suckers

i read a really interesting article this morning in the nytimes about our keen American sense to make everyone crazy.  the author talked about how we medicate shy persons in order to make them come out of their "shell", when actually, it's all part of the evolutionary process.  (if you can read, look it up yourself: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26shyness.html?ref=contributors)

in the article, fish are mentioned (evidently, some fish are smarter than others) which started a conversation over brekkie on fish and what one imagines is their really boring fishy little lives, but i think we have it all rather grotesquely and unfortunately wrong.  who has it better than fish???  first off, they're delicious little buggers, that is for certain, but just because goldfish float around in a lifelong bowl of clear or sometimes muddled misery can't possibly mean they're all signin up for Zoloft.  think about fish in the sea: i'm going to venture to say that a life of flipping your little finnies in the Caribbean just is not that bad, even if it means that, in the end, you're dessert for a Great White.  hey, at least you had it reeeeally fucking good for a while, and sharks need dessert, too.

one of my problems is that i tend to analogize everything to life.  it's like, really and seriously calm the fuck down already.

speaking of fish makes me think of my favorite water-based delectable, an octopus, which makes me think of what a huge fat hypocrite i am.  while i don't eat meat because i can't stand to think of poor little cattle and chickens wallowing around in 8-months worth of their own feces before getting pushed on a nasty chopping block to support our insatiable fat ass hunger habit, i seem to be more than ok with the fact that the incredibly intelligent octopus is clobbered and turned inside out whilst having it's skin torn off before making it into a plate of butter and herbs in front of my sweaty face.

i'm ready for lunch.

  

guys and dogs

i'd like to preface this by saying i truly happen to love dogs, but it skeeves the heavenly bejeesus out of me to see young men walking them.  sorry guys, but all i see when i see that cute little dog of yours is someone who can't, for the life of themselves or others, get it the fuck together already.  a dog is such an unfortunate scapegoat - your insecurities, your hopes, your disappointments, your desires, your fear to speak to that really cute redhead next door: all of them just come to a big fat furry head in little ol' Bo, your terrier poodle dachshund mangy but somehow super cute mutt mix.  i mean, come on.  sure, every furry friend needs a home, but show me ONE dude with a dog who has a stable relationship outside of the one he has with Tuesdays at Pet Smart and wee-wee pads.

by accident, i started keeping a tally of men i saw walking little dogs.  i found myself inadvertently furious with the pooch, when really i was hating the guy for not getting himself behind a fucking ox somewhere and making a man of himself already.

somewhere in there, i also found out that goldman sachs employees constituted the second largest group of private contributors to the Obama '08 campaign.  the first was the university of california, but who cares: dogs don't even make it into this conversation - we're all just a bunch of big fat nasty pussies.

going up

you know what always annoyed me?  analogies of life to a roller coaster.  yea, so life has its ups and downs, who gives a shit.  well, today, i went on one, and now i understand why people have to endlessly refer to it.  one minute you're all smiling up at the sky, and the next minute you're plummeting upside down to hell with your brain being banged around in concussion mode with drool flying uncontrollably out the side of your mouth, and you couldn't think straight if you tried.  just when you get over the fact that you've soiled your pants and don't ever want to do it again, you're climbing some pleasant slope again all smiling and happy because somehow you've already forgotten that you just shit your pants, not a moment ago, and then you do it all over again, losing your lunch and breakfast before sliding super easy along to a cute little stop all while giggling like a girl next to your best friend, thinking, man, i can't wait to do that again.  now i sound like a Buddhist.

steppenwolf

what about coincidences?  i always thought coincidence was a crack in the crust of some universal essence that lets us sneak a peek for a quick second into something else, but what that Else is, i'm not quite sure yet.  today was full of crazy coincidence, one being that i heard "hermann hesse" mentioned TWICE.  twice in ONE day!  if that's not some bonkers sign from the Universe, i don't know what is.

in other news, today we ate frozen banana cream on the river looking out over manhattan.  it reminded me of Gerber banana baby food, which i've sometimes eaten in secret, so that was fun.  the light kept changing from surreal-scary-overcast to bake-your-face-off sunray shots.  company consisted of a brigade of the following: a saint, two little girls, and a novice.  ah, summer.        

