A review of The Washingtonienne - so now a former $25,000/year Washington intern is making six figures on a book about her escapades taking money for sex. I bet the hookers out on L street don't make that kind of money. You see kids? Even if you're going to be a prostitute, it pays to have an education.

link to this | comments (0) | File: 

If I had to name places I can't stand to be, top on the list would probably be hospitals and the DMV. I dislike the former because it usually means I'm unwell or somebody I know or love is unwell. In general, hospitals tend to remind me of my own mortality, which is something I try hard to avoid. The DMV also reminds me of death in that I begin to understand what purgatory must be like.

In DC, and I imagine quite a few other cities, being at the DMV also means that you get to meet and interact with dedicated, indeed monk-like, individuals who seem to have mastered the art of how not to smile. Also, and most people don't know this, but DMV workers are brilliant linguists, with a subtle and charming mastery of the words no and can't. Oh, how it's almost like music listening to them speak.

But enough revelry at my joyous good fortune. I shall not gloat that I got to spend my entire afternoon at the DMV today among these enchanting wordsmiths.

It all started with a letter. The letter said I had not paid a parking violation and that the fine was being escalated to the next bracket, $60, as a penalty for my delinquency. "I don't remember getting a ticket," I thought. "Maybe Catherine got one and forgot to tell me." I tend to speak out loud to myself when confronted with strange and disturbing news such as this. I called Catherine and, just as I had suspected, no tickets. The first thing I looked for was where the citation had been given - 19th and I street, NE, an area where Catherine and I have never even been. Then I noticed something else strange: the license plate was not our license plate. "Well, that takes care of that," I thought, "Not my car. Simple case of misunderstanding." But wait a minute, there was my name and address on the letter clear as day, next to this strange license plate number. Something was amiss. A nagging feeling in my gut told me this was not going to be easily rectified.

My first phone call was to "Adjudication Services," whose address and number are printed on the citation. I gave them the citation number and spoke to a pretty nice woman who told me some other interesting facts about my ticket: the police officer who wrote the ticket had described the car as a Saturn. "I knew something was wrong," I said. "I couldn't possibly drive a Saturn." I now noticed the word 'SATR' in all-caps on my ticket for the first time. Ah-ha! That's what that meant. But when the woman on the phone checked against the actual plate numbers, she found that they belonged to a Mercedes, not a Saturn. What was more disturbing, however, was that my name did come up in her database as being the owner of this Mercedes. "But I don't own a Mercedes," I told her. "I own a Volkswagen GTI." I gave her my actual plate numbers and she verified that, yes, I did indeed still own a Volkswagen GTI, which I was relieved to hear. But that did not change the fact that I also owned a Mercedes.

Overall the woman, whose name was Mary, seemed sincerely concerned and bewildered with my predicament. She gave me some instructions to follow. She told me I should write a letter to "Adjudication Services," explaining that I do not own this car and would they kindly relieve me of this terrible opprobrium (my own words). She also said I should contact the DMV as soon as possible to find out how my name had become attached to this car's registration. I hung up a bit confused, but optimistic overall. It was just a matter of a simple letter and a quick phone call. I would simply explain the misunderstanding to all parties and all would be well with the world. I don't know what kind of drug I was smoking this morning, but it wasn't long before I realized my folly and snapped back to reality. No, this was something that would most certainly take more than a couple of well-reasoned communications.

My next call was to the DMV. This person, named Ms. Robinson, was tremendously unhelpful and said this was not a DMV matter, but an adjudication matter. "But," I said, "they told me I had to look into the root of this problem with you guys." I can't remember exactly what she said, but whatever it was, it demonstrated great mastery of those two magic words, no and can't. "Okay, I will call adjudication services back," I said. I can't recall if I heard the click of the phone hanging up before I spoke the word 'back' or after, but the two sounds were pretty close in my mind.

