UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
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You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION TV on the Radio: Dear Science Walkmen: You & Me Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Ratatat: LP3 Beach House: Devotion BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2008 Jeremy Broomfield 
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Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Update! I feel jittery and weird and wired. At the same time, I am utterly fatigued and practically useless. Didn't my neck once support my head? Isn't that what I hired my neck to do, to keep my head from lolling off to one side during important conversations with people? I thought there was something wrong with my monitor until my head hit my right shoulder with a jaw-shattering wham. I spat out a tooth that was acutally a spearmint tic tac with the green coating sucked off.
Amazon.com is getting a little too fast. I ordered something Sunday night after midnight, and Tuesday at noon, as I was reading their email that said "your package has been sent," the doorbell rang and I got chills. My package, my order. That's less than 36 hrs from last click to receipt, which is freakish.Two explanations: 1) the Sunday night shift is EXTREMELY BORED, because who places orders on Sunday night, so that when the bell goes BING and the order drops into the hopper, they LEAP into action like tweaker elves and zip whap wrap ship POW the order is gone brotha, like the last Krispy Kreme at the morning meeting. Or 2) They have help from a superpowered entity, like the devil, The Flash, or Nightcrawler. I'm not complaining. Am I? It just seems... unseemly. If I wanted something that fast, I'd go to a fucking store, and I'd look over shelves and Ask For Help if I had Trouble Finding Anything and I'd get jostled and oh my god this line is so slooowwwww and these cashiers are so dumb they [insert snap here]. Stores are for suckers, but make me wait, Amazon. Make me wait. Over my vacation, which now seems years behind me, I bought a watch. I haven't worn a watch for about ten years, because I noticed that people who had them were always looking at them, and I didn't want to be that predictable, and I didn't want to worry so much about the actual minute, and I didn't EVER want to know what time it was on the subway, becuase if you don't maintain a zen-like patience and temporal ignorance underground, you can have a stress explosion that'll take out everyone in a five foot radius, which during rush hour is like 80 people. So what changed? Why'd I buy the watch? A nod to mortality as I reach the sunset of my twenties? An aknowledgement that the time to do something memorable or important is slipping away? No, no, no. I just wanted a watch-shaped tan line. I figured the watch was the easiest way to get it. Plus now I have a new place to ferment sweat, which is good. The concierge asked me if I was eating more now that I wasn't smoking. He said "you know that's what they say, that when you quit you eat more." I said "Really? I hadn't heard that. No, I'm not eating more. If anything, I'm eating less." "Wow. Why?" "Well," I said, "the smoke really covered up the taste of food. Now that I can taste stuff again, I'm realizing that food tastes awful. All of it. I'm amazed people eat this shit every day. Ugh. Bread and grains? Fruits and vegetables, meats, dairy products? Dis-gusting. I don't know if I can ever eat again, Kevin." "Wow, that bad, huh? What are you gonna do so you don't starve to death?" As the elevator doors closed, I said "PILLS, Kevin! Like the Jetsons had! Magic nutrition pills!" Aaannnnnddd.... Scene. Friends, they told me I'd have more energy. I'm waiting, but if I drum my fingers any more impatiently, I'm gonna have bloody fingertips, and I will leave gory finger marks all over your nice white walls. Friday, June 25, 2004
I step out of the office yesterday for a walk around the block and I put a tic tac in my mouth. I walk around the block, passing the store that still has Father's Day window dressings. Walk through clot of people outside another building and breathe deeply of their smoke, which smells secondhandedly terriffic. I roll the tic tac across my hard palate with the tip of my tongue, which is getting raw from worrying tic tacs and rubbing my teeth, which constantly feel dirty from all the sugar. For ten paces I walk alongside the slouching Nipponese art student so I can get some of his secondhand, too. I roll my tic tac vertical between my left second bicuspids and split it in two like a log for firewood. Its coating is totally gone, now. The day porter walks by me on the street, screams "JER-UH-MY-EE-AHHH!!" unbelievably loud and slaps my hand with similarly improbable force. I bite through my tic tac.