kilocalories of the world, unite

i remember my dad telling me a story once about some dude who had just come over from [then] USSR.  he had taken him to a Wegmans upstate where, as soon you walk in, they're accosting your face and dignity with 18 different types of bread and cheese samples (i personally highly prefer the very luscious olive load.  loaf, i mean).  the guy had walked in to this superstore-on-steroids after a life spent choosing from only one kind of pickle, and he just knelt down and cried.  maybe he didn't exactly crouch and weep, maybe my dad was being helpfully dramatic, maybe he just moved off to the side a bit so as not to be run over by suburbia on grocery-cart wheels and became slightly misty-eyed, but i'm gonna stick with the first version, that is, of him doubled over in grateful hysterics, reciting the pledge.

maybe that's why i need to pop a xanax every time i'm forced into collecting sundry at a fucking supermarket now.  all those shelves of shit and shit and shit and shit.  fat people, skinny people, white people, black people, everyone just loading up on lemon loaf and oversized bananas and capers and cottage cheese and a gazillion different pastas and juices and sauces and meats and poultry and detergents and toothpastes...geh!!  all of it just makes my pretty little head spin.  i wonder what it's like in parts of the world like Liberia where you're just grateful your goat hasn't croaked in the past month. the concept of a cheesy-ass nacho Dorito would probably blow your fucking mind, meanwhile, here we run the gamut from a 25¢ bag of stale Utz at the bodega, to a Key Food Special of $7.99 for a 6-family pack of tortilla based product that would probably feed aforementioned Liberian for three months running.  God, i love America, but that is just fucking gross.

these are black and white cookies from Peter Pan Bakery in Greenpoint.  not a better black and white exists. not on the face of the planet, not in this Universe.

   

a face only a mother could love

one thing that really endears me to the city i live in is the heat.  early on, i didn't think i'd be able to make it through these nasty summers, but i've since (and recently) realized that, just like everything else you really really love and want in your life, you need to love it at its absolute ugliest, even if it's seepin sweat through bodily crevasses you didn't even know existed.  if you truly love something, and it just happens to be a subfrigerator scum wallower on the side, for example, you better just straight up love away if you're waiting for even a figment of it to come right straight back at you.  otherwise, you and that thing you really love are straight-up goners, and what's life without something you really really love?

take New York when it's 110' out and full-fat humidity.  your ass is stuck to the backseat of a cab where 100 other people have just slapped their sticky asses in the last hour alone, and you've been sweating since before you left the shower.  heat in New York is like a concrete metal gargoyle, crouched all quiet right outside your window looking in, rubbing its gnarly little stone hands together.  you're walking around all cool and happy as a clam in a climate controlled 68', but you know full fucking well that bitch is just waiting for you to peek out your drawn window shades so it can yell SURPRISE MOTHER FUCKER!!!! and laugh its ass off at your stricken face.  

that's heat in New York.  it's disgusting and abusive really, but you love it, even the parts that leave you all nasty because that gummy summer air grime is literally slothing off and all over you already and when people sipping lemonade enjoying a cool breeze on their verandas in the country say, "i don't know how you do it", you realize that if taking shit from summer in new york is some real kind of love, you wouldn't have it any other way.

there i am being a big ol hypocrite again since i'm also staring out a huge picture window at nothing but trees while i write this, but so what.  i'll catch a train back sooner or later, too, so...bear with???? 

this is a gargoyle in Paris, but that's kinda what heat in new york looks like.  shit, i think i just realized Love probably looks like that, too: fuck Cupid, people crap their pants and cry like babies when they see that face.  

one of the best books i've ever read is the gargoyle, by andrew davidson and i highly advise that you quickly kindlekin that shit to whatever e-reader it is you have straight away.

where are you going?

new york cabbies are truly special people, most of whom scare the shit out of me.  they are either angels, heavenly harbingers to Jesus meant to trick and spy on all of us, or demon people, both concepts being very obviously and equally horrifying.  

late night taxi rides are exceptionally surreal.  the combination of taxi tv sounds in the back seat mixed with whatever eerie AM talk show the cab driver is listening to while speaking in foreign tongue to his best bud in agudsfhakefakistan can all make for one skin-tingling ride to wherever it is you're going, and who the fuck ever knows where that is?  i can't stand AM radio.  it's like voices from another planet coming through some weird electrical fog smoke to possess you.  and then it's all dark but bright outside, being that it's new york, and therein the paradox, with all sorts of groovy people moving around, plus sometimes you're just too paranoid or drunk anyway, and then all of it is just complete surreality as you're cruising down 2nd to Delancey in the epicenter of the Universe.   

