Handbill Handout

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...