I called "Adjudication Services" back and spoke to another pretty nice person who again demonstrated concern for the issue. I didn't know it was possible, but these folks really knew how to put the 'service' back into 'adjudication.' This woman set me straight. She made it clear that simply writing a letter to them was not going to resolve it. "No?" I said, innocently. "Well," she reasoned, "if you just send us the registration of the car you do own, who's to say you don't own more than one car?" Ah, here was a woman who knew her stuff, I thought. Our office has to have proof that you do not, in fact, own that car in question, and that can only be acquired from the DMV. It was then clear to me what my next steps had to be: I would have to venture to the DMV office. It gave me chills just thinking about it.

At the DMV, I waited an hour before my number was called. I was certain that they would run my report, and, of course, it would show that I only had one car. Then I would say 'Thank you very much' and be on my way with my evidence, my proof, that I was a proud Volkswagen owner, not a Mercedes or Saturn owner. But the report confirmed my worse fears to be true: I actually owned a 2002 Mercedes with an expired DC registration! Had this all happened in some alternate state of being? Had I slept? I started to wonder if I had been cast in some cruel reality-prank show and I looked for signs of my friends lingering in the corners ready to spring out and say, "You've been punked!" When I asked the woman how this could be, how I could own this car I'd never seen or heard of before, she fell back on her wits, using no and can't in a bewildering display of verbal cunning. I managed to retort that this time she wasn't going to fool me with her double-speak, I needed to get to the bottom of this. So she directed me to her supervisor.

The supervisor, to her credit, displayed a certain bit of compassion over the situation, but no more than was absolutely necessary. By now I was a bit dazed. I offered her the oddly-formatted document that showed I owned two cars and managed to utter the words, 'Not mine.' I think she felt a little sorry for me, and she told me to have a seat while she looked into it. I did as I was told. People came and went. I outlasted all the people that had been in the room when I arrived. I watched new people show up, their numbers were called, they stepped up to the counter, exchanged papers, and most left with happy little smiles on their faces. They had gotten their new driver's license, or parking permit, or whatever the fuck. Damn happy people with their known, tangible cars! They didn't know what it was like to have imaginary cars sprout up on their records, complete with their own parking tickets and, who knows, a trunk full of recently smuggled contraband drugs. Oh, these people were living a fairy tale and I hated them for it.

Another hour went by and there was no sign of my nice supervisor lady who had been kind enough to offer me a seat. I asked a security guard if she could help me find the nice lady, that I thought she must be lost, or I was lost, or both. The security guard must have known where to look. Soon after that, the supervisor emerged from the back room with news that she had contacted the office where the microfilm is stored and that they would be getting back to her, hopefully soon. She gave me her name and number and asked for mine and told me that she would call me when she learned anything. I tried to give voice to the many questions swirling in my mind. "Documents . . . there are . . . there must be . . . signatures . . . proof. . . evidence." I said. "Not at our office . . . NO HERE," she replied, shaking her head. "Mi-cro-film." She spoke in clear syllables to make sure I could understand her.

So now it's a waiting game. Hopefully I will find out soon whether I'm truly the proud owner of a 2002 Mercedes. If I could just make this elusive car materialize before me, I might be able to make some money off of it by simply paying the parking ticket and selling the car, along with the contraband drugs in the trunk!

link to this | comments (11) | File:  DC 

Last week I spent a fast weekend in Dallas on the foot of a larger trip to Houston. While there, I went to a club called Brooklyn with my dad to see Martha Burks and The Band. Martha Burks was good, but her band was fucking incredible. I don't drop the f-bomb too often on my blog, so when I do, you know it's justified.

Listening to these guys is like good foreplay. It lulls you into this pleasant, listless state of sensory bewilderment. You become warm and weightless, like you're floating in some viscous, primordial gel. You forget things you once knew. Each taste, each smell, is a strange encounter. Small things like breathing suddenly don't matter. And in this sensory overload, you begin to feel almost numb, anesthetized. You find yourself detached and wishing it wouldn't end, but with fear and loathing, you know it will. And the only thing to do is hope you won't embarrass yourself too crudely when it does.

