tikaro.com

On my dad’s recommendation, I stayed at Habitat NY last night, a European-style hotel on 57th and Lexington with the bathrooms and showers down the hall. If all you want is a place to crash, it’s fine — and the price is right. It’s a quirky place — the first room I was given didn’t have an air conditioner, and the second room has three cylindrical cavities in the floor, like bowling-ball finger holes. Plus, the place is packed with smirky Europeans: “Ja, the hotel is inexpensive. More money for unpasteurized yogurt, sehr gut!” None of which I minded, as long as the Teutons keep their damn yogurt to themselves.

I had a good book with me: my friend at [My employer], Steve Farrell, stopped by and lent me a copy of Jack London’s The Road, about his travels as a hobo in the 1890s. It was my favorite kind of book — a new library-bound hardcover, with the original typeface photographically reproduced. And the contents! I can’t believe I didn’t know about this book before — Jack wanders the country at 18, wide-eyed and not so innocent, spinning stories to soft-hearted housewives, outsmarting railroad bulls, and riding the blinds through snow-sheds over the Sierra Nevadas. At every town, he throws feet for breakfast, bumming “light pieces” at the firehouses and carving his monica on the water-tower. It’s like Kerouac, except without all the god-awful introspection. Plus, with a depression on, London had a better excuse to bum around the country.

So I devoured the book, reading about London’s march on Washington with Kelly’s Army — a spontaneous movement of thousands of unemployed men, moving en masse to demand work, and commandeering trains from the Southern Central railroad to do it. I had no idea about this! A Google search revealed traces of the march: a trail of local historical society pages about small grange halls and mercantile houses that, for one day in their history, had been forced to feed the hoboes (and, hopefully, speed them along down the line.)

Good reading for an itinerant couple of weeks! I think I’ll go carve my monica on the cubicle wall now.

I drove my rental car back to NYC this morning, and realized that after taking public transportation for eight years, I’m a junior-varsity driver in a varsity-league commute. I got cut off again and again in my beat-up Hyundai, and kept getting mad for no reason, really. I wonder if there’s any other daily activities that get people as mad as commuting in a car? Anyhow, I tried to find my Zen place, with limited success. It’s so easy to tell yourself to stay calm next time, and so hard to keep your cool when someone else starts acting like a jerk.

Kate and I closed on our house on Thursday morning; there were eight people around the table — two real estate agents (ours and theirs), two buyers, two sellers, a mortgage broker, and a title clerk, all very friendly and nice. We signed form after form, initialed page after page, and there was some good-natured teasing between the various brokers and agents about the various “sweeteners” they had managed to get into the agreement. Our agent had a “transference fee”, common on the East coast, apparently. Our mortgage broker had given us the mortgage through a local company, who was immediately selling it to Wells Fargo, resulting in a twenty-dollar transfer fee that we were paying. The total amounts in play weren’t terrible, though, and I think that we could have saved all of $100.00 by popping a blood vessel and having to glare at our agents every time we see them in the coffee shop. So I feel like we made out okay, overall. Had we done the transaction in New York, I bet we’d both be wearing barrels with suspenders right now.

A flurry of handshakes, a passing back and forth of champagne bottles in silver party bags, and the next big thing on our horizon becomes home improvement. First thing: remove the metal awnings over the doors. Second thing: rip out the pink-and-purple ceiling fans. Third thing: remove ye olde colonial number plate from the lamp outside. Fourth thing: start painting. Small rooms take just as long as large ones, I discovered to my chagrin, as I spent all Saturday cutting in around closet doors.

The neigbors are nice, and I have a whole new cast of characters to Blog about: Dudley, the 15-year-old cocker spaniel next door, who barks ferociously as he creaks towards you, picking up and putting one leg at a time: the squirrels that our predecessors had been feeding, who come and beg outside the door, and the kid across the street who’s in one of Chester County’s big marching bands and does Peking-opera style kung fu with a polyester flag in the evenings, throwing it waaaay up in the air and catching it behind his back.

Pictures to follow!

Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Boats, Subways, Buses.

[Last night: slept on the couch at my friend Michelle’s apartment on Grand street]

4:45 AM: Wake up, catch car service to LaGuardia Marine Terminal.

6:00 AM: Delta Shuttle to Boston

7:00 AM: Shuttle bus to Water Taxi

7:20 AM: Water Taxi boat ride across Boston’s Inner Harbor

7:35 AM: Boston T Blue line from Aquarium to State

7:40 AM: Boston T Orange line from State to Back Bay

[Meetings with Bridgespan in Boston]

2:17 PM: Acela Express from Back Bay to New York

5:45 PM: 1 train to 116th street and Broadway

[Columbia CTA class]

9:30 PM: Rental car from NYC to Philadelphia

[8:00 AM tomorrow: close on our house!]

Apaches at the stockade fence; post-apocalyptic renegades in the engine room?

I was sitting in a borrowed conference room at the Bridgespan Group in Boston last Thursday, and was just getting ready for 90 minutes of frantic pre-meeting HTML tweaking, when a forest of IMs popped up on my screen: all my office-mates were let go that morning. I was on the phone with Kate as they started coming in, and she describes my reaction as a kind of frantic Ned Flanders shriek: “Oh, my, GOD!” (waving tongue and squirrelly hands included.) Hearing about it on IM was eerie; like getting bulletins from a beleaugered stockade on the frontier as the Apaches force a breach in the picket. MawPlunkett: Keep firing, paw! This-here cabin’s our last holdout! And the powder and shot ain’t a-gonna last!

Everyone’s going to be fine; in fact, some profess to be ecstatic at the change. And it’s not unexpected; after three rounds of layoffs, anyone whose billability is low for several weeks running can see the black clouds on the horizon. It’s sad, though, and spooky, and I find myself wishing for a world in which everyone has happy, stable jobs that they don’t have to worry about keeping.