anyhow - i remember being picked up once by a cab that I swear to God was being driven by Woody fucking Allen.  he started talking some philosophies to me the instant i got in the car, and when i heard his voice and saw the back of the head, i was overcome by this mortified, freezing fear thinking WA was driving my cab, holy shit woody fucking allen is driving this car and how can i let every last one of my friends and family know right this instant without being too obvious???  we talked about life and love and what makes it all come together all the way up until he dropped me off somewhere on the west side.  i payed and never saw his face, but what the fuck, why wouldn't woody allen just be driving cabs around new york, talking to people about life?  i think i actually would too, if i could, for a minute or two, at least.   

i once had a cab driver brake wildly on the Williamsburg Bridge and make to bitch slap me through the partition after i questioned his street-finding prowess.  speaking of which, Midnight in Paris, Woody's latest flick is so damn pleasing, you must see it if only because you've completely forgotten what it's like to smile your face off for two full hours, straight.

Queen of Heaven, Rejoice. Please. Alleluia.

for a while, like 30 years, i've been obsessed with wolfgang amadeus mozart's regina coeli in C, K 276.  sometimes, it's the only thing i'll play on my ipod for days, or even weeks and that's not even hyperbole.  every time those soaring fucking notes hit my earballs, i feel as if God Himself is having a very special conversation with Me Myself.  it really just makes me want to fall down on my knees on the nasty New York sidewalk i'm inevitably banging across and praise the bejeesus out of God.  sometimes i think Mozart is God.

anyway, once, i was listening to Regina Coeli when i caught the 4 at 86th headed downtown.  i jumped in and sat down across from a homeless black dude which i immediately regretted the moment i naturally respired (which is to say, right away, obviously) but since i didn't want to be a douche and move away, i stayed sittin tight.  so there i am, taking this old guy in when he looks up at me with these big brown watery eyes and he's rubbing his knees in obvious pain and i'm starting to feel all sorry for him, and i swear to God, or Mozart, he looks me straight in the peepers and starts MOUTHING the words of the chorus in perfect unison with what's happening on my ipod, in my ears, in my head: 

Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia,

Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia

Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia

I kid you fucking not, i kid you fucking not.  i almost threw up.  then some good samaritan comes over and starts talking to him so the dude, who was probably God, stops singing along with my fucking soundtrack and i bounced like a hotcake at 59th  

φιστίκια Αιγίνης

today i went across the street to check out the newly-opened Momofuku Milk Bar.  their tasty treats are renowned, so i got a Milk Coffee (i am significantly intolerant to both milk and coffee) and a croissant.  the grand total for these two items came to over ten dollars.  mortified that i had not ventured to check on those prices before purchasing this mid-morning snack, i silently handed over my debit card.  just like that.  the croissant was a KNOCK OUT, with this thick green unexpected pistachio (!) goo all throughout its innards, and the Milk Coffee was successful in giving me highly uncomfortable crazy head spinny jitters for the better part of the afternoon.  of course, the question that begs to be answered here is, how much is too much, and what does that even mean?? 

strangely enough, i also had some pistachio ice cream tonight, by accident, so i guess today was all about pistachios, or "fistiki" as they say in Greek, and the Greeks sure do one fucking tasty pistachio.  it's good to have a cone of melting green pistachio ice cream in hand as you walk toward the Acropolis, for example, while your face is practically baking off in that terrifying Grecian sun.  pistachios were also evidently prominently featured in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which says a lot for a nut, and maybe even a little for king Nebuchadnezzar who put them there.  that man seriously scared the shit out of me as a kid, what with his golden idols and raging fires and what not.

my friend Steve wanted a cat, so he got two kittens, both of which he had to give away in the end.  that proves two things: men are children, and two kittens is too much.  

tinker bell

i live in a part of Brooklyn that people around the world make endless fun of.  well, not the geographical location exactly, because it’s pretty fucking amazing - rather, the inhabitants are an endless source of great wonder or ridicule, depending on how you’re looking at it.  i won’t get into the specifics as to why, as it kinda pains me, but i realized today, through association of some other things, and through the wisdom of my ever-illustrious Natasha, that New York is really Neverland, or Neverland is really New York, and where I live is Neverpeak Mountain.  It dismays me more than a touch to realize this.  I asked Natasha what the opposite of Neverland is, and she said that it’s DC.  Or Death.   

