Defining "Historic" Down

Taken maybe 100 feet from the previous photo. This is where I'm staying for the weekend. Much more later, but in a word: Yikes.

Question: What's Another Singular for "Fungi"?

Warren and 7th St., in the window of an apparently abandoned antique shop.

A List of Rude-Sounding Upper New York Towns

All of these names can be found on this map, which I opened recently in an attempt to find something fun to do in the nearby area. I failed, but the map was diverting.

Climax
Coxsackie
Valatie (pronounced "vellatia," as I learned from a woman at a bar last night)
East Green Bush
Feura Bush
and possibly, depending on what this makes you picture, Coeyman's Hollow.

By the way, I just noticed that this is my third post in a row that relates to sex in some indirect way. Clearly I either need to get out and develop new non-oblique-sex interests, or go the other direction, have actual sex, and stop blogging altogether for a while. In the meantime, enjoy the products of my geographically forced sublimation.

Flaming Boobies

In this post, a few days back, I mentioned that there was a bartender at Yogi's who would light her nipples on fire if it was someone's birthday. Today while cleaning files out of my phone, I discovered this picture, which is the only record I've ever made of the event, though I've seen it in person three times. A guy has bent over to blow out the flame, but you can still see one fire over on the right, which gives you a sense of the size of the breasts involved. You know--if you were curious.

I was going to post this as Not Safe For Work, but honestly--who can see anything in this sad little photo? This is why cell phones need to have flash.

Remove Two Letters And The Picture's More Accurate

I Make Publishers Weekly!

Okay.  The deal has been officially announced, so I don't have to be quite so coy.  My book was just announced in Publishers Weekly.  Check it out now here before it goes behind the subscription wall.  I'm basically the entire second paragraph.

Huge thanks to Adam, my agent, and Jake, my publisher.  This is gonna be great.

A Brief Scrabulish Plea

I just discovered that a simple Google search on the game I named "Scrabulish" does not actually return any results--even though it's the name of a post on my blog! Clearly I need more links. So I'd like to make a request of the whole blogosphere:

1. Go to this post (the original announcement of Scrabulish).
2. Link to it on whatever blog you have.
3. Wait for the magic to happen, Googlewise.

Let's get this term some legs! And maybe even a Wikipedia entry!

By the way, my friend Tracy and I have just finished what may be the finest game of Scrabulish we've played to date. Expect a full report soon.

My Favorite Bar in New York, For Some Reason

76th and Broadway:


On Monday, while snapping pictures of things I love and miss during my exile, I found myself on the Upper West Side visiting one of my old haunts, and realized that I can finally take a few pictures of it, since I brought my real camera for once. So here is Yogi's, also known as "The Bear Bar," for the obvious reason that there's a large wooden bear out front. But also because there's no name "Yogi's" anywhere to be seen. Here, surrounded by high-end boutiques and fairly pricey rents, and just up the street from the Beacon Theatre, there's this wooden-fronted country bar with the cheapest whiskey in all five boroughs: a shot of well is $2.75, which I couldn't even get in Tallahassee. A pitcher of PBR is, I'm told, six bucks. (I don't drink anymore, but even when I did drink, I never liked beer.) When I first moved here and had no money, I had to find a way to go out and still save money, and this was my solution.



The other attraction are the bartenders: a continual succession of sexy, brassy, trashily-dressed women who on weekends will stomp on the bar ("Devil Went Down To Georgia" is a pretty consistent impetus), and who have to have a very high tolerance for alcohol, because the guys will buy them up to twenty shots a night. They're also fierce, as you'd expect from women in bustiers who have to juggle a bunch of drunk men. The woman in this picture is Jessica. I know nothing about her, because she's new--as you'd expect from the Monday shift before five. But she fits right in with the others. (Hi, Cyndi! Hi, Patience! Hi, Jen!) Tip them well.


I should have taken a picture of the jukebox (country clean through) or the floor (liberally strewn with peanut shells), or the seats in the back (held together with silver duct tape) or the bathroom (unspeakable), but I was afraid of how the flash would eat up my already-low batteries. But I did take a picture of this graffito, which was right behind me while I took Jessica's picture, and which has always amused me. Anyone know what it means? (My guess: "Eating, drinking, sleeping, love: all things in moderation." And I doubt it's original to Hugo.) Met one of my favorite people in New York here (Hi, Traphofner!) because it's a magnet for smart, thrifty people in general (and, I assume, because it's off the 1 line, which makes it an easy ride from Columbia up on 116th).

One of the bartenders here has--or at least had--a stunt she'd pull: on weekend nights, she'd wear a strapless corset dress, and if it was someone's birthday and you slipped her twenty bucks, she'd take her top down, wrap paper matches around her nipples (she licked them first, but there was probably something about the twist too), and light them on fire for the birthday boy or girl to blow out. There's something about even seeing that happen that adds a festive spirit to the entire room.

