Aren't you glad Mel Gibson is going off the rails?

With hopes of Katie Holmes turning up dismembered in Tom Cruise's refrigerator rapidly dwindling and Britney Spears evening out at 'bloated-dumb-has-been', Mel's showing his ass to the world couldn't have come at a better time.

I'd really like to see this one go the distance. I'm talking a full-on Waco stand off at the Mel Gibson compound--the one we were all denied at Neverland Ranch.

The Game Plan-
Keep the beard Mel. You look like a fucking acid-casuality from the sixties--it's awesome. And don't let anyone tell you you can't have a drink on your birthday. Hell, have one at the Oscars! Show the world how you can still be a real cut-up at parties.

You remember the guy who stole a tank and drove it down the L.A. freeway? He had the right idea, Mel. Think big!

I'm trying to be funny here but it's not really working. Tom Cruise and Britney are fun to watch. Their public flakyness is harmless and largley a result of the years isolation that come with achieving mega-stardom at an early age. Gibson's problems are banal and pathetic. He's shown himself to be nothing but a drunken, violent, Pat Robertson. There's no star quality panache to it at all. He's not a tortured genius like Brando, not a wild-child like Robert Downey Jr., not a Diana Ross type diva, he's just a regular, run of the mill, jerk. He should shut up and go home and we should be spared witnessing anymore of him.

The Sweet Smell of Near Victory

One definite highlight of last weeks vacation was nearly finishing a Times crossword puzzle--it was a Tuesday. I've been messing with some lesser puzzles in the local Long Island papers, figuring I would build up my skills before tackling the big dog. Sitting at the breakfast table on my parents boat, having coffe and eggs, thumbing through the Times, a bit of text caught my eye:

29)....Bombeck, Humorist

"I know that. Are you kidding me? I outright know that answer!" I quickly filled in the three boxes and for the next two hours embarked on a slow, but respectable, roll towards busting up a Will Shortz, Times crossword puzzle.

Later that evening, at my friends summer share, I picked my puzzle back up and found it nearer to completion than I had left it. One of the brainy chicks there had seen it out on the table and couldn't resist helping. She appologized and I feigned disappointment for a second, then smiled. What I really wanted to know is if she thought I had done a good job.

I used to watch Jeopardy from time to time but stopped after realizing that the only right answers I knew were from lame categories like "Baseball Trivia" and "Ben Stiller Movies"--ugh. But now that I've faced down a Times crossword puzzle I feel ready to reenter the nerdy-gaming ring with new confidence.

Notes from a wedding this weekend

If I ever get married I'm having a Jewish wedding. Between the glass stomping, the chair hoist and the London-Bridge-is-falling-down-like arch dance, I'm sold. I am agnostic and I presume that whoever I marry will be too. Maybe we'll convert for the weekend of.

The real reason is that I dread the chicken dance. I dread the chicken dance and the electric slide gives me heebie jeebies.

I didn't know this, but apparently it's acceptable to hit on the help at weddings. I got the photographer chick's phone number. She's awesome. I just wish we made out the coat room or something. Isn't that what people do at weddings?

Fly Swatter

Our friends across the street had a severe fly problem in their house. Dan, one of the roomates there, had taken upon himself the role of exterminator. I made sure to either begin or end every phone conversation I had with Dan asking, "How many flys did you kill today Danno?". He always knew the exact amount. "Seventeen", he'd say, and then, in the background, SSWAT!...SSWAT! "Die fuckers!!...nineteen." It was priceless comedy.

Dan was the kind of guy who would feed stray cats, and take the time to usher a wayward moth back outside to safety. There's just something about flies, or, perhaps more significantly, fly swatters, that makes peace loving people like Dan turn into blood thirsty killers.

It all starts when a fly has been up your nose. (If it happens while you're taking a nap, it's even more traumatic.) So, you put up fly paper, and it works like a charm, but, inavariably, somebody's hair gets stuck in the glue--always an innocent visitor. Now it's personal. Like John Henry-the steel driving man, you forsake all things mechanical and take up a fly swatter.

By early September, at the expense of many summer afternoons by the pool, Dan had shown himself the better man. He was like Bruce Lee with a fly swatter. He had developed combo-moves: wall-table-dvd-wall-quick sweep into the waste paper basket.

