areyoulistening

Last night I found a milk crate filled with old CD’s and tapes and although 90% of the CD cases were empty because my car was broken into at the stadium like 6 years ago, I did come across some actual CD’s. The tapes were old All City tapes and mix tapes Baker had made me when I had run out of Lookout! records bands to buy CD’s from.

I came across a Husker Du album that I bought because Billie Joe said he really liked them growing up and I think I may have liked 2 songs on the album…if they’re lucky. There was a Citizen Fish album that I can recall really looking alot; I think it was called “Thirst.” There were a couple of Screeching Weasel cases, but the album I wanted “How To Make Enemies and Iritate People” was not there. There was that live album the Sex Pistols released in 1996 because they got mad at bands like Green Day and the Offspring for beoming so successful. I hit the fucking jackpot by finding the L.E.S Stitiches album, which I thought was stolen. That will always be one of my favorite albums and I know Tom Gilbert is the biggest Stitches fan on the West Coast.

At the bottom of the crate was the Dirt Bike Annie album I bought in a drunken haze at the age of 19 at their show in Hoboken. They opened for the Groovie Ghoulies, who had some chick playing drums dressed like a martian or some shit that I that was boss. Before the show, Billy, Brian, Dave and I were mixing vodka that we bought at a 2nd Avenue liquor store (it was also the place I bought my first bottle of hard liquor at, by myself because the person I was supposed to meet didn’t show up. No big deal. Oh yeah, the “hard liquor” was a bottle of Malibu.) and fruit punch in giant McDonald’s cups. We walked around the Village drinking and I assume cursed at pay phones and buses. By the time we got on the Path, we all had trouble not spilling the ungodly mix all over the floor. The worst part of it was that our cups were starting to fall apart and there was all that white shit floating in the drinks. I was the oldest at 19, so Billy was either 18 or 19; Dave was 18 and Bri was 17.

Anyshits, we get to the club where the show is and I think Billy had a bookbag that we kept the giant bottle of vodka in. We found a spot up against a side wall and set up shop. For the rest of the evening we took turns going to the bar ordering four plain cokes and mixing in the vodka. I guess we figured ordering four orange juices would like a little funny, however I think that would be giving out stupid asses way too much credit. I just think we didn’t know people didn’t put vodka into Cokes. So we stood there, drank vodka and Coke like we lived in a third world country and watched the show. Dirt Bike Annie was really good live and I ended up buying the CD. The Groovie Ghoulies fucking love dead people, Frankenstein, martians and Goddamn Draculas. They were cool to see, from what I can recall but thet didn’t get me to buy an album.

The journey back to the Bronx that must have been a nightmare and I’m glad I don’t recall most of it. I do remember getting to 242nd St and walking down Broadway. We passed what is now Dr Gilbert’s Cafe and ended up going in for some insane reason. Kelly Stone was there with Katrina, Katie and Julie (The Stupids); so we hung out with them for awhile. A lot of the older guys from the neighborhood that thought we were gay, on drugs or gay and on drugs were there, so it was touch and go. I can remember writing 3TS on the dart chalkboard and someone grabbing me by the throat. I’m pretty sure it was Bobby Cook though, so he was probably just joshing around. We walked home with Kelly Stone as the sun came up and ran across the Henry Hudson parkway because it was shortcut. I am still surprised none of us got hit by a car (I’m thinking of you on that one, Billy. No offense)

I always feel very uneasy when I see an Asian person walking around wearing one of those medical masks over their face. I get the feeling that they know something I don’t…other than math, that is.

This morning on the Today Show, they were doing the usual “4th of July is coming, so be very careful with fireworks” bit. They had all these dummies set up with all kinds of fireworks in their dummy hands to show the viewers what would happen if they held onto the explosives for too long. They had the usual hands getting blown up and all that, but they saved the best for last today. They had a dummy all set up with one of those joints that shoots way up in the air and explodes into joy and joyness in the sky. This particular dummy had made the unfortunate decision to look down at the lit firework. It exploded, took off and blew his fucking head off. Matt and Meredith were both like, “Oh boy, you don’t want o see that” and “That is very uncomfortable to watch.”