Stupid train, stupid sweat. I put a tic tac in my mouth. To keep from going immediately home and stewing in my juices too long, I go to Max Fish and play some Terminator 2 pinball. But I'm getting frustrated by the table. They fixed the mechanical game built into the backboard so I can get my rightful 5 million points in RPG mode, but the table still has a really irritating starboard list and I don't get multiball until ball four and when I do, all three balls somehow drain at the same instant, before I can get a single jackpot, which I really want because Arnold says "Jackpot" every time you hit it. (Go ahead and imagine that in your head: "jagpawt," he says. Now imagine George Pataki saying it. Ha! Two Governors enter, one governor leaves: no contest.) I put a tic tac in my mouth. I'm starting to brutalize the table a bit, slapping the buttons with the force of my entire arm when I should chill out and just use my fingers, and I'm screaming curses intermittently, which impresses no one. Go home, boy. Reading Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts on the train does not exactly improve my mood, as the title character is one gloomy fuck. I put a teatree oil-flavored toothpick in my mouth. I start trying to scrub plaque off my every tooth with that pick, which involves some manual/oral acrobatics, and I can sense, without looking up, that there are various looks of feminine horror being directed at me. You know, in case I look up at them, they want to have their horror faces ready to show me, to sternly rebuke me for my antisocial ablution -- but I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of looking at their horrorfaces. Perhaps they will freeze that way. That all sounds totally paranoid, but it's not, I swear. Anyway, it's worth it -- the fronts of my incisors feel smooth as a new Teflon-coated Nokia. I do not fall asleep on time, and in fact I don't even shower until 02:00 hrs, which should be lights out, time to put some drool on the pillowcase. Finally down at 04:00, maybe, but I start seeing the clock at 06:00 again and I get that feeling where you're like "I have not slept at all" but really you're just drifting in and out and looking at the clock a lot. Abandon the horizontal charade at 08:30, wait for Democracy Now to come on the radio and horrify me with some bit of news that I won't hear anywhere else. Have to wait through the preceding show, which confuses me, as there is a person they keep talking about, like a DJ or host, named... well it sounds like his name is pronounced "tee-oh'-ka-sin" which is not a name I've ever heard. He sounds like he's from Brooklyn. Confused and bleary, I put a tic tac in my mouth and abandon the 24-hour-clock/military-time charade. They're making tic tacs bigger now. 30% bigger, with "more enjoyable freshness." Yeah. Guess the focus groups didn't like the sound of "more not enough tic tacs in the box." Goddamnit. Those fucking fucks can eat hott coxx. On the way to work I stop to buy some more tic tacs. My aunt said that when she quit smoking -- which she did without patches or pills, the old cold bird -- she had to replace the oral fixation, which was conventional wisdom, but she felt a need to replace the ritual fixation too. Some people do things to keep their hands busy, rubbing rabbits' feet or river rocks, but she chose tic tacs because the act of opening the box, extracting a tic tac, putting it in her mouth, and closing the box with a satisfying plastic click mimicked the ritual of the cigarette almost perfectly, only omitting the flame. I put a tic tac in my mouth. I've never been a big fan of spearmint anything, but the best all-around tic tac is the dark green spearminter. (Hey: "spearminter" sounds like the way a hick would pronounce "experimenter." I hate that shit -- and as per what I said yesterday, I already wrote about how I hate that shit in the FNGL. Slap!) The spearmint tic tac has structural integrity. It lasts a long time and it never softens, hard like a diamond till you pulverize it with molars. I go to work, and I work on some work I had to work on, and I work on a box of tic tacs. Eventually I'm done with work. So I put a tic tac in my mouth. I think my sense of smell is already improving, because I'm detecting odors I hadn't before. Unfortch, this is New York in the summer, where your best-case scenario is no nose at all. Some guys on the train, I'm noticing something: guys wearing big baggy jeans, like they can't compromise their style, or they have to show off their retardedly overpriced SeanJohns or whatever before they go out of style, even when it's 90° in the shade. You wear jeans all day in the summer, you brew up some serious fonk, my friend. The denim oven takes the sweat that rolls down your spine, past the waistband, and picks up some assfunk on the way to completely soaking your legs with a misty, sticky layer of nasty fecal treacle, cooking in your big-ass jeans. Yeah: you smell like a fucking butt. Please wear some shorts, or wipe your ass better. Please. My sense of smell is coming back. I get off the train and the first raindrops hit my greasy head, justifying the umbrella I've been carrying all day. I hate carrying the umbrella because there's no way to look cool with an umbrella. Of all the flavors, the weakest tic tac is orange, which turns into a sad mush between your molars after only 30 seconds in your mouth. I put a tic tac in my mouth. Thursday, June 24, 2004
Whenever I complained of being in pain as a child, my dad would cheerfully say "Pain is a useful symptom!" At the age of thirteen I discovered that this was a quote from Catch-22, and that he thought he was being very funny and urbane by quoting it. I, of course, found it quite useless and irritating, and further proof that adults were not worth listening to at all. Adults were like machines; if you found the correct input, you could reliably predict the output. ANY time I mentioned pain to him, he would spit out the quote. If I mentioned being hot and sweaty, he would say with the same giddy cheer "evaporation is a cooling process!" Dad, can you turn on the AC already? No, go sit by the fan! Evaporation is a cooling process!
