moments. in time.

so, first of all, just to update from the last post, so that everyone stays with it...

i got the ipod. and i must say, it makes everything that much sweeter. first of all, there is the ability to listen to music that i haven't had a chance to listen to before. when kels and i were living in richmond(holla), we spent a lot of money on music. and because we were buying so often and so much, i didn't actually get to immerse myself in all of it. and i still haven't. but lately i have been loving the camera obscura and the elefant. good stuff.

and when you finish a long twelve hours of waitressing and you want to off somebody, sometimes you need the catalogue of bob marley to calm you down. got that. i'm gonna say this right now, and i think it's probably factual; no one has ever been murdered in the u.s. while bob marley was singin' his song. bob marley may have been murdered for singin' his song, but that's conspiracy theory. and i specified the u.s., cause i don't know about jamaica and i don't want to be making blanket statements. but you see what i'm saying.

i had some richmond nostalgia last night, for perhaps the first time since i left. for the time i lived there, i had mostly good feelings for the place; there were some things that could have been less bobo, and yes, bobo almost defines most of richmond, but i did love it a whole lot, and on top of that, i discovered the love of my lifetime in that city, so there is a lot to be nostalgic about. thinking about it last night, i remembered the way that our back door used to sound when it opened and then shut...it was a very distinctive sound; it would mean that kels was home from work, or that charles had arrived, or trey, or ab and sarah...

i remembered the view from the front window of the hill cafe, where i spent the entirety of my work experience, the side of the building where we smoked cigarettes, where i met charles williams on his birthday. i remembered the things i would see as i rode the bus to church hill every day, the nights spent out on the patio, or on the deck of ab and sarah's richmond apartment. the walk i would take nearly every day to WRIR, sleeping on the couches at WRIR on a long news night, the walk that i used to take cali on in the fan, the sidewalk burgers, christmas dinner 2005, the creation of the three martini rule, the months and months and months when it was just kels and i, the light in my bedroom, the light in kels bedroom...the christmas lights in the hallway/studio, the view from the lee bridge on the way to ab and sarah's, especially in the afternoon, the night that charles williams came over to play scrabble for the first time, the first morning charles drove me home on the downtown expressway...too many memories to even mention(although i would love to)

there were so many eras of my life combined into such a short period of time, and that they all happened there has made richmond an undeniable part of my heart. my second home forever, and i honestly can say that i found something of myself in that southern city...perhaps a bit of me is southern. perhaps part of richmond is me. actually that is true, because i have one of richmond's sons as my other half, so there you go. love will come to you. or you will come to love, but either way, the results are fantastic.

it's nice to have this feeling for a place once you've left it. it means that it took.

where were you while we were gettin' high...

first off, i just want to state for the record that kim tre' also broke it down to 'champagne supernova' and that the only words that she made a point of singing were "where were you while we were getting high?"

apparently not with you.

anyhow, here's the deal. i need an ipod. like now.

like netflix, i have taken quite a long time to come around to the realization that it is HIGHLY necessary that i have said device. and now i am sorta kinda making the sorta kinda money that would allow me to purchase one.

i need music. all day, every day.

it is a sound fiscal investment. and i think i am going to go for the 30 gig, video joint. hell, i am working my fucking ass off, six days a week...

cable access programming: not for the faint of heart

let me tell you something. cable access television in new york city is probably one of the more bizarre things you will ever view, or at least have the ability to view on a daily basis, especially in the continental united states. last night, charles and i happened upon a program which has changed our lives forever, and not in a good way.

at eleven o'clock on wednesday night, you can tune in to one of the many mmn cable access channels and find yourself watching a program called 'kim tre' from around the way'. we happened to be passing by just as kim tre', who i don't believe is technically from around the way, but perhaps more likely from the outpatient psych ward of one of the new york metropolitan area's mental health facilities, was beginning her show. i will just explain to you exactly what we saw, because to try and actually describe it any other way would require that i at least understand something about it, which is not the case.

there is a backdrop of this strange cartoon scene involving a creature that cannot be classified but that is wearing a bonnet-type hat and whom i believe is carrying a basket of some sort. surrounding the creature are other creatures of a more recognizable species, namely a squirrel, and a couple of birds. the colors involved were, as best i can remember, red, yellow blue and white. if i am to give you any further help in understanding what i am talking about, i can only say that i would not expect to find said mural anywhere but in a small child's nursery. and even then, it would be somewhat creepy.

now, here comes the good part. in front of the mural, dancing in jeans and a t shirt that reads 'get lucky', is a blonde woman of indeterminate age. if i had to guess, i'd place her in her late forties, despite her sincere effort to radiate mid-to-late twenties. enough said, no? oh, and the music she has chosen for her opening-sequence-interpretive-dance? 'i've seen all good people', by yes. but the first part, where the music is all tripped out.

now, take a moment, put all those images together in your head, add the giant pair of white rimmed sunglasses she is wearing and figure in that a some point we also hear her speak, at which time she unearths the craziest long island accent this side of massapequa, or massapequa park, and tell me how your feeling so far.

charles had already asked that i hold his hand.

to try and explain what the show is supposed to be about, one can check the mme guide and see that 'kim tre' from around the way' is billed as a show about 'celebrities and celebrity gossip', but i assure you it's much, much more than that.

now i am going to list a series of quotes, things that flew directly from the mouth of kim tre' herself, in between bouts of spasmodic dancing to van morrison, lenny kravitz and others.

caller: "what kind of music do you like?"
kim tre': "well i like stuff that really hits my soul hard. -pause- like, i really love me some hall and oats."