J.M. Barrie, original hipster.   

/ˈskətlˌbət/

it's been pointed out to me that i say i "love" to so many things that it's just not possible to LOVE something as much as i say i do.  Jesus, freaks, is anyone alive out there???

it's one of the things i talk about with my therapist actually - feeling things so or too deeply that it practically incapacitates me.  for example, old people. they really get me.  remember the movie shawshank redemption, and how old Brooks finally gets out and he can't handle it so he hangs himself?  i was hysterically inconsolable for a week.  that poor old dude with no one to turn to, all lonely and sad and confused and old - i don't think there's anything worse.  when i see old people, young people with handicaps, three-legged dogs, illegal immigrants selling bottles of water or peeled oranges under the BQE when it's 1000 degrees out...those things just really rip my heart out.  i wish there was something i could take to stop that horrible feeling, actually.

by the same token, i'd like to think that when i say LOVE to anything, i mean it as deeply.  maybe my love for aforementioned cupcakes is not the same love as the love i have for the Love of My Life, but i'm going to go ahead and say that neither one of those loves is something to be taken lightly.  i can't imagine life without cupcakes, and i can't imagine it without the Love of My Life.

one thing i really love is this sandwich shop in my hood, Salties. it's about the size of a horse trailer (two horses tops), and they make the best fucking sandwiches out of organic produce in the world. in the WORLD.  i always get the Scuttlebutt, which is truly bigger than my head - i want to make love to that taste, seasonal veggies, hard-boiled eggs, capers, feta cheese, pickled onions on this mass of bread that is so tasty i fear it's made with lard.  the ladies at Salties evidently make a whole slew of amazing goodies, but i'm so consumed by this sandwich, i can't even see past it.

i have had their chocolate mouse drizzled with olive oil (and sprinkled with chunks of sea salt, if i remember correctly, but even if i don't - who cares), and to all of it, i have one word: LOVE

rauch enthalt Benzol, Nitrosamine, Formaldehyd und Blausaure

cigarettes.  in general, I find them to be so absolutely revolting, but sometimes, I really really really want one.  I remember when I was a kid playing around with my then best friend’s sister’s cigarettes for the first time; they were so fucking gross and filled me with dire guilt and remorse, like many things did back then.  The next day, I had such an urge to smoke that I nearly crapped my pants.  I smoked one in our bathroom blowing smoke into the toilet, but as far as I can remember, my father got a good whiff and beat the shit out of me.

today, the urge hits me when the outside temp rises to or remotely above 50’F – for some reason, I love taking slow drags on my stoop whilst watching people walk by, and since I can’t do it while I’m freezing my ass off, and I don’t do it inside, I guess you could call me a seasonal smoker.  i’ve seen a lot off my stoop over the past 8 years, a lot of it through the smoky haze of nasty cigarettes.  i’ve seen the neighborhood go from straight up Dominican to severely hipster, some Dominican.  it’s uncanny, really, gentrification.  how are we even allowed to use that word anymore?  you'd think people would freak out, when you think about it.  

anyway - they’re gutting a huge old iglesia around the corner from my place to convert into condos.  i actually wouldn’t even mind living there – there’s a huge cross on the fascade, so i think I’d feel safe.  my favorite zigaretten are the Black Marlboro Golds that for some reason you can’t buy here in America, so every time someone goes to Europe, they bring me back some BMG’s and really, they’re tasty.  they taste like summer in Europe, which I happen to love.  i find regular american Marlboro Lights so nasty that it blows my mind trying to imagine the psyche of the person who can handle sucking that stuff in without throwing up their soul. 

i caught my then best friend reading my diary in my bedroom when we were seniors - just hangin out on my bed reading my diary. so yea, that was weird

cruel cruel cupcakes

cupcakes.  there just aren’t enough words or colors in the world sweet enough for me to express how much i seriously mother fucking love them.  i honestly think they might be giving me diabetes.  a vanilla cupcake is best, with some sort of creamy pinkish straight sugar can frosting smeared all over the top.  come to think of it, i could honestly care less as to the makeup of the cake.  My personal MO is to eat just a tiny millimeter of cake off the top by accident, just because it happens to be right next to the frosting, and the paper wrapped bottom can get tossed straight into the trash.  i do this with one to four cupcakes a pop.  my therapist tells me i need to examine this behavior, but i honestly see no moral dilemma there, *what*so*ever* 

actually, a lot of my digestive - and therein related - woes in life come from an abundant overeating of frosting, God FORBID there's a BJ's birthday cake in sight.  i think it all stems from the fact that, back in the day, my mom used to make cakes from those all-American dry mix boxes, but never ever ever ever, not once, did she frost them. frosting was unheard of expensive, so instead we'd all sit around silently, eating plain ol' cake, probably staring wide-eyed into one another's faces just trying to find some sort of joy in it.  later, when we were rich enough to buy those freezer aisle dessert layer cakes, my brothers and i would come to serious blows calling "corner", since those pieces were obviously in possession of the most amounts of frosting.  

it wasn’t my mom’s fault that sweets in Bosnia are made of war-time ration flour and sugar slapped together, and it also wasn’t my mom’s fault that every last other mother in 3^rd grade provided ample amounts of frosting on the baked goods they sent to school with their nasty little brats, so to make up for it, i obviously - rightly - eat as much frosting as I can today.  

there's a cupcake shop near my place in Brooklyn, i like to think of it as Heaven.  it's pink and tiny and perfect and the propietor makes the most delicious plump juicy cupcakes of all wonderful varieties straight from scratch, no duncan hines boxes there.  the frosting is so creamy and perfect that you actually want to go crazy and paint the world with it.  i have a bit of a love affair with them, i can't lie.  anyway, after about my 12th consecutive visit in four days, the owner and I began to shmooze it up - i was devasted to find out that she a.) hated cupcakes, and b.) was morbidly depressed in life.  what the fuck???  who can possibly be depressed around cupcakes???  that blew my mind and really made me question the purpose of life, but, thankfully, not of cupcakes.

in other news, a few weeks ago, I discovered the sandwich chain Subway, and have since become a complete whore for Subway.  i'm so easy for a veggie patty on flatbread with provolone, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, guac, sweet, jalepeno and cherry peppers, with extra chipotle southwest mayo drizzled all over the top that i seriously sneer at myself.  i just can't stay there too long, because then I start to smell like Subway and people might pick up on the fact that i've literally been running there on my lunch breaks.  gross.  when does a girl ever grow up?

new york

my first mistake in life was probably really really really wanting to live in New York.  when we were kids, my parents would pile my brothers and me into whatever nearly defunct car it was that we were using at the time and head on down an old Indian foot path turned Revolutionary War troop/carriage/artery turned major cross-Catskill automobile route to the thruway down to the nasty Big Apple praying all the way that our engine wouldn't catch fire (as it often did), or that no real rainfall would impede our expected travel time, since usually, our wipers didn't work.

God, how it smelled back then.  it was gloriously gross, and so full of nasty, ripe smells.  wherever you were in New York, something was smelling up your face: piss off the homeless, that particular hot subway exhaust that comes charging at you from the grates, ethnic cuisine of some far off exotic yonder sizzling up somewhere, incense, old shit at flea markets, or, my personal favorite, old linoleum mixed with the smell of laundry detergent, God Bless Brooklyn.  to this day, catching a whiff of that sunshine as I pass some three-family building in Greenpoint makes my toes curl the way only a really poor happy seven year old can understand.

we went a lot back in the day - there were no ethnic Serbs in the part of the state we lived in, otherwise known as the woods, so it was not infrequent that we'd be making our way through the streets of Manhattan to the huge cathedral on 25th that Edith Wharton had gotten married in back in the day.  no, Edith Dubs wasn't Serbian, and neither was the church then, but it was part of the then "uptown" scene.  if you have any concept as to the age of innocence, you know what i'm talking about.  if you don't, follow Sarah Palin on twitter because that's where you belong.  anyway - i couldn't wait to get there, nasty new york, those were the best weekends of my life.  everything New York always seemed like the best fucking shit ever to me, except for the time my dad drove through some pretty scabby area and a bunch of people that we weren't really used to surrounded our car.  my mom cried and made me hide under a blanket on the floor of the back seat.  

i'm smelling beer as i write this, in Brooklyn.  beer sucks.