Similarly, if you mention ginger -- in any context -- near my aunt, she will say "ginger has restorative properties." Robots! But fuck, I turned out to be the same way once I became an adult. But I recognized the fact that I was saying the same things over and over again, so I wrote them down and published them and now I can just refer people to the Fear Not Guide to Life instead of talking. Sometimes I slip. People say "Yeah, I already know how you feel about beef, so shut up and drive so I don't have to vomit out the window of a moving car on the fucking freeway goddamnit oh god BLLLARRRRRGGHGHGH!" Or whatever. So now I don't talk. I just slap people with my zine. But about pain being a useful symptom: I like pain when it tells me things I might not otherwise realize, like "you have a splinter" or "you have an ingrown hair" or "a horsefly is eating your love handle and will soon strike a vein." What I don't like or need is a reminder that my back is fucked up. What's that you say, pain? I have a crooked spine? THANKS SO MUCH FOR THE UPDATE. I FORGOT SINCE YOU LAST REMINDED ME TWO MINUTES AGO. In charming counterpoint to the thudding bassline of back pain this week is a feeling just below my ribcage like someone left their shiv inside me by mistake. (If you are missing a shiv, please email me and we can make an appointment for you to collect it from my fucking thorax.) And supplying the chords that hold the song together: stabbing, shooting pain in my hip whenever I sit, stand, lie down or move. Actually, walking is okay, sort of. If only I was in that Stephen King story where you have to keep on walking or they shoot you. Those options seem okay to me now. Again I beg the medical establishment to construct the salvation of my spavined corpus. Say it with me: NEOPRENE MORPHINE HARNESS. Hang me up and shoot me up! Gleep glop! Bionicize me while you're at it, and go ahead, while you're in there, and coat my bones with adamantium and give me razors for fingernails and steel ball bearings for eyeballs! That would be wicked cool. When I watch Deadwood, I think about how dirty and sticky the characters must be, about all the clothes they had to wear and how they never washed them or their bodies. I think about how uncomfortable they all must have been on their crappy bedrolls. (In fact, I think about characters' discomfort whenever I see any movie or television program: "I could never do that," I think. "Her back must be killing her!") And yesterday I noticed that very few of the characters on Deadwood smoke cigarettes, but whatever. Quitting smoking is very easy for me because whenever I think "gee, I'd really like a--" WHAM some kind of pain or other shatters my line of thinking. "Line of thinking?" Is that a real phrase? I don't know anymore. But hey! Nobody likes a whiner. I feel awesome! I'm not a smoker anymore! I love my family! I have a job and health insurance! I can sing like a fucking angel! I'm gonna pick up my laundry tonight! Tigers have not eaten my legs! I own a couch! Music is pretty! Rainbows are pretty! KITTENS ARE FUCKING CUTE! Tuesday, June 22, 2004
The first day without a cigarette in thirteen years finds me not having so much trouble with the abstinence as with staying awake. What gives? I guess I spent more time sitting in my stupid chair, here, today, without all those smoke breaks. I feel like hot buttered ass. You know that feeling where you are in a situation where it is absolutely impossible for you to sleep (whether due to social or physical restraints on your freedom) but your body won't listen and your eyes keep closing and you keep shaking your head involuntarily to stay awake and all you can think about is how you won't be horizontal for at least a few hours, which might as well be forever, because you can't possibly stay alive that long? Well fuck. I had a little lie-down in a vacant office, and now I feel right as rain, or at least righter than a sewer. Two words, Corporate America: NAP ROOMS!
The reassuringly long instruction manual for my Nicotine patches says: "Keep the patches between 66° and 75°F; they break down quickly in high temperatures). Oh, well played, GlaxoWellcome! Bravo! I'll just put them in my purely theoretical "magical wonder box" which I say is theoretical because nothing can stay between your ludicrous temperature goalposts in my apartment during the summer, and you know it. Perhaps I could turn the third bedroom into a walk-in humidor, like rich people? Hah. I suppose I could keep the patches at work -- but I don't go to work on weekends. Is that what you wanted, Glaxo, for me to work every day of the week? Fuck you! I'm shomer shabbos, bitches! Should I be at all concerned about the fact that you manufacture both the patch and the Zyban? And that you recommend using both in conjunction for ten fucking weeks? Gabble! Hey, they (not Glaxo) cancelled Lollapalooza! Which is a shame, because I didn't even know about it, really. Check out that list of bands, though -- right up my alley, at least six bands I'd really like to see, and I'm sure that's no accident. Perry Farrell is reportedly crying into his wheat grass. How come nobody even mentioned LollaP this year? How come I didn't know? I probably still wouldn't have gone, because that many people make me nervous. Though it looks like it might have ended up as crowded as a midnight gig on a monday night, plenty of room to stretch out and pretend not to enjoy the music as you make fun of other people's clothes. And here's a nice image to leave you with in lieu of another story about sweat: earlier today, a muscle spasm in my lower back/hip region actually made me yelp out loud in pain, and a tear burst from my eye like the saddest reverse money shot ever. Thursday, June 17, 2004
Here is a charming side effect of Bupropion that I forgot about: excessive sweating. Maybe I didn't forget. But if I do forget for a moment, there is a handy reminder for me: fuckloads of sweat pouring down my head if the temperature crests 72°F or if I move more than five feet in less than ten seconds. It's a good thing I'm not trying to get girls to fuck me, or get people to like me, or get people not to keep ten feet away from me on subway platforms for fear of getting whatever it is I've got. It's not contagious, you fucks!
I especially hate the drops that spill off the tip of my nose like they didn't have various other avenues to choose from, like: behind my ears, down my cheeks, or into an eyebrow. Then again, my eyebrows reach brimming capacity in less than a minute of heavy sweats, and my shirt usually reaches saturation five minutes later, at which point it is no good for draining the eyebrows. But there's a bright side. THINGS I CAN DO WITH EXCESS SWEAT: • Scare people -- which is good if you want to scare people.• Make your drink salty. • Slip 'n' Slide on a dry Slip 'n' Slide. • Achieve that much-sought-after "just stepped out of a shower" look, except it looks like I don't have any towels, which then makes you think "why doesn't he own any towels?" • Make drip drawings on the sidewalk. • Die of dehyfuckingdration between my house and the subway. • Kill zombies. • Eat a bowl of dick. * * * Oh and here's the other thing about wearing shorts in the summer, which I forgot to mention yesterday. The thing is: if you are a boy and you wear shorts, you must wear striped socks. Well, I have to, anyway. Dark socks are just forget about it, and plain white socks are a ride on the lame train. But for the last year or so I've been looking for stores that sell white tube socks with two colorful stripes at the top. You would not think this a grail-level quest, but fuck me if I can find any store, on either coast (by which I mean New York and a very small strip of Mission Blvd in SF and a sock stand on Venice Beach) that carry the fuckers. It's like somebody invented a neutron bomb that only kills striped tube socks and detonated them everywhere. Nelly would say "e'rryw'err." Various people have claimed the ability to purchase these socks, for me, but no one has come through, because why the fuck are they gonna do my sock shopping for me? All right. Striped socks, goddamnit.But wait holy shit! I decided today to search the INTERWEB for my socks, and guess what? Sha-Fucking-Zamm! Check out the selection, too! I just might try out some thrice-strip'd socks, just coz I'm feeling kicky. What's my problem, anyway? I spend most of every work day staring at the interweb, and I never thought to search for socks. Why? Because raise your hand if you've ever bought socks online. See? It's like buying toilet paper online. IT DOES NOT HAPPEN. The fuck? Who are you, in the back there, raising your hand at toilet paper? You are a retard. Put down your shortwave radio that runs on a hand-crank and get me a fucking towel! Wednesday, June 16, 2004
I hereby pledge to keep the summertime heat-related posts to a minimum this summer. By this I mean that I will have, let's say, four posts that are primarily about the heat. I may mention the heat tangentially, parenthetically, or as a non sequitur exclamation, like HOLY FUCK IT'S HOT but those don't count towards the four heat-related posts. Neither, of course, does this one, being a meta heat-related paragraph in a mostly not heat-related post. At least, I'm hoping, as I write this first paragraph, that I will come up with enough other crap to write about to make it mostly non heat-related.
