sleep is weird

Yeah, so what? It’s a cliche, “sleep is weird,” but who cares, it’s true and you know it!

Sleep is so trusted, so hard-wired, and rarely questioned. So consider this buck stopping, at least momentarily, to at least introduce the possibility that sleeping is crazy: the act of getting in a bed, closing your eyes, not moving for a bit of time, then having your body slow to a crawl, while you lose consciousness, and begin “seeing” these usually-provocative yet incredibly-fragile strings of thoughts, colors, then you open your eyes many hours later, having lost so-and-so amount of hours. Lost! But we never question, why. Why do we daily commit this unthinking bodily ritual, trading so-and-so years of our life for restfulness, the energy to make the time that we do have more productive, fulfilling. Hmm.

Do you think you’d give up sleep if you had the choice? Like, when you win the lottery, you can either get your winnings paid to you in installments or get it all in one lump sum, a straight shot. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love sleep, I wouldn’t trade it for the Dickens, but that doesn’t stop me from questioning it, and it doesn’t change the fact that sleep, this zombie-inkling in all of us to power-down daily, is weird! Sleep is weird, weirdo, yes Sleep, I’m talking to you, you’re freaking weird, I love you, but you’re freaking crazy-weird, yawn.

‘Night.

wow, who knew people watched this show…

fireworks backwards!

hey, check out this new paranoia I just found

So lately I’m extremely wary of throwing away receipts of any kind in public garbage cans because what if someone finds one of my ATM receipts and somehow, you know, deflowers my credit score. I couldn’t handle that so I make sure to throw those away at work, home or some trash receptacle that I can fully trust. Hey, is that too much to ask, a little peace of mind when I throw away my garbage, without having to look over my shoulder every five seconds to make sure no ones mussing about in there, examining my wrappers. In fact, if that low-fat lemon yogurt container I just threw out never gets looked at by another set of human eyes, I’ll die a happy man. Cause, you know what they do in there, those trash-people, don’t you? I used to think they were looking for spare food too but boy was I wrong. No they’re looking for information. That’s right. They’re scraping for DNA, collecting identities to do who knows what with them, sell em on ebay, on the auction block, for crying out loud. Who’re the slaves now? Hey, stop looking at my wrappers! What’s the big idea?

oh, the angry lady

So we were visiting the gorillas at the Bronx zoo. It was that amazing-weather-Saturday a few weeks ago that punctured a hole in the earlobe of Spring, which has since closed up, of course. And since the sun was doing its thing on this particular day, lots and lots of people were at the zoo, parents constantly pointing out the animals to their helpless children, you know, as if little Haley or Ashton was blind and dumb, “Is that a zebra? Look sweetie! Does that zebra have stripes?”

We were in the second of the main gorilla viewing rooms, the narrower of the two. It was super-packed. I was reminded of that scene in Jaws 4 when they’re in that shark tunnel and the glass gets punctured, chaos ensues, death, blood, etc. Ricky and I were in the way back, hugging the glass wall, trying to breathe, when a scenario unfolded involving a woman who, for the purposes of this blog and good old-fashioned hyperbole, I’ve dubbed “the angry lady.” She was standing in front of us a ways, when someone pushing a wheelchair went by her, apparently clipping her on the heel. Needless to say, the Angry Lady flipped her muffins!

“My foot! My foot!” She cried. The man pushing the wheelchair stopped, apologized profusely. “Jesus Christ! You could have taken my entire leg off!” She said this right to the person pushing the wheelchair and the woman in the wheelchair herself, who presumably couldn’t walk. They apologized some more then wheeled away. But the Angry Lady had not finished her impressive display. “Why are they bringing that thing in here?” She whined to her husband and son. I looked at Ricky amazed, uncertain whether “that thing” referred to the wheelchair or the less-than-human disabled person in the wheelchair.

And she kept it up for a good 5 minutes or so, extracting every once of pity possible from her family (who I was quietly pitying). “No I’m ok, it just hurt a lot,” she assured them like a trooper. And we, Ricky, myself and the pregnant gorilla behind the glass just shook our heads thinking, “Some people.”

2-awkward-interactions

First one happened about a week ago: Ricky and I were coming home and there was a Latino-delivery-guy waiting outside our place. He asked if we ordered food, and we were like, “No, but we’ll let you in,” he thanked us. “Must be the girls upstairs that ordered,” one of us said. And while we were climbing the stairs together (since the girls live on the third floor), some deep-tickling inside me nudged, “Make some small talk with the delivery-guy, Matt” so I obliged this feeling and asked, “Pequena?” And the guy seemed a little embarrassed, “Oh no, Thai,” he answered. Yeah I made the fatal leap of assuming he was delivering Mexican food cause he was Latino. Terrible-horrible-blah. Ricky beat me up afterward, so I got what was coming to me.

