Saturday, November 20, 2004

Past Za blogging endeavors IV

Peter can draw characters well. [Post in comments, due to length.]

posted by (d)avid at 11/20/2004 01:49:00 PM

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

august 21 2000

in between the telling of stories and the paying of bills, between the consumption of spinach calzones and the riding of cars, between the hoisting of pints and the cleaning of apartments, a few things have gone down. these things have gone down both around me and involving me, a few things encompassing both at once. well, there are two, because the second one is going to drag on a fair bit, so consider yourself warned. excessive adjectives ahead.


first, before i forget, bowtie mcseersucker has a twin. i walked onto the elevator today at work just as bowtie mcseersucker was making his egress; imagine my surprise when behind him trailed oxford mcstripeypants. the combination of the light blue button-down of the fine woven haberdashers' cotton and the alternating navy blue-sky blue pattern of his fine seersucker pants made him look like he was some sort of mythical creature, a hybrid of a young prep-school scion and a southern-gothic attorney fond of any bourbon with the word "knob" in the name. the two constituent halves, thankfully, were granted seperate and distinct casing, and so torso and lower carriage achieved a contiguous discord not unlike a birmingham bus circa 1960.


second, i was on the subway last week traveling the short distance between my office and the once-mythical once-famed carnegie deli, known at one time for its three-pound turkey-roast-beef-russian-dressing-and-coleslaw combo sandwiches (this is true. three pounds! i have internal organs that weigh a good deal less. and not those paltry little mini-organs like "kidneys" and "alveoli"--real organs, with real jobs and a real union to insure that i show them their due visceral respect) but now known for its always-dense contingent of south american tourists. why people want to eat three heaping pounds of meat and mayonnaise-based sauces will perhaps always escape me, but that's beside the point.


the point is that i was on the train, and sitting directly diagonally from me--on the small two-seater between the door-framing pole and the wall at the end of a car--was a couple. not necessarily a romantic-type couple, but a couple of people. a man and a woman. the woman seemed attractive: good sneakers, nice hair, etc. the man, on the other hand, was the type of person that you can see in the crowd at an mtv-televised limp bizkit spring break concert moving his hands like he imagines his favorite rappers might. he had that facial-hair arrangement that has somehow tragically passed from dizzy gillespie to annoying white guys, which is to say a goatee minus any and all mustache or vertical lines and thus leaving the chin-fringe. there's not really a name for this that i know of--it's like a van dyke sans the impressive stalactitic isoceles triangle descending from the chin--but i imagine that the guy erroneously called it a "soul patch" to his friends in the limp bizkit pit. vocally, he was cursed-slash-blessed with what i think of as the morning-show-dj ensemble. low but reedy, with a resonance that balances the thin timbre. think casey kasem, where the voice is manly as far as register goes but sounds as if the person attached to it eats processed foods and has very little skill in the sexual arena. the final thing that endeared this guy to me for life (before we move to the actual substance of the conversation) was how he was sitting with his purple-lensed sunglasses and his youthful "t-shirt" and his just baggy enough to be generically cool without perpetrating khaki shorts. he was on the outside of the seat, while his companion sat to his left between him and the end wall of the subway car; for some reason, he decided to cross his right leg across both he and his companion and rest his foot against the end wall of the car, incessantly jiggling his leg so that his knee always looked dangerously close to clipping the woman's nose.


eavesdropping is inherently an in media res activity, so i can't relate the prefacing conversation; i can only gather that the man had spent some time in australia, where his "ex-girlfriend" had a "place" near the "beach"--a "beach" that was a "constant" "party." he then went on to describe the kind of music that was played at this "party," employing the most eschatalogically bad music terminology i've ever heard. it was as if he had taken a book that listed and defined every term used to mind-numbing overkill by hack music writers bent on describing a genre that they really had no idea how to describe or even appreciate. this music was apparently "acid jazz, you know, but mixed with rave." it sounded "kind of grunge," but was "garage and electronica" at the same time. now, read the quotes out loud to yourself in a casey kasem voice, but every time you come to an italicized word, move your flattened palm across your body (parallel to your body), alternating hands, so that you look like some awful parody of a yuppie imitating "rappers." now imagine doing it with an enthusiastically serious expression on your face. you were that guy. don't feel too good, do it?


in other news, it appears as though my employers have finally realized that i'm too dear an asset to languish in the research department, so they've invited me to be an assistant editor. basically, it means working with two editors (both of whom are very nice, very bright, and will never ever ask me to pick up their dry cleaning, as i've heard other editors doing) and doing a fair amount more writing. big step in the right direction for ol' bootstrap-and-elbow-grease proven.


to recap: a southern-gothic attorney fond of any bourbon with the word "knob" in the name. eschatologically bad music terminology. thank you.


p.

20/11/04 12:53 PM  

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