Argyle

I outlaw argyle
Already too easy
To identify the dull and boring
Grant me some camoflage please
The hunting should feel like a sport

I outlaw heaven
God knows your bliss is ignorant
Spirituality is not a transaction
You never know your account balance anyway
Sheol is good enough for me
If I do right

I outlaw the open mind
I also outlaw unicorns
Neither one exists
Just ask an open mind
About the other guy

I outlaw poetry
I also outlaw the electric slide
No one looks good doing either

I outlaw winning
Prizes are for losers

I outlaw television
Live your life
No more watching

I outlaw soap
Your soul never gets clean
Even if you obsess

I outlaw free speech
I outlaw blogs
I outlaw facebook
I outlaw all non-digital television waves
I outlaw myself

Give me a horse and a gun and a train to rob
And a bed under the stars

New Year's Freak Show

I got a free dollar today. Even that was ludicrous and a waste of time.

If you have gobs of money on December 30th, or even if you don't and you'd like to pretend that you do, here are some ways to waste your time:

1) Try 50,000 times to get a reservation at the same night club that isn't answering their phones for New Year's Eve. Even though absolutely everyone wants to go there, they surely have some room left for your redneck hide.

2) Try to make a reservation at one of the most exclusive restaurants in one of the most exclusive restaurant cities in the world. One day before the date. When they miraculously have an opening due to a cancellation, at exactly the time you want it, turn them down because they're running a really fabulously special prix fixe menu that is 5 courses and costs $200 per person. Seriously? You turned that down? Go to McDonald's and don't ever call me again.

3) Try 50,000 times to get into another nightclub. Why not? Maybe this one will love you more even though no one has ever heard of you.

4) Try to get the very best seats to a concert that no one has ever heard of on New Year's Eve. When those seats are no longer available, don't accept lesser seats or look for ticket brokers. Just keep trying. Your tickets may magically appear from the box office. You are, after all, awesome.

5) When all else fails, run around in the snow in a sweatshirt in the financial district at 10:45pm on a Sunday night looking for a pack of smokes. Surely there is something open. When a stranger who is peacably listening to Tom Waits' "Come On Up To the House" is kind enough to stop what he is doing to let you know that it's a fruitless endeavor, act really shocked. Continue to run around fast.

Seriously, people. If you haven't got things figured out for New Year's Eve yet, don't bother me. I can't help you. Let's talk about April, huh? April, I can do something about. Even maybe next week.

Rogan

Blogging is for whiners and complainers, right?

I try to get on in our culture despite failing to understand anything that interests people. I've been putting up with this Joel-somebody, Seth Rogan charade for long enough. I watched 40-Year-Old Virgin and laughed when I could. Same thing for Knocked Up. They weren't a complete waste of my time. They were tolerable. Like a bad Michael J. Fox movie. Wait, maybe not that good. Sort of like watching Olympic diving or the biathalon. I've even gone so far as to rent Superbad because everyone says it's just so funny. It is currently sitting in my mailbox in Jamaica Plain and will be picked up when I get home tomorrow morning if some petty thief doesn't lift it before then.

The trailer for their new movie is currently available. It's another comically tragic romance about a guy who takes a Hawaiian vacation to get lei'd and forget only to find out that his ex-girlfriend is staying right next door with her straight-out-of-Serendipity long haired foreign pop singer boyfriend. Attention K-Mart employees: Could I get some originality over here on aisle 6? I think that right at this moment I've had precisely enough. I think I'm going to rip open the Superbad Netflix envelope, repackage it, and send it right back.

I refuse to watch serials #3 and 4 from this "comedy" hit factory. It's almost like they're churning them out as fast as they can before anyone can realize just how mediocre they really are. Not even a pre-Truman Jim Carrey was this desperate (nor was he this pedestrian).

Where have you gone, Russel Ziske? Our nation is in need.

(expletive deleted)

You know those days when something happens and you know the world will never be the same? Yeah, I don't either. Every once in a while I think I've experienced it, but usually it turns out that no one takes notice and the whole durned cosmic game just keeps rolling along.

Today, I received my first musician friend request on facebook. @#&! Hey, let's take a social networking site that we're already ruining with billions, literally billions, of useless applications that clutter up pages to the point where you can't even find people's walls because they never move things around even though it's incredibly simple to do. Let's figure out a way to give people everything they could possibly ever want, so long as we can make some money off of it. Lets give them so much of what they want that they don't even want it anymore.

Pretty soon you're going to be able to muck up your page with colors and graphics so no one can read it. Pretty soon you're going to be able to garble the hypertext on your page so badly that it automatically shuts down the user's web browser. Every time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with myspace II. I'm about ready to drop the entire internet like a sack of cold potatoes and move to West Texas. I'm getting too old for this.

Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms is, quite irritatingly, the slipperiest of all my Hemingway books. The Sun Also Rises is a fun romp through Spain that puts me in the heart of the upper crust of old. If it weren't for that book, I might not understand the concerns of my clients. Not quite a road book, but not far off. For Whom the Bell Tolls is immeasurably thick and unfinishable and probably has a gloriously devastating ending that I will never see. I also have a collection of short stories that features The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Short story collections never get read cover to cover, though. No sir, when it's good Hemingway I really need, it's always A Farewell to Arms.

Unfortunately, that book is never anywhere to be found on my shelf. I know I purchased and read it back in 2002. I'll never forget my great purging of 2006 right before my travels that lightened my burden by 50 some-odd books at a local bookstore and Salvo. This book was not included. It is impossible that it could have been. I think it surfaced somewhere for a few weeks a few years ago but has since receded into that hiding place it has discovered. I haven't gone out and bought a new sampling of that profound sadness because I'm always pretty sure I still own a copy.

