Attack of the Enzymes

This was gonna be the Halloween when I actually had fun. I had the basic idea for a costume, I had invitations to parties thrown by two different sassy ladies, and I was eager to go out after a few consecutive weekends of out-of-town trips.

My enthusiasm for the whole thing started to dwindle late Wednesday night as I clutched the rim of the toilet bowl, when it became clear I’d been having more than just a little heartburn for the previous few days. On Friday, the doc confirmed my amateur diagnosis: ulcer!

Woohoo! A weekend full of stomach pain, bland soups, applesauce, and water instead of candy and hijinks! The coolest part of all was having to watch out for enough blood or anything that require a trip to the emergency room.

Fun!

Well, things are OK and my bland soups have been staying down, but my stomach still hurts and I still have to go have a tube with a camera shoved down my gullet tomorrow. That ought to be more fun the weekend I’d been planning, right?

9/11/03

So it’s the anniversary of that day again. Like last year, I’ve been avoiding the news because it makes me mad: I don’t want to see the endless human-interest stories, I don’t want to bask in the grief, I definitely don’t want to see the entire thing used as a cheap political rhetorical device. I get pissed off as all hell because it makes me feel like I no, like all of us are being used. And there’s no reason to expect otherwise, consideirng the impact of that nightmare, but I don’t want to get mad because it’s just more getting mad at the same shitheads that always make me mad. I don’t want to get mad again when I’m still trying to figure out why I still get so sad once in a while.

You see, I also avoid the news and the documentaries and the specials because I know they’ll play me like a fiddle. Not so much all the commentary and the memorials and whatnot, but the documentation of the experience still bothers me a lot. I still get sick to my stomach and I still end up on the verge of tears when I see that footage, when I read about the details of the day, when I’m made to imagine and remember and empathize.

It’s the wound. It’s this big, gaping, barely healed wound that I developed that one morning when the shit hit the fan and we had no idea what was happening and what we could do about it. I mourn for the dead, I feel for their families and friends, and I worry about the world we live in, but those are all intellectual abstractions to one degree or another. I don’t know anyone who died, nor do I think we are more or less at risk than I did when I woke up that morning. This world is a big, violent, dangerous place and that wasn’t the worst thing that has ever happened, or will ever happen. Talking about the event and putting it in context doesn’t explain what keeps happening in my gut.

I wasn’t in the area of the World Trade Center, but I ran for my life that day. We all ran for our lives that day, trying to get the fuck back to our homes or to our loved ones or to anyplace that felt safe. In a literal a sense a few million of us did run for our lives, streaming through the streets and over bridges and through tunnels to get far away, to any place less likely to be another target in all that pandemonium. But where could we find safety if the attacks seemed to be happening all over? There was news, but it was too much that came too fast and offered too little. All it confirmed was that there was carnage and confusion and danger and that we were all sharing it, so there was no one to calm us down, just other people with those same desperate looks on their faces. I’d never experienced something that bad, that big. It rocked me to the core in a way that I would never have expected, and I can’t really explain or understand why the effects linger.

My 15 Seconds of Exposure

Now that the Tivo is up and running, I’m able to catch all those back episodes of Sessions at West 54th Street that I attended, but never got to see when they were broadcast. Right now I’m watching the Cesaria Evora episode, in which I can periodically see the back of my head bobbing around. (I was always amazed how still people were during the tapings. If you ever see the second David Byrne episode, you can clearly see Mark and I bobbing and smiling uncontrollably throughout the whole performance. It’s music, ya know?)

I was completely charmed by Cesaria Evora, and couldn’t help noticing how Natalie Merchant, seated a few feet away from me, never mustered up too much enthusiasm, even during the standing ovation at the end. (Well, not that a standing ovation is anything other than obligatory these days, but that’s a rant for another time…) I remember thinking that someone could have been a little less jaded and taken a few pointers on performance techniques.

The Scary Side of Capitalism

In the wake of Ye Olde Blackoute, there was a lot of talk around the office about what a pain it was to walk down 20 flights of stairs that had no emergency lights. One of the women I work with was raving about the usefulness of the great keychain flashlight she owned that sheds a startling amount of light, so Monday morning a bunch of people chipped in and bought a bunch of them.

