d i z t o p i a

New School of Gawk

I suppose I'll have to start posting on Ye Olde Abandoned Personal Blog now that I've shifted jobs once more. Previously the editor at Gridskipper, you may now find me in the newly assembled managing editor chair at Gawker. Read the rationale here, enjoy the first-day jitters here, and weep at the tearful farewell here. For my part, I'm just glad that Gawker once again has an Alabamian component. Much more to come, as I embark on my plan to ruin the franchise for everyone. Join the fun, won't you?

Meet the Old Boss

Same as the new boss, i.e. the boss I worked for last month. This week, I start full-time blogging over at Gridskipper. No more Bronx commute, sad to say. Now I can remain cooped up in my lair throughout the day, emerging only at night to feast on the blood of the living. Come visit and send in your urban travel advice. Should be city-related and appealing to the younger, cooler, sexier crowd, i.e. no one who reads (or writes) diztopia. But just in case such a person stumbles here by accident, drop something in the tip jar at tips@gridskipper.com. Oh yeah, and while looking at Gridskipper, be sure to click on every single link at least 12 times per day. Only this regimen and megadoses of vitamins will keep the aliens away.

101 Stories About 101

Monday's post of classic student quotes from my teaching days reminds me how much I loathed teaching, and how glad I am never to engage in such ever again. If only I had been allowed to crush those defiant kids with a bulldozer, just like the caped crusader in this startling Tiananmen Square cover image (from Scott H as always, click to enlarge--right on, driver). Sadly I could not legally operate heavy machinery, so I had to try and crush them in other ways. If nothing else, I did come out of two years of teaching-assistant hell with a hefty grab-bag of Amusing Anecdotes®, collected below. Most of these I've told to friends (or in their hearing) dozens of times, so if you remember, try to say them along with me! Probably more to come if I stay sober long enough to recall.

Revenge of the Ditz: In my very first English 101 class, one (otherwise quite bright) girl didn't like the whole no-grades, portfolio-writing structure. In particular she didn't like my disinterest in justifying why this or that instruction had to be obeyed. It was like she questioned the whole college teacher authority paradigm! Madness. I don't know what she was worried about, as she had no problems with the writing assignments and had excellent grades. I must have enforced some correction that challenged her A-student egomania. Anyway, we clashed on a number of occasions, frequently "resolving" with Mexican standoffs where I would conclude by saying, "There's really no point to discussing this any further. Moving on." She would narrow her eyes like the cobra, oh yes she would. Unfortunately for me, she was also quite athletic, and imagine my surprise and horror to find her among my opponents in the coed soccer league the next quarter. I was goalie on a cheerfully inept team of grad students, most of whom were habitual smokers, copious drinkers, eaters of fatty flesh, recreational drug enthusiasts, and averse to exercise generally. About halfway through the game -- after toying with me from afar with a few easily blocked lobs -- my nemesis charged in and drilled a shot at me from close range. The ball smashed me directly in the face. No goal, but that wasn't the point, was it? I staggered backward and salvaged about two microns of dignity by not falling over, but I was just coherent enough to see the girl trotting off, pumping her fist and fairly incandescent with gleeful triumph. Rest assured she figured prominently in my own revenge fantasies for months afterward.

Royal Notice: Another student was a fine young man of Kuwaiti origin. What he was doing in Spokane, WA, is anyone's guess. He periodically flew to London on weekends to see his father, who owned a chain of Mercedes dealerships in Kuwait City. This kid was so rich he would actually have to hire someone to hire someone ELSE to kill me. Anyway, one Monday after one of these weekend trips, he didn't show up in class. Not on the following Tuesday either. Our fascist composition department had a very strict zero-tolerance policy on absenteeism; either you had a specific note from a physician, or you got three absences for the quarter, then you failed. So when the kid showed up on Wednesday looking fine, I approached him about the looming badness of two unexcused absences. He promptly and apologetically handed me a sealed envelope. This envelope and the single sheet of paper it contained were so dense and creamy that they could have been classified as dairy products. The stationery was from the office of the Royal Physician in Extraordinary to the Queen of England, certifying that the young Kuwaiti had been struck down with flu and unfit for airplane travel until Tuesday evening. To this day I kick myself for not holding out for a free Mercedes to seal the deal.