Claudia doesn't like capers. By which I mean the kind you find in salads, not the kind that involve Muppets chasing diamonds or whatever. How can you not like capers? They're fucking awesome. But Claude can't hang with the capers. She could hang with me, however, and hang we did. I saw Claudia a lot during my visit to California, which was good, and all my L.A. friends want her to be their friend too. That's how cool is Claudia, if you didn't know already. Here are some things Claudia likes: Drinking. Smoking. Her dog. Karaoke. Here are some things she doesn't like: Capers. Traffic. Haters. Okay, maybe that's not such a huge revelation. Nobody likes traffic. I want to say more about Claudia, but I don't want to ruin her mystique for those of you who read her stuff, and I don't want to bore those of you who don't. Mystique? Oh yeah. Still mystiquey. Now I must type "mesquite" to see how similar those words are. Huh. One letter away from an anagram. ITEM! The concierge in the lobby of my office building just said the word "phalanx" to me. I bet he was saving it up all day, having read it in a Times article. He didn't just walk up to me and say "phalanx," of course. He used it in context. And he mispronounced it. Still, I applaud him! Phalanx is good. I bet it was even dictionary.com's word of the day, once, though I'm not gonna check. ITEM! The Quittening has not actually started yet. I'm going to rock the full dose of Zyban for a week before I try to stop. But I am very excited about being able to breathe. I think I need more oxygen. ITEM! I hate wearing shorts, but pants are too hot. What to do? At least I'm not a Mormon. Mormons have to wear sacred long underwear all the time, every day of their lives. I am not in the least bit joking. And I do not mention this to ridicule their faith, but only to express sympathy for those who must conform to that sweaty observance. Also many Mormons, as you may know, live in Utah, which is hot. HOT! ITEM! My attention span has reached new lows, duration-wise. Or new highs, brevity-wise, depending on your outlook. This obnoxious item format is a ploy to make it all seem intentional. But look, I feel like every time I try to focus on some task or another, someone walks up behind me and hits me with a very soft mallet, soft enough that I can't feel it consciously, but it jars the place where attention is maintained out of its groove. The Softest Bullet Ever Shot. Fuck. Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Spent the weekend entertaining the ConfusingWizard and his pal Dusty, who arrived from Texas like a double-barrelled high-energy twister lifting my trailer off the ground and slamming it back down. I'm tired. You try keeping up with a pair of high-schoolers and see if your legs don't turn to jelly. I have jelly for legs. If J.Ro hadn't helped, I'd be dead for sure. Now excuse me while I crawl under my desk for my third catnap of the day.
Do y'all remember how I predicted that I'd be better about posting after my vacation? I also told my boss I'd be less spacy and unreliable after vacation. I told my friends I'd be more sociable after vacation. Wa ha ha! I was wrong, wrong, and wrong! I am just as bad as I was before, except slightly more tan. Thursday, June 10, 2004
Last night, while buying toilet paper at the bodega, I see on their little B&W television that there's some sort of Reagan-related stuff on the news. Standing in front of the TV is the wizened Puerto Rican wino who hangs out at the store, sometimes sweeping or stocking but mostly just wobbling on his wine-soaked legs. So he's staring up at the funeral or whatever, which is perched on a high shelf, and he says in almost incomprehensible nuyorican winoese: "Eh deh. Eh prezedeh e deh!"
