Handbill Handout

Well, they got the goat . Couldn’t see that one coming a mile away, eh? And it happened just as the webcams were knocked offline by a denial of service attack so there’s no evidence. Convenient, eh? It was inevitable, I suppose, just as inevitable as the arrival of the hoards of tourists in midtown Manhattan yesterday. I left my office last night and there they were, thousands of slow-walkers, picture-takers and kid-toters. Giant Christmas lights! On Sixth Avenue! (Sorry, they probably call it “Avenue of the Americas” like the tourist guides say). “Garsh maw, we needs a pitcher of dat one!” echoes in fifty different languages through the freezing wind, bouncing and skipping across frigid concrete and stuttering cars. The older one gets the more one realizes that certain events are inevitable at this time of year. The burning of straw goats in Sweden is just another one of those. The bundled tourist masses are another. Self-mythologizing is still another. Self-delusion abounds

Dry cure and pork belly. What's in the dry cure? Look close enough and you'll figure it out. Combined, in a zip-top bag. Put in in the fridge for about a week or a little more until it's firm. Hang to dry for 5-7 days. After that, freeze it for up to four months. If it lasts that long.

I have always felt vaguely out of place in America. I feel less out of place in New York City which anyone who has been to both places will tell you is not America, culturally speaking, even though technically it is part of America. This is not putting down the culture of any particular place, just pointing out that I don’t feel like “one of the gang”. I've had a vague fish-out-of-water-type sensation for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until my trip to Finland and Sweden in 2008 that I realized that at least part of my disconnect comes from being surrounded by people whose ancestry is either irrelevant (i.e. they have become “ideal”, fully assimilated Americans) or culturally very different than my own. When I traveled to Sweden and Finland I felt a strange (to me) sense of belonging in both countries likely owing to the fact that my maternal grandmother was a Swede born and raised in Finland and my maternal grandfather (who I never knew) was from Sweden. When I traveled

Don’t know what to get your special lady for Christmas? Economy got you strapped for funds? Well, nothing says romance (and not having to spend a dime) like a good ol’ love poem! Of course, not everyone can write a good love poem so here’s a handy guide stolen right from the sexiest, most romantic book in the world, the Bible! The Song of Solomon more specifically. Now we all know nobody reads the more obscure books of the Bible other than religious professionals and hardcore cuckoos and even the latter skip over the Song of Solomon because it’s just too damn prurient. In fact I’m surprised some preacher from Missouri hasn’t lobbied to have the whole thing thrown out of the Bible. Anyway, the really cool thing about the Song of Solomon is that it’s in the public domain, just like the rest of the Bible! You can plagiarize away without fear of being sued. I’m here to make this easier for you. I decided that if I took the Bible and combined it with that other great concept of my childhood

Carl was on page five of the ten page diner menu when he gave up. “How the hell do they expect us to believe that they can cook everything in this novella safely, never mind well?” he said to his Aunt Ellen who had invited him for brunch. Ellen continued perusing the lengthy document even though Carl knew damn well she was going to order scrambled eggs, sausage, toast and coffee just as she probably knew he was going to order a turkey club and a diet Coke. She insisted on going through the motions despite the fact that the final resolution was already known and immutable which made her not unlike 99% of the other human beings on the planet. Ellen closed the menu and said “You’re at a diner, most of this stuff is cooked the same way and whatever isn’t safe is probably just here for show and they’ll tell you they’re out of it if you order it. Anyway, why does it matter?” Carl looked across at his aunt. She was in her mid sixties, only about ten years older than Carl was owing to the fact

I almost skipped going to see some live music on Saturday night. I found a movie on the SyFy channel (formerly the Sci-Fi channel) that was so compelling it glued me to the couch. If the Mrs. wasn’t going with me to see the show I might’ve not been able to tear myself away. The movie? Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus I might as well get it out in the open now: I am a sucker for monster movies. Not horror movies or vampire movies or zombie movies. Monster movies, as in a giant something or other destroys a city before being defeated by some heroic scientists or another “good-guy” monster or some combination of both. The monster may or may not be an allegory for “man tampering with nature”. The dialogue must be the sort of dialogue nobody ever hears in real life, there should be no passages that resemble actual human conversation. The dialogue exists to move the plot, such as it is, along. In other words everyone not being killed by the monster (and even some who do wind up kaput) is “Basil