But you know what, that is what July 4th is all about. A few people may get hurt very badly or have their heads taken off by Mega Roman Candles, but it is all worth it. America deserves the bright colors and loud exlplosions in the night sky even…nah, especially if people will be killed or maimed for it. America was built on the backs of dead Irish, German, Italian, Chinese and Black (Well, they were slaves) Immigrants. So how dare you take away the rights of idiot middle Americans and dimwitted Southerners to have their faces melted off by a “California Boom Dog” or a “Thuderfire Crunch Berry.” Benjamin Franklin did not die face down in the mud on Christmas Eve at Gettysburg during the bombing of Pearl Harbor for nothing! So fucking put on your American flag tee shirt, have a beer, light some stupid shit and thank God in America heaven that you live where you live!

Peral Jam played Madison Square Garden last night and it got me thinking about music in the 90’s in general. It is funny how Pearl Jam was able to kind of find their nitch nowadays as like a Grateful Dead type band that tours like crazy, but never has a hit on the radio anymore. I mean, I’m sure they aren’t hurting for cash. They were one of the biggest bands in the world when they were going really well. So good for them; I always really liked the song “Daughter.” I also thought about how weird it would be if Kurt Cobain never killed himself. I wonder if Nirvana would still be making records or if Kurt would have gone off on his own to make solo records with babies crying, little screeching sounds and other wacky shit going on? I have a feeling Dave Grohl would have been like, “I gotta get outta this band and try to enjoy my life.” I’m sure Krist Novoselic would still be bald and all looking like he lived in the woods though. I guess we’ll never know.

There is this guy at work that sits across from me and he is one of the most annoying people on the planet. He is about 4 foot 11 on a good day and makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 489 personal phone calls a day. I don’t think it is unprofessional or anything like that-I just hate what he talks about. He’ll put on these funny little voices (one of them reminds me of the one Uncle Joey used to do from Full House…the woodchuck one, you know?)  and he very rarely says “Hello,” it’s usually “Greetings!” or some dumb ass shit. From there he’ll go on to talking about old Mickey Mouse cartoons with people (Don’t get me wrong, I love Mickey and all…but come on, pal), the price of things, broadway shows or my favorite was when he was attempting to move out of his parent’s place.

“Mom, I need you to stay at the apratment until the couch comes. You know I can’t, I have my duties here at the paper! I know you have the time to take off! Golly!”

Everyday around 10:30 am or so, he starts calling all the kosher places (Come on, you had to know that was coming)  in the area and asks what kind of soup they have that day. He eats soup even when it is 100 degrees out, so he clearly has issues.

When Lost had new episodes on, he would come over to me and talk about the show. He would ask:

“Did you see Lost last night?”

I would say:

“No, I don’t watch that show.”

He would go on to explain to me what had been going on up until last night’s show and what the lastest episode was like. I would sprinkle the conversation with sayings like:

“I literally have never seen the show once, ” or “I don’t know any of the characters names. I know as a group that they are lost…that is it.”

At the end of last summer, he asked me if I liked Dave Barry and I said that I really, really, really hated him. He looked surprised at first, but went on to read me the thought of the day from his little Dave Barry calendar. I’m sure it had something to do with how hard it is to work a cell phone or how he never stops to ask directions when his lost and it pisses off his fat wife. For a month, I had the Dave Barry thought of the day (it was usually the previous day) sitting on my chair waiting for me. 

In the last few months, he has started performing little magic tricks for the office. They usually have something to with making four quarters turn into a silver dollar or making poker chips appear to change color or disappear. For the most part, he is performing tricks that someone who lived in the Wild West during the Gold Rush would appreciate. The most uncomfortable part is when he screws it up or drops it on the floor in the middle of the trick and says:

“Oh, I just do it for the kids. Myself being the biggest kid in the world!”

