Today I was cleaning my bookshelf — tossing shit all over the place like I was Kansas earthquaking — looking for my headphones. Dear World, if you’re even somewhat involved with my life you probably already heard, but my beautiful Audio-Technica headset disappeared and I can no longer listen to James Blake in his mind-numbing bliss-ness. If someone found them, I would give them anything. Anything. The biggest problem is that I can’t help but notice that throughout my life I’ve lost tons of things. Mostly coats. Dear Mom, I’m sorry about all those extra coats: the Captain’s jacket that was left at a Kentucky hotel, the windbreakers I left multiple times in elementary school cafeterias, and much more.
While I was searching, I found a cd from Ariel Rubin. “Who’s Ariel Rubin?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you because you really needn’t stay in the dark: she’s a singer-songwriter-type based in Boston. She plays electronic ukelele which I think is a little gimmicky, but she pulls it off in a barely-gimmicky sort of way that makes it hard to hate much. After watching her do a live concert at the MegaStarshipBucks near Harvard — sufficiently convinced of the semi-gimmicky-ness of her uke-strumming — I decided I would support the band by buying a cd. There’s something about supporting the underdogs, it gets me every time. I walk over to her stand. “Which of your EPs is the best, do you think?” I ask her. Ariel indicates that the newer cd is produced much better, but we laugh at the difficulty in picking a “best” together. Such mutual rapport. I haven’t made friends this quickly since the time I was ordering coffee downstairs and, when the register stopped working, suggested with a coy smile that it was these “small victories against the machines” that kept us alive. I hand Ariel $15 dollars. My hand wavers momentarily, waiting to receive change. I do not.
I am not receiving any change.
“Well I guess I’ve made quite a contribution,” I reason to myself striding back to my corner table. My computer is still there. I have a computer-table-lock-thing but use it with little frequency and thus constantly to worry that I will return to my table to find a vanished computer. I lose everything else, why not? I like in movies and TV that when things disappear, they always leave a dust-imprint where they once were. It would be nice if that always happened, so every time you left somewhere there was a buttocks imprint proving you were once sitting there.
Then again the world would be a dusty asthmatic hell. So maybe not.
I look at the back of my new Ariel Rubin cd. There are three songs listed on the back. “You’ve got to be nutting me.” For those less mathly inclined, like myself, I did some quick calculations: that’s $5 per song. I don’t think I’d even pay Elton John $5 for Rocketman and that’s probably the best song of all time. I look back at Ariel Rubin from across the crowded MegaStarshipBucks: you may have won this time, Ariel, but I will vanquish you some day.
Her music is good, you should listen to it. But you should maybe avoid buying the $15 dollar EP.
I know that winter is coming, but I just keep listening to Beach Fossils, Real Estate, and The Drums and pretend that it’s perpetual summer. I usually do that while wearing a winter hat. This contradiction doesn’t bother me as much as you might think it should.
The number of Facebook friends who I add has dropped considerably these days, even given the relatively new shift in social location. In fact, my history of Facebook would probably show something of an exponential decrease curve, or a bell curve. Look, I don’t take economics classes here, I don’t do those CHART things. I’ve narrowed down possible reasons to two options. Either A) because I don’t have any friends or B) because I don’t use social networks with the same incidence that I did before. Unfortunately, given the frequency of snarky or music-themed statuses on my wall, it’s much more likely to be the first than the second.
On Friday, I was walking through “The Yard” in the bitter cold with a friend. We had both made mention of the bitterness of this cold and our desire that this cold be less bitter. Then I get a call on my cellphone.
I never get calls. Even when I know that the number is a mystery and probably a depressed-sounding Hispanic woman calling for Charlie or a telemarketer trying to sell me purple capsules to increase the size of my penis, I pick up the fucking phone because of how few calls I get. “Are you in the Yard?”
I am.
“I’ll come find you by the steps.”
And so I wait. The cold continues to bitter.
“Ok, you need to take off your shirt for a picture.”
I don’t really like doing that. You can’t let this Gulag frame out into the wild too much, especially not when there’s light around. Given the propensity for secret photos to make their way onto the internet, I’m slightly concerned. But then the idea of accidentally stumbling upon myself on a Ukrainian porn website makes me chuckle.
“And you have to hold this baby-doll.”
I’m starting to feel increasingly violated, but mostly just confused.
“And you have to suck your thumb.”
Violated.
“Ok, thanks so much, bye!”
And with that they disappeared. I started to put my shirt and coat back on, wondering the whole time what had really just happened here. I couldn’t help imagining this is what it feels like after a low-budget adult film shoot when you put your clothes on again and go back to your job serving burgers at a California Arbys. Then I remembered the little sticker they place on the back of books rented for class:
“I’m a rental, be gentle”
I have more in common with used copies of Dostoyevsky than I realized. Admittedly, it’s been a small goal of this blog to insert that line into something for quite a while.
Today Annenberg, which I will henceforth refer to pejoratively as “the cafeteria,” was serving “smashed potatoes”. Nobody likes smashed potatoes. We like mashed potatoes and we like regular potatoes. If anyone wanted hard, under-cooked potato chunks in their silky mash, they would ask for it. And if anyone is asking for it, you’re wrong. We don’t ask for eggs half-way cooked or under-done chicken. Even though, as I’ve heard from my meat-consuming comrades, the cafeteria does that one anyways.
Whoever decided to replace the Cranberry Pomegranate juice with Fruit Punch has created a vendetta with me that they are probably unaware of. Prepare yourself for battle.
Today was the Harvard Book Store 20% of customer day. That means that today I went like the Benjaminian-influenced bibliophile that I am and dutifully bought more books to enrich my knowledge base and my bookshelves, which are already so over-saturated that the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time sit forlornly at the edge waiting to be read next semester. While I was inside, perusing the fiction shelves, I overheard a sentence that seemed out of place surrounded by so many great works of literature:
“The Odyssey is about… going around the Roman Empire right?”
Fortunately her friend corrected her. I didn’t want to have to do that.
“I didn’t realize the Baltimore Ravens were named after Edgar Allen Poe.”
“Neither did I.”
“Yeah.”
I had to leave.
People who wear sweatpants around everywhere bug me, even though I can’t really put my finger on why. I think everyone should be comfortable, but the rest of us are wearing real pants and you’re just a fabric cloud. It’s like clothing cheating. Maybe part of the resentment is that it feels a lot like they’re wearing pajamas outside. I admit to not really knowing. In contrast to this, I believe strongly that babies in pajamas, particularly onesies, are more adorable than usual babies. Go figure. Then again vomiting in public is much less acceptable coming from older people in sweatpants than it is from babies in sweatpants.
I heard Pumped Up Kicks again today. I thought that song was gone. Then I realized: it will never be gone. Pumped Up Kicks is an ontological certainty like birth and death. There is waking up, there is the sun, and then there is Pumped Up Kicks. When I die, they will be playing Pumped Up Kicks at the hospital. In the moment of my final breath, I will smile knowing that I have finally escaped Foster the People and their strange song about a school shooting. But then, as I approach Heaven, which I will realize much too late is real and will curse all of that sinning, blasting from the low-quality speakers at the gates will be Pumped Up Kicks and I will turn to St. Peter and say, “Fuck it. Send me to Hell.” And in Hell, I’ll scream “Noooooooo!” because I’ll probably just have to listen to bad remixes of Pumped Up Kicks and I’ll just suffer for the rest of eternity.
Sundae Sundays would be better if the ice cream weren’t a color that I’m relatively sure doesn’t exist in nature.
My name is Brad, I used to like Pumped Up Kicks and I still like babies in pajamas.
1 Comment
i appreciate your continued blogging. keep it up