The winter holidays encompass many things, not the least of which is Seasonal Affective Disorder, an affliction that some of you may think I have after reading this. I assure you I do not. In fact I think that realizing every holiday season could be your last and using said realization as motivation to enjoy every bit of the season is probably the healthiest thing one could do for oneself. There I go jumping the gun again. Well, you might as well stop reading here since I’ve given away the whole point of today’s exercise. Yes you. Shoo. Go away. I’m going to talk to myself now. They gone? Good. Christmas 1999. My parents were old, but not so old that they should have both been wheelchair bound. My mother had a bilateral hip replacement. My father had one leg. Still, they should have been able to get around better but it was easier to be sedentary and truth be told they were probably both very tired of living. I don’t blame them, my dad was 71 and my mom 69 and there are days where I’m

It is Thanksgiving Eve here in New York City. Way back when the Howard Stern show was on the radio the head writer, Jackie Martling called this “The Wildest Night of the Year” because most people got out of work early and had a four day weekend so this was a drinking day on par with New Year’s and St. Patty’s Day minus all the amateurs who infest the bars on those two days. This was the night when all the regular party people go out and celebrate. I used to be one of those people. Now that I’m deeply involved in food prep for Thanksgiving, I am no longer one of those people, at least not this year. In the past though I was not only a participant, but a leader. For a few shining years I led a band of merry drunks on a quest that we never completed. Yeah, several years back I got the bright idea to say “Hey, why don’t we do a pub crawl the night before Thanksgiving. We’ll have one drink, and ONLY one drink in every bar on 8th avenue from Scruffy Duffy’s (just south of 47th street)

This is the shortest work week of the year in my industry and therefore it is also one of the longest weeks of the year in my industry. What? Look, you know the difference between objective time and subjective time, don’t you? It can be mathematically expressed as an index for all you number nerds out there. Your numerator is how long each minute feels and your denominator is how many minutes are objectively in the week. Or you could use hours, days, whatever. In my industry we basically shut down around 1pm on Wednesday for the whole weekend which means objectively speaking I have a 2.5 day work week. However because of the combination of people wanting to jam things in before the holiday and the overwhelming longing for the weekend that 2.5 days feels like about, oh, I’d say ten days which gives you a subjective time index of 4. Or 4:1. However you want to express it. Anyway, it’s long. That longing for the weekend is a big factor in the equation. In a normal five day work week on Mo

Carl was in the bar in his usual spot with his usual drink doing his usual staring at the screen behind the bar wondering what to do next. Besides ordering another drink, of course. The bar was an old one without a sign out front but it was well known to the locals. It did not require any effort toward advertising to stay in business. It offered exactly what its target market required: a dimly lit room, somewhat but not terribly noisy, alcohol, and a television with cable to occasionally distract a person from their thoughts. The bartenders didn’t ask many questions, didn’t give you their name unless you asked and generally left you the hell alone except for when you glass was empty. It was a good bar. A dying breed. A man could be comfortable alone there. For the first time in several years Carl’s old acquaintance Sam walked in the front door. He knew exactly where to look for Carl. He came over and sat down. “I heard from Al” he said. Carl didn’t blink. “You hear me?” he said. “Yeah”

I stepped off the bus Monday morning onto the east side of 6 th avenue just north of the block where my usual coffee cart sits. Normally the bus stops at the corner a full block north of the cart and I cross the street there and then walk back one block south to get my coffee and bagel. Some mornings the crowd of buses on that section of 6 th is such that the driver will discharge all of us a block short of the stop rather than wait until the buses in front of him clear out. Monday was one such morning. The current coffee cart guy had gotten used to my routine and had on the occasions where I de -bused directly east of his cart and had to wait for the light to change before I traveled west to his cart he had my coffee and bagel bagged and waiting by the time I crossed the street. I found this really annoying because I sometimes order and extra-large coffee instead of a large and his spotting me and putting everything together before I even got to his cart destroyed any opportunit