He also lacks the ability to realize when a conversation is over. He lurks around looking at you after telling you all about the deleted scenes from “The Pricess Bride” movie as you attempt to give the old “Well, back to work” look. Just today he asked me if I wanted ear plugs because they are doing drilling on our floor. I fake laughed and said no. He stood there for at least 15 seconds…saying nothing. I wanted to skin myself alive.

He doesn’t mean to be annoying, but some of the most annoying people never intend to be that way. In fact, I guess at some point I said something about liking the Onion to him, so now he hand delivers the Onion to me every Wednesday. It is a nice gesture, but nice gestures done by people that get under skin end up being…well annoying. The thought of the Onion now makes me think of this guy, so I’m going to have to say something to him about it. I don’t want to hate the Onion because he hands it to me with his grubby, little matzo ball soup covered hands, you know?

Late last week may have been the final straw for my patience with him. He comes up to my desk and says:

“Have you heard they’re moving us to the other side of the building?”

“I heard the were thinking about it,”  I said through clenched teeth.

“Yeah, it looks like we’re going on the other side of those glass doors and the web people are moving here,” he said with the smile of person that is just asking to get hit over the head with a stapler.

“I guess that makes sense, ” I answered looking at my cell phone pretending I was getting a text message.

There was a good amount of silence until he perked up with, “Yup, I hear it could be done by July.”

“Oh yeah, who told you that?” I said and I was a little interested at that point.

Apparently that is exactly the question he wanted me to ask because as soon as I asked it, there was smile on his fat face from ear to ear. He looked from side to side and said:

“I can’t say. I can’t tell you where this information is coming from.”

“Are you serious? What for? You know what, I don’t care. Just let me…are you done? Is that it with this little bit here?” I said feeling like an idiot.

He smiled, turned and walked the walk of a very short person. As he waddled away I began to wonder,”Did I just get played?” We’ll see what his next move is, but if he doesn’t play his cards right he could see his “Dave Barry Thought of the Day” calender suddenly in his ass.

When you’re a little kid, you want to be a baseball player or a singer or an actress. After awhile, you start to realize that shit like that is not going to happen. You get to high school and some tall, lanky, creepin’ Jesus looking motherfucker throws you a curveball with 1-2 count and you jump out of the way only to have the pitch be called strike three. Or you can’t sing to save your life or your not good looking enough to be an actress.

The factof that matter is, eventually life will become a series of smaller and smaller dreams you fight like hell to protect. After you’ve let the big dreams go, you start to think on a smaller level and you can only hope something sticks. You get out of high school and twist and turn through college trying not to take classes you don’t even need. I know at some schools they hold your hand and make sure you only take what you need, but the SUNY/CUNY system is there to make straight cash, babay! I would sign up to take “New York City’s Role in the Revolutionary War” and find it it was totally useless for my major at the end of the semster. Whatever, I guess it was just as much my fault.

In college, you fucking sift through everything in hopes of finding something. I had no idea what I wanted after I finished at Purchase, so I put the real world on hold and went to grad school. It was easy to dress it up like, “Oh Sean is going on to get his Master’s in Liteerature! He really knows what he wants!” Yeah, I knew I didn’t want a fucking job. I continued to make cotton candy at Yankee Stadium and other sporting arenas throughout the country. You may ask yourself why they would fly our stupid asses to Vegas, Miami, Detroit and Atlanta just to make cotton candy. I’m not really sure, but I know we were good at it, pal.

After grad school, I was under the impression I could just become a college professor because I’m a fucking idiot. It turns out if you have a graduate degree, you can only teach at a two year school–which was fine with me. However, they all want experience and you can’t get any unless you’ve taught somewhere. I guess you could call it, “Getting the screwgie.” It seemed that would have to be another dream that would be fucking choked out of me by this hell sucking world.

I got that internship at the Daily News (which Tracey called “Your volunteer position at the Daily News” which drove me up a wall) and ended up getting a position (and no, it is not 69 with other dudes)  at the News that paid me to come in everyday.

Everyday I would apply for teaching jobs I had no business applying for. SUNY Empire called me and the guy who interviewed me grew up in Riverdale so that helped me get the job. I got another job in January teaching English and Writing at the College of New Rochelle.

