slacking off

i didn't forget about the heroic asshole aspect of this blog. i'm pondering who to do next: john becker or archie bunker, who is pretty much the prototype. though gary is tellling me to do wayne arnold, but i really can't think of anything redemptive about him just yet. been really busy with Fanzine stuff since i got back from maine. our listings in NYC and SF really went to shit this summer, and now that casey is somewhat back from his three-month coke and poetry binge, he's slowly getting back into Fanzine. still kind of annoying. "did it ever occur to you that maybe i would like to go do coke and fuck girls and stay up til 5AM (not because i'm working) having fun? no, i bet that never crossed your mind..." ah well. it's a paraphrase from bottlerocket. more TK. i'm way behind.

picture: nothing special. digging around in old folders and found this one of emily and megan at golden gate park a couple summers ago. 2004 i think. my pic with emily's fancy camera.

maine

updated: 10.10.06

old stuff: was so pissed about delta i didn't even get to the part when i was actually in maine. here's some pics from branden's wedding last year because i don't have the energy to write more at the moment. i'm still mad.


my grandparents at the hall where my cousin had his wedding reception. wish i took this one. don't know who did, most likely a family member of some sort. someone take credit for it. i was off getting drunk.


me and branden on mary's mother's bike. wedding outfits were pretty wacky, but yo it wasn't my wedding so it's cool. i think the last time i wore those pants was in high school. branden got his the day before the wedding. good times.

[edit: photos were taken by my other cousin's wife, pamela, who also used to go out with this asshole matt wright, or wrong as i'd prefer. what does that have to do with her? well... nothing. i just wanted everyone to know he's an asshole, and not of the heroic variety.]

new stuff: ok. it's been a few weeks since the whole delta incident and i think i've finally calmed down enough to talk briefly about the maine trip. Peaks Island is probably the best place i've been to in the last year or so since my cousin's wedding. i can't really articulate what's so great about it, but after six years of living in major cities something about Peak's is so utterly refreshing even though during most of its summer months is very touristy and crowded. i've never been there when it was like this. peak's is two miles off the coast of Portland, in the Casco Bay. you take a ferry to get there, and all along the way you'll see orange floaters with ropes tied to them. at the end of these ropes are lobster traps. they're all over the place. the back of the lobster boats are open, like a pickup truck without the tailgate, and lobster people fish up the ropes and haul the lobster out of the cold, clean water. i'm working on trying to get a job on a lobster boat.

once you get off the ferry you walk up a driveway to a parking lot and a couple stores. we jump in a car. the doors are always unlocked. nobody locks their car doors here, it seems. at least the locals don't. there's a tiny post office and a little market, a gas station that looks like it's reserved for fire trucks, an actual fire station, a library, a bike rental place, a couple of pricey but tasty restaurants, and a elementary school tucked in there somehwere. there's a lot of houses: some of the usual cape cods; some multi-storied beachfront houses with yards and long, winding porches; tacky new houses that stand out like sore thumbs; expensive, obnoxious looking glass houses. there's no code here, no neighborhood standard to tell you what to build, which has its obvious ups and downs. my cousin's house is gray with a spire and a crow's nest platform which is good for smoking cigarettes on. inside there's FIFA06.

FIFA06: this was the source of much competition between my cousin branden and i. i don't know how mary dealt with it most of the time. ever since we've been kids, branden and me have been screaming at each other over video games—the last i remember being goldeneye for the N64, though we'd usually team up with my brother on perfect dark's version of the PvP and fight like 8 or 9 computer controlled characters. i don't really know much about soccer, but i got pretty into the world cup this summer. i picked Barcelona since i know ronaldinho plays for them and that dude eto'o and that lou ferrigno-looking guy puyjols. anyway, we spent hours screaming at each other, cheating, talking ridiculous shit, doing my best not to throw his controller at him, and ultimately the score inched near even after losing the first 8 matches. i know he's up there practicing for the next time i go up, so i have to buy this game.


[ me and branden getting drunk in front of my parent's house at my brother and mari's baby shower a couple summers ago.]

back to the island: me and branden went fishing a couple times on the ocean side. first time we went at night and it was pitch black; the only things we could really see were our smokes and the white crush of waves crashing agains the little rock jetty we were standing on. the water was rough—if we fell in we'd be goners. plus we only had one fishing rod so we both had to take turns smoking and fishing. we caught one striper that night. a couple days later we went in the morning and the sky was bright and sea was blue and cold. this high tide was a lot calmer than the previous venture out, though i'd probably still be doomed if i fell in, but i'd probably die happier. feeling the sun and the cool, clean air, seeing the cliffs and the pine forests of the adjacent islands felt like you were really supposed to be there; not just here on the island, but here—like this is what people should see everyday of their lives: the enormous night sky, the patient air, the tall cliffs and thick trees and the hushed ocean stretching beyond. i couldn't even tag there, though somehow i wanted to know that i'd been there. it's probably the closest i can get to the vertiginous sections of US1 i'd rush off to past pacifica south and muir woods north when i'd have crazy mental breakdowns and stand 200 feet over the ocean and imagine the silence of falling down. anyway... we caught two more fish that day and tossed them back in. me and branden had some fake mexican food in portland, and i'm pretty sure i found a pube in mine (fucking hippies). saw some little punker kids, which for some reason was pretty amusing and fun. caught a plane back to nyc and have been plotting a way to get back ever since.