There is a stack of DayMinder brand desk calendars on a bookcase in my office. They rest partly obscured by the sprawling tendrils of a prayer plant that I grew from a cutting given to me by a co-worker almost ten years ago. The plant has some dead leaves that I really should cut but I don’t. It’s fall. I should have some dead vegetation in here to honor the season, shouldn’t I? The DayMinder brand desk calendars go back to 1999. On my desk I have a DayMinder brand desk calendar for 2009 open to the week of November 9, and underneath the dwindling stack of pages on the right hand side there is a DayMinder brand desk calendar for 2010. To the right of all of that is my rolodex. Rolodexes were on every desk when I started, now I would say the majority of desks on this floor do not. Progress. The age of electronic communications. Every Monday morning I come in and turn the page on my DayMinder brand desk calendar. There are four boxes on each page. On the left hand page there is a box sho

I’m thinking about e-mailing some of my old e-mail addresses. I have some addresses that I no longer use that lay out there somewhere in the proverbial cloud. Are they still receiving messages? Millions of messages urging someone, anyone to buy Viagra and a watch and a college degree? Oh those old domain names. Pipeline which became Mindspring which became Earthlink; hell for one brief not-so-shining moment I even had an AOL account though only until the free hours on the CD I got in the mail ran out. The crazy, heady 1990s, where have they gone? How many dead mailboxes are out there just accumulating mail? How many mailboxes of dead people are out there accumulating messages? I know I have a couple of e-mail addresses for dead people. What would happen if I sent them a note? Anything? Can you imagine that there are probably thousands of computers out there in that cloud (funny that they call the Internet a “cloud” now because it is an almost too perfect description of the tri

“Oooooowwwwwwwwwwwwhhoooooooooooooooaaaaahhhhhhh goddammit that feels good” intoned the drunk at the urinal. Reflexively everyone on line in the Whitehall terminal men’s room backed up a few steps waiting for the inebriated pisser to fall backward and become a fountain. Fortunately he did not and instead continued “Yankees! New York! Champs!” while swaying unsteadily. “What about the Mets?” came a voice from inside one of the stalls. “Mets? Fuck ‘em. They can’t say anything. Too bad.” He was done now and attempting to zip his fly and in doing so looked like a five year old asked to solve a Rubik’s cube. He staggered toward the sink and the crowd noticed he was wearing the uniform of a postal worker. “No. Mets. Can. Say. Can’t.” said our mail carrying pall as he waved his hands in front of the motion detector to try to get water out of the faucet, failed and reeled back out into the terminal. I saw Hammered Postal Worker weave over to a couple of buddies and start talking to them but co

One of my old bosses used to sit at his desk and organize M&Ms by color while he talked on the phone. No, I’m not making that up. I mean you couldn’t make that up. Well, I guess you could make it up, hypothetically, if you thought about it. And if I was a writer of style, of nuance, of "protect the innocent" and created characters based on reality instead of using reality itself I’d say he organized Skittles by color or maybe organized pretzels by size or maybe stacked Pringles or maybe, or maybe, or maybe that’s the best I can do. The best ideas I can come up with. So you choose one. Which one? So now you’ve chosen and I can write about the man who (blanked blanks) while talking on the phone. Why not change “talked on the phone” to “held meetings”? Or “worked on spreadsheets”? Or “Surfed the Internet”? No, no, the last two won’t do. Won’t do a bit. And even “held meetings” doesn’t really work because really, who would believe that? So we have to have him bla

So I’m sure you’re just like me and you’ve asked yourself: What would happen if today’s entertainment sensibility had existed at the time of cave paintings? Well I think it would go a little something like this… Caveman Investor: Hey Urgwag, we just reviewed your latest series of paintings in the south cave. Really great stuff. Caveman Artist: Thanks, I’m really trying to collaborate with your integration people. Caveman Investor: (not really paying attention) Yeah, really great, really great. We love what you’ve done with the buffalo in the second act, really great stuff the way the spears stick out of him at different angles and how he falls over in the next panel and the spears are still at the same angles. CA: Uh-huh, well it’s not realism but really an interpretation of our linear intersection with the creature’s life. CI: Right, right, say listen (looks down at stone tablet) about those spears, the integration people aren’t happy. CA: Why not? CI: Well, Argwajug’s spea

Better advice than anything, ever.

