Hello.
I thought it would be
fun to revisit my old “this is what happened during the week” diary-blog thing,
but instead of recalling my memories and writing them down during the weekend,
I used the Notes app on my phone to jot random shit down in real time. I started
reading David Sedaris’s “Theft By Finding”, which is a collection of his
personal diary entries and it inspired me to do this. I have no original ideas.
Also, I constantly,
randomly alternate between past and present tense, and even though that’s bad
writing, it’s happening. I’ll just say that when I used present tense I was
just in the moment, man! Real-time, real life GRIT writing.
Quick sidenote: I bookended the week by attending WaterFire the Saturday before and after. This has nothing to do with anything, but it's purty.
Quick sidenote: I bookended the week by attending WaterFire the Saturday before and after. This has nothing to do with anything, but it's purty.
Anyway, here’s some nonsensical
daily minutiae.
Monday 09/24/18
- I began listening to the episode
of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast during which Chuck Pahalniuk was his
guest, and it was outstanding, insightful, and deeply uncomfortable at
times. If you’re a fan of Fight Club or any of his other books you should
definitely check it out. I learned that the line “I haven’t been fucked
like that since grade school” was used to replace another line that the movie
studio thought was too extreme, but which they wanted to revert to after
screening the movie (by which point it was too late).
Tuesday 09/25/18
- Several people on this train
are sniffling, to the point where they’re breaking my concentration while
trying to read. It’s like a mucus symphony.
- An older gentlemen stood at a
urinal in the bathroom at South Station with one of his hands pressed on
the wall, which is never a good look. The pose makes it look like the dude
is deriving sexual enjoyment from holding his dick with his free hand and
mentally making a “AAAAHHHHOOOOHHHH” sound like Homer in that episode of
the Simpsons when they were in New York City and he finally got to use a
bathroom.
- The Middleboro/Lakeville
commuter rail is running two hours behind schedule due to a disabled train
due to the fact that more than a single drop of rain hit the tracks. It’s
65 degrees with 96% humidity outside and yet the heat is blasting in here,
because the “feel” part of the sensory aesthetic has to accurately reflect
Hell too. The middle aged woman sitting in front of me is swearing up a
storm and periodically glaring down the stairs at the 0 train conductors
standing there in order to convey her displeasure in the most passive
aggressive way possible. She stood up once, walked over to the top step,
looked down, then turned back in a huff and returned to her seat with
curses a blazing. Middle aged white ladies are the most terrifying
creatures in existence.
Wednesday 09/26/18
- It rained last night. Running
through grass to catch a train, I managed to get mud all over my shoes and
up to my left knee. And the train was late.
- The soundtrack to the day was
Strapping Young Lad. It’s been that kind of day/week.
- I met a friend for drinks at
South Station and we talked about the kind of bass she wants to buy, and
it’s nice when someone I know also agonizes over every detail of purchasing
an instrument to the point of taking all the fun out of it, just like I
do! “Will I really like it?” “Is it worth the money?” “This is stressing
me out, I think I’m going to go watch tv and start the whole process over
tomorrow.”
Thursday 09/27/18
- I watched the season premiere of
South Park this morning. My favorite part was hall-monitor Butters
patrolling with an automatic rifle.
- The laws of spacetime have
rearranged and this week has lasted 13 billion years. My brain is a
useless pile of goo.
- My brother, cousins, a friend,
and I caught the one-night showing of Transformers: the Movie (the
cartoon, Michael Bay-less 1986 one THE REAL ONE) in the Randolph Showcase
theater. I cannot say it’s a good movie, but it was a big deal to me as a
child and I’ll love it forever. With it playing on the big screen every
flaw in the animation was amplified. I was reminded of all the plot holes
and things that didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t heard the gloriously bad
80’s Metal soundtrack played so loudly since I first saw it as a kid. It
was perfect. Pertaining to both audio and visual, this wasn’t a remastered
version either. The animation wasn’t displayed in HD and the sound was
certainly didn’t measure up to today’s standards, and I was very fine with
this. It recreated the experience of seeing the film in ‘86, when I was a
wee lad of six years old watching in horror as heroes I worshipped on tv
met their fates in various, graphic manners. On the tv show, 99.999999% of
the lasers fired from guns missed, and the rare hits resulted in, like,
maybe a red welting on one of the robots’ arm. In the movie, characters
were MURDERED. One robot took a laser shot and orange fire poured out of
his mouth as he fell to the ground, lifeless, as shown below:
Not horrifying at all to a child!
And of course, there was the Optimus Prime death scene. Traumatic as it was I choose to believe that seeing it built character in me. All children should be made to see this movie and cry out their weakness too.
Friday 09/28/18
- The long week drew to its
inevitable conclusion and I unwound by playing some skee-ball and Tetris
at the A4Cade in Cambridge (think Hipster Dave & Buster’s). Here’s a
helpful hint for playing skee-ball: what works for me is keeping my grip
on the ball loose, my wrist limp, and let the follow-through of my arm
dictate the ball’s trajectory. I landed successive 50-pointers before
somehow managing to get a ball stuck near the 20-point hole, which froze
everything and prevented me from playing any further rounds. How this is physically
possible, I do not know. But I did it.
