i have a little XM radio thingy, and i've hooked it to the speakers on my desk, and am playing loud music right now. it's just changed to the hives. it's loud. what i'm listening to is channel 54, which is called LUCY. i like how all the "alternative"-type stations have people-names. there's also FRED, which is pre-nirvana stuff, and ETHYL, which is post-nirvana.

the first time i ever heard XM radio, it was in my parents' car in new orleans last fall, and i kept cycling through the stations and found this one. the concept of lucy is sort of an oldies station for people around 30. it's interesting. they play a lot of morrissey, XTC, psychedelic furs, etc., plus then they throw in stuff like the hives on occasion. so i told my dad that--"did you know this is an oldies station for people who are thirty?"--and he said, "i have not heard a single one of these songs before." of course not, i told him.

according to my mom, one of my dad's standard stories has become riding around new orleans and "listening to the oldies station for 30-somethings and not knowing a single song." my mom bought me an XM radio based upon that experience, which i complained about for a while, but now i am accepting it and trying to enjoy it. not long ago, she asked how i was liking it and asked if i was listening to lucy a lot. i said not really, that i liked XMU better. (and that station is the KEXP, WOXY equivalent.) she said, "don't tell your father that. he thinks you listen to lucy all the time."

i don't know why that's an issue, but i told him anyway and tried to get him to sit through XMU, but it was too much for him. he said, "i'll have to stick to lucy. it's weird enough for me."

this morning the cops stopped the M60 bus and got on and looked in our bags. they kept saying over and over, "it's all for your safety. open your bag please, sir, it's for your safety. sorry for the intrusion, it's for your safety, thank you."

it is so hot. i can't do anything. sentences longer than ten words might be out. we don't have any air conditioning. we have some fans. now that the sun has gone down, it just feels worse. new york city. hot this week.

you know how when you mention deep snow or heat waves or floods, people always come out with some season-year combination? as in, "you want to see snow, you wouldn't have survived in winter of 78" or something like that? any time you mention the heat, my mother still talks about the summer of 1980, when it was very hot back in tennessee, and we had two candles in candle holders that melted while on the dining room table.

that summer, when the candles melted, it was 113. in celcius, that is exactly 45 degrees.

it's not that hot now. but i can't stand it. i have to go read in the coffee shop now.

the other day i put my potted palm in the bathtub to give him a rainstorm. these days he's very big, so getting him through doors and around corners is hard, and the window and fire escape are out of the question. consequently, he gets dirty. that can't be good.


harrison in the bathtub

i got harrison in 1998, when i was in new orleans. i didn't really have any furniture, or much of anything, except this big one-room apartment with high ceilings. my mother hadn't ever seen my place, but thought i should have something homey, so she sent me a potted palm. it was a bit of an oddity, having two glasses, some forks, and a four-foot-tall plant, but i liked having him around.

his name is harrison because back in those days whenever i sent something to my mother, say flowers for her birthday, i always sent them from "harrison," meaning harrison ford. sometimes i used to be kind of sweet.

when i first got him, i had no idea how to take care of a plant, so he turned brown and almost died. i read at the library to cut off the dead parts, so i put him on my front porch in the lower garden district, pruned him down, and left him there to get rained on. absolutely everything in my neighborhood always got stollen, so i expected him to end up gone, but instead he lived outside for a month and started to look healthy.

when i moved to cleveland i borrowed a pickup truck and put my only two large possessions--harrison and a couch--in it, covered them with a blue tarp, and drove to cleveland for two days. being in the dark that long on his side didn't seem to hurt him.

he lived with me, and then with me and mia, in cleveland, and then came to new york with us. in our old apartment he took up one third of the back room, and there was no way to take him anywhere to clean him, so i would occasionally spray him off, but it didn't help much. in our new apartment, which is big, there is room to turn him around and move him with the sunlight. and, as i realized the other day, room to take him into the bathtub. voila. so, it rained.

it seems that i always retreat to writing about music, especially when i start with a blank mind and just start typing. yo la tengo, pink floyd, fleetwood mac. that sounds like the beginning to an SAT question, if, like, the SAT were cool.