delta. don't do it.

edited: 9.22.06
just don't. don't do it to yourself. read why.

back in mid-august i bought a ticket to go to portland, maine, off the coast of which my cousin and his wife live on this unspoiled paradise of the north called peaks island. the ticket was $142RT—pretty cheap. i got it through expedia and i was supposed to take off last friday 9.15 at 8.45pm. the flight was through delta, but the actual plane was operated by something called freedom airlines. i was trying to get out of brooklyn and up to maine pretty much all summer long, but because of work stuff and people flaking out i couldn't make it until just this past week. i was dying to get out of here.

i showed up to JFK at around 6.30pm. i took the L to broadway and made a surprisingly easy trip from the A to the airtrain. took about an hour and 15min total from the graham stop, and there was actually some pretty interesting stuff to look at along the way—bunch of huge and ancient cemetaries, some of them completely overgrown by weeds and trees; a ton of graffiti spots and a yard or two with probably about three decades worth of paint on the walls. the delta terminal was a shithole as soon as i walked in—there were 60 people wrapped around in a broken line that in some circuitous fashion led to the ticket counter. i went to the e-ticket checkin and punched in my confirmation number and got some message on the screen: IT IS TOO LATE TO CHECK-IN FOR THIS FLIGHT with another, smaller message that stated my flight left at 12.51am the PREVIOUS morning. obviously there was something fucked up here... i called the delta number and talked to the first of many people from bombay, india (i asked them). the flight was actually delayed until at least 1AM—which didn't work for me since the last ferry to peaks island was at 11.30pm. so i rebooked for the next flight for 1PM on saturday and went home. all around me there were other people whose flights had been cancelled or otherwise inordinately delayed.

saturday. i called delta and talked to bombay, india dude #2. took him like 10min to find my flight info and finally told me my flight was delayed til 1.50pm. i showed up at noon; the delta terminal looked a lot more orderly. i went to the e-ticket check-in. after finding out the flight was delayed to 2.45 i got another retarded message while trying to check in. i waited in line for the counter. i tried to check-in with this delta lady, but she said she couldn't find my flight, my information, and my confirmation number didn't exist. then these people from israel cut in my place in line and the delta lady stopped helping me. then later when she was finished with them, she gave me a boarding pass without a gate number on it. it was just some generic boarding pass to get me out of line. i went through security with no problems.

i got to gate 23 (the gate listed on the tv screens at the airport), and saw somewhere around 200 people crowded around the gate entrance with like three people working. this was the literal end of the airport—the corner where delta shoved all the angry, pissed-on and otherwise disgruntled customers and jerked them around for several hours while their desperate workers scrambled around to find the outgoing airplanes for all these people, whose annoyance was increasing exponentially and sweeping across newcomers to the gate. i had more than 2hrs to wait for my flight out, so i went to burger king, which was probably the worst place i could have gone to. i had these chicken things that i remembered were ok from the last time i ate there, which was around 10 years ago. now they are shaped like cut-out king's crowns and taste like dry newspaper. i went back to gate 23 and saw my flight was delayed again until 3.20pm. the crowd was getting restless.

gate 23 was the area where delta sent all its customers whose flights were delayed or cancelled the previous day (when i called they claimed there were weather problems, which was total bullshit because it had stopped raining in ny at around 4pm on friday). the three delta workers wouldn't even talk to us on the portland flight because our plane was not physically on the ground at JFK. in fact, they had no idea where the plane that was supposed to take us to maine was—as would become clear in the next few hours. they were trying to find the plane to boston. they announced the plane to boston was in the air somewhere and would be here soon. at 3.10pm the screen shifted to 4pm. at 3.50 they announced our plane was in manchester and was getting ready to take off and that we should be ready to leave at 4.30 (again, bullshit: it takes at least an hour to fly from manchester to JFK) and promised an update on the flight status by 4.15. at 4.50 we hadn't heard shit and the flight was now set for 5.20. at 5.30 they changed it to 6pm. at 6pm they announced our long-lost plane in manchester was still in manchester. bullshit. i had enough. the flight was being delayed indefinitely. i got the fuck out of there.

over the course of the day i was on the phone with a bunch of delta people from bombay, india. i talked to them about possible refunds and cancelling the ticket. apparently it was delta policy not to refund tickets until the flight has departed. another told me the only way to get a refund was to talk to someone at the counter. another told me i would not get a refund on anything. another told me i would get a small refund or a voucher for another flight on their shitty airline, and to use this voucer i'd have to give delta 50 bucks (this would later prove to be true). i went to the ticket lady back downstairs and explained what was up and that delta was fucking around and i wanted to cancel my flight and get a refund. "we don't have your money," she said. "expedia does."

i called expedia when i got outside. "we don't have your money," the lady said. "delta does." after about two hours of arguing with expedia and delta, this dude manuel at expedia tracked down some guy at delta named Ian Scott, who turned out to be another indian dude from bombay, india who offered me the voucher that i'd have to pay delta another 50 bucks to use. no thanks, i said. just give me my money back.