Second is a bit more subtle. Happened a few days ago. I was leaving work, waiting for the elevator, and some cleaning-guy was starting to vacuum, and I was nearly certain of two things: firstly, that I heard him fart, and second, that he knew I heard him fart. We were alone mind you. And he starts walking toward me and says, “I’m sorry,” and I answered, “Ah, it’s fine,” while making the universal gesture for “it doesn’t smell that bad,” even though it sort of did. But slightly confused he then says, “Excuse me,” and moves past me to plug in his vacuum! He was just saying, “I’m sorry,” like, “Sorry, I just need to get past you,” but I mistook it for a fart-apology. What a world!

spam-poetry

so the duder site keeps getting comment-spammed (what can you do?) but I noticed that some of them are slight-works-of-art, for example:

——————————-

“pokemon nurse joy porn comic giving birth to a child videos national dance assocation competition can a woman with one kidney have children articles about human sexuality pornographic no hassle pricing columbus sign language classes massachusets yorkshire terriers for sale recipe tuna casserole”

and another…

“guard and inmate gay prison sex movie about abused husband tom selleck lumps in the mouth anime lesbian catgirls boston fetish strapon amish midwifery analysis of tilting at windmills amhest massachusetts romantic adventures porn puerto rican paso fino classes”

return of the san-jose-sharks-guy

Revelation!

Not sure if you heard (how could you have not?), but the aforementioned San-Jose-Sharks-Jacket-Guy, who has been MIA for a good 6-7 months, today miraculously reappeared along my morning-commute-route, only now he’s wearing a NY Rangers jacket!

He looks about the same he did months and months ago, with a thick, long-white beard, perhaps he’s a bit thinner and more ragged, but it’s hard to tell. The NY Rangers jacket is much lighter than its San Jose counterpart, some might call it a “Fall Jacket,” so here’s hoping when the temperature drops he starts once-again donning everyone’s favorite turquoise extravaganza.

On a side note, there’s this other guy who’s consistently along my morning-route, he’s part of that 34th Street community revitalization project, responsible for those flower-arrangements along 8th and 9th avenues. He’s usually cleaning the sidewalk as I walk to work, sweeping, gathering or whatnot, and one day about 2 weeks ago he stopped me: “Excuse me, do you have the time?” “Oh sure,” I gladly obliged, squeezing my cell phone out of my dumbly-tight work-pants (gosh I hate work clothes).

But just a couple of days ago, the same worker-guy asked someone else the time, just as I was passing. “9:37,” the passerby said (give or take) and the worker was very thankful. Made me start thinking: perhaps someone (maybe me?) should buy this guy a watch? Would he even take it? Maybe he doesn’t wear watches for cosmetic reasons like me (they make my arm look too short).

Anywoo, I’ll keep you posted whether NY-Rangers-Jacket-Guy becomes a butterfly, so to speak, and metamorphoses back into his much-beloved San-Jose-Sharks-Jacket self.

what’s your favorite subway euphemism?

Now don’t get me wrong. The NYC subway system is a pretty miraculous thing. But like any public, crowded, aging great-work, it can be irksome, particularly when it stops mid-tunnel and the engineer comes on the loudspeaker to give us (if you can hear him/her) just enough information so as to slow our collective descents into primitive man (yeah, that’s right, if we’re desperate enough, umbrellas can also be used as clubs).

But what’s your favorite subway euphemism?

Mine is “earlier incident.” You know when the train stops and the engineer apologetically explains, “Due to an earlier incident, trains are running at reduced speeds,” etc. Anything could be an earlier incident, provided it happened and it happened before right now. Yargh, really keeps you guessing, but maybe that’s the point.

What’s yours?

subway-turnstile-fraud

Gee, Golly. What a week. First locksmith-blackmail now this. Ok. So I’m entering the C-train at Lafayette this morning, sort of in a hurry since it’s around 9:02 AM and the train has been wont to arrive between 9:04 and 9:08 most days (who’s counting?), and there’s this crowd of three boys (probably around 16, but larger than me, big surprise) surrounding the single turnstile headed toward Manhattan. As I scurry closer, it appears, through their gesturing and words I can half make out, that one of the boys mistakenly swiped on the Manhattan side instead of the other side, which goes deeper into Brooklyn. So as I try to swipe myself, which is difficult since they’re blocking the way, one of them asks me, “Hey can you swipe on the other side – we already swiped on this side by mistake.” Sounded like a reasonable thing to ask. But just then I hear the train coming – granted it could be an A, but who’s willing to take that chance? It must be 9:05 by now, dear God! I get flustered.

I reach toward the turnstile to enter, but before I get there: “HEY, that’s our swipe!” the kids yell. “Sorry I sort of want to make this train,” I fumble fogey-like, again reaching for the revolving metal bars. “That’s illegal!” one cries, but when I finally try to move through the turnstile, wouldn’t you know – it doesn’t budge. The kids never swiped at all!

So I get out my Metrocard, hear the train-breaks sqeaking (Shite, it is a C!) while one of the boys screams, “But we already swiped here!” “I JUST TRIED IT AND IT DIDN’T MOVE, MAN!” I yell out of nowhere, swipe my card on the 2nd try (after one flub) as the kids wryly giggle, and I stumble down the stairs just as the train starts leaving. Shite. At least I now have ample time to be pretty-darn embarrassed about yelling at some youths, calling them “man” for some reason (what was that about?), and just plain feeling-all-square and blah and stuff. Fudge, I hate work-clothes.