I want to teach English and Writing full-time as soon as possible. My point in writing this stupid shit, is to say even if you think you have no shot at getting something or some job, just fucking apply for it and do it anyway. Just fucking do it; don’t let these no good, rat, sons of a fuckhead keep you down!

This is America, babay! Love it or leave it!

Anarachy…Anarchy!

No blood for oil!

This blog is not anti-American….it’s anti-war!

I never smoked weed on a regular basis, but I did dabble in the fine art of “hashish” or “gunja” while growing up. The first time I smoked, was at one of Matt’s Woooooorld Famous Deck parties. It was the summer after our senior year in high school and the party looked like a deleted scene from “Dazed and Confused.” Tom, Billy and I showed up about an hour before anyone else was going to be there with three 30 packs of Coors Light (which we paid $30 each for because the guy at Madaba’s knew he had us by the balls.)  We began drinking right away and from what I can gather were pretty lubricated by the time everyone else showed up.

Some of the people that did show up to the party were very into weed. They broke out a pipe and lit it. I decided that I would try to get high. I hadn’t thought about the fact that I was drinking beer all night and really had no idea how I was going to react. It didn’t go very well from the get go. It seems I broke some type of rule by blowing into the bowl and was yelled out for blowing the weed out of the pipe and onto the deck. I was screamed at and someone broke out a notebook that had all these rules for smoking weed. You read that right, they had a notebook with rules on how to smoke weed. Now the kid who had the notebook looked exactly like the kind of kid that would carry around such a thing. However, it was all very strange for me.

As the night wore on, I figured out how to work the bowl and ended being all types twisted. Billy knew what he was doing, so he ended up getting quite shit smashed. At some point, someone drove to McDonald’s and brought back enough food to make everyone sick. For whatever reason, Billy sat on a seat that was in the middle of the yard, fell asleep and left himself open for McDonald’s BBQ sauce bombs. Once I realized they were throwing shit at him, I began picking up the containers of BBQ sauce and started throwing them back at the people on the deck. To this day, there is still a McDonald’s BBQ sauce stain on the back of Matt’s parents house (Take that Mr Mayor!)

At the end of the night, Billy, Tom and I walked back to my house and fell asleep in my room. The next morning my father woke us up and asked us if we wanted eggs. I wanted to fucking kill him or at least injury his face or neck. Billy and Tom said, “Sure.” I took a shower while they defied all logic by consuming actual food and threw up all over the shower. It was “stale yellow beer that tasted like weed” puke. I had learned that mixing weed with mad beers was not going to work for me.

I waited awhile until I took the 420 express train for a second time and I think it was one of the camping trips that I again boarded that son of a bitch. We brought a bunch of “chillums” up with us and sat around the fire smoking it. It felt a lot like something that would go down in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Captian coined his famous phrase, “The fire doesn’t care what it burns” that night and laughed at his own joke for what felt like 25 minutes.  Everything was very blurry that night and sometimes I wonder if we had been sold “super grass.”

Later that same summer (2000), I would go down to the river with Billy and we would “boot the gong.” One night he was singing this song in a very high pitched voice and we spent most of the evening singing it while trying to figure out what song it was. We never figured it and odds are it was never a song to begin with. One of the things I didn’t like about smoking, was that I always felt like I ended up acting like the kid in an anti-smoking commerical. Laughing all stupid and wanting to eat mad stupid shit all the time. Case in point, one night after coming back from the river, Billy and I drove to 7-11 and went on a feeding frenzy. I still know what I got: first I microwaved Chef Boyardee Meat Raviolis, followed it up with a Big Gulp of Vanilla coke, king size Snickers bar and a donut the size of my face. I was very unhappy with what I had done to myself the next day.

When Baker, Tom and I went to visit Billy in LA for Spring Break 2001, I was exposed to a lot of weed related things. There were bongs on the floor everywhere and some dudes woke up and hit them first thing in the morning…it was intense. There was a good amount of smoking and playing video games where monsters fought aliens, at least I think it was only a video game. One evening they called someone to bring the “bobo bush” to their place. The guy shows up and sticks around to ”blast a J” with us.  After awhile, he asks if he can have a ride back to his baby’s mamma’s house. Ben said he’d give him a ride and I was pretty we’d never see him again, but he did end up coming back a little while later.

