Change Already!

It seems like I'm done with summer, a little while before it actually ends, at least according to the calendar. Do you know what I mean? It isn't just that I've had it with the heat, and I have, or that all the highlights of my summer are behind me, maybe they are, maybe they're not. It's not even som much about being done with summer, I'm just ready for fall. I'm ready for the sense of change that comes with a new school year, or for those of us out of school, the knowledge that summer is over and it is indeed the less fun loving fall.

For me, this is in part driven by the fact that business slows to a lazy pace in the summer. As a result, I have more time than I know what to do with, and since it is hot, and I'm naturally lazy, it's even for me to do even less. Fair enough, it will be frenetic in the fall no doubt.

However, my laziness is now only compounded by the fact that my poor body is breaking down from the miles I put on it in the heat, and a rather pathetic slide into 2nd base two weeks ago. So, now I'm barely going to exercise for the rest of the week in the hopes of turning in some sort of decent performance in Sunday's first ever NYC Half Marathon.
What's a decent performance, I couldn't tell you.

Anyway, all of this probably wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't for the fact that I'm in a bit of a cultural rut, and can't find anything I want to read or listen to. The last book I finished, Before Dawn, was fantastic, a look at evolutionary history traced through the Y Chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. I have another book along similar lines, Guns, Germs, and Steel but I can't quite get into it. I need something light to read in between, something fiction that I can gobble down in a couple of days if I like, but so far nothing has really grabbed me.

I can't find anything to listen to either. It seems to have been a really awful year for good indie music so far, other than a handful of albums that came out much earlier in the year. I guess this stuff is kind of cyclical, and now we're in another barren period like the mid 1990's, sometime after Pearl Jam, and before The Strokes. So much of what I hear on the radio is just awful, particularly the more rock oriented stuff.

Personally, I think that if indeed indie music is a bit fallow right now, it might be even more of a dry period than last time, because so much of the era I love has been cannibalized, homogenized, or just flat out rereleased the past few years. The last few days I find myself really unable to listen to anything from the 80's, anything at all.

I always feel a little guilty when I go off on a spiel like this, these are not real problems, and both you and I know this. We've all been where I am right now though. It may not be a particularly interesting place, but we've all been there, and hey, a change is coming.

Stream Of Consciousness

Become What You Are is one of the greatest album titles ever, the Smashing Pumpkins are kind of underrated, but I don't doubt Billy Corgan is a bit of an idiot. This morning the dentist told me that I am genetically predisposed towards plaque. I walked past a window that had all of these trophies in it, and I thought they were kind of quaint. Middle Class is not the goal. I know someone who I think works 80 hours a week somewhere in corporate America. I know someone else in drug rehab who can't keep a job. Do you want to be remembered forever? Do you want to be historical? I've recently discovered that white wine does have redeemable qualities. What do you listen to when there's nothing you particularly want to listen to? My relationship to music is totally 14 years old. I have to need a song, I can't just love it. Meadowlake Street by Ryan Adams is the saddest song ever. I'm not particularly sad right now, I just like the song.

(Deep Breath)

I have all these diverse interests, but I focus on very little. That's never really bothered me, but I've been aware of it. Yesterday it bothered me. I'm very good at playing devil's advocate. It allows me to argue with everybody. I met someone last week who doesn't eat fruit, not even tomatoes. This guy at the cafe I'm writing at thinks he saw a rat, so now I'm watching out for rats in the hedge. I will never ever like rats or bugs. Why is it that I'll watch fiction on tv, but other than the occasional mets game, I never watch non-fiction on tv. Oh yeah, it's not information dense enough.

That's it, go back to work now.

Because I Still Have Wine To Drink...

a little bit about politics, which most of the time I would rather not approach quite so directly.

I'm sick of hearing people whine about George Bush, the war in Iraq, and Ratnerville. I'm mostly sick about hearing people whine about the first two because whenever they do, they expect you to agree with them 100%, and I most certainly do not.

I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not it was a good idea to invade Iraq, back when we were close to doing so maybe just after we did, I'm not sure which. Either way, I wanted to ultimately know how I felt about war, and war in this situation. What I came up with is actually has nothing to do with why we said or say we're fighting the war. In the end, I came down on the side of fighting the war because I thought people like Saddam Hussein should be removed from power. I still do, and I think we have as responsibility to protect and fight for people threatened by their evil leaders elsewhere too. It's kind of a Jewish thing I'll admit, Never Again.

As for Bush, he embarasses me as an American to no end. He looks like a liar, he's abused the constitution, and he has endangered Americans throughout the world, by his mistreatment of POWs and other detainees. Insofar as all that goes, I agree with most people I know, but I would never compare him to Hitler, and that too is a Jewish thing, but it's also a common sense thing.

And then there is Ratnerville isn't there? I'm going to cover this separately. See Our Little Piece Of Turf

I Should Not Smoke The Sensemilla

The reason I don't get stoned anymore is because every other time I do, I get very unsettled, I guess in the parlance of the professionals, I get paranoid and antisocial. This is kind of annoying, primarily because I still want to smoke pot from time to time. Of course, this isn't unusual, plenty of people who used to smoke a lot of pot say the same thing. It goes in line with my general thinking on psychoactive drugs , there's a time in your life you can do them, and then there isn't. It differs from person to person, so it goes. It also underscores my thirtysomething goal of becoming a pill popping alcoholic.

Anyway, last night was one of the rare times that I decided to get high, and unfortunately, it was one of the times my brain decided to get paranoid. So, I made my way home from a show a bit early, and entered my building all set to just chill out and watch something really stonerish like the X-Files on the telly, except for the fact that my forty something neighbor was lugging forty something boxes up the stairs. Of course I had to help her, I'm nearly twice her size, 20 years younger, and I think she may have a limp or something.

Of course I had to help her, despite the fact that small talk with her was lower on my list of things to do than cleaning the toilet that time. I also wasn't sure that my coordination was really up to par at the time. So, I hauled the remaining boxes up the stairs as she told me a story about her father who wanted them out of the house, and I told her about how my mom was the same way, and then I went inside, and very stoned, I tried to pay attention to the Mets game, something that was really beyond me at the time.

The Cat Lady Of Roenicke Place

You can see these people coming from a mile away. A lot of the people that call me are pretty stressed out by the time I answer the phone, but some have a little something extra going on in their voice. It's that little bit of nervousness that people who may not have the greatest of social skills get when they're talking to strangers. You can just listen to them and you know something is not right, and this is sad, but it is not the point. The point is sometimes these people have 18 cats, and I can't help but think this is sad also.

Animals are great, I love my dog Kinka, she's a great pal, has been for years. It's never occurred to me to get her a dog so she'd have company. That's the reason a lot of people get a 2nd pet, and sometimes even a 3rd. Sometimes people don't stop there. In some cases, like the cat lady of Roenicke Place, 8 is not enough, neither is 18, she has 19. 19 cats in a 1.5 bedroom apartment, a small one at that.

Do you know what that smells like? If you're in Manhattan right now where it's 100 degrees, go outside and smell the garbage on the nearest curb, 10x worse. You walk in to these people's homes and you're overwhelmed and you just know it's not going away, you're not going to get used to it. It's disgusting.

It's easy to believe these people are filling up a void in their life with their animals, in fact there's nothing wrong with that. Like I said I love Kinka, and I will be very sad when she's no longer there to greet me at the end of the day. However, I don't see her as a replacement for family, and I don't think I ever could. She has a different role than that, maybe nearly as important, but different.

And this got me to thinking about whether people who were really filling a void in their lives with pets, the cat lady who is not likely to ever get married, this girl N. who
has two pugs that are obviously sibs for the kids she won't have; are actually creating a family or joining a pack, or engaging in someting else altogether.

And I'm trying not to make any value judgements, but I don't see how it's possible that these relationships we have with animals can even begin to fill the needs that family does. While I'm at it, I have a hard time believing that people can really be happy alone in the long run. I'm not so sure about kids, but I don't even like them that much, and I kind of want them, not that I could begin to tell you why.

This train of thought was largely sparked when a newish friend of mine, got a 2nd dog. She had gotten the 1st recently and over several drinks, it got me and e to wondering how many cats and/or dogs were enough. Near as we can tell, a single adult living alone certainly crosses the line when they have either.

a. 4 or more cats
b. 3 or more dogs
c. Any combination of 4 cats and dogs
d. 1 really odd animal (pig, duck, etc..) and any 2 cats and dogs.

Now, while these numbers are certainly argueable, there was some sense behind this.

Do what you will with this.