Between the layoffs, having been in Boston and Philly for a week, and not having a place to live, I’m feeling disjointed right now. Amtrak seems to agree with me; we’re stuck behind a derailed train right now, creeping from Newark into New York at five miles an hour with no lights or air conditioning. When I walked forward to the cafe car, I saw a Hassidic man bowing and praying with a scripture box bound to his forehead. Another man had an actual hand loom set up in his seat, and was weaving a patterned blanket from twenty strings of yarn coming from a messenger bag under his seat. Maybe civilization is collapsing, and the train is being run by a Mad Max punk with a mohawk, a coral necklace, and chunks of motorcycle tires riveted to his shoulders.

Should I stop learning Java and start learning how to throw a sharp steel boomerang?

Remember, Jesus is with you always. And his merchandising sucks.

Essay question for the day: Why is Christian graphic design so crappy and derivative? I mean, come on! When I was a full-time Christian in college, I remember getting badgered to listen to Christian bands, which meant buying Petra CDs and not pulling my hair out by the roots when someone put Amy Grant on the church van radio. No freakin’ way! I used to carry around an emergency Nina Hagen tape at all times to burn away the debilitating effects of Rich Mullins’ “Our God is an Awesome God“. Why do Christians have to imitate corporate culture, with “Lifesaviours” T-shirts and “God’s Gym”, and bands that are supposed to rock real hard, but end up sucking even harder?

Buddhists have cool graphic design. Hindu stuff kicks ass. What’s with the horrible Christian derivative merchandising? Latest culprit: the small, white oval European-country-acronym sticker. “FRG”? Nope. “SPI”, for South Padre Island? Not even that level of wretched, pissing-calvin fratboy humor. No, only now have the Christians caught up with their own entry: “JC”. Ugh.

This is a picture that I took the other day on the Amtrak train, because the guy in the suspenders was so frowny. A couple of people have told me it looks like it’s from an Amtrak brochure. Look! Rust-brown decor! Frowny guys in suspenders! Gleeful geeks with wireless connections taking surreptitious pictures and posting them to the Internet! My next site: “Sleeping Commuters From Harrisburg, Drooling on the Armrests.” Real-time!

Sorry to join the B&T set? Not hardly.

On Sunday, I rolled up my tent, packed my sleeping bag, and walked out of my apartment, leaving the keys in the mailbox before I closed the vestibule door. Yep, I moved out of the city — and for the next ten days, until Kate and I close on our house, I’m a Man Without a State, like all the expatriate dignitaries in a Krister Stendahl book. Well, maybe not just like the stateless dignitaries in a Krister Stendahl book.

Anyhow, when I walked from Penn Station to [My employer] today, I felt like I had cut the rubber band that connected me to New York — for me, now, like for umpteen million others, New York is the dirty place I go to during the day to make money. Which I seem to be fine with. I was always envious, as a kid, of my parent’s New York Years — my dad, living in a loft above a motorcycle shop and working at Look magazine, and my mom, living in the west village and going to see Charles Mingus in jazz clubs — but I feel like I’ve had a good run in New York, too, and I’m ready to move on. [later addition:] After all, how’s this for a New York Coolness high water mark? I walked into Vice UK, the hipster brit-shirt store around the corner, and they had filled the shelves with Defend Brooklyn merchandise since my last visit. The small, dirty Brit ravers gathered around to hear my stories about the origins of the shirt. (“Look! He has communed with the Mighty One! He knows about the origins of The Shirt!”)

There were birds singing outside Kate’s apartment window this morning, and all the cherry and dogwood trees are in early bloom, and the grass smelled of fresh rain. And there are tennis courts you don’t have to fight a stockbroker to use, and if you go down a flight of stairs in West Chester, it’s okay to touch the railing. And Amtrak runs between New York and Exton every day. I always knew that I’d move out of New York someday, and I was always afraid that I’d feel really sad about it, and always regret moving. Nope, didn’t happen: frankly, I feel almost like it’s the first day of summer vacation. And, if I miss it, Kate and I can just get rich and have a pied-a-terre (so that our teenage kids will have somewhere to go raid the liquor cabinet. Ha! I’ll show them: alum in the gin!)

Useful things on the Internet:

The list of *really* useful things on the Internet is pretty short: Yodlee, Project Gutenberg, Moviefone, and now this, from James Lileks: how to tell the year your house was built by looking under the lid of the toilet.

Where was my self-confidence in junior high school, when I needed it?

All day today, and I do mean alllllll day today, I’ve been normalizing data on the Soaps In Depth websites. Trouble is, the tables I’m working on are already populated with data, and it’s really really really tedious. But I’m learning to normalize much better, so that’s good. And my good friend Kieran Downes has launched his personal website, ilinxaudio.com, and has put up a new song that I’ve been listening to over and over again. It’s a really cool song, and as I’ve been sitting here normalizing data, I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to do while accompanied by this song. I’ve decided that I’d like to slick my hair back, grow a pencil-thin mustache, wear some tight, loud, plaid polyester-blend bermuda shorts hiked WAAAAY up with black knee socks, and strut around Soho with a boom box on my shoulder playing this song and a beatific smile on my face: “Look, everybody, I’m dressed like a completely retarded John Waters clone and I’m STILL WAY COOLER THAN YOU!!!”

So it’s a pretty good song, as you can imagine, even if my retarded-John-Waters-cooler-than-you button is easily pressed. It’s called “Sprinkles”; if you have a fast connection, go check it out!

PS. I could wear the Bermuda shorts in my new Mini Cooper.