2000-01-16 :: 02:58:13
ask nicely, Adam Schlesinger, and see the gray
Soundtrack: Ivy, "Apartment Life"
I scored this in DC tonight at Kemp Mill -- used for $6 -- and it's the out-of-print '97 edition (Atlantic). Thusly I am indie-credified. Hahaha. I'm so so [not] indie. Got another CD for $4 (Jason Falkner, "Can You Still Feel?") and the clerk gave me the Foo Fighters "There Is Nothing Left To Lose" promotional mobile. For free! Hot diggity. I think he was gay, and it was Dupont Circle, and given how I was dressed... haha. But come on, with my hair? What you can get if you ask nicely, you know, is a lot.
For instance, there was this homeless lady outside Xando, she shook with cold under a grey blanket, and she asked for change. I thought hard, for some reason not just blowing her off, and I honestly apologized (I really had no change, a $20 bill was it). When I came back with Mike I asked him if we should invite her in to get smores or something. He wasn't sure if management would let us (I think he was right, they probably would have asked us to leave given what they said later), so I ended up going outside to ask her if she wanted something and she asked for hot chocolate. I asked if she was gonna stay there or come in and she said she'd wait there.
So I go back in, order her a gigante (wowwee!) hot chocolate and ask the clerk if there are any pastries that will be dumped at day's end (it was late, after all, past midnight) and he said yes. I asked him (nicely, of course, in keeping with the theme here) if he'd toss in the lone crumbcake that was left and he responded that those get put back in the fridge for another day... so I asked if there was something else that could be given and he told me to ask a manager. Which I did (her name was Christine -- or maybe Kristy, there was no nametag and I'm not sure). Well, the clerk pseudo-asked if I'd be put up to this by the woman and I told Mr. Perfect-hair-and-pierced-ears-clerk that this was my doing (truth). And before that he checked if we were bringing her inside the store. Told the manager I was buying the hot chocolate, but would like to know if they'd toss in a pastry. And so Christine acquiesced and gave me a lemon danish and told me they have to be careful since "they" start living outside if they give out the food -- and I understand, I really do. It's tough. It's the whole feeding the stray cat problem.
Mike and I order our shit (memory: first chai latte -- mellow) and when it comes I bring out the hot chocolate. Where is the homeless lady? Gone! I looked out several times during the meal (heh... snack) ... nothing. So I returned the danish and thanked Christine for her kindness and split the hot chocolate (now lukewarm chocolate) with Mike on the way home. I spilled a shitload of it all over my right hand since I was doing it inside a car with the door open over the grass -- fuck. Went back inside to wash up and get the drops off my slacks.
Lessons: Do not order crumbcake at Xando. Do not buy hot chocolate for homeless people you cannot see/verify that they are remaining in place as you are buying it. Do not split hot chocolate in paper cups while sitting in a car. Do ask nicely. Do walk around the city for a long time for no good reason and shop in used CD bins and talk to your friend about nothing in particular and listen to your CD finds on the way home and laugh.
Shit, I was kinda hankering to hear her story for some reason. She looked like she had one. It's like my thing with old people. I want to just ask, but I don't. It's so presumptuous. Oh yeah, I had that dinner with Grandma tonight before I went out with Mike. And it went smoothly, so that was good. I didn't ask for any stories, but I will do that before I leave. Promise?
I was at Xando yesterday (the one right in Dupont, not this one which was a few blocks away) with Pa�l (who may be referred to as Paul sometimes since the � is a pain to type). Trendy! I actually had my first taste of chai then, I lied before, but it was Pa�l's -- so it was a tiny lie. Anyway, what a place to see and be seen. (Other note: First taste of Taco Bell was about two or three days ago -- chicken soft taco and chicken chalupas. No one seems to believe this was my first taste of the "magic" *ahem* that is Taco Bell.)
After we finished there, we went and saw Paul Mooney perform standup, and it was very Def Comedy Jam-ish (he's written for Pryor and Murphy). Anyway, I wrote down some of the things he made me think about, including race relations. Some of his jokes were so angry at white people that it made me think "If you are so angry, then how can things ever be amended?" He made fun of the people who weren't totally going wild over his really charged material, which I think is definitely a step too far. But then he had some real points: The Civil War came down to the right to own a black [wo]man (or hundreds/thousands, rather). On everything else, we could compromise, but when it came to that -- the country turned on itself. A rather simple statement, but he framed it in a powerful way and it stuck with me. I'm sure somewhere some history teacher said that to me, but I don't recall he or she saying "Shit has to be deep if you turn on your own over it." Indeed.