Curious about the nifty trinket, I took a look at the website where they were ordered, and probably placed myself right at the top of an FBI or Homeland Security watchlist the minute the site hit my bowser logs. Discount blowguns? Knives fit for a Klingon? Spy cameras? Man, who knew it could be so easy to acquire everything needed for a superhero utility belt or a anti-establishment fortress. I’m glad I found my flashlight and all, but I get a little squeamish thinking about the endless varieties of suspicious stuff that’s out there for the taking.

The Great Blackout of Aught-Three

The Great Blackout of Aught-Three, as experienced by me:

  • Frankly, I enjoyed it. I have many blessings to count, I realize I live within a feasible walking distance from home, I was wearing comfortable shoes, the iPod was fully charged and loaded (and it also makes an excellent source of light in a darkened emergency stairwell), my apartment’s not that stuffy so I had a much easier time of it than a lot of other people. Still, it was a nice enough day and it was pretty interesting to see what was going on during the hike uptown and over the bridge. I have to admit that at times I had to stop myself from breaking into song along with the iPod, because I was so nonplussed about the whole experience, and I was finding so pleasant to just walk and watch people and stuff.
  • I LOVE NYOf course, it all would have been so much worse if the rest of the city hadn’t been so laid back about it all. Compared to that other time, no one was was freaking out that I could see. We calmly climbed down the 20 stories to the street, where people were hanging out talking to others, deciding what to do. Walking up Lexington Avenue toward the Queensboro Bridge, people were waiting calmly on lines at pay phones, delis, and ice cream trucks, and the only ones being assholes were the fat-cats sealed up in their SUVs who were pissed off that they didn’t have the right of way anymore. And for once, no one was greeting their hostility with more hostility. People were just rolling their eyes at the temper tantrums. Every truck driver with extra room was telling people to hop on, and at the bridge there was a human chain lifting others onto the upper roadway for the trudge home.
  • If I had to be stuck in a major city during a massive power blackout, I’m sure as hell glad it was this one. New York’s active street-level culture is normally a plus from a social standpoint, but it’s also useful in a crisis. It’s a pedestrian city, so if you’re forced to hike across it, there is no shortage of places to get water, food, or alcohol. There are lots of payphones, in case the cellular networks are down or overloaded. People are used to regular contact with strangers, so it’s not a big deal to interact with your neighbors or other people on the street. It becomes much more of a shared event.
  • I’m very grateful that delis and greengrocers stayed open long enough to let people stock up on provisions for the night. All we had at home was a half-gallon of milk and some wheat bread, so I was lucky to grab some fruit to snack on during the night.
  • Even with my rose-tinted view of life in New York, I was amazed at the lack of street crime and looting, especially after living through the blackout of ’77, and then later living in the middle of the neighborhood (Bushwick) where most of the looting and the fires took place. I guess it was part of the relief that this was just a blackout. Also, I have to give our charisma-free mayor some credit for telling everyone the power would be back by midnight last night. By letting everyone think it would get back to normal soon, those announcements probably prevented a lot of mayhem during the night.
  • I’d always believed the party line about this problem being solved after ’77, but I guess a certain vulnerability is the nature of any interconnected system. Even if safeguards had been put in place since ’77, I suspect that power usage has increased enough to leave us back in the same position. Bush is already yapping on about how the system needs to be modernized, but I bet he’s thinking along the lines of lucrative contracts to his pals in the petrochemical and other traditional power industries. I’m thinking more about the sensibility of alternative power sources, especially fuel-cell networks that would allow cars to dump excess fuell-cell power back into the grid, rather than letting it burn off while the car is idle.

