10-3-02

Here I am on the freakin' Q train. I'm on the Q train because for some reason the R is running behind. The Q train bothers me for reasons I've never been able to pin down. It just looks at me crosseyed when it pulls into the station. It thinks it's so smart, why, I oughta...

Anyway, I'm on my way home from my first multi-day temp assignment in a month. I don't know about other cities, but the NYC economy is brutal right now. Ass-poundingly brutal, in fact, because as the unemployment rate rises, so does the price of housing, for some reason unknown to science. Well, maybe not to science, but to me. Thankfully we've got the housing thing covered for a while, but we'll have to be a bit more aggressive in searching out future apartment deals. But that doesn't bear thinking about when I can barely get a frrrrreakin' job for more than one day per week.

Waaaaaah, waaaaaah, bitch, gripe, moan, yeah, yeah, I know I'm sleeping in the bed I made. Such uncertainty is the price of tempdom, so I oughta shut my yap. Though I'm becoming a recurring character in the Rich Bitch Clothiers Show. I'm like A. Whitney Brown or Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live. I'm there a lot, but I don't really work there. This assignment is somewhat more lengthy, so I'm kinda like David Puddy on Seinfeld. I might make it to Newman level if I'm lucky. Or at least Tommy Chong on That 70's Show level.

I have to say right now that I have become this big That 70's Show fan. I fucking hate sitcoms for the most part, but as far as I'm concerned, that show has the most believable characters on television. Especially Forman. No, Forman's PARENTS. I'm convinced that the writers filmed my house when I was growing up. (D'oh! Hi, Mom & Dad!) And I'm sure my obsession with the show has nothing to do with the fact that Donna is incredibly hot.

Hmm? Oh, sorry. What was I talking about?

Oh, Rich Bitch. Yep, I'm back there. Back in good ol' Times Square. You know, Times Square is kinda getting to be my neighborhood now. I know it way better than any other part of New York because I've worked in nearly every section of it. Wanna find Smiler's? Got it. Virgil's Bar-B-Q? Over there. Ghost Ship billboard? Smack dab in the middle.

It's interesting, because Times Square was the first thing I really explored when we visited the city around New Year's. It was midnight & I was all wired, and the lights just drew me like a big bright person-drawing thing. The thing is, it's horrible. It's tacky, it's over-commercialized and chain-stored, it's full of fat tourists...but somehow it's just damned fascinating to me.

With all of the obnoxious advertising and Disneyfied shopping experiences popping up nationwide, there really needs to be a place that takes it as far into the ridiculous as possible, just so we know what that would look like. And Times Square does that. It is pure, unadulterated greed, smiling a plastic smile at you with its big-screen white teeth and handing you a silver shopping basket. The whole place is just very honest about what it is, and I guess I respect that.

All the more reason for Rich Bitch to be there, of course. Though my job now is to send out brochures for a charity they're involved with. It's not a bad place to work, except...

Okay, listen to me for a moment. There are many reasons to hate the 1980s. It was a largely horrible decade, and has visited many atrocities on our society that have remained well past their expiration date:

1. Hair metal (you think it's dead? think again and make the sign. you know you want to.).

2. Frasier Crane (the man's been playing that character for 20 years. for God's sake, someone assassinate him!).

3. The Bush administration (it's like that chunk that just won't flush, no matter how many times...).

But THE MOST pervasive and culturally devastating development of that entire accursed decade is the VALLEY GIRL ACCENT.

Jeeeeeeesus Fucking Christ on a STICK.

I knew this would happen. I knew it the day my sister came home and started talking like she had peanut butter lodged in the roof of her mouth (D'oh! Hi, sis!). The Valley Girl accent is dependent on all sentences ending with your mouth wide open and lips curled, as if taunting the listener to stuff a bar of Irish Spring in there. And it is EVERYWHERE now, because all the girls in all the little shitty towns that were so uncooly not in California started talking like that in the 1980s, and THEY NEVER FUCKING STOPPED. The smart ones, such as the Wifely, generally didn't pick it up or they dropped it later (as in the case of the aforementioned sister, who is now Valley-free. Hi!), but the remaining 95% of the female population is still spewing it.

The inflection, though virally present as an undertone, is at least subdued in most women my age now, but not in the ones who are still trying to be 18 ten years later (God help us all when they turn 40). And a good portion of those women are apparently employed at Rich Bitch Clothiers. I mean, I suppose it's possible that they're all from California, but come on. Thank Pete that guys didn't really have an equivalent in the 80s, at least not that I've spotted. Unfortunately, most guys borrow their voice inflections and catchphrases from beer commercials, which isn't a whole fuckload better.

All I know is, I haaaate it. No, I FUCKING hate it. It gives me bloodlust like nothing else that isn't Pauly Shore. Please, for the love of all that's good and just, if any of you haven't ditched your Valley Girl accent by now, just fucking shoot yourself in the head or get speech therapy. It is nothing short of a plague upon the land, and I'm almost not sure if big, black, pus-filled buboes under my arms wouldn't be preferable.

So all of this is to say that I like my job okay, as long as no one talks too much. On to other things...

Got a lot of work done on the disc, thanks to my friend Paul. Got my CD burner, though I'm now finding out how stupid I've been over the last 2 1/2 years that I've been recording this thing. Without lugging out the technical details, I'll just say that I can't burn anything until I've reduced the sampling bit rate. Don't worry about what that means, the upshot of it is that I'll need Paul's help to convert it to the proper bit rate and all will be cool.

Which means that I'm a much happier cranky old bastard than I've been in a while. I really think this album thing is going to exist someday soon. And the world will smart for it.

There's a sense of anticipation in the household air nowadays, and I think that's because we are doing what we set out to do, however clumsily and slowly. Moving here was the step we needed to shake ourselves out of our comfort zones and pursue these unorthodox goals we're always on about.

However, we are indulging in some comfortable silliness tomorrow. We're off to visit my friends in New Haven, and the four of us are going RenFairing in Carver, Massachusetts! (That's Renaissance Fairing, to the un-geeked.) Oh, the fake British accents will be flying. Make no mistake about it, my friend. I didn't watch all those episodes of Doctor Who for nothing.

Now the train is pulling into the station. Gotta transfer to the R and get on down to Sunset Park, where every man, woman, and child will stare openmouthed at the big honky in the tie.

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