as part of her volunteer duties at an animal shelter jenny has been fostering a mommy cat and her litter of kittens for the past couple months. four of them. a week or two ago she got four more kittens bringing the total up to eight. the cuteness of eight kittens is more than eight times the cuteness of one. i went into her room to play with them, but i couldn’t find them. and those spazoids aren’t very inconspicuous. i went to get jenny to tell her that they escaped or something. it turns out that they crawled up through her dresser to sleep in her sweaters. jenny opened up the drawer to show me the big pile of cuteness greater than the sum of its parts. way greater.

so afterwards i went with jenny to the shelter when she brought the kittens in to get their ears checked. i decided to check out the other animals in lieu of watching the kittens get the mite feces cleaned out of their ears. there was a cat with seven toes on its front paws. seven. it looked like it had thumbs. it was the coolest thing ever. i’m not even exaggerating. i guess it’s a fairly common mutation.

then i walked into the dog part. they all started barking really loudly at me. maybe they were just excited because they thought i was coming to take them for a walk or something, but the barks were so damn grating. i felt like those cartoons where daffy duck turns into walking t-bone once that dog notices.

for a few grades of elementary school i had to walk by a yard with really high solid fences. i knew there was a dog in there, even though i couldn’t see it through the fence. i knew it was there but it would bark at me every time i passed. it would bark loud. i could tell that it was just on the other side of the fence. i remember hearing it breathe in between barks. but i couldn’t see what it looked like at all. it’s not like it would matter though. even if it was a tiny little smiling dog that looked more like a bunny than cujo i still would’ve thought that some day it was going to eat me. some days i would go out of my way to avoid barky. one of those times i came across a big “playful” sheep dog. i guess it thought i looked like a fun kid to play with. he reared up and put his front paws on my shoulders knocking me down and pinning me. i guess he thought maybe he’d climb up me or something. dogs are dumb. i was smaller than him. at any rate all i was thinking was that second grade wasn’t the year i wanted to kick it.

these things may or may not have influenced my wincing at the shelter when the dogs started barking at me. but i have been reminiscing a fair amount about the way i used to think about things. i’m been working with computers for years and years and i read quite a bit of leftist political writing. despite this it still takes me a while to catch on that someone’s talking about a peripheral and not a rodent when they say, “mouse.” and i always think of the facts of life not the CIA when i read, “the langley crowd.” there’s gotta be some sort of explanation.

my roommate asked me to put up this story. i took private swimming lessons from some student at a university my dad worked at. i don’t know how old i was exactly, but i wasn’t old enough to be in the men’s locker room by myself so i would change in the women’s locker room with my teacher. i was also young enough to not know that while it’s usually wrong to stare there are some things you’re never supposed to stare at. however. i was old enough to decide that in the women’s locker room is where i wanted to spend the rest of my life.

sometime after this when i had learned “modesty” and at the time when i was first starting to be allowed to go pee pee on my own my parents took us to some sort of 50s era styled diner for dinner. the kind where the bathrooms are labelled something like, “daddy-o’s” and “shortcakes”. in cursive lettering no less. i couldn’t figure it out. c’mon! cursive? i weighed the options, admitting my inability to go on my own to my parents was not one of them. i made my choice. i was happy that this restaurant seemed to recognize that there’s no way anyone could possibly be tall enough to use the toilets that hang on the wall. only regular toilets like at home. but i was still uncertain if i made the right choice. someone came in and i leaned over to check out his (hopefully) shoes. no guy in a 50s era diner would wear pink shoes and i knew it. i was sunk! so i sat there in that stall until she left and i was sure that i wouldn’t get caught. could i still get detention even if the girl’s bathroom wasn’t at school? i finally made it out of there. unseen.