Eh-hem.

Anyway, the drummer was this heavy-set guy who tended to look out the window most of the gig, which gave the appearance of effortlessness, boredom, or both. But every once in a while he'd turn and make a motion to one of the other band members and you'd see that his whole mind, possibly his whole being, was in the song. His solos were these free-form, off-beat, almost a-rhythmic series of ripples and pulses that somehow fell into cadence at the end of it all. Unreal. The bass and keyboard player were equally impressive. At one point the keyboard player played this series of triplets that caused a strange utterance to escape my mouth. It was gibberish. But I had said it and it seemed good.

Yes, these guys reminded me why it is we play music - to transcend our normal language and rise to something more basic, more instinctual, more universal. I left the club feeling inspired and that night I dreamed deep colors and rich plots. Now, all I can think about is playing music. Other things are beginning to pale in comparison. Sometimes, I won't think about playing music. During these times, these times when I'm not thinking about playing music, I'll think about listening to music, and this will inevitably lead me to stop thinking about it and instead start listening, start playing.

Which brings me to Mat's music survey which he has passed on to me, among others:

Total Volume of music files on my computer: 7.54 GB, 1,176 files, 225 folders.

Last CD I bought: Well, the last full CD I bought, was actually downloaded from iTunes and was Bob Schneider's I'm Good Now (Amazon Link), which has a couple of great tracks on it, including the title track.

Song playing right now: Corn Flakes and Sodium Penethol by Bob Schneider (The Galaxy Kings)

Five Songs I listen to a lot these days:

I'm Good Now, Bob Schneider from I'm Good Now
"Untouchable Face," Ani DiFranco from Dilate
"Too Far Apart," Wilco from A.M.
Ireland, Tori Amos from The Beekeeper
Getting Better, Bob Schneider from I'm Good Now

Wow, looking at those, it appears I'm in some strange sort of 'recovery' mode. Must've been the recent trip to Texas, and the resulting excavation of my past, that did it to me. Well, I've surfaced and am better for it.

link to this | comments (2) | File:  Music 

Last Saturday, Cath and I went to New York to celebrate the birthday of one of my cousins, who was turning 60. It was a true New York Italian party, complete with an accordion-led band that played some great Italian Polkas. There was dancing, singing, and of course, eating. I regained contact with several of my cousins who I hadn't seen since 1991.

We drove back late Saturday night so I could catch an 8:25 am flight to Houston Sunday morning. Now New York had been rather balmy, but it was nothing compared to Houston. Houston - where outdoors is like a swamp and indoors is like a refrigerator. Houston - the land of always-on AC. My glasses fogged up as I walked outside the airport. Ah, yes. Houston. H-Town. This used to be 'home' and I needed no further reminder as to why I would never call it that again.

Paul picked me up from the airport. Paul and I have been friends since we were 4 years old. Throughout elementary school and most of junior high, Paul and I would hang out almost every day together. I have two blood-siblings, but if there were another sibling that I could name simply because of the shear amount of time we spent together during childhood, it would be Paul. It was good hanging out with him, but also strange - strange because of how different our lives were from 24 years ago when we read Mad Libs into a tape recorder during late night sleep-overs, or played an intricate game of 'can't touch the ground' after school. (The object of the latter was to go through every part of my house without touching the ground, as the rather unimaginative name implies.) Now here we were, on a plot of land that would soon be where Paul and his wife Erica's first house would stand. We stood on this property, now just a plot of weeds and dirt, and listened to the crickets sing their high-pitched songs through the grass. We remembered days riding our bikes in fields just like this in our neighborhood of Norchester, making jumps out of the dirt, riding until we were exhausted, covered in sweat. We'd cool off in the pool, eat, and go back out for more until there was no daylight left. At that age, we never minded the hot, Houston air constantly pressing down on us like some warm, damp sponge. At that age, we were invincible.

