Just once I'd like to take the rubberband off of a head of broccoli and not hear Dave Murray's voice calling it "the poor man's cock ring."

first fruit of the wfmu record fair

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when i was 27, how the fuck did i think i was going to live the rest of my life?

the chanting begins about 3 minutes in

radio city music hall in november

Walking down 50th Street this morning,
As the dwarfs converge.

(I love New York.)

It is the morning before the WFMU record fair, the one truly holy day on my calendar. Somewhere inside the Metropolitan Pavilion waits one of my all-time favorite songs, which I have never heard before—scarcely imagined its existence.

I pray now to the vinyl gods to grace me with wisdom and discretion, that I might better separate the sonic wheat from the kitsch-appeal-only chaff, and stamina, for there are many stacks to rifle before I sleep.

last day of mercury retrograde

Diana was in town last night and we went to the Rubin Museum of Art to check out the Himalayan pieces and to watch La Jetée. La Jetée is a French short from 1962 that inspired Twelve Monkeys. A survivor of a nuclear holocaust is obsessed with the image of a woman standing on a jetty. It’s a childhood memory, of a moment of calm just before a man is murdered, and the man returns to it in his mind over and over. The image is so strong the other survivors draft the man for a time-travel experiment, necessary to save humanity. The man meets the woman, they fall in love. In the end, offered the chance to travel forward to a peaceful, advanced future, he requests that he be sent back to the jetty, to that time before the war. After the screening Thomas Cahill spoke, and he said that as you get older you increasingly recognize this circularity in your own life, things that you thought you’d passed through forever unexpectedly coming back, and it was pretty funny to be sitting there with Diana and reliving it all.

(And what made it doubly funny is that we’d seen Deirdre and Harry in the galleries above—my first glimpse of Deirdre since Fire Island—although they slipped out before I had the chance to make my awkward hello.)

jenny's last day in new york

It was in the summertime in Virginia. Katy and I were building a house in the woods on the Thornton River in Culpepper County. We’d work all day in the hot summer weather and in the evenings we’d drive into the town of Culpepper and have dinner at Pizza King or Jerry’s Diner or the Dixie Pig. After supper we’d go to the 7-11 where I’d park my bus and sitting in those warm, humid evenings we’d drink a couple of beers and listen to the Orioles baseball game on the radio while we watched people go in and come out. Young long-haired rednecks wearing baseball caps advertising farm products and young women with beauty parlor hairdos and beefy men in overalls climbing in and out of their old cars and pick-up trucks. And we’d speculate about these people, about who they were and what they did and what kinds of relationships they had and who they were married to. Then, finally, we’d drive back in the cool evening air with the windows open, the baseball game still going. We had each other and there was nothing more we wanted, and I felt blessed.

Katy had lovely green eyes, a wide, pink mouth, and a musical laugh. She was open, guileless, and what I finally found unbearable was how much she loved me. I began working on a construction job, building a house in Cleveland Park, and thinking about another woman who worked at the site. And Katy would drive down to the job in the middle of the day to bring me food, while I was scheming about this other female, wishing Katy hadn’t shown up.

And even now, when I think of it, it makes me want to cry.

-- Joe Frank

return to the cabin

I stayed in the little room and it rained again and the sound on the tin roof brought it all back, but it wasn't as painful as I might have expected. More wistful. The foosball table was out, too, and the Tesla album lay near the stereo.

Dave didn't mention a thing.

as always, dealing graciously with a compliment

After dinner last night, walking with mom on Orchard, shopkeeper jumps out of his shop:

SHOPKEEPER: Ethan, I thought that was you! I just wanted to thank you so much for the review last week.

ETHAN: Oh, of course, my pleasure. See, mom, he liked the review. She hated it.

SHOPKEEPER: Oh yes, I showed it to my sister, my mom, they were so proud!

ETHAN: See that, mom, he has a supportive family.

MOM to SHOPKEEPER: When you were a child, did your mother let you win at Candyland?

SHOPKEEPER: Well, my mother wasn’t really into games. But if we’d played them, yes, she would have let us win.

ETHAN: See. That’s why he’s well-adjusted.

Now I can see the regret freezing on the shopkeeper’s face, regret that he’s come out onto the street to give a personal and thoughtful thank-you, only to be sucked in to some ancient family conversation that exists only to make others feel awkward and uncomfortable.