Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

On Friday, December 13 at 8pm, Tom and I saw Daniel Kitson's new one-man show Analog.ue at St Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn. On Jay Street. Analog.ue is rapid-fire monolog that glorifies moments in time. Kitson cherishes moments in time. He nabs them with tweezers and jams them in preservative jelly. Then he studies them, up close. You can see his breath condensing on the specimen jars and you know he's so into it he doesn't notice. He also doesn't see his fingerprints on the glass. Daniel Kitson.  Very interesting guy. Kitson ruminates fiercely over the idea that no one's life is remembered in a comprehensive YouTube video. You can't buy your own Truman Show. Like mine, all your moments in time are scattered across the memories of everyone you know.  On Saturday, December 14 at 3pm, Nina and I attended the Emoji Art & Design Show at Eyebeam Studios on West 21st Street. Before emoji, emails and texts and Facebook statuses were all rat-tat-...

Last weekend, right after Karen told a story about a lost fig, I told Anna that Stevie Wonder had been burning up my headphones for two entire weeks. Stevie has an extremely large catalog. I also mentioned that my friend Michael Goodson inspired this motown marathon. To which Anna replied, "Of course he did." Apparently Michael Goodson has been behind a lot of noteworthy pursuits. At grandma's house, I slouch over my computer at the dining room table getting bitch-slapped by the Google Play registration application. I turn on some music. My tinny little computer speakers kick out the middle of a Stevie song. Instantly, my pop, who perches on a chair in the livingroom, says, "Little Stevie Wonder, Fingertips Part 2, 1963, 3 minutes and 13 seconds in length." Pop's well known to rattle off long lists of random facts, but seriously what the fuck? This is the question I pose. Pop says that when he was in college, living in a house he called the Su...

At Swedish Club on Saturday, I mistakenly ordered a shot of whiskey in a pint of Guinness. Obviously, I don't speak Irish Pub. Nonetheless, I felt like Alexander Skarsgård's grandmother . Every day, that feisty bitch rolls her wheelchair to the farmers market and puts down a couple shots of Fernet-Branca with a beer chaser. Not mixed together though, so I'm clearly rougher. I got into a conversation about charts and graphs. No Saturday night is complete without a little chat chat about curves. I wanted to say something about outliers. I do not know how to say outliers in Swedish. I resorted to my old trick, make up a word and hope for the best. I went with "ute" (out) + "liggare" (someone lying). Unfortunately, uteliggare means "homeless person" in Swedish. Everyone became sensationally confused and that was the end of that. I went back to figuring out how to get whisky with nothing else in the glass. Little did I know at the time, but the ...

When I grow up, I would like to be a geriatric scarlet. Iris Apfel will act as my godhead in this pursuit. I waffled briefly— one time I drifted off for a second, dreamt I was Helen Mirren and felt incredibly calm and collected. But as Iris Apfel says, "More is more, calm and collected is a bore." Actually she doesn't say that. As a geriatric scarlet, I intend to pursue the following activities with great vigor: 1) When I arise in the morning, I will part heavy midnight blue velvet draperies. The tassels will be brocade. Obviously. 2) All meals will be eaten on china. I'd like to dine on a pattern featuring small fluffy foxes with keen eyes. Foxes are overlooked when it comes to decorative dishware. I saw a taxidermy raven encased in a thousand sparkling crystal marbles at the Met. There will be one of these about. 3) My friend Stuart told me the other day, "When you're retired, somehow you can spend the whole day going to the post office." Perh...

Imagine a few mildly porny terms. A word or two you'd find on packaging at the Ben-Wah Balls  Sex Emporium. Back in the spicy section. Now picture your grandma. Now picture looking over your grandma's shoulder and seeing these words printed on cards she is holding in her hand.  So that happened. It was all my fault but I'm going to blame it on Tom anyway. I had separated out all the more depraved squealing hog kinds of " Cards Against Humanity " playing cards. Except I didn't include Tom in my plan. He saw a bunch of loose cards lying on the table and put them back, all tidy in the front of the box. And then I dealt Grammy those first cards with no visual inspection.  She  laughed so hard she choked on a piece of potato knish. S tay street, Grammy. Meanwhile my mother, on the other side of game table, somehow managed to get dealt 20 cards and refused to give any of them up. She hoarded "Helplessly giggling at the mention of the Hutus a...

Let us begin with the review in question.  It is a one-star review of Sleep No More by Amaria M : "I'm hot, sticky sweet, from my head to my feet." - Def Leppard A few weeks ago, Tom and I slipped onto a 1 train uptown. Tom sat down next to a saucy minx with an enormous quilted tote bag nestled in her lap. She twisted like a corkscrew in her plastic orange subway seat, squeezed some savage duck lips, lined up her Android and snapped a selfie. With the flash. Her hair swished left, her ample flesh went right, a re-duckeling of the lips. Another selfie. With the flash. Sexy squirming. Repeat. 17 glamour selfies in the time it took to get to West 72nd. Most of the humans in the subway car who were not blinded by the strobing flash were extremely busy taking Vine videos of our MTA starlet. Mostly, I was just confused. Such activity simply could not be happening without " Pour a Little Sugar on Me " blaring like the voice of god. I think it...

Rumors persist that Cher has Indian heritage. Are they true? If you watch this video, the whole half breed thing strikes you as a little dubious: Cher rocks the outfit, but she's precariously perched on what appears to be a horse that is almost dead. It makes you wonder what kind of Indian would run down to a ponyride, toss aside some ten year old birthday girl and commandeer her mount. Cher's riding style is also suspicious. It is excessively upright. But let's look at the alleged facts: If you reference Wikipedia , you will find that "Cher's father, John Sarkisian, was an  Armenian  truck driver with drug and gambling problems, and her mother,  Jackie Jean Crouch  was an occasional model and bit-part actress with Irish, English, German, and   Cherokee  ancestry." Yahoo Answers reports: " Her mother is of French and Cherokee descent. Her father is of Armenian descent. Cher was born in California and her father left her and her mothe...

Pre-Foosball. Mark on Pier 57 We were on our way back from Pier 57, a pock-marked slab of ancient asphalt and the perfect place for Mark to learn how to ride his spiderman bike. There had been a lot of motivational shrieking. The kid almost pulled off a Triple Donut Dare, but then his chain snapped and that was the end of that. Wheeling Mark's freshly dead bicycle across a park by the west side highway, we spied a lopsided foosball table tucked amidst the shrubs. Of course we stopped for a game. It was me vs. Tom and Mark. I won, final score 5-3. I scored 7 of the goals. I'm a wild kicker and Tom and Mark were missing half their little guys.

Dear Apple, Maybe you think you are making my life easier with these automatic backups and lack of a "Save As" option, but in actuality, you are causing me to go insane. Every presentation I give is a variation of an earlier one. So my workflow is this: open up the deck I presented last week to a prospect with the filename "Deck for Mary Smith," begin to edit it for Sam Jones, save-as the new deck "Deck for Sam Jones." Except with the new Keynote, this workflow is impossible. As the lesser of evils, I selected the workflow option to make an automatic backup of the deck I open up. So as a first step in the new workflow you've forced on me, I have two files: one named "Deck for Mary Smith"  and the other named "Deck for Mary Smith-backup." Except the "Deck for Mary Smith-backup" is actually the deck I presented to Mary Smith, and the "Deck for Mary Smith" is actually the deck I want to present to Sam Jones....

American Rust   This book I just read, " American Rust ," takes place in a small Pennsylvania town named Buell. It's a fictional place where the steel mills shut down and everyone is a meth addict. In other words, it's a postcard from my youth. What I like about this book is that every character gets shafted. Shafted figuratively and even literally, as one character was in prison. I reek with schadenfreude , you see. I rub it all over my head like glitter and boil it in my tea. It's very decadent, untoward and unsatisfactorily fleeting. Almost immediately after indulging in any amount of black-hearted gloating, I feel the beady stare of the Evil Eye . If you are an old Jewish woman on the Upper East side, recognizing good fortune is a sure-fire way to attract demons who will take it away. I frantically ward off them off by pretending to spit three times: ptiu ptiu ptiu. There is magic power in showering spittle upon bystanders. You should know this, Bubbe...

I hover around the pull-up bar. It's the best pull-up bar in the weightroom for people under 6' tall without solid leaping skills. I fit in that demographic and so do many other shorter, less springy folk. We all keep glancing over our shoulder waiting for our chance to move in on the equipment. A guy wearing blue seventies-style nylon shorts rushes in for a turn before I can cut him off. He does a couple of pull ups and then squats down right below the bar, placing his hands underneath his feet. He straightens his legs, hoisting his ass skyward in some sort of advanced leg stretch maneuver. After a few minutes, he performs a hop and more pull-ups. Followed by another round of leg stretching. And some pull-ups. I monitor his activity wondering what the fuck limber hamstrings have to do with pull-ups. I realize that I will need to ask to work in with this guy because this could go on for hours. I also realize that if I do ask to work in with him, I will have no choice but ...

Lots of manly men at a meeting at Personal Capital. Photo credit:  www.personalcapital.com I signed up for an account with Personal Capital (https://www.personalcapital.com). It's a half cool financial app similar to Mint.com, but with more investment tracking. Basically, Personal Capital offers many chart and graph opportunities, which I enjoy. Here's the timeline of this endeavor. Please note how many sentences start with "I." They start with "I" because I perpetrated the action, all by myself, like the Lone Ranger. I sign up for Personal Capital using my name, my home phone number (which coincidentally happens to be Tom's home phone number) and my email address I enter our investment accounts into the Personal Capital app. Most of the accounts I enter are the ones in my name, because they are the ones I know the passwords for. I also enter some joint accounts that are in both my name and Tom's name. I can't remember Tom's pa...

Stockholm in Summer Summer "is the most beautiful week of the year." It is 75° and blue as Odin's eyeballs. The Swedes celebrate good weather. There is frolicking and mushroom picking. There are weekends in small cabins in the forest with no plumbing because as Camilla has been saying for twenty years "it is a very Swedish thing to pee in nature." Be prepared for a swim at any time. While at a wedding, it is usually good form to wait until after the service and to put back a few toasts before dashing across the lawn for a quick dip in a lake. If you are civilized, bring along someone who is willing to stand ashore and hold your jewelry while you are in the water. If you clink on your wineglass during the wedding reception, the bride and groom are supposed to kiss, just like in the US. But if the bride or the groom has left the room and someone clinks on a wine glass, then everybody can kiss the remaining party until the absent party returns. Nothing is ...

I marched up Church Street in TriBeCa bearing a flag. The flag had previously marked the epicenter of our Midsummer land grab in Battery Park. Which we take very seriously. Midsummer in Battery Park, NYC. View from the SSCNY Land Grab My marching endeavor was cut short by Karen, who absconded with the flag. She could no longer take my so-called "willy nilly" approach to flag bearing. She was in the army, where nothing is especially willy nilly. Karen braced the flag in a grip that clearly took some practice.  I tried to copy her example, but hopping around a maypole like a small alcoholic frog for five hours had really taken a toll on my ability to concentrate. Our procession of Tom Revelers arrived at the birthday celebration restaurant. Luckily the maitre d' was willing to check the flag in the coatroom because some people not including me felt it might be awkward to gad about a dining room hoisting a flag. Thus began the First Night of Tom. The Second...

Today we babysat Jack and Ella and may I say we are the best babysitters ever. We only lost the children for a very short period of time. On the way home from lunch at the Ramen joint, the two of them took off across a field and vanished. Not only that, but Jack had Tom's iphone clutched in his sweaty little palms. What a fly in the ointment to lose not only two kids but a phone besides. Of course it didn't take us long to put the pieces together and mastermind an ingenious plan because we are, as aforementioned, the best babysitters ever. I called Jack on the phone. The crumbsnatcher let me go to voicemail. Eventually, I went with the "find my phone" GPS feature and Jack and Ella were located in their livingroom curled up before the dim light of an iPad playing Angry Birds in Space. Jack had not wanted to answer the phone while he was running. We rewarded his safety-first attitude by letting them watch Tracie's rendition of the Aerosmith/RunDMC Walk This Way ...

Bubby and Zayde In 1939, your Grampy worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He got on the BMT with his gang after work and they were tired. Already on the train was this Irishman who worked at another shipyard. He was sprawled out over three seats, this Irishman, and the train was full. Grampy approached the Irishman and asked him to sit up. The Irishman said, "Why do I have to listen to you, you little Jew." And before the Irishman had even gotten the words out, Grampy lifted his fist and beat the shit out of him, left him unconscious in a pool of blood. We grew up in a tough neighborhood, you know this Bubbala. You can't be weak in such a neighborhood. I told you about my first date with your grandfathah, when we were sitting on the trolly in the Bronx and a boy ran past. He was Grampy's good friend this boy. He called out to Grampy, "Hey Roite! I'd stay and talk to your girl but the cops are chasing me." Anyway, when Grampy got home that evening ...

The Annville Memorial Day parade featured a horse-drawn carriage hauling a coffin. My hometown can always be counted on to muster up some morbid exuberance in the name of America. The Little Dutchmen Rock Memorial Day Parade The day kicked off in true Pennsylvania style. A flock of leathered up vetrans straddling  spit-shined Harleys  thundered down Main Street. Then came about a dozen floats bedecked with plastic garden of eden interpretations. Intrepid children perched on folding chairs while the wind smacked them in the face with artificial palm fronds. They held signs selling competing Summer Bible Camps. One of the more promotionally minded outfits had a rear guard handing out lollipops wrapped up in new testament advertisements. If child molesters are good for nothing else, obviously their victim recruitment strategies are worthy of emulation. We got to see cocker spaniels up for adoption in a pick up truck, followed by a raucous mob of 4Hers...

I would never pan out as  Miss Subways . First, when it comes to locating MTA stations in Brooklyn, I can most often be found circling the block like a mad cow. Second, the contest ended in 1976. Third, and most gravely of all, I'm no ingenue with big dreams and coifage of any kind. But if Miss New Jersey Transit were a contest of only strength and skill, I might have a slightly warm snowball's chance at a title. I can do a lot of pushups. I can also pull off the following: I know, and do not hesitate to take, the shortcut through the garbage tunnel in Penn Station. I can sit in exactly the right car to jump off the train 2-5 steps from the platform stairwell leading to the exact door to the street which is closest to my final destination.  I never, ever, get stuck in a seat facing backwards. Barf. I have long since overcome my curiosity about the chirping bird noises blaring from a single loudspeaker downstairs underneath the NJT departure board near the K...

Starlight Girls EP by the Starlight Girls Reviewed after 50 plays I imagine this band as minstrels. They appear friendly; until vaguely menacing melodies curl around a Boris and Natascha underbelly and you know it's too late. You're completely bewitched. Buy it. Now. Buy Starlight Girls  on Amazon.

Night Visions by Imagine Dragons Reviewed after 123 Plays on Lastfm At first I thought this album was uniformly mediocre. Upon closer analysis, I realized that mediocre is the calculated mean average rating. The album has one really good song, a few half decent ones and three candy-coated, gelatinous sugar pop blobs that are just fucking unbearable. They bring down the average something fierce. Buy a few of the singles on Amazon:  Night Visions

Nick Waterhouse at the sold out Mercury Lounge show 4/7/13. Luckily he is over 21 with ID. Standing outside the door at the Mercury Lounge, Tom and I waited for the bouncer to thoroughly study our IDs. Even with a margin of error spanning a couple decades, guesstimating someone's age by their appearance alone is clearly very difficult. It is completely up in the air what I was doing 21 years ago 1992. Maybe I pulled a tendon accidentally falling down the stairs while performing a drunken rendition of Whitney Houston's hit single 'I Will Always Love You,' or, it is highly likely I was born that year. Nick Waterhouse's drummer. Luckily over 21. A pack of guys cuts in front of us. One of them sticks his California driver's license in the bouncer's hand. Tom is like, "WTF?" I'm like, "Holy shit, that's Nick Waterhouse." The bouncer is like, "The end of the line's back there, brothers." Nick Waterhouse...

The turkey vulture eyeballing me through the bedroom window.   I woke up this morning feeling beady eyes gazing longingly at my forehead. I think I heard the smacking of thin yellow beak lips. A turkey vulture menaced me through the bedroom window. He had obviously flown in for the vulture jubilee on the grass out front. A forelock here, a ribcage there. Is that floppy thing a pancreas? Turkey Vulture Jubilee Further investigation revealed a trail of blood dripping up the driveway and over the yard. I'm a jot leery when it comes to predators who can spread their main course over a fifty foot radius. Am crossing my fingers that our dinner guest is nocturnal or this Easter Egg Hunt could go horribly wrong.

Thanks for the heads up Michael Goodson  I was way too drunk for only 9 pm. Nonetheless, Tom said I won the Q&A. We were front table and center at the Sam Lipsyte "The Fun Parts" book event , which also featured Mike Doughty wearing a suit. Sweet and sexy  Dave Hill , moderator, completed the trio on stage.  A lumpy woman flailing her arms around in the corner earned the first slot in the Q&A. She began, "I write for a living also…" and paused dramatically, toying with the edge of a cream-colored scarf rakishly tossed over her head. It hung like vanilla frosting dripping off a danish. Two hundred writers within earshot synchronized an intricate eye rolling sequence. I took the lull as an opportunity to order more bourbon. Sam bustin' a move It is my firm belief that there is no need to suffer the absence of self-awareness when you can rejoice in it. Accordingly, Writer Woman continued, "I write non-fiction since I'm a histo...