Alternatives to Barbra

For those out there willing to plunk down $3500 for Barbra Streisand tickets, please consider these musical entertainment alternatives:

1) KISS Reunion! --Madison Square Garden, performing their greatest hits on a loop, for seventy-two hours straight, with no bathroom breaks--in full makeup, of course.

2) Beatles Reunion!-- One night only, also at Madison Square Garden, with the reanimated corpses of John and George. Vanilla Fudge to open.

3) Michael Bolton!-- In Space! That's right folks, the sexy and soulful, pony-tailed heart-throb, performing in zero-gravity for one full orbit around the earth.

4) U2!--Two nights. (All encores pending the decision of the band.)

5) Twisted Sister!-- The "We're not Gonna Take It" guys will be your personal sex slaves, and minstrels on demand for one week. *All members to be tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and present a clean bill of health upon arrival.

Gym Kings

A youtube video made me remember a clique of kids in highschool who didn't know they were a clique. They didn't know because me and my clique never told them.This is the link. I don't recommend watching it, though. It's a real peice of shit video.

We called them Gym Kings. They were guys and girls who, because they were never good enough to play on real sports teams, made gym class their sole forum for acheiving athletic glory. Always the de facto captians in flag football and always willing to peg the deaf kid in a tight game of battle pins, the Gym Kings believed that legends were made in those twenty minutes before fourth period lunch.

Once in a while, though, there was a reality check. When the actual captain of an actual highschool sports team had enough of Gym King-antics (ususally if they felt distracted from flirting with hot freshmen) they would, in a matter of minutes, crush a Gym King's team, so severely, as to make the score board totally irrelevant. After Kenya Johnson busted Sean Delaney's (King of all Gym Kings) nose with a spiked serve that he saw comming, the Gym Kings got the message that there were to be limits on phony bravura.

Those same Gym Kings are now adults in the world. They are not hard to find. They are the ball-busting door men and women at your office, guys who stay sober for karaoke night, they are regular callers on conservative talk radio...

I feel like I have too many of these:

They are known as "pocket tees". These generic, bargain basement, drab, repression-tees just make me sad. Besides the fact they don't breath, there is a breast pocket that, if you use it, makes you look crazy.

I use it for loose change sometimes.

I've always been jealous of people with dresser drawers full of real tee shirts, the kind you get from little league, church picnics, credit card scams, national parks, corporate sponsored happy hours, AIDS walks, NRA meetings, and concerts. An abundance of real tee shirts is clear evidence of the kind of full life that I am not leading.

There is no tee shirt like the one you steal from your ex:

In every relationship there comes a point when you need to borrow a shirt. Most times, if you're on the ball, you will have identified your significant other's favorite/coolest tee shirt. You put it on without asking, and they like the way it looks on you. It makes them happy to know that you too see the beauty in their favorite tee shirt.

Sooner or later, you break up. If you leave the relationship on top, you have a new lucky tee shirt. If you leave heart broken, you have a new rag to dust the furniture.

Is EVERY moustache a porn-star moustache?

That doesn't seem fair to moustaches.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Beastie Boys Lyrics

Many times in highschool, I might have died, wandering the streets of Midtown Manhattan at two in the morning, had it not been for B-Boys Makin' With the Freak Freak. A rookie from Long Island, too drunk to ask for directions, I would remember these words:

"I get my hair cut correct like Anthony Mason
Then I ride the i.r.t. right up to penn station
Penn station up on 8th ave.
Listen all y'all you get the ball bath"

Then I'd make a one-eighty from heading towards the river and make it to Penn Station just in time to catch the 3:49.

More Words of Beastie Wisdom:

Setting realistic goals and acheiving them:

"Setting My Sights And You Know What I'm After
I'll Be In The Paper, The News With Ernie Ernesto
They'll Even Print My Recipe For Pasta With Pesto"

Integrity:

"I might stick around or I might be a fad
But I wont show my song on no TV ad"


Devastating Fashion Sense:

"With the white sassoons and the looks that kill
Makin' love in the back of my Coupe De Ville"


Proper Diet:

"Heart Attack, Heart Attack Man
Spend All Your Money On Your Health Insurance Plan
Heart Attack, Heart Attack Man
Keep On Getting Bigger Because You Know That You Can"


Respect for elders:

"Like Harlem World Battles On The Zulu Beat Show
It's Kool Moe D Vs. Busy Bee There's One You Should Know"


Questioning Authority:

"I'm the king of the classroom - coolin' in the back
My teacher had beef so I gave her a smack"


Philosophy:

"Which came first the chicken or the egg
I egged the chicken then I ate his leg"


Good Manners:

What's Gonna Set You Free
Look Inside And You'll See
When You've Got So Much To Say
It's Called Gratitude, And That's Right

The Self Hating Mick

So I'm looking through a photo album from Steve and Sara's trip to Italy/Rome and gasping at every new page. Surely this is the most breathtaking cathedral in the world, right? (turn page) Ok, this one? (turn page) So, this was dropped from space by an advanced race from the future, right?

No, that's just what Italians did in 1094.

Now, flash to a week earlier: I'm looking through photos from my parents trip to Ireland, my homeland. Wow, that sure is green...rain's a lot, huh?...So, they have Virgin mega-stores there too?

There are exactly two architectural marvels in Ireland: 1)An, Indiana Jones-style, rope bridge. 2)Piles of rocks preventing sheep from walking into the ocean and drowning. Both are real old, and real simple.



What were my people doing in 1094? They were drinking. Early. On weekdays. They were drinking and making-up stories about wee-people, and rainbows, and dead spinsters screaming their lungs out.



Heart cries, `No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.

-Yeats


Oh yeah--Yeats! Shaw, Swift, Wilde...James Joyce!! That's what my people do! We sit in a dank pub on a Tuesday afternoon, pound beers, and write fucking masterpieces!

Bullshit bar stories + alcohol induced halucinations + isolation and boredom= disproportionate literary achievement.

Sand Shoes

It's a rare moment when I get to be a positive influence in the life of a young child. I, in fact, go out of my way to avoid them on trains and in restaurants, where I find their behavior coarse and intrusive. That's why I was pleasently surprised this Saturday, spending the afternoon at the beach with my friends Steve and Johnny, and Johnny's little girl, Lucia.

Lucia is three, and quite beach savy for her age. She builds decent sand castles, (or "zoos", as she prefered they be called) and shows a natural understanding of shells and sea weed as decorative materials. She has a keen interest in baby crabs too, and does not hesitate to scoop one up and raise it high above her head, like a living trophy, for all to see and covet.

I have a routine at the beach where, when I'm done swimming, I wrap a towel around my waist and bury my feet in the sand--It's just what I do. Sitting like this and watching little Lucia chasing her Daddy in the waves, it occured to me, that with a three year old around, grown ups must be a source of entertainment lest the child cry or turn into Stalin. In this mode of thinking, I had a flashback to my own childhood, and realized why I always bury my feet in the sand: to make shoes.

When we were very young, my sister and I would take turns burying eachother's feet in the sand and carving out a ridiculously over-sized pair of shoes. The Beach Cobbler (sorry) would meticulously draw on laces and cool racing stripes, while the customer would have to sit still nd try not to disrupt the other's handiwork. Half the fun was stepping out of them at the end; like breaking some cartoon chains of bondage.


Jones Beach 1983--I don't know who these people are.


Of course I showed Lucia my sand shoes and they were a revelation. She laughed her head off with delight.

I haven't told my sister yet.

I'm still working on the office wallpaper. I know it's creepy.

All Good Slang Must Pass

According to a friend of mine, I am, single handedly, trying to bring back the word "sike".

Nonsense! I tell him.

I mean, I know the word itself is nearly twenty years out of date, and over a decade past being appropriate for parody, but there is no way that my minimal--and tasteful--use of sike could be construed as an attempt to bring it back. Fuck me where I stand if I use the word sike more than once a month in casual conversation!

And yes, I use it consciously. When someone is walking away from a barbecue, stressing about the height of the flame and harshing the general vibe of the party, and I casually point out, "burger's on fire", when it's not, and they turn to look; what else am I supposed to say? "Just Kidding"? No, "Just Kidding" would earn me a spatula across the mouth.

Words die, I realize this, but it never hurts to keep a few solid ones in your back pocket for just the right situations.