The last time I “blew my roof off” was with Tony “Yao” at Untermyer Park two summers ago. Yeah, I know it’s kind of loserish but I was trying to find myself. We walked down that huge flight of stairs which ends by the foundation of that house. The entire time we were standing there in the dark, I was convinced that was where Son of Sam used to meet Satan and got myself very scared. After we “tightened our wigs,” we made our way back up the long flight of stairs. Half way up the stairs, I saw a Honda Accord in the woods. I did not think I saw a Honda Accord, I fucking saw a Honda Accord. However, I had a considerable amount of trouble convincing Tony of that fact.

When we made it to the top of the steps where we could see out into the street and noticed that there were a few cop cars driving by very slow like. We scurried to hide behind a tree and up against the wall. Tony threw the rest of the “bo-bo”away and the freak out commenced. We whisper yelled at each other while the cops shined search lights into the park. Tony started talking this crazy talk about just walking out there like nothing was up and dealing with it. How are we going to act like we didn’t just “blast a roach,” in the pitch black of the devil’s favorite place on Earth? I said something like:

“Give it a minute. Let them drive by and we will fucking run once they are out of sight and that will be the end of it. I am fucking 25, Anthony! We are too old for this shit!”

Thank God they did end up driving by and we got the flock out of there without having to deal with them. We made our way back to his car and I think we both kind of died a little on the inside that night. Since that incident, I have not touched any of the “butter flower.”

On a totally unrelated topic, the Metro North goes by the New York School of Podiatry everyday and today all the doctors and nurses were out on the street in front of the building. I wondered if there was some type of emergency or what exactly could be wrong over there. After the train started to pull away it became vey clear that something was definitely afoot.

I never played football in high school or for a league as a kid because I was born with a heart murmur and I could have been killed if I was hit hard enough. I also didn’t play because it looked like it hurt lot and the people that played seemed to be a little mean spirited about playing.

A heart murmur is basically a strange sounding word that means the heart has a leaky valve. The leaky valve produces an abnormal heart beat and the side effects may include being awesome (Nah, I’m just playing).  The type of heart murmur I have, allows blood to flow back into one of the four chambers of the heart. You see the human heart has four chambers (I think, don’t fucking look it up on wikimedicine or some shit) and blood is moved from one chamber to the next. After the blood has left one of the chambers, there is a like a little door that closes behind it and that will ensure that the blood will not flow back into that chamber. However, one of my little doors does not fully close and blood leaks back into the chamber producing a clicking sound in my heartbeat. It is caled a “Mitral Valve Prolapse” or “floppy” valve syndrome. I guess it’s better than having “floppy” you know what syndrome, but I guess that will come later in life.

Until I was 18 or so, I’d have to so see a Cardiologist every six months or so. It sucked when I was between the ages of 12 and 16 because I was chubby and hated taking of my shirt in front of people, nevermind an Indian doctor that had a strange penchant for sucking on hard candy when talking to me. They basically used the same machine to look at the heart that they use when they look inside a woman’s stomach after the baby fairy has visited her in her sleep and whispered a love poem into her ear. Again, I’m pretty sure it is the same machine, don’t get all medical on me because you like Grey’s Anatomy, okay? So I would take off my shirt and introduce the Molson Twins (One of the funniest terms I have ever heard for bitch tits…ever) to Doctor Apu and he would put this clear jelly (see: ky jelly) on this little instrument that was shaped like if a penis had sex with a channel changer.  When I got older, I would make a joke about how, “I was only here for my heart, Doc. Don’t get any ideas here, HA. You know…you know what I mean.”  So anyway, he would lube up the intsrutment, rub it on the titty where my heart was and we would watch my heart on this little monitor (I just realized that that means I’ve had mad ky jelly on my chest). He would always say something like:

“Ok, see here Sean, where this chamber is doing it’s job and closing after tha blood has moved onto the next chamber? Well, here in this chamber, this is where you’re heart is not working correctly. See all this blood that is pouring back into the chamber? That is the problem.”