Sunday evening, after a day at the pool, and a Mexican food outing, Paul and Erica drove me back to my mom's house, where my mission of the week was to start: I am to clean out most of my junk and decide what needs to be kept and what needs to be tossed out. The impetus behind this weeding out of old things has to do with my mom's imminent move to Dallas.

Most of the stuff I'm finding is stuff that needs to be kept. It's taking a while to filter through it all, because I'm winding up looking at all the photos and reading all the journals. During third grade, we had to keep a journal in one of my classes and I'm so glad we did because it offers a great glimpse into that year of my life. Some of the entries are simply accounts of what happened that day, others are stories I made up.

Here's the entry from my birthday:

November 24th, 1982

Birthday!

Today was my Birthday! It was fun! I got a new tennis racket and a swetsuit. I played all evening with Paul and he watched me open my presents. When Paul left, my mom and I went out for mexan food my favorit. I have a specil waiter named jose and he was going to come and sing me happy birthday but i was in the restrooms. I was mad! But he brought me a sopapiya and put a candel on it and made it into a birthday sopapiya. Instead of a birthday cake. When we got home I read a book and went to sleep.

Pretty cool. So simple. Is that me?

Other interesting things I found included Star Wars figures, matchbox cars, Garbage Pale Kids, wacky pack stickers, lots of photos, and notes from junior high girlfriends.

This evening, we drove by our old house and my elementary school. I lived in Houston from the age of 4 until 18, so just driving around this area causes a flood of memories, things I haven't thought about in years. It's making me realize that it's probably good to eventually leave the place where you grew up. Otherwise, you'd constantly be confronted with moments from the past, constantly reliving old memories. It's hard enough for me to relive the memories of six months ago, much less 26 years ago.

I guess, in small doses, reflecting on those years is therapeutic. It reminds you of who you used to be, and in a way, reinforces who you have become. Every so often it's good to come face-to-face with your old self and get reacquainted.

link to this | comments (4) | File:  Childhood  Friends 

Okay, I thought I would be against this sort of thing on general principle, but I have to admit that the personalization options in the new Google Fusion is pretty neat! Read a full article here.

link to this | comments (1) | File: 

If you've been thinking to yourself, 'Where might I go to smell teriyaki-scented car fresheners, have rubber, decapitated limbs thrown at me, and have brutally graphic, frequently gory, and often horrific prose read to me?' then I have just the thing for you: go see Chuck Palahniuk read at one of his 'Smell the Meat' book tour stops. Last night I was lucky enough to see this odd, carnivorous event first hand, and I have to say that, while I did not become one of the many people who have actually passed out while he read from his new novel, Haunted, I could certainly see how this was possible.

The event took place in the Grand Ballroom of the National Press Club, which is on the 13th floor of that building. Already, before even entering the room, I was feeling a bit 'haunted' by that fact. I've been to the Press Club for one other occassion: a press conference held by the large non-profit I used to work for, and it was also on the 13th floor. What I found myself wondering then, and again yesterday was this: Why does this building even have a 13th floor? Isn't that supposed to be a no-no?

The Grand Ballroom was already mostly filled by the time I got there, so here is some good advice if you do go to a Palahniuk reading in the future: get there early. He's often early himself, apparently, and will sign books at a leisurely pace before the event starts. He also seems to enjoy standing for odd poses with fans who want a picture with him. I saw him pose with several people, pretending to inject a fake needle into their arms. (This had to do with the fact that one of his fans had given him a pen that looked like a syringe before the event.)

I found a seat near the center of the room next to a mother who appeared to be accompanying her three junior-high aged kids to the event. The first thing I noticed about this woman was that she wore mocassins, and the way she was dressed, it seemed like she had walked straight out of my 1985 elementary school yearbook. She did not look comfortable at this event, and that made me a little uncomfortable, particularly when Chuck told stories about guys caught dead in sex booths, still holding their dicks in their hands, or a chronic masturbator with HIV who was afraid he had killed his dog because the ignorant canine would inevitably find and eat his soiled tissues from the trash-can each morning. Oh yeah. This was some uncomfortable business, alright. Still, most of the people laughed, gaffawed, or at the very least, cracked a smile. Not the mom sitting next to me.