"Yeah, I noticed," I say back at him, "and I'm sick of this relentless fawning from every single face on TV." He just sort of vibrates and wobbles some more. "Like, I get that he's dead and it's appropriate to mourn his passing and all," I say, "but dying doesn't excuse all the horrible things he did or all the important things he didn't do. To truly honor the dead you have to be honest. I just can't bear to hear all the amnesiac assholes trying to pretend that he was a great man." I'm pretty happy with my speech, especially because there are some other customers in the line, which satisfies my performance RDA. But the wino gets wobblier. He starts to croak something out. "E wah a grey mehn! EH GREY MEHN!" Oh shit. I look closer and see that the wino's eyeballs are about to float out of their sockets on a wave of 40 proof tears, and that a viscous drop of grief-snot hangs translucently from his septum, quivering with potential energy. Then I realize that for this guy, Reagan might actually be his president -- like maybe he thinks he's still in office, and that this is an FDR-style death in the White House. Maybe the last time he was sober was the mid-eighties? I don't know. But I couldn't help but wonder: why the hell would a disintegrating 50-year-old hispanic wino with dubious residency status have any good feelings at all for a president like Reagan? Some mysteries are bigger than my mind can handle. Like: why do zombies start to rise up from the ground? Like, one minute the town is peaceful, and then, for no apparent reason that I've ever heard, the first rotting hand pierces the dirt above its coffin. By the time the rest of them are out of their graves and ripping at your door, there's no time for philosophy. But friends, now, here, in the downtime between attacks, shouldn't we attempt to figure it out? If we never ask why, how can we learn? We've lost too many family members to unspeakable horror. We've seen our friends rise up to fight us just moments after being killed. We've seen priests machete-hack their own hands off to prevent the flow to the heart of whatever is in a zombie bite, only to moan for our flesh an hour later, bloodlessly, handlessly. Well, only one priest, really. To recap: whatever. Mysteries. Some unsovable. Like why did I even write a post today at all if I was just gonna be a spastic retard? A drooling lobotomee could have written something better by mashing his cheeks and jowls against the keyboard for a hour or two. Goddamn you, Reagan. Stay down. Stay under the ground. Stay. Or if you're gonna rise up to eat brains, do it while you're still in D.C. -- plenty of tasty candidates for munching over at your old place. Who can you eat at your library in Simi Valley? Not a lot of brains in Simi Valley, though you could eat the Rodney King jurors for a light snack. I don't have to work tomorrow. Pataki closed state offices. How 'bout that? See you later, suckabitches. Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Being back at work is difficult. I feel like the soles of my shoes are coated with treacle and my ass filled with buckshot. My head lolls uncontrollably to either side, refusing to stay upright, and I barely have the energy to move my typin' sticks (fingers) without creating errors at a ratio of 2:1 versus real words. Did that last bit even make sense? I did, however, have the energy to download the Walkmen's entire album.
But someone told me today that I made them LOL with my last post, which made me LOL in return, and then my boss reminded me that I was no longer on vacation, and that, here in New York, endlessly cyclical hysterical cackling is usually confined to the subway system, and was inappropriate for the workplace. I tried to explain the ironic nature of the laughter, but she wasn't having any. I wiped the drool from my chin and started to LTM. But I was inspired, sort of, to stretch the blogging muscles. To scrape the rust off the undercarriage. To grind my coffee beans for espresso, if you catch my drift. I'm quitting smoking. Whoa! There, I said it. After thirteen years of a pack-a-day habit, I'm through with it. For the last few months my cigarettes have been tasting like ass, and I get no pleasure from them at all. I get out of breath if I imagine a staircase, and my lungs just seem pissed off. At home, I only smoke in my room, because the new roommates are nonsmokers and would prefer the house not smell utterly of my pathetic addiction. I've been smoking because it's expected of me for too long, and isn't that revolting? Here's an illustrative anecdote, though: Several years ago, at the house of a friend we'll call Felter, I was talking excitedly about some bullshit, and I cracked a window and started smoking. She went to the kitchen for a makeshift ashtray, and for the rest of the evening, I smoked and we talked. Eventually I went home. The next evening, her roommate Brig sat at the same table and lit up a smoke. He was a smoker, see. But the Felter freaked out. "Um, What are you doing, Brig?" asked Felter. "What do you mean?" Brig said, all innocent. "You know there's no smoking in the house." "Oh really? Yesterday Jeremy sat at this very table, smoking like a chimney, and you didn't stop him," said Brig, reasonably. "Brig," said Felter, "that's Jeremy Broomfield." Which at the time I thought was pretty righteous, and very funny. But the implications may have been disturbing. Was she saying that I was a highly honored guest and that nothing would be denied me, in the best traditions of hospitality? Maybe. But it's far more likely that she was saying I was a hopeless, intractable addict, and that any attempts to curtail my indoor smoking would be met with scorn, indifference, or total incomprehension, so it wasn't even worth trying. If you want to hang with UD, you gotta smell the smoke. Well, I got a prescription for Zyban today. My shrink has this annoying thing where he has slowly morphed himself into my pyschopharmacologist, and my appointments have shrunk from the typically paltry 50 minutes to a cool quarter hour. But I've got my scripts, friends, and if you want to share a cigarette with me, you've got one more week. After that, don't tempt me. Please. I just want to breathe again. Stupid California. I hate what you do to me. Thursday, June 03, 2004
So I didn't have the InTerWeb access, the time, or the inclination to update you from afar during this vacation except for that last post. But big ups to Gregor, for filling my size thirteens! Way to keep the people entertained in my absence! You really satisfied our readers' need for wit, observational humor, and, of course, irony! Blogger of the year award to you! You lazy hobo-blowing fucktard!
