September 15, 2008
Even Rove
Rove stabs McCain in the back:
Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that Sen. John McCain had gone “one step too far” in some of his recent ads attacking Sen. Barack Obama.
Rove has leveled similar criticism against Obama.
“McCain has gone in some of his ads — similarly gone one step too far,” he told Fox News, “and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the ‘100 percent truth’ test.”
The Obama campaign immediately leaped on the quote.
“In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove — the man who held the previous record — said McCain’s ads have gone too far,” said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, in a statement sent to reporters minutes after Rove’s on-air comments. Rove masterminded both of President Bush’s successful White House bids.
September 14, 2008
Lohan CANNOT BITE HER TONGUE ANYMORE!
Posted today on Lohan’s Myspace blog:
UH OH!
Current mood: shockedI really cannot bite my tongue anymore when it comes to Sarah Palin.
I couldn’t be more supportive of a woman in office, but let’s face it, it comes down to the person, and their beliefs, male or female.
Is it a sin to be gay? Should it be a sin to be straight? Or to use birth control? Or to have sex before marriage? Or even to have a child out of wedlock?
I find it quite interesting that a woman who now is running to be second in command of the United States, only 4 years ago had aspirations to be a television anchor. Which is probably all she is qualified to be… Also interesting that she got her passport in 2006.. And that she is not fond of environmental protection considering she’s FOR drilling for oil in some of our protected land…. Well hey, if she wants to drill for oil, she should DO IT IN HER OWN backyard. This really shows me her complete lack of real preparation to become the second most powerful person in this country.
Hmmmm-All of this gets me going-Fear, Anxiety, Concern, Disappointment, and Stress come into play…
Word is born.
And as a quick addendum, Tina Fey as the VPILF.
September 13, 2008
RIP David Foster Wallace 1962-2008
Writer David Foster Wallace found dead
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was teaching writing at Pomona College.
joel.rubin@latimes.com
September 11, 2008
“You D0n’t CaW ‘Dem AnT33KZ Win Theyz FR0m ‘D33z Ci+y STREE+Z, y'a0h!!!” (Part I)
There are times, like nearly everyone living in the boroughs, where my roommate and I feel as if we’re running The Big Orphanage of Little Things Kicked To The Street. Here, before you, lies our first installment of orphan “things”... and by that I mean, things you probably shouldn’t give to orphans:
1) Chinese Viagra, or so I’m told. Maybe they do give these to orphans.
2) A nondescript, white striped black blouse found on the Ludlow Street Free Wall that smells like the aftermath of a Jamaican voodoo ceremony. I was somewhere between my fifth-and-sixth whisky when I grabbed it. It's totally yours, if you want it.
3) The ultimate “I-WANT-TO-SHOOT-A-PORN-RIGHT-HERE-IN-MY-HOUSE” DVD series. You don’t need Chinese Viagra. Just Isaac Hayes, a few blaxploit visuals and some 125th st. astroglide!!
4) Achingly adorable Zen monkey with a shattered pocket kaliedioscope. Found items separate on the same stairwell of the former Troutman loft.
5) It was there I also found this truly hideous painting.
6) A single 30-pound barbell I refuse, to this day, to handle without gloves. Not even sure I know what it's still doing in my house. Which means that it lives.
7) A prerequisite for New York Public School teachers.
8) A prerequisite for assholes who “don’t want a negro for their next president.”
(NOTE: Okay, according to one of you, I have to suffice my political incorrectness with some sort of explanation? Uh, really? On my own blog? Because I really don't like being accused of generalizing. Particularly when I'm blatantly OVERgeneralizing. Thank you and good morning to you, too...)
9) A wolf rug found on the Google image search, but very similar to the one I rescued off of Winthrop street and sat in our backyard all summer cultivating centipedes. It now ceases to exist. And by that I mean, it lives in Hoboken.
10) Discovered on an "urban camping" detour. Has since lit a many-splendored night.
11) The last of my stuffed animals with a bondage collar and pirate hat from a rooftop theme party last summer. Should well sum up my debauched coming-of-age story and swan dive from innocence...
