Choire Sicha

Saturday, July 19

I was wondering how to say goodbye to New York, but it came and said goodbye to me -- in mob form.

I'd been wandering around New York all day, buying things. A sweet book of plays, the great Mars Volta CD, sci-fi snacks in bar form, expensive moisturizer, an odd haircut. I was at my final stop, the Virgin Megastore, putzing around. The kids were bopping at their listening stations, and all the music sucked. I finally found a CD I wanted, with Nina Simone singing My Way on it. I shuffled over towards the register, wondering if I needed to re-buy some early Public Enemy. As I crossed the store there was all this weird energy by the registers; the shoppers were all spinning disconcertedly, and the staff was all high-pitched and squeaky.

The long row of 30 or so listening stations were entirely occupied by young men, all with the headphones clamped to their ears, all staring vacantly forward into the store. At first I thought it was random, like a pretty arrangement of washed-up jellyfish on a late summer's beach. But after a minute the intentionality became clear. It was the creepiest and most moving thing I've ever seen. Totally fantastic. While I watched I wandered into the checkout line and then I thought, no, I don't want to buy anything here. Purchasing culture isn't just deathly, it's boring. I put the CD back on some random shelf and I left very happy. Thanks, Mob Project! ⊕

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Friday, July 18

Dear New York City: Would you excuse me? I cut my foot before and my shoe is filling up with blood. * ⊕

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Thursday, July 17

I was inspired yesterday to finally become an organ donor. I learned that Mary Roach has written extensively about the importance of research cadavers, and while I'm far too lazy to fill out the paperwork for all that, checking off little boxes on the back of my driver's license seemed totally within my abilities. I do have some pretty specific organ bequests, however, enumerated below.

Given that I'll be travelling thousands of miles in the next month throughout lands where few New Yorkers dare to go, I figure now is the time to make plans for my organs. After all, my odds for being killed in Utah while living in a truck for a week are about 50/50. And just think: you'll all be like, I like totally knew him! Okay, I didn't know him, I totally read his stupid website once though. Typical of you traitorous whores I call readers.

So, a few free gifts before I go off to my merry martyrdom:

I'd like to leave my luxurious Gentile hair to Mr. Rudy Giuliani. His fascistic iron grip on morals and mores while Mayor left him no time to evolve beyond the crudest of ratty comb-overs. From beyond the grave, I could give him the one power he could never seize from the poor, infirm, and darkly-skinned: the power of not looking like a cracked-out wildebeest.
I'd like to leave my gorgeous alcohol-free liver to one Ms. Elizabeth Spiers, lovely editrix of Gawker. Like Willy Loman, or a husband of Roseanne, her job makes her drink -- and drink she should.
Of course I shall leave my delicately charbroiled lungs to our current Mayor. Maybe he die soon?
I'd like to leave my left eye to the stupid Supreme Court for their decision to demand that public libraries install internet filters. Just one eye, get it? Get it? Yeah. And of course the left one for Ms. Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez. RIP baby. Left Eye would have wanted you to see smut on the internet in your public library.
My retarded deformed hammer toe I bequeath to the Jivamukti yoga studio. As the Ivy League chakra brigade balances upon their ballet-schooled toes, let them gaze upon my simple -- and odorful -- wall-mounted reminder of imperfection and challenge.
If I should somehow be pregnant at the time of my demise, I'd like my sweet little fetus to be harvested for stem cells on the desk of President George Bush.
I should like my most important organ, my overly bilious spleen, to be gifted to the zombified Senator Clinton from New York. Her lack of bile is an affront to feminists and people-minded people everywhere. Her autobiography reveals her to be a fool and a tool. If my ransacked corpse could say anything to Ms. Clinton, it would be: get pissed off. Maybe, just maybe, if she could tap a little of that anger that surely must boil beneath her lake-like exterior, she wouldn't have the satanic patience to be such a damn puppet of the centrist sell-outs.

And for the rest of you: fire your handlers and speak your mind, or I'll leave you each a crusty toenail and a pint of black black blood. Hurry up, please: we'll be dead before we know it. ⊕

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Wednesday, July 16

he New York City Tattoo Convention

This May, I spent a weekend with my pal Geoff trolling for hot tattooed boys at the annual tattoo hoedown. Well, Geoff wasn't trolling -- he's like straight and married. Or whatever, maybe he was. That's his business. Anyway. What did we learn? That a little ink doesn't make you a rebel, and that grown men shouldn't pull people around by their nipples. Geoff took the great pictures, I wrote the words.

→ The story and pictures are at The Morning News.

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Tuesday, July 15

Am I crazy or is the state of travel in this country a disaster? How come I can't get to San Francisco non-stop next week for less than $700.00? How come I can't rent an SUV in one city and return it in another for less than $684.00 dollars a day? How come people don't jump when I say "I have money, just give me what I want when I want it?" Don't they understand I will not be caught dead in a Hyundai Accent?

Have I been in New York too long? Have I become ass people?

**UPDATE**

Two hours later, I have been rewarded for being a pushy New Yorker. There is in fact a price on everything. Good evidence. Meanwhile, I have a Manhattan-sized headache -- no, not the beverage, lush. I just need to get out of this "town."

Also, they didn't have Jet Blue when I quit flying 12 years ago, okay? When I was a kid, we all flew standby. You could just go to the airport and say "put me on the next plane to Rio." I did that all the time. Heh, okay, no I didn't. But. They don't have standby no more, that's for sure. You call it progress, I call it boring. ⊕

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Monday, July 14

"I was born in the desert, so I know how it feels there," warbled Stevie Nicks in her tribute anthem to Gulf War I. As a matter of fact, Ms. Nicks was the most written-to celebrity by soldiers engaged in that war. For her reply, I understand, she sent a photo of herself with the words "May the spirit of Rhiannon be with you" written brushily just to the side of her face.

I believe she did not fare as well during Gulf War II.

My personal experience with that song: one sunny San Francisco morning, oversleeping as usual in my dark cave of a room, I heard Ms. Nicks belting out her very over-produced patriotism at a very high volume. And then I heard it again. And again. And again. As a little surrealist gift, Philo had left our apartment with the track on repeat as audio torture, or perhaps spiritual enlightenment aid. To this day, only he knows for sure.

Still: I know what Stevie means. I miss the desert and the wilderness. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty has emerged from the Great Salt Lake, thanks to the inexorable processes of evaporation and super-salinization. Rabid wild dogs roam garbage dumps on the massive Navajo reservation of northern Arizona, just an indigenous person's femur's throw away from the nation's biggest natural tourist attraction. Down past Tucson, the saguaros stand bepecked by birds and unbent by care. Reno and Boise extrude their third-rate toxins. And who wouldn't be compelled to go to Wendover, and who wouldn't give someone else's eyeteeth to consider purchasing an Integraton?

So, very soon, I may be packing up a truck with a lot of water and a sleeping bag, and going off to pay my respects (or have respects paid to me, to be revealed). From the ruins of the west of course I'll break on through to the decadence of the coast; Los Angeles, San Francisco, ruins in their own ways really. Traci Lords will be there, performing her new hit cover song "Nobody Walks in L.A.," undoubtedly beneath a billboard of Angelyne. Heather Locklear is there, with a run in her flesh-colored hose; her latte is totally decaf. And this time, I won't myself be walking in L.A. down Highland Avenue, the hooker-seeking trucks zooming to the curb as I commute to work to pour coffee for Nicholas Cage's girlfriends for $5.35 an hour. I'll actually be behind the wheel, allowing whoever's young and hopeless these days to do the walking for me. ⊕

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Sunday, July 13

Storm surge.

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