The first thing Chuck did when he got up to the podium was have some helpers pass out these teriyaki-scented car air-fresheners. You quickly learn that the words 'air-freshener' and 'teriyaki-scented' are contradictory in nature. He then asked people to 'touch their meat' and if they didn't have any meat, to 'touch somebody else's meat.' I found this quite humorous, in an MTV, Beavis-and-Butthead sort of way. I like a literary man who can come down bathroom humor now and again, and with Chuck, this is again and again.

Chuck told a couple of stories about past readings, and some of the strange fans he'd met along the way. Then he read from his novel, Haunted. He read a story from it called 'Hot Potting,' which, if it isn't the most grotesque story in the book, it probably ranks pretty high up. The climax of the tale involves a stark, shocking description of the particulars of what happens when a man is slowly killed from falling into a scalding hot-spring that is 200 degrees fahrenheit. The prose from this story is at times crude, and at times scientific, just like most of Chuck's writing. He uses the crude to bring it down to raw basics. Then he uses the scientific language to keep reminding you that this is real. This really could happen to a person.

I was pretty grossed out, but luckily I'm not the kind of guy who becomes light-headed or sick from hearing such verbal descriptions read aloud. But somebody like Catherine definitely would have had to leave the room. In fact, several people did just that. Most stayed, however.

When the reading was over, Chuck opened a big bag of rubber limbs - legs, feet, arms, hands - and began hurling them into the audience. They were shockingly real looking, complete with painted on blood, and bones that jutted out of the limbs. I came very close to grabbing a leg of my own as it spun through the air at a frightening velocity, but it went just over my outstretched hands. I felt the breeze of it touch my fingers. Chuck said these made good dog toys, but I don't have a dog, so they wouldn't have done me much good.

The event closed with a Q&A session. My favorite moment out of this was when a young girl just about to graduate from high school asked Chuck if he thought it was worthwhile to spend a lot of money going to writing programs to learn how to write if you can just go and do it without the formal classroom. I understood what was at the root of the question: what were his thoughts on creative writing programs, MFAs, etc? Were they a waste of time? His response was very tactful and insightful. On the one hand, he didn't want to discourage her from pursuing an education that would probably serve her well. He joked that there were a lot of professors out there who made their living from those sorts of programs and one day he hoped to be one of them, so he didn't want to shoot himself in the foot. But, on the other hand, he told her the only way to have stories to tell is to live an interesting life, choose your friends 'unwisely,' and make stupid mistakes as frequently as possible. But then he made sure to add this at the end: just don't get brain damage and don't die. I thought that was a nice touch.

The mom next to me still did not smile.

I stood in line to have my hardback copy of Haunted signed by Chuck before I left. I stood in line for about 20 minutes trying to think of what I was going to say. When I got up there, it was all very fast, but I managed a brief exchange that went something like this:

"I think it's encouraging that you didn't start seriously writing until you were in your early 30s and that you were published at 35. I'm in my early 30s now and I sometimes wonder if I missed my creative prime because I was too busy living."

He gave some thought to this before he said, "We haven't gathered enough good stories until we're at least 31."

Then he handed me the signed book. I smiled, thanked him sincerely and walked away grinning. I'm 31, I recently left my job to begin writing part-time, and I do finally feel like I have some stories to tell.

link to this | comments (6) | File:  Reviews 

I think one of the funniest things about the recent news concerning Deep Throat's identity is how we all politely ignore that the informant was named after a 1972 porn film about a girl whose clitoris is in her throat. I suppose it says something that we're all able to stifle a Beavis and Butthead giggle every tme the name is mentioned. Thinking back, I'm sure it made my mom squirm a bit when I originally learned about Deep Throat while writing a paper about Watergate in 7th grade. Bob Woodward, you have a sick sense of humor.

link to this | comments (0) | File: