“Accountants are cowboys of information,” Wallace scrawled.
I’m in Los Angeles because of a failing relationship. The City of Angels lies an easy 350-mile flight from San Francisco, a city where I now live for reasons that have more to do with her than I’m willing to admit but less than my friends and family back east believe. I didn’t have to see about a girl. Well, at least not entirely.
We worked wonderfully in theory when she and I lived in Brooklyn and we were dating other people. In practice, we’re a fatally flawed couple. I say ‘I love you.’ She says ‘I appreciate you.’ L.A., we have a problem.
Neither of us says anything, but it’s over. She’s known for a while. I held on to the slowly yet inevitably unwinding thread for longer – which explains why I bought us tickets to The Airborne Toxic Event’s homecoming show at the resplendent The Walt Disney Concert Hall and flew south – but I’m now letting it slip from of my grasp, too. “We lie to each other like they do and say we’re so happy / It’s easy when you’re young and you still want it so badly.”
So here we are, starring down at the foursome, their assorted friends and lovers, and the rest of the audience from our seats 20 feet above stage left. It’s fine; the concert, a charming celebration of the band’s remarkable success, is the type of event that calls for a date, even one with no future.
Later that night, she falls asleep on my arm in her bed. “I stare out the window and I think that I might scream.” I don’t. Sometimes you smile, gaze into the sky, and let things wordlessly fall apart.
Bundt Cake for Breakfast: The indie rock band
B C 4 Bfast: The boy band
Bundt Cake, Always: B C 4 Bfast’s greatest hits album
Bundt Cake for Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch: The poetry anthology
They Want More Bundt Cakes!: The parenting guide
Mini Bundt Cakes for All: The hunger-relief organization
"There are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe.”
If a friend and I spend $142.10 to watch the Golden State Warriors play the New York Knicks in Oakland, we should get seats on the bench not in fucking standing room only.
Thanks Dave
I read a lot of things on the Internet every day. A good portion of them make me worry about the future of the human race. This, however, makes me want to curl up in a ball and just give up. We. Are. Fucked.
Savage Thoughts: Making Ideas Work →
I hear great ideas for new companies all the time. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these ideas never mature into startups, and even fewer become lasting companies. This is ironic because most people think building a startup is all about having a great idea. (I believe the phrase goes “if only I had thought of Facebook, I’d be rich!”) The truth is that while a good idea is essential, it’s only the first step in creating a viable startup.
Smart dude.
A tiny image seems like the appropriate level of fanfare.
There’s something terrifying about being able to use my laptop to figure out where the airplane I’m currently flying in is located over the United States.
Also, hi Rocky Mountains.
Two truths and a bunch of lies?
And for the next two hours, as the snow piled up on the arched windows behind him, Frey delivered his opinions on the memoir genre (“bunk,” “bullshit,” a marketing tool that didn’t exist until several decades ago); fact and fiction (there’s no difference); truth (it doesn’t exist, at least not in the journalistic sense); Europe (where he turns for validation); America (which is obsessed with honesty and raises people up only to tear them down); the best writers (Mailer, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Cormac McCarthy); documentary (“a thesis on truth that hasn’t been proven yet”); Oprah (“I should have never fucking apologized”); the kind of writer he wants to be (the most controversial and widely read of his time); making literary history (he’s in it to “change the game” and “move the paradigm”; he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world); self-editing (a trap for young writers); mistakes (part of the spontaneity of a work of art); and, most important, how to write (“don’t give a fuck”; sit for ten hours a day, 600 days in a row; “write what you want to write, and make sure there is one hell of a disclaimer at the beginning”).
First, Bates gets new dorms. Now this? →
I really went to college at the wrong time.
"It was really sort of magic up until just the last part, wasn’t it? I felt it. The second verse was pretty good, I thought."
How the mighty have fallen
“My favorite part is to infer from the adjectives/adverbs chart what topic the write focuses on. It seems that Simmons is most concerned with the sport as a whole and Whitlock with the individual players, while Reilly seems to be working on a children’s book.”
Um, congrats?
(But seriously, let’s all bid a sad goodbye women’s soccer in the United States. The WPS was one more admirable, but ultimately doomed, attempt.)
Who wants to move to Turkey and join me as a basketball beat writer for the Besiktas Times?
You spend the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2006 happily confused. You didn’t know what to expect when you moved to New York City, and it’s better that way; Even if you had, you would have been wrong. Everything is harder than it should be. This is why so many would-be residents depart soon after arriving; they either burn out and move on or quietly fade into the larger canvas of New York. You won’t figure it all out, but you resolve to haltingly inch closer.
October 7, 2005, the day you add the Kaiser Chiefs “Oh My God” to your iTunes library, marks roughly your quarter-year anniversary in Brooklyn. No one celebrates. In that amount of time, you learn the basic ebbs and flows of New York, which you unironically begin calling “The City” as if it adds gravitas to your largely anonymous presence. New York is; therefore you are.
You find a job at a restaurant in midtown that requires you to clear martini glasses until 2 a.m., 3 a.m., sometimes 4:30 a.m. The bar sits far enough off Broadway that the patrons are actors, not tourists. They tip well. The successful ones come for a drink after their seventh performance of the week as Sir Robin in Spamalot, and then depart. The “actors” drink Jack Daniels and Amstel Light until your manager, fueled by cigarettes, anger, and the eternal frustration of being a New York Mets fan, finally tells them to leave.
Because the myth of being poor drives your decision-making more than reality – you will take a 50 percent pay cut when you get a full-time editing job – you eschew cabs to take the subway home to Brooklyn, behavior that’s partially fueled, you suspect, by the implied romance of the venture. Isn’t the promise of a 4 a.m. trip on public transportation why you’re here?
Invariably, somewhere between 14th street and the Broadway-Nassau station, a debate ensues in your buzzed brain: take the C to Clinton/Washington or the G to Classon? The latter stop almost certainly requires a long wait on the platform but leaves you a block and a half from the duplex apartment you share with two friends from college and a high school buddy who won’t get along in six months; the former doesn’t necessitate a transfer but drops you more than half a mile away.
Inevitably, you stay on the C, emerging above ground on a leafy street in Brownstone Brooklyn that’s ominous when it’s dark and you’re new to the city. You wear stained black clothes that signify you work in the service industry. You’re obviously carrying cash. “Oh my god I can’t believe it / I’ve never been this far away from home,” Ricky Wilson screams out of your white iPod earbuds, the only thing separating you from the blackness. It strikes you that you are rather far from home. And that it’s probably your own fault if you get mugged.
Just as quickly, you and Wilson begin to disagree: “Cos all I wanted to be / was a million miles from here.”
Sure, you may walk a little faster, but you’re happy where you are.
"Just once. That’s all I needed. If anything ever happens, if I get arrested, the newspaper has to say, ‘Emmy-nominated Tracy Morgan.’” Though about this year’s Emmys, he adds, “I’m coming home with something this year. It might not say my name, but I’m coming home with something.”