For Kirk
Yes, today is September 11th, and there is no evading the subject. Even the most ordinary conversations that are about to take place today carry the subtext: “Were you there? If not, then where were you?”
--
I had left New York three days prior to the cataclysm downtown, getting frantic calls from an aunt who thought I was still staying with a friend on Bleecker street after attending a summer program at Vassar. I don’t have an actual story as much as a callused and visceral reaction to the footage itself, which like everyone else, evoked the calling of an end to empires, a sense of simultaneous disbelief, dismantling and gaping division with the future, fearing it might unravel like some sped-up cartoon.
/
The best of us knew better than to predict the avalanche we’ve been watching ever since.
/
When I moved back to the city early in 2007, I volunteered between jobs for a non-profit company that sponsored a suicide hotline. I had found the position through a geriatric home in Seattle where I was employed the summer after college. I was resistant to the idea of having to communicate with people over the phone, much less people who were at a breaking point with their own lives. To be slated as an official volunteer, you undergo a series of test-runs with the accompaniment of a social worker. I asked her a series of nervous questions in advance, such as: “How do you persuade someone from offing themselves when you can’t even physically take a rifle or bottle of methadone out of their hands?” and “How do you discern someone who is at a serious brush with death vs. some guy who stopped his car at 3 AM and doesn’t want to tell his wife what happened at the bar that night?”
/
I was told to finish my Chamomile tea and take a deep breath. If it ever got to a point where it became overwhelming, I could refer the caller to her, and she would take over. The first caller was a teenager who was existentially distraught over the breakup of his girlfriend. He had also been up on dextroamphetamines for about 3 days straight, and the advice I gave was, very simply: “Get yourself to a shower and take a good night’s sleep.”
/
It was the second caller that I won't soon forget; he's the reason I am writing this post at all. Upon answering the phone, there was 10-to-12 second abyss of silence before he finally said the words: “I am ready to do this. I'm ready because I no longer feel the pain of being missed.” The man introduced himself, for all intents and purposes, as Kirk. Kirk had worked as a firefighter in Staten Island, and was one of the many workers resposible for salvaging the bodies through the Trade Center ruins for three straight days in a row. Through this period he lost six members of his team, and his respiratory system was permanently impaired from breathing in through the soot and spending sometimes as long as six-hours deep in the subterranean wreckage of the attacks. Though he was responsible for saving what he estimated must have been 10-12 people (including 3 children), it was the memory of watching his friends being immolated alive that followed him the most. He remembers watching their faces ravaged by fire as they remained speaking, turning their last words over to him to pass along to family members. At the time of his call, he was ready to drive his Ford Tacoma straight into a lake near the Adirondacks off of a fifteen-foot dock. I'm still uncertain to this day whether he meant that it was fifteen feet long, or fifteen feet high. I'm guessing it was the former. Or maybe his car wasn't even pulled up to a dock at all. Perhaps he was standing in his pantry stark naked clutching an empty box of Cherrios. Who's to know?
/
“I am already pretty well acquainted with hell,” he kept saying. “As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if I were already dead.”
/
I began to feel completely out of my emotional capacity for comfort. I had read about post-traumatic stress, but only as sanitized by theoretical textbooks that imparted no insight beyond the physiological. I knew that it could be defined as a paralytic condition, but I was no psychologist. There was no hope of my being able to say anything to this person to truly to be of help. This is, of course, the last thing you’re supposed to say. I kept referring back to the social worker, who nervously continued handing me back a transcript as I foddered him with questions like “Is this the first time you’ve ever contemplated taking your life?” “Have you ever sought out psychological treatment through a clinic?” and finally “What was your intent by calling us tonight?”
/
“Because I deserve to get to heaven,” he said. “And the only way to do that is to stay alive. My children do deserve a father, even if I’m a shit father, which I’m sure they think that I am. Still, I’d rather them complain that I was a rat bastard all their lives a rat bastard who was never really there.”
/
The social worker was, at this point, in a state of hysterical sobbing, asking if she could take over. I continued to do my best by listening to him talk about his ex-wife, and how he had no one, not even the divisional officer he still considered his best friend since childhood, to speak to about the experience they endured together, or what surviving it all really meant.