And if you ask me, a *good guitar solo is, and always will be, "Bitchin'". End of story.




*Dinosaur Jr. version of Just Like Heaven

As if Family Bands Weren't Already Cute Enough

I had never seen a Japanese funk-band. But there was one playing in Penn Station today that was, honest to God, a really good band! Though I have no hard evidence, I like to think that they were a family band: Big brother on tenor sax, little brother on drums, brother-in-law holdin' it down on bass, his wife (middle sister to the others) playing bongos and a standing splash cymbal, and Ralph, the African American UPS guy, sitting in on keys!

They dressed in Izod polo shirts and sandals, and were all smiles, playing their, simple but riffy, instrumental blues. You could tell they were just recently off the boat too; when big brother on tenor sax thanked the audience and offered the bands CD it was in really broken english with loungy cadences.

I'm really bad at impressions over the internet, otherwise I'd do it for you

The last time I took acid was on a camping trip in Tennessee

Moths flew in from all corners of the woods to burn up in our camp fire. Watching these little drunken kamikaze planes turned out to be the height of hillarity and drama for my friends and I that night.

We watched them come in on their squiggly flight patterns, their wings curling up like tissue paper once they hit the wall of intense heat surrounding the fire. They went down in tail-spins and nose-dives, some engulfed in flames, others only partially so, their bodies leaving a trail of smoke as they lost power and fell.

But who could blame them for acting drunk? They'd spent lifetimes getting teased by the moon every night. Maybe one or two of them had even fallen under the spell of a light bulb and has been going around dissallusioned ever since?

The apparent orgy of insect suicide took on a different dynamic when one of us observed that certain moths seemed to have a method. On a log, set about two feet to the side of the fire, moths were landing. If you really focused in, you could see them struggling to hold their place on the log against the billowing heat while they counted to three. For these guys, the point was not just to burn up in the heat but to penetrate it and reach the heart of the fire.

One more thing about Neil young

There is a town
In North Ontario
Dream comfort memory despair...

Where the fuck does he get "dream comfort memory despair"? And he sings it like Jesus Christ is in the audience.

That lyric melts my spine.

U-S-A! U-S-A!

I watched about a total of fifteen minutes of the World Cup. (Stephen Colbert had every good line on America's apathy towards Soccer so I'm not going to try.) What I found disconcerting about the event were the crowd chants. They were all so melodious and joyfull. The Spanish "ole, ole, ole, ole" song could be a top twenty hit if you put a rave beat behind it. It made me wonder about America's chant:

U-S-A! U-S-A!

Christ, we sound like cavemen! Apparently, most international soccer (sorry, I mean "Futbol") chants are based on patriotic folk songs. Now, I'm not saying we adopt the metric system or follow the Geneva Conventions, but maybe we could take a cue from the rest of the world just this once? We have a lot of great music here. Perhaps we rework a Cole Porter or Muddy Waters tune? Run-DMC? Why not a round of This Land is Your Land?

On second thought, we wouldn't want to give the world's aspiring immigrants any ideas. Maybe we do a special version at the next big international event: This land is OUR land/ Don't you forget it/ We don't like so-ccer/ It's slow and it's bo-ring/...

Long May You Run

Flipping past VH1 the other night, I caught them playing a block of Neil Young videos. I immediately thought he was dead.

I fully support VH1 playing all the Neil Young and Dylan they can get away with. I just think, at this point, that they should include some sort of heads up as to their motives for doing so. A CNN ticker-like read out of the aging rocker's vitals would suffice.

Between Dylan's heart-fungus, Neil Young's brain aneurysm, and Keith Richards falling out of trees, there's just no telling when a round of slapped together tribute shows, easily mistaken for innocent video rock-blocks, will materialize on a sunday night.

Dear High Priest/Priestess:

Before I leave this world please open up a pack of mini post-its, split in half, and stick one half onto each of my eyelids. Fill my mouth with: one unopened box of orange tic tacs; my Ipod; my new watch; two forms of ID and a universal tv remote with fresh batteries.

To guide and serve me in the afterlife I wish to be accompanied by: the one mexican woman from the Deli who knows how to make bacon-egg&cheese sandwiches the right way; a reasonably priced chocolate lab with all his shots and papers and shit out of the way; and maybe the new girl who started in the computer lab about a month ago? if she's up for it. Scratch that, I'll just ask her myself. It's cool.