Junk Drawer

I’ve been menaing to write more about the many exciting or at least mildly amusing things going on lately, but it’s been hard to gather the will to sit and concentrate on the blogging thing. Here are a bunch of quick links that I’ve been meaning to pepper throughout a series of scintillating posts…

The Junk Drawer

  • Art Chantry, Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 is an incredible restrospective of the work of my all-time favorite designer, now showing at P.S. 1. I can’t rave about this enough. The work is fun enough to look at in reproduction, but he does so much with materials and printing tricks that seeing the stuff in person is about a million times cooler. (And they’re using the same title for the exhibit as I did for a fictional exhibit years ago. but I’m not bitter.)
  • Speaking of P.S. 1, I’d like to point out that it’s not the same place as P.S. 122 in the East Village. You really ought to check out what’s going on at P.S. 122, because they put on tons of great theater and dance and performance and such, and it’s their ticket prices are great for what you get. More on this later, because I’m starting to work on a number of projects with them.
  • And speaking of great stuff at P.S. 122, Heather Woodbury is kicking off their new season in September with her one-woman, eight-installment, 100+-character show, What Ever. You really ought to check out her web site, where you can listen to streaming audio of entire acts of the show, so go and whet your appetite.
  • Flaming Fire were one of the guest acts in the Devo Tribute Show I saw last week. They were pretty exciting, and the lead singer was pretty hot, but you must check out their site to see the progress they’re making on their project to have artists illustrate every single verse of the Bible (1079 illustrations complete; 35586 remaining).
  • The Grand List of Comic Book Cliches is funny because it’s true.
  • Typophile: The Smaller Picture is a project that’s building a typeface via collaborative effort over the internet one pixel at a time. (Thanks, Mike!)
  • Gilles Barbier is the artist of a fantastic, witty sculptural installation called L’Hospice that depicts elderly superheroes loafing around in a nursing home. (Better pictures halfway down this page.)

Flotsam and Jetsam from the Weekend

I’m still trying to digest the entire Atlantic City experience. We brought Hugh down there for his bachelor party yesterday, and the whole place was so much more than I ever expected. More trash? More kitsch? More kitsch? More guidos? More people aging gracelessly? Yes, but also more, in a ways I can’t quite put my finger on. It should be experienced, but I thik the less time spent there the better. Maybe. I’m too sleep-deprived and still too overwhelmed to decide.

More elaborate stories and pictures to come. For now, a grab bag of links and random things we found amusing:

  • Since it came up in conversation: the Bullet Time Ping-Pong Game.
  • If you buy a round trip bus ticket to Atlantic City, it costs 27 bucks and comes with a voucher for a 14-dollar refund. There’s no catch, in case you think it’s just a scam: get off the bus at a casino, trade the voucher for a slip form that casino, and a quick detour to the casino floor is all you have to do to trade that in for 14 bucks cash money. A friendly travel tip from your pal Sparky.
  • Smokers should note that you can still smoke indoors in Jersey, and especially in Atlantic City.
  • At one point, we were trying to imagine what it would sound like if Ladysmith Black Mambazo did a version of “Three Is a Magic Number“.
  • I haven’t given much of a thought to the recent popularity of guidoism (there’s no novelty to it I grew up in the thick of it), but it’s hard not to ponder the whole phenomenon in a big Jersey destination spot.
  • Sometimes it’s much safer when straight guys are straight guys.

Dog Days

Huh boy, what a day this turned out to be. Nice enough day off, catching up on some overdue sleep. I was hoping for a leisurely time running errands, maybe a haircut and a nap after taking Andy down to the vet to have a tick removed and a lump on his ear looked at.

Well…

The doctor wasn’t in the first time, so Andy and I just had a little stroll and planned to go back later. After grabbing a couple of slices from the Pizza Twins around the block, I brought the little fella back. I brought his muzzle, since he gets a little uppity around other animals. There was strange kitty that was making him anxious, so I picked him up and coddled him like a baby to keep him calm.

Then this big, black dog came out from one of the rooms in the back, and Andy went fucking apeshit. I tried holding him still, but he got all squirmy and clawed at me and jumped down. I had a firm grip on his leash so he didn’t get a chance to bolt across the waiting room, but he was still all mental, clawing away at his muzzle and trying to pull his head out of his collar. I managed to quiet him down, but then noticed blood all over my hands.