I haven't been in months between the not-drinking and the housesitting in Brooklyn and Jersey City. But if I manage to find a place on my return that's convenient to the 1 or the A, I'll be back in a shot. And if you ever come to visit, beware: this is a place I'll likely take you. It's not for the faint of heart. Wear disposable shoes.

An Experiment in Money Flushing

I came back from New York City late on Monday (because it's a two hour train ride PLUS another hour by car from the station), and woke up to remember that the house I'm staying in has been rented out for the upcoming weekend.  So this is the one time in my tenure here that I really do have to find alternative lodgings.  In light of this, I packed up everything and moved it to another house my host owns 12 miles away in an actual town. 

Why am I not in THAT house this whole time, you may ask, since it's near a coffee shop with wi-fi and a supermarket and the other usual amenities that I complain about lacking?  Because it's a fixer-upper.  No refrigerator.  No washer or dryer.  No hot water.  And, as I discovered last night, no heat at all.  (Also, no pots or pans or other stuff to cook with.)  So my plan has changed a little.  While free rent is an admirable thing to be able to pull off, the fact is that because of the generous free rent I've been enjoying thus far, I've got more than enough money saved up now to live on until the contract comes (if the free rent continues)--so much so that I might just try to live in a hotel for the next several days, say, Thursday to Monday.   There'd be less shuttling my stuff around, less disruption in my schedule...and, more importantly perhaps, hotel rooms have always been terrifically productive for me.  I wrote the bulk of my book "Travels With Ritalin" in hotel rooms; about 200 pages in 30 days.  After Memorial Day I could come back here and everything would be normal again because there are no more holidays threatening my peace. Just a tentative idea at this point, but I can feel it growing warmly inside me like some lovely hothouse flytrap.  

There should be photos from New York City shortly.

Spring in the City,and the Hydrants are in Bloom

38th Street and 6th Avenue. As my last post mentioned, I'm back in New York very briefly, and even though I've only been away for about two and a half weeks, I've turned into a total tourist. I brought my adult camera and have been snapping away like crazy, hoarding up images of everything I love that I'm going to miss when I go back into Nature. Many pictures. You'll see.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to enter a subway. They have subways here.

On the Train

I’m on a train from Poughkeepsie heading to Grand Central Station, and I can barely express my delight. Partly of course, it’s because I’m leaving the country and returning to the city that I miss so much. (Just temporarily, for a business lunch, but it’s worth the hour’s drive and the cost of the ticket.) But a surprising part of me simply thrilled at the prospect of being on a train again, after spending so much time driving and (more often) sitting still. I’m not a traditional boy, and the closest I ever came to being obsessed with trains as a child was at age 7 or 8 when I spent a few dozen dollars over a month or so’s allowances building a mediocre electric train set—not because I liked trains so much, but because I had been reading Boys Life and felt I ought to have a hobby. I don’t have many actual hobbies. As a friend of mine once said, accusingly, “Dave, all you ever want to do is read, write, and fuck.” It's almost true, alas. So what’s up with trains?

I have a theory. When I first moved to New York City, I fell crazily in love with the subway. There was something in me that responded so primally to these vast carriages, moving tirelessly under the city. I suppose part of it was the mythic appeal: you descend into the underworld and bargain with this metal dragon who is mollified by piles and piles of MTA gold, and in return it whips you at unearthly speed and you emerge into the sunlight miles from your starting point, and most of the way to your destination. It’s a feeling of possessing a kind of magic that isn’t available in Tupelo. But even more than that, if I’m really honest, I think I just like the rumbling.

A lot of ADD folks like me get accused of living too much in our heads. People only say this because they don’t know how much fun it is in there. Right now my brain is boiling away with every word at my command, and if not this sentence, then the next or the next, any sentence I commit is theoretically capable of thrusting forth any world I have the wherewithal to describe. Bring on the spangles, the bright flamingoes, the sultans and shamsheers and mahouts! I picture them all parading in a circle as the flageolets tootle and the tympani thrum, and—what the hell—let’s have some gamelans hammering their weird circular drones. If I look out the window right now, what do I get instead? More goddamned trees. There’s really no contest.

In fact, the real world is the enemy of creativity in many ways. I’ve noticed even in this brief sojourn that if I have a single thing to do later—say, a meal I promised to attend at five—it can hobble my entire day, even if it’s ten a.m., because all the swirling words and ideas and images and whatnot have to circle around this giant FIVE, black granite, all caps and yea high, that’s impossible to ignore, even if you shove it in the corner and try to keep the party going. It’s still there in the room, and there’s nothing you can do to get rid of it until five. I’m helpless around it; it throws off my brain’s feng shui.