“you were gone for a long time.”
“oh.”
“you’re dad went in to check on you. he couldn’t find you.”
“what do you mean?! i was there!”
“did you go to the girl’s bathroom?”
“no way! no way! uh uh!”

i suppose i am usually reminiscing to some degree, but i have quite a bit more lately. which is prolly normal for any brand new adult who is nearing a crossroads.

i live on a private way. a terrace even. because it’s private we’re not required to purchase cambridge parking permits. but we weren’t quite as free as we thought. it turns out that our neighbor is the self-appointed parking manager of the terrace. val’s a pretty nifty guy. has tons of goofy stories about his family, our other neighbors, laying the asphalt that became MA-128. but starts of his conversations in the most antagonistic ways.

“i’m going to have your car towed if you don’t move it right now.”
“uh. but i live here. i just moved in.”
“well, you have to buy a parking permit then.”
“from who?”
“me”
“uh. but i thought this was a private way.”
“the police will still tow you.”

here he went into this horribly graphic story involving the suicide or maybe murder of one of the other residents. it involved some probate issues which for some reason involved the entire terrace. and now val recoups this with permit parking.

“okay, well, how much is it?”
“2 dollars.”
“uh. for how long?”
“forever.”
“oh. heh. sure. no problem.”

ever since then if our permits aren’t completely visible, or if we’re not perfectly in the lines (that val painted), or if someone seems to be using the visitor’s pass too much val is right there on the front lines. for god and the terrace.

well. the visitor’s pass is not doing so well. it was passed to us from the previous tenants. who knows how many generations of tenants it’s been through. instead of confronting val for a new pass i decided to take it to work and borrow some of the clear packing tape to paste all the pieces together.

problem.

when i got into work i found an email from our office manager. she wanted the tape guns returned to the supply room. these emails of hers are code for when she’s looking to chew someone out.

the situation is thorny. first, i know where the tape guns are. second, while i don’t know if i’m actually on her bad side or not i know that i don’t want to make my situation worse by having her think i misplaced them.

about the second point. last year i noticed a nasty brown stain on some of the papers on my desk and another one on the carpet nearby. i looked up to find the pipes coming from the urinals in the bathroom on the floor above me. nas. ty. i asked the office manager to get this fixed. many times. nothing happened. she kept telling me that people had come in to fix it or that people were coming in soon, but the spot just got bigger. a year later and i was still tasting the golden spray. i move desks and suddenly it gets fixed. if i’m not already on her bad side, i do not want to be. also, check this. toward the end of my sentence i got yelled at for not informing her of the fire sprinkler dripping behind me.

“i had my headphones on and couldn’t hear it.”
“don’t you ever take them off?”
“i think i’m done asking you to fix leaks.”

now, about the first point. i used these tape guns to “fix” my “book”. (which has been working quite nicely.) i got one from some supply type shelf, which isn’t the supply room, but to me a sensible place anyways so i put it back where i found it.

now i can’t just tell her “i used them, but didn’t know i got them from the wrong place.” that won’t be good enough. according to the email, these guns are “clearly labeled” that they belong in the supply room. i’ll also point out that the tape guns are prolly labeled with one of those “oh so handy” label makers. just like half the office. “oh, this is chris’s mouse!” i’m pretty good at unconsciously ignoring the labels now.

i can’t pretend to have found them either. too risky.

and i can’t just use one secretly either. the office has no walls. she will hear me use it.

so i’m sitting here wallowing in my inability to confront people.

this weekend my ex-roommate called me with an extra ticket to the white stripes show. i was only marginally interested in seeing them. but. there are a few songs of theirs that i really dig. and as i hadn’t hung out with brad for a while and i hadn’t been to any shows since i got back from my trip i decided to check them out. besides. they were bound to have some decent opening acts. damned if i could figure out who they were before the show though. their names weren’t even on the marquee. i only found out the name of the second opener by looking at the stray items of their merchandise that slipped out from under all the white stripes poster for sale.

i still don’t know the name of the first act.

blackstone generating facility

it was a pretty enjoyable show though. i was playing “hotter, colder” with the first act. i have yet to really absorb blues rock. some of the sincerity seems to be too often traded for over emphasizing eliding trailing r’s. colder. but. the other half of their show was surf revival. hotter. way hotter. i have yet to find a surf revival act i didn’t adore. the closest i’ve come to stalking (i think) is searching for old usenet posts from the members of man or astroman?.

the second act, whirlwind heat, certainly did not disappoint… me, at least. the front guy was a maniac. the bottom half of his body would slide around the stage like james brown while the top half flung itself around like iggy pop^*. at first i thought they might be german. i guess the story behind these guys is that they started off as a pretty typical rock trio until the front guy got his hands on a moog synthesizer. it was schprockets from then on. i think they lost brad when the front guy alternated between distorting moog feedback and yelling “trash bag helmet”. i was still holding on though. other people were yelling, “you suck!” which i’m betting was sarcasm.

also blackstone generating facility

then came the white stripes. jack white can really wail. i dug their performance but unfortunately (for someone, i’m sure) i was unable to really concentrate. i kept thinking about a dream i had last month. i was in this movie theater helping one of the employees fold up a large movie poster. but the more we folded in the larger it got. the movie theater guy started getting pretty visibly nervous. it did not help matters when flames started coming out of the folds of the poster. a crowd had already formed by then. it became apparent to me why the movie guy was so nervous. turns out that the flames coming from the folds were really flames from hell. the devil poked his head out. and started talking to the movie guy. really threatening like. i was holdind him back. the devil looked like this australian scuba guide i met in palau. and he, in turn, looked like freddie mercury. the devil was telling the movie guy about how he was going to go the hell and how hell really sucked for guys like the movie theater guy. i had the devil in a sort of loose headlock and although the devil was totally ignoring me i still felt like i should prolly stay out of the whole affair. but i did end up interrupting the devil. i said, “that’s just like your assessment.”

what a show!

on friday i watched i decided to bike around town with my camera. i mainly took pictures of or near the charles river.

i took some pictures of the blackstone generating facility on memorial drive. reed, my boss, curator of the “largest collection of images of super 8 equipment”, has some weird mini obsession with this place. i thought i would take a couple pictures of it for his site.

last week this other guy i work with made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt. on the way to lunch me and nelson picked up some “cookies & m&m’s” from some guerilla type marketer. getting back to “the office” with our lunches i took the candy bars out of my pocket and threw them on the lunch table.

“whoa! where’d these come from?” - my boss again, who is also always interested in new objects. he is ever refining an estimate of the number of distinct objects in his house. “jim. do you think a box of paper clips counts as one object or should i count each paper clip?”
“there’s someone handing them out up by the copley t stop.”

jenny’s kittens are getting bigger

“oh my god! what the hell is this!?” chris, the other guy, who foiled my plans for a handlebar moustache after my trip by giving himself one first. “i can’t believe guys actually took these!”

“it’s not like we paid for them.”
“unconscionable. who would eat that?”
“what’re you talking about? where i went to junior high you could trade smokes for cookies with m&m’s in them.”
“they look like they have anthrax in them.”

i was teetering on the edge of losing my calm, serious work demeanor at this point. the utter vehemence that had been not so gradually building up in his attitude was poised for the kill. then nelson opened one to eat it.

“jesus! it looks like a 4 year old made that.”
“har har … !”
“excuse me, could you keep it down we’re on a conference call.”

game. set. match.

* i met this guy in new york once who used to tour with iggy pop as his drummer. he told me that iggy made everyone watch the jerk before each performance. wow.

last night i rented three movies. cutter’s way, the deer hunter, and wayne’s world 2. christopher walken was the theme, i suppose. the deer hunter features his first major role in a movie (or at least first role in a major movie). wayne’s world 2 features what is hands down his finest role. ask around. then finally, the guy who recommended cutter’s way to me sort of looks like christopher walken.

it’s still snowing in boston

the guy at the video store accused me of only renting the deer hunter and cutter’s way in an effort to legitimize my rental. he implied the wayne’s world 2 was populist crap and was the only thing i was interested in seeing. i said, “look at the cast! christopher walken, tia carrere, charlton heston, drew barrymore, tia carrere, rip taylor!” rip taylor was a bit of a set back for my defense. a defense which obviously failed since, on my way out, i was asked if i wasn’t sure that i didn’t want to rent citizen kane and cutthroat island too.

jenny’s foster parenting kittens

one summer, a few years ago when i was living in pasadena, i frequented this one video store. i went to rent a couple of movies along with this girl who i’m pretty sure only hung out with me only because i knew who jean cocteau was.