I immediately got panicky, but as I wash trying to wipe the blood off Andy’s paw I realized that he was the one who was bleeding, not me there was a bit of a gusher on his left front paw. Leaving bloody paw prints across the floor, I brought him to the desk to get some paper towels and tried my best to keep him calm until the vet was available.

The tick was no trouble and the lump on his ear was harmless and easily removed, but it turned out that his paw was a bit more troublesome. While I held him down and cooed sweet, calming things into Andy’s ear, the vet shaved down the paw to get a closer look. Our sweet, little puppy wuppy was so eager to get his muzzle off so he could try and “play with” a strange dog twice his size that he just about ripped one of his own claws out of his paw. Since it was the claw, there was no way to stitch the wound closed, so the vet had to just wrap up Andy’s paw in layers of bandages that will have to stay put for a few days until things get better. Oh, and then there’s the antibiotics and the ear drops and the follow-up appointment he’ll need if the wound starts bleeding again once the bandages come of in a few days.

Of course, he’s only able to hobble around now, so I had to carry him most of the way home because he kept lying down and sighing every time we paused at an intersection. Now he’s home and sleepy making sad faces. (See below.)

Bandaged Andy

Frankly, I think he did the whole thing on purpose to make us feel bad for him since he knows we’re trying to find him a better home.

You’re Allowed to Ask

For the first time in a while, the subject came up a couple of times this week once while discussing a project, again while chatting with friends during a much-needed caffeine break. I realized how much it’s become my open secret, the thing everyone knows but still never mentions, except with extremely obvious and awkward oversensitivity.

I, of course, still think about it all the time. I think about it every time I take medicine, when I wonder how I’ll feel when and if that one, easy-on-the-system pill isn’t enough to keep things under control. (I don’t try to hide the medicine when I take it anymore. Have you noticed?) I think about it every time there’s a drop of blood from a bad hangnail or a schaving scrape. (I usually wonder how I’d react if I ever had a more serious scrape that I couldn’t tend to all by myself, where someone else might want to help stop the bleeding or clean the wound.) I think about it when I remember what it was like to have sex, back before the antidepressants and the guilt and the fear and the mixed feelings. (I know I shouldn’t judge, but I do, and no one was more reluctant to admit it than me, especially when I realized I was my own jury.)

I don’t mind talking about it, you know. Seriously, it’s alright to be curious, to wonder how things are going. The answer might just be, “Fine. A little depressing from time to time, but still fine overall. The numbers are all holding steady, just like I hoped for.” Sometimes, I may not want to get into it then and there, but what topic (except the weather, maybe) isn’t like that now and then? It seems weird that it never comes up, since it was once such a big deal when we had to talk about it.

I don’t know if I expect a certain reaction or not. I don’t think I do, but the topic seems conspicuous by its absence. Maybe I just want to be a little less stoic I don’t want to fall back into those old habits of acting like I can handle it all by myself and smile all the way. That didn’t work out so well, after all.

And don’t rush in and act all concerned all at once, because then I’ll feel totally self-conscious. That would be awkward

I know, it’s a little unclear what the best approach would be. Sorry about that, but I don’t know what to advise, or if I’m even trying to give advice or just…you know, get it off my chest. That’s life, I guess fuzzy, unclear, something you figure out as you go along.

Lies! Lies! Lies! Ye-ah!

AAAAAAARRGH! Again! And again! And again! And again! And again! What the fuck is wrong with everybody? It’s not alien trickery, and it’s more than just media bias. It’s us that’s part of the problem, even if we’re paying attention to what’s actually happening. It’s not even a new problem!

Last night I went to a fantastic AIGA event called Hell No: Designers and The War, where I got to hear an incredible array of people try to express their frustration, their anger, their stupefication, and even a little bit of their hope about the state of our union. Sure, they were preaching to the choir, but the feeling was pervasive that no one was really appreciating how far out of control things are going.

Trying to think of stuff to spread around on stickers or posters or something, I scrawled this stuff in my notebook:

  • If you REALLY loved this country you’d be furious at the people running it.
  • So why CAN’T we change anything?
  • What else do they have to do before we do something about it?
  • America and its government are not the same thing. We’re ALLOWED to disapprove.

Ugh. Feeling powerless again…