Blood Simple: During the final essay exam, students had to remain silent. They could raise their hand to ask me a question, and I would approach their desk and hear their plea. However, they could only ask me dictionary-type questions (definitions or spelling), or questions about the essay question itself. One girl raised her hand, and I leaned in to hear what she wanted. She reared back a little, stammered a quick, "oh, excuse me," and let loose a titanic sneeze. Unbeknownst to us both, she was also on the brink of a massive nosebleed. She sprayed blood all over my arm, left side, her desk and essay, and the back of the student in front of her. She shrieked and ran out of the room. I froze for a second, looking in amazed disgust at my arm and hand, and then calmly led the bloody-backed student over to the restroom, where we washed up. I told him to go finish his exam, then I stopped by the department office to let them know what happened. (They were amused, and said to let them know if the student was ill, or if I got AIDS.) I returned to class to find the bloody-sneeze girl already back in her desk. I asked if she was OK and she said yes, and she apologized, obviously mortified. Eventually, time was called, and essays were handed in. After the girl left, other students asked me what happened, and I explained. They looked visibly relieved, and said that when we three left the room earlier, there had been animated discussion -- some of the students were convinced I had punched the student in the face, resulting in the spray of blood. You can tell you're dealing with a bunch of rough-and-tumble farm kids when, despite this possibility, they all just returned to writing their essays.

Seduction By the Innocent: I had just shaved my head, a dramatic shift from my typical frizzed-out shoulder-length locks of the time. In my creative writing class, there was one lil’ goth chick who wrote a series of bland Stephen King ripoff stories. There was some good detail work though, and she was a fine student otherwise. Part of the class routine was a one-on-one meeting with each student halfway through the quarter, where the student read their current story aloud, then we discussed. She and I met in my tiny office and went through her story. I was reading over one paragraph and pointing out good bits and pieces, when I looked up to see her staring at me as if hypnotized. She breathed huskily, "I loooove your hair." Despite several precedents from colleagues, I wasn't ready for student-teacher freakin' in the office, so I delicately and nerdily steered the conversation back to the work. I don't think her heart was in it, though. If I'd known baldness was such an aphrodisiac, I'd have shaved back when I was a nubile coed myself.

Starving Artist: My last English class took place in the evening at the urban extension campus, so it was mostly what we euphemistically call "adult students" (insulting both to adults and students). One of these was the bitterest man I ever met in Washington state, a place known for bitterness. He was in his early 30s and married to a shrew of a wife. He worked as some kind of obscure banking assistant, but his dream was to be a sculptor. His evil wife, however, thought that his art was a waste of time, so she forced him to sculpt only in the basement, and only in one corner. He told me once that if his wife found any sculpture, tools, or materials outside a clearly demarcated line in that corner, she would throw them away. Actually drive them to a dumpster somewhere so he couldn't retrieve them. She apparently performed this check while he was in my class, so he was always preoccupied, wondering if he'd violated the line of death, and if his artwork would be gone when he got home. This is why Spokane produces so many serial killers.

Low-Interest Clones: I was teaching the class with the embittered sculptor when the story of Dolly the cloned sheep hit the media. Since we studied rhetorical writing, I always seized on any issue that could be clearly separated into for/against sides. (Capital punishment and abortion were both forbidden topics, as students instinctively regurgitated the most trite, brainless arguments available.) Given all the scary talk about scary clones that Dolly caused, I though this would be a fun one. Plus, we're actually arguing about cloning! It was so sci-fi. Anyway, imagine my surprise and disappointment when it became clear that the class did not seem scared or threatened at all by cloning. Despite all the hue and cry from religious spokespeople, none of the highly religious students objected to cloning. So, I tried to imagine the most morally objectionable cloning scenario possible. "What if," I said ominously, "the government found one really strong, durable guy, and cloned him a million times over to create a ... SLAVE RACE OF CLONES!" (cymbal crash!) ... No reaction. If anything, they seemed mildly attracted to the idea of slave-clones handling society's crap jobs. Finally, as I continued to prod them for possible negative consequences, one hand went up. I eagerly called on the student, one of the few younger college-age kids. "What if," he said, "the clones rebelled against us?" Hmmmm ... well, naked self-interest isn't exactly moral outrage, but it's a start. "Good point!" I said, beaming. "So, to prevent rebellion, let's say we engineer our grunt-clones to have only the most rudimentary intelligence. We'll factor down their brainpower to that of a toddler!" Dramatic pause! Imagine this horrible future of retarded clone slaves! Another hand went up. Yes, you! Older female student in the back who has never spoken until now! "Maybe," the lady whispered uncertainly, "we should keep them down more? Like, only as smart as a dog?" Other students nodded. There you have it. Moral quandary solved. So much for all your dithering, egg-headed bioethicist wimps.