I would lay there being awkward and chubby, trying like a bastard not to move so the paper under me wouldn’t move. I always felt like when I was moving on that paper it made me “sound” fatter. Weird, huh? I still hate the sound of that paper when someone is sitting on it and moving around.

By the time I was 18, the Good Hindu Doctor told me the murmur had become weaker as I got older and that I didn’t have to come as often. I do have to take antibiotics before I have any surgery because if what was being operated on became infected the infection could travel to my heart and cause me to become a dead person. So as far as I know, the leaky valve has become less leaky and I should be okay. I don’t think I’ll join any men’s leagues for organized tackle football, but I do like the idea that I could play if I was stupid enough to think something like that would be a good idea.

Pete: The title actually has something to do with the content, but don’t get used to it, babay! I never follow any rules! I’ve been breaking rules my whole life! My life motto has always been: Rule #1 There are no rules!

I hate when people say speeding doesn’t get you where you going any faster. If you want to get somewhere before someone, you try to move quicker than them. The whole concept of a race is based on the idea that the person moving faster will win. Speeding gets you there quicker.

Which of the following three things did I really see on my way to work yesterday:

A homeless man wearing short blue shorts and a green Starbucks apron…nothing else.

A person order a “large pizza soup.”

A little boy on the 1 train platform at 34th Street drop his red lollipop on the floor, pick it and put it back in his mouth.

Fox News Channel identified Barack Obama’s wife as “Barack’s Babys Mama” on a news program yesterday. What the fuck were they thinking? First of all, it is really racist. Also, if I understand the term correctly, it is meant to identify a woman that a man had a child with but has not married . Am I wrong in assuming that? Later in the broadcast, they called Obama “boy” and “son.” They also claimed that 67% of black people on Earth today were born on Saturn.

My sister bought Honey Nut Cherrios the other day and we were talking about how they used to put  prizes in cereal. She babysits these two little kids in Scarsdale (They actually live on the same street that Jay Z and Beyonce just bought house on) and she said that cereal never comes with toys in it anymore. She said the kids don’t even realize that there was ever a time when it did. What a crock of shit, you know? It was always cool to know that even though you’re were going to have to go school in a few minutes, you could get some little thing to screw around with at the kitchen table. You can’t have anything nice anymore, you know? I blame the media.

This morning on the Today Show, Tiki Barber made a joke about being a barber in his spare time. So he basically stole one of Tony’s worst jokes of all time.

There is a 107 year old man that is going to lead some parade in Andover, Mass. He once turned down a job offer from Thomas Edison (I guess he isn’t the brightest bulb in the drawer, huh? Am I right? You in the back, you get it? Sure you do.). Anyway, I have no doubt that this parade is going to be the slowest moving parade of all time.

There are few things worse than walking into a bar and watching a karaoke guy set up his shit. You think you’re just going to watch some of the Yankee game or whatever and all of the sudden a 56 year old woman wearing a Fuschia Puffy shirt is singing Gloria Estefan songs in your ear.

The bar I went to last night was Fogarty’s in Bronxville and I got hit over the head with a few things. The first person that I spoke to was a guy named Franklin that stunk of Noxema. It turns out it was not Noxema, it was Vaseline. I knew this because he offered me a roll of film. The Vaseline was for his new tatoo which I can only assume was a picture of a naked chick washing a fire truck. It turns out he needed the canister that rolls of film come in to put the Vaseline in. I guess those little travel sized Vaseline jars were just too much for him to handle.

A little while after that, an older guy came to the bar and told Mike about how painful passing his kidney stone was. He went into a story about how the doctor put a Q-Tip (Phone is ringing…Oh my God) into the business end of his dick and rotated it. He said he didn’t think that it was all that painful and it made me wonder about the size of his penis hole, which in turn made me picture his penis with a big penis hole…so that sort of sucked for awhile. He did admit that passing the stone was quite painful and said he was ready to, “Announce that it was a boy.”