all the time i think of something to write about, and i mean something that doesn't have to do with yo la tengo or whatever. i'll be sitting on the bus, for example, with my forehead against the window, watching the people on the street, wondering what kinds of diseases are on bus windows, and an idea will pop up. and then i'll get to work and write three paragraphs about it, and then i'll set it aside, and the next time i think about it it's maybe a day later, and the idea seems old and boring to me. so then i do nothing with it.

but music, and obsession, and josh's problems--that's what we were talking about. you might notice, or might not, that the titles to the entries are lyrics to whatever song i am listening to at the time, or alternately, whatever song is playing in my head.

the other day i was writing an email, and i called it ray ray rain, because it was raining, and because i was listening to bettie serveert, and the song was ray ray rain. immediately afterward i went to look at gothamist, for boredom reasons, and this was at the top. ray ray rain, and it kind of made me think i'd accidently proven that the entire world exists inside my head.

so then i asked the gothamist guy if he had bettie serveert on the brain, and he did. so at least i caught him at it, too, and if the state police in the jackboots come to arrest me in the middle of the night for caring more about indie rock songs than about my job, i can at least give them his name to get my sentence reduced.

the sidewalk crowd, my people

how long does it take a topic to become stale? it's the weekend, but the subject of this shall be last weekend. and last weekend was july 4th.

my july 4th had a revolving cast of characters, and they mainly revolved around the trip to battery park to see God Bless Matador, which was the main river-to-river festival july 4th celebration. i would like to point out that the matador press release for the event begins: "America is one of the top 8 or 9 countries in the world, and with that in mind...." and yes, i think tax dollars helped pay for this, and that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and irony is your daddy, and the terrists have not won, yeehaw.

stephen malkmus played at 4:20 (ha, get it), and yo la tengo went on at 6. the problem was that even though we arrived at 3, we found a line that slithered from the lawn, around the corner to the world trade center sculpture, down to castle clinton, and then intermingled with the line to the statue of liberty. boys and girls in dinosaur jr shirts and slightly overweight couples in white shorts and straw hats were forced to interact, in order to figure out who was in what line going where. so, overall, i think the day was worth it, all to help bring america together.

they stopped letting people in around the time we were on the sidewalk across from the stage. so we stayed there, with the other sidewalk people, and probably had what amounted to a really nice spot.

manhattan view and the gantry, waiting for the fireworks

yo la tengo played stockholm syndrome, which is one of my favorites, and i got to find out that james, the bass player, sings it. because that never occurred to me before.

after that we took the 7 to long island city, where we chose gantry plaza park to watch the fireworks. and that was good, too. loud and bright.

going home on the 7, and by 7 i mean the jewel in the crown of the mta

i would say we took the 7 home, but we watched two or three full ones go by, and then the 7 broke. it broke. so, with the 7 broken, we walked.

i'm not sure how many jobs i'll ever have where if i stay late i will sit at my desk drinking a 16oz budweiser and blasting fleetwood mac. you know, if i were to have to judge myself based upon the previous sentence, i am sure i would hate me. budweiser, fleetwood mac, work. these are vile things.

how pedestrian does it make me if i say that hearing pink floyd play together for the first time in more than twenty years, the first time in my adult, music-consuming life, was great? live 8 was a special thing, for that, for me. i thought they were classy. i would have loved to have been there.

this morning i was thinking about how it's almost time for the fireworks. the plan this year is to try and watch them along the east river, on the queens/brooklyn side.

however, this morning that's not what i was thinking about. what i was thinking about was this--does anyone remember either last year or two years ago this time, when the cover of the new yorker was an art spiegelman painting showing a guy waking up in the middle of the night, in a sweat? the guy looks really worried. there are fireworks all around his head, and in the background--the entire background actually--very large yet very subtle, is a mushroom cloud.

i haven't even thought of that once this year. stuff blowing up, that is. i remember thinking the new yorker had a lot of guts to put that on the cover. but it's what everyone was thinking of, so really what else should they have put?