Glen wandered east up the block across from the building toward a bar he frequented in years past hoping to grab a nice steam-table sandwich and a pint before hopping the bus back home. Would it still be there? What do you think? No, it was gone. Replaced by a Starbucks, of all things. How typical. Disappointed Glen headed back toward the building and as he walked he noticed how much the street had changed. There wasn’t a single deli or coffee shop or dollar store or drugstore or Hallmark shop or anything, anything at all where he remembered it. He had just been in the office for the initial meet and greet a few weeks before, was it possible things had been different then and he hadn’t noticed? Glen hadn’t worked in this neighborhood at the job he held the previous five years so he thought it was possible things had changed that much and he just hadn’t noticed a few weeks earlier. Not getting any younger, Glen thought. Well, our man Glen was right on with that observation. H

Into the lobby through the revolving door he went and he headed toward the elevator. Odd, Glen thought, there were security gates here last time and I had to swipe a company-issued ID card. Now they’re gone. The thought stuck in his head roughly as long as it took Glen to board the elevator and punch the “39” button. The doors closed and Glen was suspended in that timeless time that we all must spend in elevators sooner or later. That dead time where there isn’t quite enough time to have a full conversation with anyone you might be acquainted with or read a page of a book or do much of anything. Elevator time is like time spent at traffic lights, a totally unproductive time that we should all get a reimbursement for at the end of our lives. As Glen (or what it Glen’s narrator?) reflected on this true to form the doors slid open again and interrupted the thought. Glen turned right off the elevator and noticed an attractive receptionist at the front desk. Was there a receptionist

It was a dark and stormy night. Wait, no it wasn’t. It was a dull and rainy morning, not a dark and stormy night. Sorry, I always wanted to start a story with that little Snoopy tribute line there. And now I have. And now I will remove myself so that the story can begin. It was a dull and rainy morning and Glen was annoyed that he had been called in to the office unexpectedly. He’d only been doing consulting work for this company for a couple of weeks and other than an initial meet and greet he had never had to darken the door of the office. All of his work was done from home, or had been done from home until today. So there Glen was ambling from the park and ride lot toward route 13 when he noticed the red hand that replaced “Don’t Walk” on the traffic lights of his youth start to blink. “Shit” he muttered and started hustling to make the light. Route 13 was a six-lane highway with intermittent pedestrian crossings and if you missed the light you were waiting for a while, a “wh

A friend e-mailed me about blogging and where this friend could find mine. I gave the friend the URL and some advice. Here it is, with some additions. Said friend may read this. Said friend may not. Either future is fine. "Blogging is so 2006. Nobody does it anymore. And mine is crap, but it's here (with the URL) You can also subscribe to my twitter feed at that site should you want to be a little contemporary. Oh yeah, and accept my goddamn Facebook friend request already. Nobody is your friend in real life if they're not your friend on Facebook . Didn't you get the memo? Oh yeah, you should know that there are five good entries on my blog. Unfortunately, there are 410 total entries. Good luck finding the five good ones. What you don't think I'm gonna tell you, do you?" Notice the terrible, terrible lies I told this friend. There are now four hundred and eleven entries on this blog, or will be as soon as I hit "publish post" on this

This is the first paragraph of today’s post. Normally I would put something here that either establishes the premise or is a complete non sequitur. However, I don’t have anything to write about today so pretend this is blank. Go ahead. Pretend it’s BLANK! STOP READING! I’M SERIOUS! There, now that we got rid of that literal crowd, we can continue. Continue with today’s topic. What is today’s topic, you’re wondering, and why did you get rid of the literal crowd given that you (I) have few readers to begin with. You should be focused on maximizing the amount of people that read this. Why? Why? Because….well there is no reason, other than ego I suppose. So maybe I shouldn’t bother with maximizing my audience. I don’t serve ads so I’m not making money from this anyway. Oh, and at this point I should really be beginning to discuss the first main point of the story or essay or whatever it is I’m writing here but instead I’m distracted by an internal discussion. However let me as

Today is my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Or rather today is the 60th anniversary of the day they got married, because legally I think they are no longer married since they are both dead. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure once you’re dead you’re single though I don’t know who came up with that rule. I mean sure, it makes sense when one partner is gone and the other is still here, but when you’re both dead are you both still single? And if you aren’t, is your “new anniversary” the death of the second partner assuming you both didn’t die on the same day? Bah, it’s all too complicated. For the purposes of this essay, let’s just assume that my parents, though dead, are still married, and that their anniversary is today, though that’s only based on hearsay since I wasn’t present at the occasion. Really all I have is their word for it. Which I hope was correct, seeing as how we have what they said was their wedding date on their headstone and boy howdy would I be embarrassed if we w