Maybe it's time to buy a new one.

Sigh.

An Adventurous Morning

I awoke to the sunrise without an alarm and knew that today would bring me something special. After checking my daily computer crap while grabbing a bowl of cereal and a banana, I took the Netflix down to the mailbox and saw that there were a couple of pairs of women's shoes at my door.

Before we get too excited, I'll inform you that my roommate Sam had his friends and their dog over last night, all of whom found a way to occupy his bedroom. If you try to stay with me, there's no such abundance of space where I sleep. Both pair of shoes belong to a married woman who was here with her husband. NEXT.

After some personal deliberation and an episode of Entourage, I set out for Trader Joe's and the Puma store to get wine, cashews, sneakers, and a work bag. What I found when I got there blew my mind.

First off, I arrived in the Back Bay area around 9:45am and realized I'd beaten most of the store openings. Enter Starbucks. After waiting in line a few minutes, a girl poked her head above the baked goods counter and asked if she could help me. "I have a very complicated order for you," was my response. I could see in worry in her face and that of the barista next to her. "I need a small decaf coffee."

After drinking about half the coffee outside where it was about 50 degrees and gloriously sunny, I set off on my shopping expedition down the marvelous Newbury Street. I really had no idea what to expect, but found everything that I thought Downtown Crossing should have been. Every kind of awesome, elitist shop I could think of was nestled into two blocks of brick buildings with small uniform signs hanging all the way down. This led me to the Army/Navy store, and after about 15 minutes contemplating bags I settled on a perfect gray paratrooper bag with a red star on it.

Across the street to Puma, I found a matching pair of gray and red sneakers that were the sort of thing I had been dreaming of. Anyone who knows me knows I don't just go 2-for-2 shopping like this. Usually I don't find anything I like, which is why I hate shopping. The sneakers were also cheaper than I thought they'd be, which made the purchase easy.

There was a Best Buy on the corner. Being recently single, my DVD player is still in Syracuse at someone else's house. I'm not about to quabble over $30, so I bought a new one and can now watch my Netflix on Osei's killer television. Sold. 3-for-2, batting 1.500 for those of you keeping score at home.

What the heck, there's an Urban Outfitters across the street. Might as well stop in and see if they have any cool t-shirts on the sale rack.


G.I.JOE


I now own a shirt featuring Flint, Lady Jaye, and Roadblock. Go home. I win.

At Trader Joe's, which was actually my first stop, I got the cashews but not the wine, as that particular store doesn't have a license to sell it. Looks like I'll have to make a special trip for 3-buck-Chuck on Tuesday. Oh well, 5 items ain't a bad haul any day.

Wow, now that you're sleeping and the boring details of my shopping excursion have come to a close, maybe I shouldn't bother you with the details of the crazy Bostonian who sat across from me on the bus and proceeded to talk to me about land rents and good old boy networks for the entire 15-minute ride home. Or the drum troop that was wailing away and parading down Centre Street mere blocks from my house as I was walking home from the bus. Or the pile of people waiting for breakfast outside Sorella's. That's pretty common. Heh. We've reached noon, which means your day may just be starting. Good luck.

Would you do this to your parents?

My parents came into town this weekend. Normally, I guess you'd play it safe. Easy travel from here to there and nice little tourist sorts of things and nice safe meals. Didn't happen this time. Mom and Dad got a Boo Guy Show experience.

Friday night, after they braved the horrors of driving into Boston, I took them to the Cuban restaurant on the corner. It took over a half an hour to get a table, and then another 15 minutes after that until we even had water. They were out of the Friday pork plate special #1, so my dad and I wound up with a crazy pork roll instead. Congris, fried plantains, yuca, Asian vegetables, juice smoothies instead of wine and manhattans...

By the time we got all the loot from home up to my 3rd story apartment, they were ready to head back to the hotel. Fast-forward to 11:20am Saturday:

Mom and Dad are waiting at the T stop when I roll up on the 39 bus. We head to the heart of Boston on a trolley filled with friendly college students, one of whom is wearing a t-shirt with a hammer and sickle and Karl Marx with a lampshade on his head. Another one gives my mom an eyeglass case as he hops off. When we finally get to Park Street, we are greeted by the unmistakable Subway Smell and then pass a couple of senior citizens hobbling up the stairs to street level. Ouch. I thought my knees were bad.

I proceed to hike them through Downtown Crossing, over the bridge into Southie where I work, back to South Station for a pizza lunch, up Atlantic Avenue to the harbor where we see plenty of ocean water and Chris Pfohl, through some more of the monstrously tall financial district, to the old state house for roasted cashews and buskers, Faneiul Hall and Quincy Market where we see a living statue and a man who folds himself into a pretzel, and grab a beer. After that, it's back down to Boston Common and the Public Garden, where we spend an hour and a half. By this point, I think I've hobbled about 3 miles on a bum knee.

What else can you do with a day in Boston but hop a bus whose destination is Roxbury? Of course, the bus drops us off a block past where the map says it will, so we take our weary legs an extra circuitous 4 blocks through some low-income territory, but eventually end up at Gaslight Brasserie, where we attempt to order food from French menus we can't read. We wind up with excellent pasta and pizza and really expensive drinks.

After that, I nab my first Boston Cab ride, which is considerably cheaper than I thought a Boston cab would be. I leave Mom and Dad to the hotel around 8:00PM and retire to my abode in JP where I am dead asleep by 10:00PM. You know that if a young guy like me is out that early, it's been a day. They left for home this morning. Rock and roll.

In short, your parents can take it. Give 'em the works when they come to visit.