As a result, most ADD people report feeling their most creative when the world itself has been grayed out somewhat, usually with some kind of droning repetition. Getting ideas in the shower is common to all of us, perhaps, and certainly we’re all familiar with the creative energy we often get just as we drift into sleep—the hypnagogic state, they call it. Many a writer has met inspiration by locking herself in a bare room, and the rest of the world outside. But I’ve found that I often require even more than that. At Hallmark, in addition to locking myself in a conference room, I had to run around in circles, staring fixedly at the carpet, until some combination of repetition and dizziness turned my brain a little fuzzy, gave it no purchase, and I could collapse on my back and start dreaming. On my computer right now I have a recording of a waterfall that I listen to at high volume on earphones whenever I need to get writing done. I owe it thousands and thousands of words by now. Every time I get a new computer, I’m comically helpless to write on it until I get some sort of recording on it too—a mountain stream will also work, and someday I may even try whalesong. It’s not perhaps essential, but it’s close to it. In my muse’s heroin kit, that’s my favorite needle.

Not now. I’m writing without my waterfall. Because I’m on a train. It’s even better than a waterfall, because on a train, the world whizzes by—so it’s pretty well all blurred out—and the deep thrumming rhythm of the tracks gives me exactly the same feeling I was trying for when I was running around in circles back at Hallmark: a sort of feeling of undifferentiated busyness while sitting still. Because it’s not just the world that can throw off your concentration. Your own body is also a culprit. Lock me in a quiet room, with nothing to distract me, and if I don’t get wrapped up in my writing immediately, I’ll find my own body bothersome. Am I hungry? Thirsty? Do I have to go to the bathroom? What’s that pain in my stomach? Oh, god. Is it cancer? No, that’s ridiculous. Diabetes? MS? Probably not. But now my feet hurt. Is that real or am I doing it to myself?...and before you know it, I’m trapped in a vicious cycle of worry and panic that can only be broken by entering the world again to calm down—I’ll go online to confirm that nothing’s wrong, or I’ll pick up an onion and really notice it until I laugh, or I’ll call a friend. It’s amazing how often the mere sound of a friend’s voice, sitting out there in the real world, reminiscent of a particular joyous time and place and personality, removes all my hypochondria before I even have a chance to ask, “Has my skin looked yellow at all lately?” This is why I think creativity actively hates the real world. In my case at least, if even my body intrudes just by being a body, my brain will think of a dozen swift diseases to teach it a lesson.

But not on a train. In the same way that it helps to have the world blurred out, a consistent little sensation of motion all over gives your body a soothing lack of specificity. Right now my left leg is numb from the knee down. My ass hurts too. And is that an odd pain in my left hand? No matter. All of this is obviously because I’ve been sitting awkwardly on a train seat and writing with this computer in my lap. It’s the train’s fault, not mine. I can actually picture my fear of infirmity rushing out my leg onto the floor of the car, through the wires, transferred to the wheels and onto the track, where the train sloughs it off and it’s soon miles away in a rural meadow. Before I know it, I’ve written 1155 words.

So it’s not that I’m not creative at other times, but I think that on a train, the leg braces come off and I can suddenly surge into flight. Goodbye world, goodbye body, hello brain-fun! I don’t even have to write anything or have particularly good ideas. I’ve had them before, and what I get at the very least, even when I’m just taking the L subway from 8^th avenue to 6^th , is something like a contact high. I can look around the car at the same old streaky posters and the dully gleaming handles and think, We had one helluva party here once.

Of course, you have to come down some time, and this train is going to pull into Grand Central in under an hour, and I’ll have to pick up my actual computer and walk to my real-world destination. And that place will have its own appeals: its tastes, its smells, its shiny objects. But if I’m lucky, I’ll also be able to sit for a moment with my eyes closed and feel the train inside me the way I felt as a child after my first trip to the ocean. I found then, lying pleasantly achy on the guestroom bed, that after a day of swimming with the waves I could still feel as if I was on the ocean: my body tossed up, pulled to the side, swirled and prodded as if the very air in the room were like some affectionate, nuzzling pet, desperate to express a profound and gracious love that even words would laughably fail to capture. If I’m lucky, today at lunch while I’m nodding and talking and moving objects around, deep inside me I’ll see feel the touch of the train. I swear, if I could feel that way all the time, I could write a novel a month. I really could.

Bar Napkin Cartoon 56

(click to enlarge)

A Jihad For Love

A gay Muslim filmmaker has put together a documentary called A Jihad For Love (using the original meaning of jihad, "struggle," with a view toward wresting it from the murderous lunatic wing). Filmed over 5 1/2 years and in 12 countries, it documents the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims, many of whom live in countries where homosexuality is a criminal offense, if not a capital crime.

I mention this now because it's getting its U.S. debut starting on May 21st at the IFC Theater in New York City, and since I'm still stuck in the country and may not be able to see it, I'm hoping other people can. It'll be running for two weeks--and then will presumably go to other big cities, with (I'm just guessing here) San Francisco pretty close to the top of the list. (At least I hope so, since a friend of mine who would TOTALLY be here at the IFC just moved to SF and will miss it. Heads up, Ryan!)

Here's the website. As I understand it, the producers also did a film about the lives of gay Hasidic Jews called Trembling Before G_d. (Can't comment on it yet, but it's in my Netflix queue.) Their next project will be about gay Unitarians who suffer condemnation because...oh, wait. Unitarians don't condemn anybody! What kind of crazy religion is that?