I kept thinking that I should write a Fear Not Guide to California, but I didn't get very far in my thinking about it, because Los Angeles does not encourage thought of any kind. There are all these distractions that conspire to ruin your concentration, like traffic, ridiculous-looking women, and frankly improbable amounts of sunshine. But here are some rough sketches: THE FEAR NOT GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA, ßeta version 0.1
Clouds: Los Angelenos look at the sky and call it "overcast" when the smog obscures some string of hills or another. They can't play cloud-shape games, and [insert SPF/IQ joke here]. Hippies: Here's a stolen (and probably mangled) anecdote related to me by B.Perks about west coast hippiedom: A craggy old hippie dude with dumb white dreadlocks and stupid ugly tie-dyed everything is pushing a baby carriage filled with homemade pot pipes and other weed paraphernalia. He yells "Crazy hippie shit! I got craaazy hippie shit here!" An equally filthy but teenaged hippie runaway-looking girl, also with white dreads, walks up to the dude. Hummers: More Cars = more Hummers, which is depressing, and makes me rethink my position on gun control for fully automatic assault rifles. Like isn't the H2 supposed to be bulletproof? Don't you want to test that? Not on the windows or anything, or while the vehicle is occupied, but in a parking lot? Target practice time! Try the tires! Try the engine block! TRY A FUCKING FLAMETHROWER. Pacific Ocean: Sometimes you can get someone to take you to the beach, but if you mention a desire to go in the water, they will look at you like you have herpes sores surrounding your eyesockets. There is actually a Water Quality report on the news radio station (just after the Traffic and Weather reports, which are totally unnecessary, because the traffic and weather are always the same (q.v.)) and LA residents will not even get their toes wet unless the report says that the AIDS content of the ocean is lower than 800,000 parts per million, which it never is. The LA ocean is AIDS all the time. Redwoods: We went to Muir Woods National Monument outside of SF (the place in Vertigo) and those trees are really impressive. Not to sound all hippie, but sometimes nature can really take your breath away. The grandeur of it all is only slightly tempered when J.Ro keeps insisting that you hide inside a hollowed out trunk, wait 'til some unsuspecting parkgoer walks by, and then jump out "like you live there." But it's especially nice to be safe on the redwood forest floor if the guy who drove you there is a fucking lunatic who thinks that he can see around blind curves and that testing the gription of his tires on winding cliffside roads at 60 mph is the only real proof that he owns testicles. Screenplays: When you drive over the border into LA County, you get a bizarre desire to type up some dialogue in an arcane format of centered 12pt courier. Everybody has a screenplay, and they're all totally awesome. Totally, brah. Tap Water: Really varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, but seems to originate, lightly filtered, straight from the ocean, which see above. The water in Culver City on Tuesday tasted like semen. Women: Every woman in LA is required by law to walk around with a string up her asscrack and to wave her arms around like a nincompoop if you smoke a cigarette within 20 yards of her frosty hairdo. Maybe silicone reacts with tobacco in some explosive way? Wow, that would be awesome. Imagine: you walk up to a tarded bimbette who got rejected from Blind Date for being too stupid (as if!) and you blow a stream of smoke at her redonculous boobsacs, then you take cover behind an H2 and count to five, at which point BOOM, and a wet rain of brine, blood, and a thin gruel of bimbo "brains." * * *
Anyway, Then I get bored, and so do you. So in summary, I bought the awesomest book ever at a San Francisco used bookstore. The vacation was the tonic I needed, and the perfect length too. In fact, when the plane touched down at JFK I actually shed a gay little tear to be coming home. Maybe I was just showing off for the cynical gum-snapping flight attendant, or maybe my spine was weeping in anticipation of sleeping on the only comfortable mattress in the world, or maybe depressurization just sucked the fluid out of my ducts. Or maybe I love New York. I'm back, bitches. Holla like you want some! |
OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" |