Right before I left, Mike introduced me to a girl named Toejam. However, she was really Earl. But I can understand how you could get the two mixed up.

Before I went to the bar, I helped my father take the cover off the pool which is one of the top five worst things to do in the fucking universe. I think it’s right before getting a Q-Tip (Breath and Stop. For real, show me what ya got.) stuck in your wanghole and right after being a Nickelback fan. Anyhow, the issue with taking the cover off the pool is that the cover itself is about 10 times too big for the little pool we have and so it sinks into the half empty pool and fills with leaves and water. The leaves sit in the water and create a black slug that smells like someone filled a whale with diarrhea and garlic, let it sit in the sun for a month and stabbed it. When we attempt to pull the cover off the pool (which is situated way too close to the deck at certain points because we had to rebuild the pool a few years ago and neither of us had any fucking clue how to do so) the sludge and water jumps up at us, gets on our clothes and yesterday I got some in my mouth. I spit right away and we had to stop for a few minutes because my Dad was laughing so hard. He said,

“I think I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen you spit.”

“Well, I don’t get disgusting, shit-smelling leaves in my mouth very often,” I replied.

To which he said, “What do you want from the pizza place?”

I didn’t answer and we went back to pulling the cover off. We spent a few minutes telling each other what we thought the water and leaves smelled like and decided low tide at City Island was probably the most accurate.

To be honest, it was the easiest taking the cover off the pool has ever been. I did notice that my father will touch anything without thinking about it. He would grab handfulls of disgusting wet leaves and branches and just stuff in a garbage bag. A few years ago there was a dead squirrel in the pool and he just bent down, grabbed it and threw it away. A dead squirrel that had been floating in black water for the entire winter. He didn’t hesitate for a second. What if his fur came off and his skin was all fucking wet and gooey? He didn’t care. Jesus Christ.

I heard some of the new Weezer album the other day and it sucks. The single is pretty stupid also. It’s called “Pork and Beans,” which should send up a red flag right away. The chorus contains the line “I don’t give a hoot about what you think.” There is another song where Rivers Cuomo just lists the bands that he likes alot and references popular music of the last 20 years. He is also allowing himself to be photographed wearing a cowboy hat, a shirt that makes him look fat and a mustache…which is very sad. Their last album kind of sucked also. The Blue Album and Pinkerton were so good for such different reasons that it makes me sad that they have become what they are now.

My ipod frooze last week and I did that special thing where you lay it on a flat surface, press two buttons for ten seconds and reset the whole thing. Monday morning I go to take it out of the charger and instead of the Apple logo on the screen, there is a picture of a sick cartoon ipod with an X over each of it’s eyes and a big frown on his face.  Apparently they hired Acme to pick out what the icon for “Your ipod is totally fucked” would be.

I did get the sick cartoon ipod to go away after awhile of screwing around with it. I hit a few buttons and the Super Mario Bros. chased him around and they cornered him with help of Ms. Pac Man and one of the monsters from Rampage. I thought I was all set…no dice. It skiped songs, made crazy sounds and wouldn’t do anything I told it do. Kind of like taking a really long car trip with one of your cousins that grew up upstate somewhere.

So yesterday, I made an appointment with the “Genius Bar” to have one of the eggheads fix my shit up. First of all, I had no idea you needed an appointment to see of these guys. I only found out after going on their website and it warned me that I will need to do so. It was at this time that I began to get myself ready to pull a real life”John O’Connell” and put on a show at a store if I don’t get exactly what I needed…no matter how crazy the request. I went over the stuff my father always did in these situations: I wanted to be sure you to use the old “Oh, I’m sorry I thought you worked here?” when a question was unable to be answered to my satisfaction and the good for all purposes, “You guys have to, have to be fucking me here?” 

Today was the big day and I went to the Apple store on 14th and 9th (You can use hopstop.com if you’re not sure how to get there). The outside of the store is totally glass and it was more of the same once you stepped through the doors. There was a glass staircase on the left, glass tables with shiny new Apple products and all the employees wore orange or teal shirts depending on how fucking smart they looked. The whole place looked like something those little guys from Fraggle Rock would have built if the Fraggles didn’t love to eat the glass that they built with. I was told by some real friendly son of a bitch that the Genius Bar is on the third floor.