I don't know if anger is the proper response now, though. How very Real World of me (I just saw a fragment of an episode today in which some black girl was trying to explain the realities of race relations and black life to the Alabama girl). I certainly don't have the answers, but it made me see more gray on the whole thing. So much of it seems self-perpetuating since no elegant solution exists.
He had a funny joke about how Jews say "I'm Jewish" -- like what, "I'm twenty-ish?" "Are you or aren't you?" he said. It's not like it's normal to say "I'm Christianish." Of course, you could compare it to "Scottish" or "Muslim" or something proper like that (which of course, it is), and you do have to consider the source... He made some crack about Jenny Craig and not seeing her in ads, and the fact is she's not in ads because she had a bad accident and can't talk, apparently (he didn't seen to be aware of this at all). Not to mention the fact that his opening material centered around OJ and Monica (*gag*). The opening act was a riot (and hot). I wish she had more stage time, she did a lot of solid audience interaction and moved around (Paul just sat there for his entire act). Thank you, girl in leather pants and pashmina shawl (not the opening act, just some patron), for walking around so much, especially near our table.
Ooh, this is a good album. I'm glad I bought it. Repeat.
Mooney made a point about white people on trial -- "White people always got the right answer: 'Why did you kill your wife?' 'I was sleepwalking.' 'Sounds serious! We better research this!'" This is not a joke: I saw it on 20/20, and you probably heard about it at some point. Heh, the guy's name is Scott Falater, but it's pronounced "fel-aye-ter," which I stupidly found amusing (say it out loud). Anyway, I bet Mooney was right. If a black man claimed he was sleepwalking when he murdered a woman, the public would be much more likely to say "bullshit" than in this case (not that plenty of people didn't, but I doubt you'd see a 20/20 on it that even raised a sliver of doubt). Just a thought.
Well, since last I wrote, I finally got to see American Beauty. Man, no wonder all the critics shat their pants over this film. First of all, props for near-even screen time of male and female nudity. It's about time, right? Not that I needed to see Spacey's ass, but hey, good on Mendes for balancing the exposure-of-breasts ratio out somewhat. I really liked how much the film demonstrated the difficulty in expressing pure emotion properly (verbalizing and connecting). And oddly enough, there are a lot of parallels to Fight Club (it had to happen, right?). The plight of the ordinary (those with nothing to lose) and the fear of being ordinary; the wrongness of living for "stuff" like the $4,000 silk sofa. I wish he'd poured the beer right on it just to spite her. Haha.
Frankly, it captured the strangeness of life and coincidence better than Magnolia did, particularly since I don't think that was a main theme but something you can take from it anyway. And personally, I liked how much it dealt with seeing beauty in small things. I don't know if it was intentional, but when all of those video tapes of what Ricky Fitts sees as beautiful end up getting left behind -- that says a lot to me. What if you left your journal behind? Your most personal possessions? What would it take to do that? I am not sure if Ricky was cataloguing his past or what... that would definitely be interesting to know.
I need to see that movie again, and I want to see that in the theater. Oh yeah, and since the sound blipped a little, I asked nicely and got free passes for me and the friends with which I went. And an extra one, to boot. Huzzah.
Brett sent me inspiring and funny words. From selected emails:
On a side note, I think the fact that the Playstation is cheap and all over the place is pretty damn cool... sure, it isn't bleeding edge anymore, but the facts that (a) there are 70e6 of them out there (b) the machine is relatively easy to develop for (c) the market is still very much alive despite encroachments of high-visibility next-gen systems like Dreamcast (d) the software is super-cheap to manufacture all make me sort of giddy with the idea that given a good idea some random schmoes could sit down in an garage and do something novel and get it out there to a ton of people. I guess I am just fascinated by the far extreme of the technology curve, wherever something programmable is cheap and ubiquitous, because it feels like vast unspecified potentials are easily within reach...
...
Also, Doctor Dre was staying at our hotel. One day we saw his kid talking trash on the waterslide because the hotel dudes wouldn't let him go down head-first: "I'm not gonna hit the fuckin' wall, fool!" Haha.
...
> that. I often wonder what people are thinking, how they conceive of the
> thoughts that I am trying to verbalize at them.
Yeah! Language as remote thought invokation! Conversion of neuronal firings into audible semi-coherent blathering with reception on the far end and interpretation into, to a very rough approximation, the same thoughts. The beauty is in the re-interpretation: your thoughts *aren't* exactly reproduced, thus allowing the conversation to progress as a result of the thought-drift. Rad!
I often wonder if people are spending more time listening to me or just thinking of the next thing to say. Well, that or wishing I would shut up.
Zounds. Time for me to shut up.
So are you sure about keeping that diary?
last five [im]personal journal entries: