Parapoetica

If you haven’t already discovered Clublife, go read it now. (But not at work. He uses bad words.) It’s the biting, sociospective journal of a twentysomething grad student who ekes out extra income as a bouncer at two of New York’s swankier clubs.

Standing watch over Manhattan’s club scum grants him plenty of material, but Rob can just as easily craft a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses girl story from the dust of a single Altoid.

A brief sample of his cynical style:

There exist misfits in our world. Nonconforming, unfortunate, lonely people who experience a singular compulsion to attach themselves to something with which they can somehow identify because, for whatever reason, other people find them unattractive or distasteful to be around. They find this something, and whether they genuinely like it or not, they’ll cling to this entity for dear life, because the object of their devotional obsession is the only thing they have, or have ever had, to give meaning to their lives.

Mmmm. That’s good reading.

I took Amtrak to New York this week for Passover, and spent much of the trip gazing out the window at life on the wrong side of the tracks. On the outskirts of Bridgeport, CT, there is a small club called the Pleasant Moments Cafe, which is what you think it is. They’ve got a sign out front that says:

OVER 50
DANCERS WEEKLY

It took me a few horrified minutes to realize that that was in fact one sentence, and not two.

Like many folks, I do my best thinking in the shower. And I’m starting to use the Getting Things Done system, which insists that you write everything down, so you’re using your head for thinking, not remembering.

The natural outcome: I just ordered me a waterproof notebook for three bucks. World, look out.

So there’s these guys, right? And they’re like running from the cops who are chasing them, right? And, like, they jump out of the car and are all “Ha! They’ll never find us now!” because they can hide behind a porch until the cops leave? But we just had a blizzard? So they left footprints?

Boston Globe: Footprints in Snow Led To Arrest

At some point, passion and allergies are indistinguishable.
— Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, is starting his own Florida town—Ave Maria—and implied that he would be banning birth control and porn in the city. Now he’s trying to clarify. “There are a lot of misconceptions,” he told the Associated Press.

Well, sure. That’s what happens when you ban birth control.

Googling for some lyrics, I came across the LiveJournal of qwantz, who has come up with what he calls the best format for music EVER. I have to agree. The formula: Turn any pop song into outline form.

Just one example out of a thread filled with hundreds (credit to vitoverde):

• Types of wine available
  • Depending on your appetite
    • White
    • Red
    • Perhaps some Rose instead
• Preferred seating
  • a table near the street
  • our old familiar place

• Guest list
  • You
  • I

• Seating arrangement
  • Face to face

• Preferred Seating
  • Anytime you want

• Preferred Dining Establishment
  • Our Italian Restaurant

• How are things these days?
  • Okay
  • Good job
  • Good Office
  • New wife
  • New life
  • Family doing fine

• When we lost touch
  • Long ago

• Since then
  • You’ve lost weight

• Things I didn’t know
  • how nice you could look after so much time

• I question your memory regarding:
  • Those days hanging out at the village green

• Your attire
  • Engineer Boots
  • Leather Jacket
  • Tight Blue jeans

• Features worth recalling
  • a jukebox song regarding New Orleans cost $.10
  • the beer was cold
  • the lights were hot
  • The nights were sweet and romantic
  • I was a teenager

• Brenda and Eddie
  • High School relationship
    • Popular steadies
    • Attended prom
      • Named King and Queen
    • Rode around
      • Car top down
      • Radio on
    • Areas where they outstripped others
      • Looks
      • Being a hit at the Parkway Diner
• Things we never knew
  • that we could want more than that out of life
  • Brenda and Eddie’s inability to survive
• Post-High School relationship
  • Purchases
    • an apartment
    • deep pile carpets
    • painting from Sears
    • another painting from Sears
    • Big waterbed
      • Cost 2 years savings
  • Reasons for fighting
    • a shortage of capital (too much on the waterbed?)
  • Things they didn’t count on
    • Apparently noisy tears, sounding like
      • ‘whoa-oa-oa-oa, whoa-oa-oa-oa’
      • ‘yeah rock and roll!’
  • Circa summer 1975
    • Status of their relationship
      • Had it
      • highs complete
      • lows complete
      • show complete
      • Lifetime ban imposed
    • Alternatives
      • Greaser option exhausted
      • Picking up pieces appears likely
    • Public reaction
      • “always knew they’d find a way to get by”
  • My reactions today
    • This exhausts my knowledge on this topic
      • Can’t state any more facts than I already have stated
    • Wish for you to join me in waving farewell to Brenda and Eddie

• Recapping our dining options
  • Available wines
    • Depending now upon your mood
      • Red
      • White
      • I’ve spoken so long, apparently the Rose is no longer available
  • Meeting time
    • At your discretion
  • Location
    • Our Italian Restaurant

The Globe’s Sam Allis sums up the odd New England nether-winter season":http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/02/27/so_near_but_yet_so_far_in_the_midst_of_winters_grasp_the_light_is_a_tease/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+—City%2FRegionNews

We live in the Moon of the Brown Snow. What’s on the ground is a dark granulate the color and karma of petroleum byproducts. What lies below it is unspeakable. When the snow melts, as it does chaotically, the grass below rises, bald and raw, the mud particularly mean. Potholes multiply like ants at a picnic and the sidewalks bruise our bones. Boston is plumb winter ugly and we are, too.

The Indian guy from the Village People (who is, in fact, part Lakota) donated his gold “YMCA” record to the National Museum of the American Indian.

And the museum happily and ceremoniously accepted it (a Lakota prayer was sung first, then everyone danced to “Y.M.C.A.”), on the precept that sooner or later they might need such an artifact of a bygone era, perhaps to flesh out a future exhibit on the folkloric value of disco, and native cultural responses to it. (No, you shut up. It could happen. Why not? There are only so many ceramic pots, war bonnets and kachina dolls that people can stand to look at, and so when the day comes that someone asks, Hey, what about the Indian dude from the Village People? the Smithsonian, as ever, will be ready.)

Celebrity Artifact (washingtonpost.com)