delta fucking blows. if there were an asshole company of the year award, they'd be in the top two. they don't have any infrastructure or organization and i'm pretty sure they will be filing for some sort of bankruptcy protection after losing about 1000 customers this past weekend in JFK alone. the upside to all of this is that branden (my cousin) and his wife (mary) bought me a ticket on Jet Blue for later that evening. Jet Blue is the polar opposite of the bullshit that was Delta. diametric opposite. as soon as i got into the jet blue terminal there was no stress. it was well-lit and clean. people were smiling. i had a beer and watched baseball while waiting for my flight, which left exactly on time and arrived in portland early. almost as an intentional "fuck-you" to delta. i got into portland at 10.20pm saturday, 24 hours late.

Red Foreman, heroic assholes take 2

"When I die, I want to be buried face down, so that everyone who doesn't like me can kiss my ass."

update: 9.15
that's my most memorable quote from the dad on that '70s show. admittedly, i didn't watch this show very much when it was on. i knew it was funny, but for whatever reason i never really watched it (reasons vary from: (1) i didn't have a tv; (2) i had a tv but only got like 2 channels; (3) i had a tv but i didn't get any channels; (4) i didn't know when it was on.). well anyway i started watching the reruns in the past few months. foreman is the archetypal, red-blooded american tv dad. he's mostly an asshole to his friends (donna's dad, bob), his wife (when he can), and the kids (the dumbasses). [personally, i want to do with "douchebag" what red foreman did for "dumbass"; that is, make it a household epithet.] aside from being a nixon-lover, red has his redemptive side too—see the episode when hyde's dad comes back and hyde moves out of the foreman house. or the episode when they have to clean out jackie's parent's cabin and red finds a stash of pot on hyde and kicks him out of the house, even though you can tell he doesn't really want to. he's a man of principles—but he's also somewhat beaten down by life. he has a Walter Mitty thing going on with kitty, even though he strives to pretend he's the man of the house, as most men will try to do before finally surrendering any say in the relationhip. anyway... this whole post is kind of silly, but red foreman... he's not number 2 by choice, but rather by merit of the above quote, which bumps him up to somewhere in the top five. i think i'll have that engraved on my tombstone... well... since i plan on being cremated maybe i'll have it engraved on an urn and tossed into the sea.

other stuff... my flight to maine got cancelled by the dicks at delta, who failed to inform me until i was already at the airport. when i tried to do electronic check-in, i got some fucked up message that told me my flight had already left at 12.51 am the previous night. then i called delta to find out what the fuck was going on and i got some some outsourced customer service dude from india who took forever to confirm my flight was cancelled and to tell me the next flight out of JKF wouldn't be for another 5 hours. so i have to fly out tomorrow, which sucks because it's pretty much like losing a day and a half of hanging out in maine. tonight i told alexis i didn't want to talk to her anymore and she sent me some link of steven seagal singing the blues with some backup band. why, i don't know—in both senses. for some reason i'm a dick for wanting fried chicken and get annoyed when people say "oh, that's gross." well, ya know what? i think a fuckin' $30 hamburger is gross. sorry if my taste buds aren't as sophisticated and well off as yours. anyway, another night. i'm still the asshole.

ps. to people who don't have bedbugs: you don't really help the situation by making light of it to the people who do. you don't understand that you're being an asshole. unless you've actually dealt with bedbugs, woken up 15 times at night slapping at things you think are bedbugs, woken up screaming and covered with hyper-paranoid sweat because you know you have bedbugs and you know that, at some point in the night, they're going to get you, checked yourself every morning for the 5 or 6 new bug bites that appear in random spots from your back to your legs to your arm to your neck to your face, don't talk to me about bedbugs, and please don't fucking try to make fun of me about having bedbugs or make me sympathize with you for being creeped out about bedbugs. that's not very nice, and to paraphrase number one asshole vincent gallo, being nice feels real good.

crocodile hunter r.i.p.

i didn't really plan for this to be my next post and it's somewhat tangential to the heroic-asshole theme, but i don't really mind (well, contains elements of both heroism and asshole-ish behavior, but they're separate in this case). i was getting a lot of shit earlier today for being bummed out that steve irwin died yesterday. some people went so far as to say, "oh, he got what he deserved; if you want to live by jumping on alligators, then that's what you get." what an asshole thing to say. irwin loved animals—but he was by no means naive about it, as opposed to someone like timothy treadwell. irwin knew the line and knew when he was pushing it; he also did a lot of crazy shit and handled himself far better in very dangerous situations than you or i, as commoners in this world, would. the guy loved animals—and i'm by no means a fellow animal lover (i think of animals more like people; some i like and some i don't. i especially dislike little, yappy dogs.)—and he was passionate about them, but there never seemed to any other hidden agenda with him. i have to respect him—for his craziness and daring, but also for his passion and the fact that he always seemed honest about it. i don't know... part of me is trying to be less cynical and less uptight, despite the overall nature of this blog. i have to give it up to him. i had fun watching his shows. r.i.p.