Hench!

Today I was sorting through the Goodwill, as I often do, looking for a good suit. I didn’t really find anything, and I’m kind of broke, and it was pissing down rain: so I left. Luckily, I had my trusty discman with me, so I was able to listen to music.

Now, I wasn’t listening to New Orleans music, but all New Orleans music moves along at a stroll because there are so many parades there. There is a uniform, midtempo kind of beat that happens with all of tunes that come out of their. From Rebirth Brass band all the way back to Jelly Roll Morton. As I was walking around in the rain, thinking about food, I began making this list in my head of good music to listen to while your walking.

First of all, Tower Of Power is fucking great music to listen to while you’re walking. Especially their self-titled album (I think it’s their third), which has the great song “What Is Hip.” Now, Tower of Power kind of has shitty lyrics, but who gives a fuck. They’re great. You basically feel good whenever they’re playing, and doubly so when you’re walking around.

Johnny Thunders is another good one. I don’t know if he’ll work if you’re not in New York, but if you’re in New York it kind of seems like the sort of thing that ought to be playing all the time. It’s just a grimy, inebriated strut, all the time; kind of like a greaseball Shirelles cover band, really.

There’s a lot of shit that’s really bad to listen to, which is sad but there you go. For instance, my favorite band is the Fall. However, The Fall makes miserable walking around listening. Too much midrange, to much shrill shouty shit. You can’t really get into it, and eventually it will make you go back home, which is where you ought to be listening to the Fall in the first place.

Also good is dub reggae, Laura Nyro, Nico, Merzbow, Earth Wind & Fire, and Sam and Dave.

Jesus, this is a boring post. I just can’t be fucking bothered, there’s too much to do. I’m tired, and I’ve been having a really hard time sleeping without getting up a bunch of times. I must have woken up about five times last night, and I ended up just endlessly tossing and turning. I can’t be expected to come up with a good blog entry! Besides, half of my blog entries seem to be about recommending music to people, and I’m not really sure what my motives are for this. I guess I don’t really care, either.

So fuck the music recommendations. I can also report that I killed a cockroach today, ate spinach soup and a salad, drank two bottles of Rhinegold beer, ran into this guy I used to work with in a bookstore (he’d grown a beard), talked to my friend Joe on the phone, and went grocery shopping, although not in that order.

My groceries:

1 sixpack Rhinegold beer
1 package of tortillas
1 tomato
2 cans black beans
2 cans of lentil soup
1 can of vegetable barley soup
2 cans of vegetarian chili

I know that I bought a lot of cannned food, but sometimes that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I’m also trying to save money, considering that 1.) I need a new laptop worse than fucking bad, and 2.) I’m hoping to move sometime this year. Also, I just need the fucking cash, man! Eating out is expensive, especially since I insist on getting salads and shit like that these days. See, before I met Sarah, I’d eat like half a pint of brown rice and a hardboiled egg. Another favorite of mine was the raw tofu sandwich. You’d take two slices of rye bread, a slab of fucking raw tofu, half a raw onion, and French’s mustard. Make a sandwich or two out of that, that’s your lunch.

Sarah managed to introduce me to food, and now I always eat tasty food which is a little pricey. It’s much better food though, and I’m much happier than I used to be. Christ, was I a miserable bastard.

Despite all this healthy-ass food, I have been sick for about two fucking weeks because I

Look, this isn’t important. How are you people? Maintaining radio silence? Do any of you like Earth Wind & Fire? The Feelies? How is the rain treating you? In fact, I’ll bet you almost anything that each and every last one of you is at work right now, and bored out of your mind. I’m borred out of my mind as well. In fact, I’m not even really writing this, I’m really listening to WFMU. I should really go and that. 91.1 FM, East Orange New Jersey.

Just got done with jury duty, thank god. It was real brief. I went in one day and got selected, and then I went in a second day and was told that the case was dismissed.

I’m not sure what I expected the Brooklyn Supreme Court to look like behind the scenes, but I didn’t expect it to look like a Greyhound bus station. Which is how it looked. You know, crummy graffiti done in a real hurry, such as “Ging + Lil Hab” or “Eat Dick” scrawled all over the bathroom, lousy little chairs that have had about a million asses sitting on them, bored people waiting for time to pass, announcements over loudspeakers, and a couple of muted televisions with close captioning. I sat around and read the Glass Menagerie, which I didn’t like as much as I thought I would.

This is going to sound stupid, but I always feel like I’m in the future when sitting in a public building like that. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m a sloppy guy, but I always figure that the future is basically going to look like a locker room. Everyone will be really poor, all the clothing will be really shittily made, the air will be stale, there will be grime all over the place, and it will smell like disinfectant. Even in the courthouse, someone had take a shit on the toilet seat. I went into one of the stalls, and there was litereally someone’s shit on the seat, like they’d done it on purpose! Fucking disgusting, and I’ll bet it was that weird old Italian guy with the moustache and shifty eyes who did it, too. That the sort of thing that will be a common occurance in the future.

Television news reminds me of the future. If you watch MSNBC without any sound, you get a real sense of how shitty and banal television really is. It’s just two talking heads, and the text across the screen reads like this:

TODAY, KARL ROVE WENT IN TO DC COUNTY COURT FOR QUESTIONING. ROVE WOKE AT 6, AS IS CUSTOMARY FOR HIM, AND ARRIVED AT THE COURT AT NINE.

THE CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL IS LOOKING TO CONTAIN THE AVIAN FLU. IN CHINA, THEY ARE SCREENING POULTRY IN AN ATTEMPT TO STOP AN OUTBREAK OF THE DISEASE.

UP NEXT: HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW JAMES BOND? WE’LL HAVE AN INTERVIEW WITH THE BLONDE BOND AFTER THIS. CINDY, DO YOU KNOW WHO HE IS?

HE’S A SCOTTISH ACTOR, I BELIEVE. AND FOR ALL OF YOU WHO ARE WONDERING WHAT REESE WITHERSPOON IS UP TO, STAY TUNED.

There’s a little crawl of news that’s even MORE banal than that going across the bottom of the screen. You know, everything is clearly going to be at the lowest common denominator in the future. And public architecture is going to be incredibly bad.

Some public buildings are really nice, like Grand Central and the main Brooklyn post office downtown. In fact, I saw Marky Ramone there, and it really flipped me out. He and his wife were FedExing something, and at first I saw him from behind. I didn’t know if was him, of course, it was just a skinny guy with that old guy slouch dressed like one of the Ramones. I turned to Sarah and said “It’s funny, in the city you really see all these old dudes who never grew up, like these fucking late seventies artifacts—” and then the guy turned around and it was Marky Ramone! I nearly lost my shit.

Later, Sarah asked me why I didn’t say anything to him. What do you say? “Hey Marky, you drum really fucking fast?” That’s all he did! The guy played one fucking drum beat for a couple of decades. But what a great beat. I also saw him parking his car in the neighborhood where I work, and sitting outside at this cafe in my neighborhood.

Anyway, no Marky Ramone at the courthouse. Have you ever been so fucking bored that you can’t read? I eventually got to that point. I began thinking about soul music, and trying to decide in my head whether it was the best kind of popular music ever or not. I think I ended up deciding that it was, although I’m not sure that I really mean that. Is it? It probably is

Now I’m just sitting around and putting the finishing touches on this story I wrote. It’s probably the best thing I wrote for some time. I’m glad it’s done.

Louis Wain was a gentleman who liked to paint portraits of cats. Then he went crazy.

The poor guy just liked cats. His cats went from began looking very mistrustful, then evil, then really psycedelic and evil.

Eventually, Louis Wain was confined to a sanitarium, where he would paint cats looking wistfully at the outside world.

Anyway, Louis Wain is dead now. Poor guy.