Inertia Uber Alles

This crisp and sunny spring weather is kryptonite to productivity, or even the flaccid joke masquerading as productivity required to blog. Not that I've been enjoying the weather directly. I'm still shackled to my L-shaped defensive revetment/hutch. But I think I've developed a permanent crick in my neck from turning my head to the right and gazing longingly out the window. Good thing my chair still swivels. Lookit the little coeds scampering to and fro! Hither and yon! Mostly fro and yon. I would like to get fro and yon as well, since to and hither currently blow. As usual, the frenzy of the first week back in the backwater has given way to the more typical workday pace resembling suspended animation aboard a giant starship loaded with sleeping pills and PBS transcripts, moving at the speed of pudding. Even my two nearest coworkers were absent today, until one showed up tardily (tard that she is). I did get caught up in a brief flurry of photocopying. That was the highlight of the morning. I haven't even accomplished much in the way of procrastination. Wish I had a front porch to rock on, or a no-good hound to cuss. Maybe I'll take up whittlin'.

Hate Is the New Love

Here is the plan. (1) Daily postings once again, at least on weekdays, and (2) more essayistic crap, less gee-whiz-lookit-th'-funny-links crap. Of course, I'll probably continue the Friday link dumps ... despite being ignored by most regulars, they bring in swarms of lurkers. Blind, slavering, Olsen-twin-seeking swarms. Not that the navel-gazing material won't be just as frivolous and trite as ever, but it's actually easier to do stream of consciousness than hew to a particular gag. Plus, I'm sick of googling for photos of waffles or jetpacks or snakes with shoes, etc. From now on, relevance will get even more questionable, perhaps even moving beyond the realm of questioning entirely and back into certainty. And the savings will be passed on to you. I might even get around to tearing up this tediously institutional page design.

Right now I'm questioning my inherent love of attack. Just this very afternoon, I resisted the ideal opportunity to be perfectly, incandescently cruel to someone I didn't know. To be honest I was thrilled with the prospect. Even as I read the object of my derision -- perhaps I'll link to it if conditions warrant -- all kinds of lines of assault formed in my brain like a shimmering 3D schematic. Little dots and arrows surged, charged, cut, shredded. It would be beautiful. It would be surgical and yet messy and gorgeous. And it would have been all the more glorious because it would happen in a venue that, at that moment, was suffused with fellowship and forgiveness. The underhanded maliciousness of my response would be magnified by the sweet air of companionability it destroyed (or attempted to destroy). I shit you not: my pulse increased at the prospect. If this wasn't a sexual response, it was definitely rooted in and/or heavily stimulating some very primitive reptile brain instincts, which somehow had a direct line to the rhetorical centers.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to argue. But maybe even more, I love the rare chance one gets to just blast somebody or something with no regrets or restraints. Admit it: There's a wonderful, righteous pleasure in slapping down someone who (you feel) deserves it, with no consequential consequences. I haven't indulged that tendency much on this very blog, and maybe I should. If not here, where? Especially when my words shall live forever in search engine caches and come back to haunt me one day? You do know that "chris m" is a pseudonym, right? Any resemblance to any "chris m" living or dead is purely coincidental. That chris m is a nice boy who loves his mother and never said anything bad about the government or your mother or what your mother did with the government.

So what stopped me from venting today? I can still feel the joyful rage endorphins. It woulda been good clean fun. I don't think it's maturity, which few could accuse me of. Nor second thoughts or better judgment. Nor even respect for others, though I do respect others, even some of the others involved in the venue mentioned. The sad fact is -- and we're going really deep here -- I think I decided that it would be best, absolutely best, if I just responded with a very small gibe, just a tiny little bit of naughtiness, in the hopes that it elicited a more scathing and particular response, which would then leave me free to really open up the floodgates of bile. Sort of like when the action hero pointedly turns his back on the mostly defeated villain, knowing full well there's a loaded gun lying around, and then when the punk goes for the gun, THEN Clint E. can whirl around and righteously ventilate the bastard. And this post in particular is part of that strategy, though I only recognize that in retrospect.

Sadly, I also recognize that what this anger-fishing may gain for me in causus belli, it decreases the street-cred factor I'd get for a totally unprovoked and unwarranted attack, however spiteful. There's a loss of flair in the reasonably nasty rebut, as opposed to the ambush. But maybe that perception is part of my Love of Evil. Obviously I'd prefer to be feared and despised than loved and respected. Must be spending too much time with academic types. Only the lawyers I know still try to convince me of mankind's essential decency.

The Six Planes

The floor is short institutional carpet. Its main color is dark gray, veined with black and green and light blue and dark red, not unlike the flesh of a corpse drowned in water heavy with tannins. The floor tilts north, toward the center of the building. This tilt means my desk is crooked, leaning backward as it were, which causes the keyboard drawer to slide back underneath the desk when left to its own devices. To stop this retraction, I wedge an old keyboard wrist rest into the left track of the drawer. The long sausage of silicone gel dangles obscenely, sometimes brushing my left knee. The office administrator is in the office directly below. She's so corpulent that she rarely comes upstairs unless summoned. However, she's gotten very good at detecting the presence and movements of upstairs staff based on our footsteps above her head. Frequently I'll walk into my office and my phone will immediately ring, as she calls to ask a question. My chair is a vintage 1970 office classic, boxy with wooden armrests and shoulder-height green-and-white plaid back. It swivels, leans with a Victorian creak, and rolls on its five casters as far as the loose and bunchy carpet will let it.

I face the north wall most of the day. Like all the walls, it's covered with light wood paneling. Directly in front of me is the computer desk, or "hutch," not to be confused with "Starsky and." This desk-hutch holds the computer and printer, a lamp, a few documents I rarely consult, stationery and envelopes I have never touched, one reference book I use about once a month, a desk calendar with many concerted markings for off days and few markings for work-related tasks, and various desk doodads (pens, pencils, a dagger-like letter opener) which are mainly there for idle twirling purposes. The north wall also has a stout wooden bookshelf, a little over six feet tall, that holds stacks of paper relevant to last season's book projects. Throwing these stacks away, bidding goodbye to tedious and pointless books singly and en masse, is one of my principal pleasures. On the other side of the north wall is the office of a coworker covertly known as "Merlin" for her diaphanous and garish self-made gowns, scarves, dashikis, ponchos, and other fluttery garb. She is often consumed with various personal and professional obligations, real and imagined, which keep her out of the office, which is a good thing. A steady stream of interns marches in and out of her office, apparently not substantively contributing to aggregate work progress.

The west wall has the door, two chairs, and a closet. The door is white, in the right-hand corner of the wall, and extremely thick and sound, as befits a former Jesuit dormitory. There is a silvery gothic "Q" on its face, reason unknown. A plastic coathook on the back holds my coat, if any. There's an intercom panel next to the door, which allows me to buzz in people who ring our main door two flights down. 99% of these people are not here to see me, but they mash every buzzer button, quickly and in sequence, just to get inside. I hear the buzzers in other offices go off, one after another, closer and closer, until they get to mine. I used to hate this, but now I get up and buzz them in just to stop the jangly racket. In the hall outside, you turn right for the bathroom or go straight to other offices. This intersection is most frequently traversed by myself and the production editor--the man who turns finished manuscripts into bound books--as his office is across the way. The two chairs sit side by side facing me, against the wall, and between the door and closet, one dark brown and the other light tan. They are heavy, wooden, armless, and shiny smooth with years of wear. They likely have served one purpose or another on this campus for decades. The tan chair, on the left, is where I usually drop whatever lunch, coffee cup, magazine, newspaper, or other miscellany I happen to have with me when I arrive. The brown chair, right next to the door, is where the very occasional visitor instinctively sits when talking to me. This is because I have a giant behemoth of an old schoolteacher's wooden desk between me and the door, at a right angle to the north wall. The desk contains many files and papers from my predecessors that I have not bothered to examine or maintain. There are usually a few stacks of paper on the desk related to current projects. These stacks either get briefly reviewed by me before being remailed somewhere else, or perhaps they are tossed onto the heaps inhabiting the bookshelves or closet. When someone comes into my office, I turn 45 degrees to the left and observe them with the disinterest of a Kremlin basement bureaucrat, circa 1957. Few dare venture fully into my office, preferring to hover at the threshold or to sit immediately in the brown chair. The only person to actually approach the desk is the director emeritus, who is hard of hearing. Merlin will sometimes attempt to come around the desk to point out something to me on a paper she's brandishing. I strongly discourage this practice with body language, scowls, and the evil eye. If that doesn't work, I jump up to meet her in the narrow space between desk and wall, and she retreats, as well she should. In the left corner of the north wall is the closet. It is shallow, with six rows of shelves supported by a bracing central plank. In this closet are stacks of paper related to the most future-distant season of book projects. As a result of the room's tilt, the entire north wall cants downward as you look from left to right. This crookedness made it impossible to close the closet door, which I didn't like having to deal with anyway on my occasional scrounging missions among the stacks of paper inside. So I called the facilities department and had them remove the door and take it away. No explanation was required for this maneuver. Sometimes I wonder what they did with the door, as it had a triangle of wood sawn off its top to accommodate its half-collapsed frame. It would not have fit anywhere else.

The south wall has a useless window and a bookshelf. The window actually does have one use, in that it holds the window-unit air conditioner. This device is all that keeps me alive in summer, as this ancient building absorbs heat like beachside asphalt and has no central air. Otherwise the window faces the administration building. Sometimes there are classes of some kind in the room immediately opposite. Occasionally I am startled by a wave of laughter coming from that room. Other times a bird will land on the air conditioner with a loud thunk, then flap away. The bookshelf against the south wall, imposing at eight feet tall, holds stacks of paperwork related to current book projects. Even these are rarely consulted, as everything I do is just a matter of routing, scheduling, emailing, calling, cajoling, and herding people and paper around. Much like anyone else.

The east wall is my favorite. It has a metal horizontal file, used for committing freelancer resumes to the uncharted depths, never to be seen again. There is a torchiere lamp, and a trashcan, and an accursed radiator that spits and pulses with hell-borne heat. There are critical notes posted detailing holidays and paycheck dates. But mostly there is the window. Ah, the window. It's five and a half feet tall. Directly outside is a small courtyard, home to a middling tree and prowling and yowling cats. Then there's a two-story yellow building which serves as nameless adjunct office space. Adjacent is a two-story house or apartment building with a patio. Somewhere in this building lives a woman, never seen, who on warm days makes a rhythmic yipping sound which both disturbs and cheers me. It sounds like "eeeeeee-YUU! oooooo-WEEE" with the length and intonation varied a bit. At first I thought she was calling to a pet. But it's more like some kind of springtime devotional. She also plays Cher, which I like less. To the left of the yellow office is a huge parking lot. Right now it's filled with cars covered with snow from today's mini-blizzard. Insufficiently winterized people are trudging around, scraping frost of their windshields. Beyond the parking lot is a road, then the New York Botanical Garden. It's the best thing about this view, at least when not obscured by swirling snow. I can see a hump of a hill with thick woods and grass, then a seemingly impenetrable treeline beyond. Boulders and shale protrude through the turf here and there, even in the snowfall. The window rattles in the wind and, thank God, can open to its full height. Opening this window is my only means of survival when the radiator turns on. It's cracked open about three inches right now, despite the cold and weather.

The nine-foot-high ceiling is a pitiless grid of old, white acoustical tile. Probably WWII era. Probably all that protects me from its asbestos fillers is its thick coating of high-lead paint. There's a piss-colored fluorescent light in the middle of the ceiling, but I never turn it on.

Return to Scenter

My office is a three-story brick building, converted from a former Jesuit dorm. There is a gothic "Q" on my office door, provenance and meaning indeterminate. Because of the building's age, we do not have gender-separated bathrooms. There is one bathroom directly outside my door, another at the opposite end of the floor, a third one level down, and a fourth on the ground floor.

During winter months, the building's steam heat runs at irregular intervals. But when it's on, it's ON, baby. The radiator, approximately two feet to my right as I type this, has a little bullet-shaped valve that squirts out excess steam with a pleasant cobra-like hiss. Fairly quickly after ignition, the steam heat is severe enough that my flesh begins to curdle and enpinkify like a lobster before the surf-and-turf. Ergo I must open the window to survive. And so, the day is spent in a constant traversing and retraversing of the slippery slope between radiator intensity and height of window opening. Right now we're at about 1/3 mast in the window department. The steam was on most of the morning, but is now off, and it's gotten a bit colder outside.

No, wait, I know you want to move on to your afternoon porno roundelay, but here's where it gets good. The only way for the window ventilation strategy to be effective is for there to be a crossdraft, yes? Another window must be open somewhere. But the only window I can open with impunity is the window in the nearby bathroom. Sadly, the prevailing winds do not favor me. That is, they tend to blow into the bathroom, across the hall, into my office, and out my window. You see where this is going?

Normally this is not much of a problem. The most gastrically disastrous people in the building favor the other facilities. There are only three of us that regularly use this particular commode. My shit, of course, does not stink, and one of the other individuals has the sort of deferential temperament such that I assume this person poots out discreet little packets of descented plastic-wrapped colorless waste, and even that only at home.

But then there is the Other Person. The OP has many questionable habits, and has been flatly rebuked by another employee for the OP's habit of wearing a thick haze of the most acrid pathchouli imaginable. Patchouli, a scent that smells exactly as one would assume it does, given its gut-barf of a name. And not just ordinary pathchouli. This is some kind of weed cultivated off deliquescing human cadavers, or maybe on the shores of one of my home state's famous "hog ponds" (i.e. vast cesspools of pig crap).

Now, if that's what's on the outside of the OP's body, I can only imagine what's churning around in the nether regions. Because when the OP uses the terlet and I'm downwind ... it's bad, bad, bad. What to do! Close the window and suffer the steaming, or open the window wide and hope that there's enough residual oxygen in my lung tissue to keep me alive until the death-cloud passes? And ...

... GAAAAH! Talk about cosmic anti-karma. Right as I was crafting this elegant whine, the OP did her dirty, sinful business in the room of rest, then came directly into my office to chat about something, accompanied by a potent dose of personal vapor. I nearly swooned, and I don't use that term lightly. I guess the upside is that I'm now inured to the stench, as my olfactory centers have shut down. In fact, I believe they just died right off my brain and dropped down my sinuses onto the keyboard. Sort of a shriveled little chestnut shape of a thing.

Could be worse. At a previous job, a hapless coworker shared a small office with a colleague and that colleague's relentlessly farting dog. The door had to stay shut to keep this dog away from another office dog. The colleague's solution was to constantly spray some kind of organic berry scent air "freshener," which achieved a permanent, noxious miasma of dogshit and strawberries.

Ahh, a nice breeze just blew away the worst of it, so I'm in the clear for a little while. Still can't smell anything though. I guess this means I can start smoking again.

How I Spent the Blizzle of 2005

Three words: Big Metal Ass. While my NYC comrades thrashed weakly in snowbanks and my beloved C train succumbed to the predations of a homeless and as yet uncaptured pyromaniac (I'm looking at you, FPP), I was back in Birminghamme to celebrate my progenitors' 50th wedding anniversary. Hard to believe ... half a century and my parents are still luxuriating in their Brad-and-Jen phase. But in addition to that, the Girlfriend Attorney and I bummed around under sunny skies and 65-degree days. It turned into a rejuvenating little mini-vacation.

But of course it took three attempts to score a flight back into La Guardia, so I'm late and behind and overworked and underfed. Plus there's another Gala Festival of Dreadful Futility this week, or whatever they want to call some big meeting I'm forced to attend. Boils down to another week of light posting for you and another round of Everclear and Gatorade cocktails por moi. So hold your breath for a little while longer. And don't forget the Ass. Never forget the Ass.

The Day the Earth Tried to Swaller Me Whole

Chet Week continues with the fulfillment of a Chettish request, i.e. posting photos from a long-ago incident wherein my car nearly plunged into a sinkhole. Chet was there (that's him kneeling on the right, barely visible between two standing band dudes), along with several others, not to mention my favorite band at the time, the Sugar La Las. Yours truly is the topmost of the two heads leaning out over the kneeling girl. Click on the pics for larger versions. To recap:

Back in the days of yore known as 1992, I was but an innocent lad made of sticklike limbs and frizzed hair, and I had some of the worst musical taste imaginable. I was only just beginning to emerge from a unilateral diet of (also frizzed) hair metal. One of the first local bands I ever had a group crush on was the Sugar La Las, an art-pop assemblage fronted by a large Eurofreak named Mats Roden, and a pixieish temptress named Carole Griffin. Plus a drummer and percussionist and bassist/keyboardist whose names escape me now. They were a fun, wacky band, and they had the good fortune of being generally good musicians. Roden wrote most of their songs, and he was a medium genius at coming up with great pop guitar hooks and catchy lyrics. Plus, they did face-melting covers of "Shook Me All Night Long" and "Delta Dawn" among others.

Anyway. The Sugar La Las, though nominally based in my ole home town of Birmingham, would occasionally come southwest to Tuscaloosa for shows. They did so one Sunday night at a dive called the Ivory Tusk, off the University of Alabama's now largely dead Strip. Great show, much fun, etc., with several of my local pals in attendance, La La converts all. Since it was a Sunday night, the bar had to close a little early, and there were fewer people than normal. Which meant I got to skeeze on the band a bit, which no doubt led to some awkward "I love you guys" booze talk. Can't really recall those details ...

What I can recall is that another associate, who we'll call Magoo, wanted to buy a T-shirt but was out of cash. I agreed to drive him to an ATM to re-fund himself. We staggered out of the bar to a campus parking lot across the street, now empty except for my gleaming 1988 Chevy Cavalier. We piled inside, I reversed out of the parking space, and then the car made a crashy-hitty-impacty sound.

Not good! Perhaps I was a little tipsy, officer, but I was pretty sure there were no cars or foreign objects nearby. But I gingerly put the car back into drive and eased forward. The car did not move, though it shuddered a bit. WTF, I thought, years before that acronym became popular I might add. Did I get hung up on a parking barrier or something? Magoo exited the vehicle to check, then frantically beckoned for me to join him.

Outside, we saw this. The pavement had collapsed beneath one of my front tires. It doesn't look like much in this photo, but this opening was only the top entry to a large, bulbous chamber, about fifteen feet deep and  thirty feet across. My car was essentially perched on nothing but a thin crust of asphalt.

We scampered back to the bar to summon help. Calls were made. The Sugar La Las at first refused to believe us, but they and the few remaining barflies came out to spectate. Cops appeared with truncheons akimbo, disappointed that this was an actual geovehicular emergency that required them to help rather than harm us. They sprang into action by distributing orange plastic cones around the perimeter, which had the desired calming effect.

Band chick Griffin was overcome by the scene and was barely restrained from hurling herself into the depths of Hades. Eventually a sort of Gobot tow-truck was called, and it managed to extricate my car from the brink for about a hundred bucks. Later it was revealed that the sinkhole was actually an ancient, long-disused, unmapped water main from bygone times that had finally collapsed. This became a key detail, since the University blamed the city of Tuscaloosa since it was their old water main, while the city of Tuscaloosa said it was a University parking lot. End result: Chris pays for his Gobot truck assistance. The hole was excavated, filled with dirt and gravel, and paved over within a week. Had my car actually fallen in, I and Magoo would likely be down there still.

As to the Sugar La Las, they were a classic case of bittersweet almost-making-it. Always on the brink of a record deal, artistic principles and band infighting finally split them up. Last time I saw Mats Roden, he was a waiter at a Thai restaurant. I heard that he later died of an aneurysm or embolism or something. Carole Griffin went on to become a successful baker and restaurateur. I drove the Chevy Cavalier to Spokane, Washington, and then back to Alabama two years later, but that return trip finally killed the poor beast, and I sold it for a few hundred bucks. The end. Excelsior!

Day of Wine and Snoozes

Went to the Death Lunch for the fired coworker previously mentioned. We dined at Pasquale's Rigoletto, a highly generic Italian place on Arthur Avenue. Arthur Avenue was once the heart of the Bronx's Little Italy, but this district has largely de-Italofied just like its analog in Manhattan. There are still a few old dons and little nonnas toddering around, but for the most part the neighborhood has been rapidly assimilated by Albanians. There are almost as many burek joints as pizza parlors now ... in fact, many of the former pizza parlors have seamlessly transformed into burek joints, usually with no change of name (or even taking the word "Pizza" off their name).

But there are still several old-school neighborhood Italian eateries, and Pasquale's is one. Pretty generic main dishes of pasta with marinara ten thousand ways; bruschetta and cheese was surprisingly crunchy and good. Otherwise forgettable. Since this meal commemorated a workplace termination, it was somewhat subdued. I was actually hoping for a little more in terms of bitterness fireworks, but nothing really manifested beyond a couple awkward silences. Oh well. I guess if you're foolish enough to come to one of these things after getting fired, what can you do but act nice and lap up the pity?

As for myself, I lapped up a few glasses of red wine and thus am too sleepy and unmotivated to post anything other than this krap. At least it was all on the Pope's dime, as the university picked up the tab. Thanks JP2! And now, to hide under the desk and nap in the venerable G. Costanza tradition.