/
“You’ve both made it through this year,” I said. “What if you finally let yourself talk about it? I mean, just the two of you? Any chance of that happening? Or even helping?”
/
Sighing at the impotence of this advice, he asked me how old I was, at which point, I felt as if caught dead in some furious lie. At this moment, he'd find out for himself what I'd been afraid he'd know all along. Not only that I was two full decades younger, but that my experience with pain was, by comparison, conjectural and mostly egocentric... like the worst Smashing Pumpkins records. (Or in our case, the most effective.)
/
“I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt, kid, and go home,” Kirk said, as if assuaging me through equivocation or a flat-out lie. “I should go just go home and sleep off days like this. Like a dog. Yeah, that's what I'll do.”
/
“You’re free to do whatever you want in this lifetime,” I reply, "You know that, right?" My breath caved in as I realized I may have implictly been giving him permission to move ahead, start his car and hit the dock.
/
“So are you, my brother...” Kirk laughed for the first time. “So are you.”
/
He asked if I listened to jazz and played me the first few seconds of an album on his car stereo before hanging up. I never got the name of the album, nor did I get the name of the artist . I quit my training at the support center the next morning.
--
Yes, today is September 11th, and there is no evading the subject. Even the most ordinary conversations that are about to take place today carry the subtext: “Were you there? If not, then why weren’t you?"
September 10, 2008
Revisiting the Floor of the Crime
“SO brand new, it SQUEAKS like Spanish LEATHER!”
It's only a slight exaggeration to say that in the past 5 months I have been flooded with requests from friends to launch a brand new blog. That’s because when I say flooded, what I mean is that I’ve actually been hassled and prodded to howling mercy by the same three-or-four friends to start this hit-and-run masterpiece. They are also, predictably, freelance copywriters (and whisky hound harlots by night... although they prefer to call themselves Flashdancers.) It was the same pressure that was forced on me around July of last year to join Facebook for the sole purpose of publically losing at scrabble. I did a DARE speech in the fifth grade about resisting peer pressure. So now look who finally got passed the crack pipe...
Seeing as how it’s merely days after my 24th birthday and I am falsely spiritualized and full of brave, ecstatic resolve (or is that literally just the ecstasy?) I have decided to take their cue, grab myself by the balls and shake them ecstatically and resolutely all over the world wide web. So this should fulfill two ambitions I left behind from my childhood. Porn star and dictator.
So who was the wise man that said we’re only born with one purpose on this Earth? Cos I'm 'bout t'show dat mofoka' d'STARZZ!
That is, if I don't get bogged down in overestimating my enthusiasm and fidelity. You see, previous attempts at blogging engulfed their potential when I decided to post my trials at memoir writing, photos of friends in various states of tribalistic undress, and catered often (sometimes only) to the wanton subject of MYSELF.
We're going to spin this record a little differently this time around.
This blog will consist mostly of the expendable suggestions and observations that come from being a young corporate misfit/music producer/composer/failed playwright living, working, luxuriating, travailing in - as a close friend puts it - "the greatest city you could possibly hope to become a failure." (Not that I'm that fucking disparaging about my own fate... but ah, how these truths take!) Lists will be assembled to expose the essential things to urban living, like "The Top 10 Subway Stations To Pass Gas" or "Where to Become A Fleeting Celebrity For Public Indecency." And in spite of the fact that I seldom go to the movies, don't have cable or an actual subscription to a morning newspaper (does anyone, anymore? I mean, really?) I will probably do a fair amount of gloating about music, politics, books, cinema anyway... as though my opinion is the only one that really matters.
Which it is. Like, really. My opinion. The only one you'll ever need to hear.
In the meanwhile, let's hack right through the exposition of who I am, what brand of toilet paper I use and why my opinions should matter at all. The whimsical success/tragedy of the typepad revolution is that they actually make you pay $5 a month, which means that I'll probably be keeping this regularly. Therefore, if you don't know me and want to know more, "Sit still!" as the lapdancer said to the Japanese investment banker... while crying.
That should cover the first item on the syllabus, titled: "Uncertainties on Trystan's Sexual Orientation."
Next, please!!!
Love & Other Thermally Insulated Appliances,
Trystan