"i was, like, the only american that worked there. and i was always like, 'usa all the way!' and they hated it!" -on the restuarant in soho that she worked in with a bunch of "foriegners"

"i really liked the collabo he did with..." -she used the word "collabo" no less than ten times in 28 minutes.

she also said "stee-lo" and i believe she wanted it to mean "style", but i was laughing to hard at the hall and oats thing to remember it verbatim.

i can honestly say that i have never seen anything quite like this. kim tre' talked to her sister, a person going by the name of "charms", some dude named peter who claimed to have sent her a picture of himself playing guitar "what did the email say???" kim tre' shreeked at ol' pete, and pete goes "it said, this is a picture of me playing guitar." oh good lord.

so yeah, i can't say that i'm not both intrigued and frightened that i am currently inhabiting the same island as this woman. charles was straight frightened; he claimed to enter a kim tre' induced coma directly after the program ended from which he was only able to emerge to watch mark cuban on dave letterman.

but i think i might have to happen by next week, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that this really exists. oh, and kim tre' immediately trumped all other weirdo cable access shows i have seen, including the dude who ran a half hour of women walking by on the sidewalk filmed by his hidden camera, set to weird trance music he created, the drunk guys that had a drunk sports news show, and the gay gentleman who was trying to run his own mtv by taping mtv and vh1 and then running the taped-videos on his cable access program and pretending he was a v-jay.

hedge funds and hedge hogs: not related.

a great majority of the people i wait on lately seem to be discussing hedge funds. and since i don't know what a hedge fund is, and can tell you nothing more than that hearing that term makes my mind jump immediately to hedge hog, which i'm sure is technically the wrong direction if i truly want to learn the definition, i asked charles about them today. he said that you have to have a lot of money to have one, which didn't tell me much, except that i like the people i wait on even less now.

also, i have been compiling information to support my theory that people who rock the black amex card are the shittiest tippers in the world. i intend to feed said information into a flow chart, which will illustrate this in a comprehensive manner. hopefully, blogger will soon allow one to post a flow chart. or at least a pie chart. that would help.

we went to see the yanks game on friday; it rained and they lost but it was still rather kick-ass. we stuck around through the rain delay, which was well worth it, despite the loss. and i got my mariano rivera shirt. all is well.

also, the puerto ricans did it up this weekend, as it was the annual puerto rican day parade...our neighborhood is predominantly puerto rican, so it was pretty much the mecca of the festivities. yesterday was filled with the sound of blaring car horns and shouting, as vehicles covered in the puerto rican flag sped up third avenue. saturday, they set up the festival directly in front of our apartment, so all one needed to do was walk out the front door and into a wealth of food possibilities. i am particularly fond of plantains.

off to get the avocado out of the avocado, now that charles williams explained the process. not at all how i would have thought one should get the avocado out of the avocado, but obviously, i'm not exactly up on these sort of things.

tuesday a.m., nyc

i am pretty much always the last one to catch on to the joys of all these newfangled conveniences that define our modern age. here, let me hit you with this: netflix? oh hells yes. the rest of the world may have known about it five years ago, but good lord, am i loving it right now.

other discoveries of late: commerce bank is the most non-bank-like bank in history. they are super nice to you, all the time, and they don't give you the eye when you walk through the door, like they've already decided that there is no way in hell you should be in the same building with all that money, even if it is locked up. in fact, they follow you around and ask how your day is going and stuff. which could probably get annoying if you spent too much time in there, but in small doses, it ain't bad. this is the first thing that kelly ripa has ever endorsed that i haven't immediately sworn off on principle. i am not sure if that signals the apocolypse, or that i have finally gone soft, but whatever.

this morning i woke up and thought it was saturday, and wasn't even slightly distressed to learn that it was, in fact, tuesday. good stuff.

stolen cyberspace, jay-z, mariachi bands, nba playoffs, bbq and bad dreams. in that order.

i know i shouldn't be complaining, since i'm getting it for free and all, but stealing wireless can be extremely frustrating. seemingly hours of watching those little green bars at the bottom of the screen while the page tries to load...and then? connection lost. always at the pivotal moment, too. like it knows you're stealing it. that internet. it's crafty.

the guys who like to hang out in front of the hair braiding place next door and blast music are particularly fond of jay-z. and since we all know how i feel about jigga, suffice to say i am in the right place. i can't think of anything i would rather have blasting obtrusively from downstairs on a regular basis, honestly.

there has been a conspicuous lack of subway characters of the day since i posted about them. naturally. although this morning i was blasted out of my post-waking-pre-working stupor by the mariachi band that joined me on the 6 train. that was pretty fun.

it's been raining almost daily in new york city...not usually all day; it will either be sunny in the morning and then storm like crazy, or vice-versa. but last night we had a rather brilliant display of lightning, as dallas and zee german rallied agains the suns in game five(?) or was it game six? sorry, i'm up to my ears in nba playoffs here. it's all too much, and i have no earthly idea how i'm gonna deal when it's over, but we don't have to think about that just yet.

aside from all that, roof-deck action has been quite nice; our neighbors are mad cool and share charles willliams' obsession with grilling meat products. it all works out rather nicely for me.

we have been sleeping in the air-conditioned part of the apartment, however i am faced with a quandry; every time we sleep in there, i have these ridiculously horrible dreams. like nasty, bad shit. last night's was so bad that i really don't want to sleep in there tonight, no matter how humid and unbearable it is in the rest of the apartment. the images are a wee bit too fresh. and while it was all rather over the top, i personally find my dreams to be rather affecting. we will see. i'm already trying to devise a plan to improve our air conditioning-conditions. summer in the city...