him off at the library before her chiropractor appointments and pick him up after. This meant spending about two to three hours a week at the library, never really reading any books, but just picking one up at...
The Big and the Small, Fighting in Space
I went for another bike ride around Josh Harris’ suburban neighborhood. This happened at around 7 pm, after the sun had finished having its way with the world of Austin, Texas. There were funny clouds overhead, pink and purple and blue. Sometimes when you look at the sky, you can’t help but say a prayer that goes, “Yeah right. That looks like a Hollywood thing.”
There...
August 2008
2 posts
RAINBOW FOR AMERICA
There was a rainbow outside my window as I write this. The sky over Austin, Tx is like a high school hall way where the sun, the thick-necked line-backer bully roams freely, beating the crap out of the clouds and airplanes and me and you. Now there is rain and cloud blood. Which is rainbow.
As many of you may know, I recently moved to Austin via car. Andy and I packed up all of our stuff in his...
HISTORY
Due to the fact that I’m moving soon, I haven’t had time to write in this thing. Everything is culminating in MONDAY the day when Andrew and I pull a trailer across the USA. In any case, I wanted to put something in here so here is a text document I found on my mother’s computer. It is an angry diatribe against the degeneration of the history channel. I will write more in this...
July 2008
8 posts
Briefly
It’s 6:30 AM. My neighbors were just screaming at one another (WARNING EXPLICIT):
WOMAN: “WHAT DA FUCK!”
MAN: “FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING CUNT!”
WOMAN: “YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
MAN: “I SAID I’D GET YOUR FUCKING CRADLE!”
*SOUND OF WEEPING CHILD*
*SOUND OF CAR STARTING*
MAN: “YO! YO!”
*SOUND OF CAR DRIVING AWAY*
MAN:...
AND
I mentioned the West Gate Mall. This was a place, previous to my employment at the aforementioned Art and Drafting store, that Michael Gerkovich and I frequented. We did so because we believed the place to be haunted. It is a run down mall populated mostly by elderly people who amble from store to store, dragging dialysis machines and oxygen tanks in their stead. The West Gate Mall is a place...
HOW TO DRAW
In the winter months of 2003, I worked at “The Art and Drafting Connection” in the Westgate Mall. I have visited psychics, read exhaustive horoscopes, and received letters from my future self. All of these sources agree: THIS WILL REMAIN THE WORST JOB YOU WILL EVER HAVE HAD. The establishment was right next to a Subway Sandwich Restaurant. Subway’s distinctly hallow smell of cold-cuts...
AND
Who wants to see Batman in IMAX with me? RAISE YOUR HAND!
One time I was working at a job binding wedding photography books together in the photographer’s house. He has two sons and their room is right next to the office. I heard one of them playing with action figures by himself and in the midst of the punching sound and grunting sounds that little boys make when playing with action...
JUST LIKE A DOG
So I haven’t been writing here enough. Here is the reason: I’ve been working “LIKE A DOG” in new york. Lifting things and moving walls and going on errands. You know, things that dogs could never do. I’ve been neglecting my friends for the sake of FABULOUS MONEY. I work here at this photography studio. One of the people I work with is called “WILLIE”. He...
CASINO
My sister and I sat on the back patio this afternoon while my parents were at a casino they like to frequent. We were looking up how to make mozzarella cheese. It seems pretty straight-forward which is exciting.
The concept of “CASINO” is interesting and weird to me. What’s even more interesting is that most casinos, including the one my parents regularly attend, is owned by...
ALSO
Did I Used To Be Interesting?
When I was going to TEMPLE UNIVERSITY I used to send myself emails a lot. Whenever I had an idea I would email it to myself. A lot of them don’t make a whole lot of sense anymore. I was going through them this morning and I found this letter I wrote to myself in the future on August 16th, 2006. Here:
“If you are reading this, you are from the future and I am from the past. If you are...
Big Things
(A Photograph of Me and George the Face Puncher)
The other night my parents took my sister and I out for my sister’s birthday. We drove to the eatery my parents like very much called “THE MELT.” On the way there my sister and I played a game with one another where, when one of us is not looking, the other turns on the “SEAT HEAT” button on the other’s seat. It’s a strangely embarrassing...
June 2008
8 posts
ALSO
PLEASE BUY ME THIS T-SHIRT:
Comfort Lodge
Josey showers at night, whereas I shower in the morning. I was raised to do so, you see. There is not a single person in my family who showers at night. Lauren made me aware of a funny conversation that occured the first time Josey came to visit:
My mother entered my sister’s room in the morning, rousing her from a deep slumber to tell her, “Well, I was going to the bathroom last...
FAMOUS SCIENCE
Very recently, I came across an AMAZING british television show called “Look Around You”. It’s a parody of educational shows from the 1970’s and 80’s. I’m relatively certain that I am the last person to ever hear about this, unless that person is you. Here:
It reminds me very much of an idea for a television show that Matt Borda and I had a few years ago....
An Inevitability
If I am left alone for too long, I will inevitably find myself eating nachos or cereal while standing at the kitchen counter, wishing that Mad Tv or Mind of Mencia were not the only thing on television. If you are reading this, and you have gone to college for “ENGINEERING”, I need your help. Help me engineer my day to optimize maximum productivity. Help me engineer a vent diagram titled, “TODAY...
WATERCOLOR
Last night my father challenged my sister and I to a push-up contest. When I bent over to do a push-up, some chocolate candy fell out of my pocket. I’d forgotten I’d put it there. My family was suspicious of me so I told them, “NO NO NO, YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG IDEA! IT’S NOT MINE! I’M JUST HOLDING IT FOR A FRIEND!”
Here are some of the phrases that appear...
Robots, Tall Places, and Violent Men
At work today I was reminded of the time Scott and I built a bunk-bed from parts made of wood. My boss and I were doing the same thing, except instead of pieces of wood we had incredibly heavy steel parts, and instead of it being a bed it was an enormous industrial robot. Here is the robot we were building today:
THIS IS GUY STUFF. Once when Andy and I were destroying a desk with a hatchet i...
"Hello Every One"
This is the very first entry of a blog that I am writing. Here is the very first story: The other day I was making telescopes with a telescope maker for money. The telescope we were making was for a Hawaiian science-type person. The making of the telescope required that I crawl inside an enormous oven with a tube in my hand that was connected to a large industrial vacuum.
Here is the very second...