I made my way up the glass staircase and begin to practice my “Well, aren’t you the fucking Mutts Nuts?” tone of voice. I was met by another employee that worked there and he had a computer in his hand. He said:

“How can you help you, sir?” 

“I have, uh, a thing to see a genius at 1:15.”

“Great and your name?”

“It’s Sean….Sean O’Co…”

“Yes, Sean O’Connell at 1:15. Come this way, Sean.”

Now earlier in the day I was talking to Tracey about what to expect and he told me that they would laugh at me because I was bringing in an ipod that they stopped making 4 years ago to get fixed. So I was pretty ashamed to even take this thing out of my pocket and my defense for this was going to be to act like a dick.

I walk up to the genius bar and my genius looks like a decent guy. I still hesitate to take this fucking artifact out of my pocket so I warn the guy:

“Listen, I got an old ipod here and if you even look at my sideways for a split motherfucking second…I will fucking…”

I didn’t say that shit. I said:

“Look I got an old ipod and it won’t do shit anymore. Is there anything you can do or do I have to get a new one?”

He grimaced and I kind of went to snuff him, but stopped myself and smiled instead. He looked at the screen (which is cracked) turned it on and scanned through my songs and said:

“Damn bro, you like some gay shit.”

He didn’t say that shit. He said:

“There really isn’t much we can do for an ipod this old. You might be able to go to Tekserve (or some shit) and they might be able to do something. We can’t do anything for you man, I’m sorry. There is a swap discount we can give you if you buy a new one.”

So, of course, that is what I did. I bought a new ipod because the one I had was too old to fix.

In the end, they were all pretty nice people over there at Apple. I’ll be honest, I thought I was going to have to leave a bloody trail of Apple employees in my wake. That was not the case at all; they were nice about the fact that I like to take care of things. I don’t think a person that has the ability to take care of something should be punished for it. I guess I kind of was. I mean, I did have to spend $180 dollars today. At their core, the people that work at Apple are a smart bunch.

When it is this hot, I have trouble focusing on anything besides the fact that it is so fucking hot. It also doesn’t help that there are people walking around in this soup saying shit like, “Hot enough for ya?” and “They say 100 today. 100!” I know what they said. I have a television and a radio. It is the first thing they talk about on the News at 5, 6, 10 and 11. They always have some asshole reporter with his sleeves rolled up three quarters of the way on a beach interviewing people that have the kind of life that allows them to go the beach in the middle of the week, another one in front of a hydrant spraying water all over the street follwed up by tape of some residents of the neighborhood saying things like, “These kids have nowhere to go to cool down. I don’t think its a big deal if they open the hydrant to stay cool. I wish I could run through it, but I’m too old for that now!”

Which is of course followed up by another reporter at a “cooling station” somewhere in the city (”cooling station” Did we lose a war?). They interview the the bald guy with the glasses that grew up in New York his whole life that, “Loves the heat. It doesn’t bother me. I tell ya this, It’s better than that better cold we get come winter. I lived in Queens my whole life and I say give me the heat! I’m too old to be shoveling snow!” We should have someone put the Kiebash on people saying they like the extreme heat better than the bitter cold. Someone like former NYC Mayor Ed Koch or Joe Torre.

There are schools in parts of Jersey that are closed because of the heat and then they’ll wonder why all the kids out there end up being so soft. Send ‘em school, sweat it out you little dickheads.

My grandmother used to say that the people on the news got excited when there was a heatwave or when there was going to be a really big snow storm. She used to say that it took a really sick person to get excited about stuff like that. Then again my grandmother said a lot of things, especially in the heat.

I will give mad props to the City for how good the AC is on most subway cars. However, walking around on the subway platforms will make you wonder if life has any purpose at all. I will not give props to the New York papers for headlines like, “The Baked Apple.” It makes a body wonder, if it is this hot now, what the hell is August going to be like?