Anyway, all are to be drowned in proper ceremonial fashion and their bodies subsequently entombed aside my own...blah, blah, blah.

Sincerely,

Pharaoh

"This job is robbing me of my dreams--literally."

One thing I used to love about a day of skiing was the inevitable all-night-skiing- dream I would have when I went to sleep that night. It was as if my muscles would fail to recognize that I had stopped skiing so that, when I went to bed, my sub-conscious mind would put me back on the slopes. It was like having a night of mistake-free runs down a perfect mountain at no cost.

This penomenon extends to a number of repetetive physical activities, including soccer and swimming, which cast one into dreams of fresh air and triumph. But way more commonly, involuntary dreams result from waiting tables. Seriously. Ask anyone who is, or has been, a server for any length of time if they ever involuntarily dream about work. The answer you will get, unanimously, is that they were plagued by dreams about work. It's so wrong.


Not only do you come home at three-o'clock in the morning, covered from head to toe in beef and cheese smell, you are forced to relive hours of hard labor in your most private dream time. And it's never the niceties that may occur in the course of a shift of which there are many. Every serving dream I've heard is that of a sinking ship full of cruel, hungry, fat people and you're the Captain.

Why can't all dreams be about saving beutiful women from oncoming trains? Or flying? Have you ever dreamed you were flying? Of course you have. Lord it is fine.

Mach III Debbie

Debbie is a woman in my office who exists in a state of perpetual motion. I have never seen her sit or stand still for even a moment. I can't imagine what it must be like for her to pee.

Debbie is courteous to a fault. At around eight thirty every morning she speed walks past my cubicle, and like a paper boy slinging the early edition onto a drive way, she says, "'Mornin' Peter"...and she's gone.

I think of Debbie as an abstract sequence of events: a very polite smear of beige colered light in the corner of my eye; a dopplerized salutation; finishing with a gentle gust of wind that cools my morning coffee.

Shellshocked: baldness and the male psyche

Apparently there are certain E.D. drugs on the market which come with the diabolical side effect of causing baldness. If this is true, then these drug companies have a wonderful sense of humor. They know full well that going back to Samson in the old testament, a full head of hair has been linked to sexual prowess. James Dean, Cary Grant, Elvis, Patrick Duffy--all men with mighty quaffs! On the bald side--Sean Connery. I'll give you Sean Connery.

But he's interesting. James Bond himself lost his hair? But that's just it!You never saw Sean Connery actually loosing his hair. He was Bond one day, then he was shock white, with a beard in Hunt for Red October (dope flick) the next. By the time he became the pissy old Irishman in The Untouchables with a horse shoe of distinguished grey, there was no telling what the real Connery looked like anymore. But it's the gradual, and public, transition into baldness that throws some men into such irrational states where they can conceivably opt for hair over a functioning libido.

Surely everybody's favorite Bond, even in the throes of hair loss, never failed to rise to the occassion but that's not to say he never felt the pressure. I gaurantee there was a moment when a team of publicists had talk Sean Connery out of hair plugs: "But Sean, you're British! We don't do such things to our bodies!"




We've all seen the lengths that men will go to when faced with gradual but inevitable hair loss. What man in his right mind leaves a braided pony-tail hanging off his shiny, bald skull? While baldness has been shown to indicate high testoterone levels, studies are still ongoing about it's effect on brain functions.

*Lisa from the fabulous blog womenhavingitall
, who stated in a previous comment that women, "don't care about baldness" prompted me to write this post.

I'd like to ask her:

Did you feel the same before you got married?

Thoughts from the Wagon

After five beers I can do calculus. And I've never done calculus. I am so loose, I can moonwalk up a flight of stairs. I am so sure, right now, I could shoplift a Kayak. Five beers into the night and I'm Muhammad Ali, only I'm shooting pool, and every shot is willed by destiny to fall.

After five beers, I promise to meet your father. I will shake his hand at the door. With a five-o'clock shadow and my sweatpants covered in grey dog slobber, I'll look him square in the eye. And with five beers drunk out of the six-pack under my arm, I'll offer him to split the last one.