“you have three very overdue dvds.”
“uh. i’ve never rented dvds from here.”
“dudley do-right, south park, and from dusk till dawn. … 2.”
“i swear i never rented those.”
“you actually rented that tripe?” said the girl i was with, confirming my suspicion.
“no, i didn’t rent those.”
“sir, it says so right here. you did. you rented them along with the bank dick, i confess, and murmur of the heart.”

i’m the urban iceberg, baby!

here’s where it all became clear to me. weeks and weeks prior, along with the three the clerk just mentioned i tried to rent l’avventura. when the clerk opened the video to check that i hadn’t cleverly slipped a porn tape into the box - as if my choice wasn’t already “artistic” enough - i noticed that the tape in the box was actually lamerica. not what i wanted to see. i went back to check for another copy (no such luck). returning to the counter i found the clerk checking someone else out. someone who was renting some dvds! the clerk had already scanned my card and must’ve rented the other persons dvds to my account. ha hah!

i explained the story murder, she wrote style to the clerk and the manager, who had now come over to see what the commotion was about. i was pretty agitated because they wanted a hundred and some dollars in late penalties and replacement costs. so when they were only marginally swayed by my version of the events leading up to the current situation i played my trump card.

“look, i’ve rented a couple dozen movies from you this summer. none of them have been made after 1970 and in this country. you think i’m going to steal dudley do-right?”
“hmm. i’ll talk with the girl who checked you out. she’s made this mistake before.”

when in doubt, condescend.

ps. last week i found out that my roommate and i both remember where we were when we first heard eminem.

a while ago i decided to try start reading infinite jest. when i checked out, one of the bookstore clerks snorted and said, “aah, the jest.” the rest of them giggled. that just poured salt all over my other prejudices about the book. based on everything that i’ve heard about this book screams pretense. so much so that i’m too embarrassed to read the book on the t, where much of my reading occurs. it’s my own dumb hang-up. but then again, it is my own dumb hang-up. in any case, i’m now on my third “i’m not actually reading infinite jest” book. it’s hilarious, but i’d be nicer if i felt better about reading my “look at me, everyone, i read big books” book in public. a friend of mine suggested i make a cover for it.

so i did.

solitary jest

and transformed this into this. i put an oprah’s book club logo on the spine and the lyrics to “dancing with myself” on the back. i was also able to change the author’s name from “thomas w. laqueur” to “thomas wanqueur”. tomorrow i take it for a test drive.

last night i had an interesting dream. i was going to be put to death (i recently watched mr. death). quite often my sense of anxiety or fear is really blunted in my dreams. throughout this entire death row dream i never felt scared or upset or anything. i was very calm. there were a number of things to belie what was happening. first of all, i wasn’t in prison. i think i was in a lecture hall and i was dressed really casually. second, there was only three of us in the room. a friend of mine who was also going to be executed and the executioner, my boss. my boss and i get along quite well and i’m way certain that he has no intention to kill me. we were to be offed by lethal injection. but we weren’t really going to be injected. in front of each of us were three tall styrofoam cups filled with ice and the particular poison. complete with big plastic straws.

christian science center

my boss, switched out one of my styrofoam cups with a glass of really thick apple juice, almost apple sauce. “this is better for you.” he also gave me a plate of really soggy and stale looking french fries. i sat for a moment and decided, “fuck it, i’m gonna have to do it at some point.” i didn’t feel any anxiety at all and i remember thinking, shouldn’t i be less mellow about all this? but, i grabbed the straws from the two remaining cups of poison and sucked it down as quick as i could. it tasted like horchata. which was appropriate since that’s what i usually drink from tall styrofoam cups. i left the apple juice alone, stood up, and ate a couple french fries. i felt the poison take effect almost immediately. all numb. i also felt my heart stopping. i had to sit down again. i closed my eyes, died, and then woke up.