[270] Screed City

[270]

11/21/2023 Tuesday. Papers Box. Crisis Incorporated HQ. Room 253. Ridgewood, New York.

What a difference a week makes. I suppose. Tomorrow G turns 16! Mother fucker. I mean, 16 years ago plus roughly 10 months. 16! I can't believe it. Heading up to Chatham in the morning tomorrow. Spend the day and evening celebrating. Then Turkey Day. Then I guess I come back here.

Also, I got a 10 day job in Atlanta, GA or thereabouts starting on Monday, with Scott. Travel on Sunday. An independent rigging job at some school down there. Should be lucrative. Will be lucrative. The plan is to bust it out and head back up the following Friday with Sunday off.

Also, the Brooklyn rigging job is on. Or soon to be on. Mid-December. That job seems like gold-bricking cake. Two blocks from my studio. NYC prevailing wage which is a hilarious amount of money. If that goes through I will feel pretty good about the next six months. The only problem is that I have to get my OSHA 30, which I have now done five hours of, 25 hours to go. It is like driving on the interstate. Boring as hell, but you have to pay careful attention. It is a slog-job. The hardest part is paying attention. And because my work space is also my studio, I find it very difficult to not do other things while I am doing it. Like listening to a pod cast that you have to retain all the information from. A very boring and poorly grammared pod cast that has a test at the end that you have no idea what the questions will be and some of the answers are so dumb and esoteric that you have to go back and re-read pages and pages of dryly written material to find what you are looking for. Thank God for the internet, for once.

Also, I am moving all operations to Ridgewood. Voting, address changes, W2s, W9s, or whatever, tax stuff. I went to the library the other day to get a voter registration form. The library by the train station. Been meaning to go there forever. It has been so long since I have been to a proper library. It felt fantastic to go inside. A reminder that I missed my calling. After I picked up the voter registration form I took a look at the new releases. Mostly garbage, naturally, but I went around the other side and stumbled upon a rag-tag group of shelves titled: Local Authors. And behold, who did I see there? Jesi Bender. She published The Book of Last Words [Italics] from Whiskey Tit. I mean, I have been trying to get my books into the Brooklyn Public Library for, I guess since I started publishing. To no avail. But seeing Jesi's book there I was heartened. I asked the librarian about it. How I could join the group of shelves. The group of shelves that looked like the Island of Misfit Toys from that Rudolph stop-action movie. She told me to ask this other librarian. I asked him, he told me to either bring a book in or go onto the website and submit an application. I went home, filled my voter registration out, went onto the computer and tried to figure out how to submit a book for consideration. I was not heartened any longer. I would have to mail a book in. Then they would have to consider it. Deciding whether or not it was worth getting. And then they would never tell me if it happened, I would just have to look into later, like between now and sometime in the future. A year? Two years? I told Professor Curly about it. Said I was going to take a book over there, Donkey [Italics,] and since she was leaving the apartment to go into the City she wanted to come with, it would be a good times for us as a couple. Date night, but for a few minutes in the day time.

On the way I showed her the mail box close to the train station. She has asked me a few times lately to drop a letter off. A thing I don't mind doing, but she always seem harried by the prospect of finding a mail box. I tell her where it is, she doesn't listen though. Maybe by showing her she will feel less stressed? I don't know, modern times.

At the library I found the second librarian again. Handed him the book and said:

"Yeah, I tried to go online like you said, but it was super complicated, so I thought I would just come back."

"That's okay. This is it?"

"Yeah, I went onto the Barnes and Noble site and the book was on it, so I don't know if that is what you meant, but it was there."

"Okay, that's good. What genre is it?" He was thumbing through the pages.

"I mean, I guess Wyoming noir? I mean, that's is what it is, I don't know if that is how it's..."

"Wyoming noir, okay." He played along, but his face told me that wasn't a thing. "I'll take a look into it."

"Great!"

I brought Professor Curly over to the local author shelves and showed her the books. She said it was cool that it existed. I agreed, a little skeptical of it's importance, but as we were standing there the second librarian yelled over at me that he knew somebody who published with Whiskey Tit. I assumed he was about to say Jesi Bender, that her Kinder-something [Half-Italics] book was on the shelves. I didn't interrupt him. He said:

"Uh, um, his name is uh, David Leo Rice."

"Oh really!"

"Yeah, I used to have this reading series at this comedy venue. He read there once. The event got cancelled, sadly. Because it was a venue they expected butts in seats, and we didn't, well..."

"Readings are hard. Nobody..."

"Yeah, I think it would be better for me if we did like a sit down thing at like some quiet place, like a coffee shop or something."

As he was saying this my brain was literally showing a video of Tom's studio, of David Leo Rice doing his reading, of me doing my reading, the contrasting visions, approach to performance and writing, that this poor guy, the second librarian, accidentally stumbling into a position that I would have loved to be in, and his idea of having a reading was the anti-thesis and, frankly, the base-line, epitome of reading culture that bored my god-damn socks off. That no matter what you do as a writer it is almost impossible to get away from. Unless you are like Aileen Myles or Joy Williams or Patti Smyth or something. Where you could get an audience that wasn't punk rockers but also wasn't grammar-heads or font-geeks or the kind of assholes that read Finnegan's Wake [Italics] for two decades.

But it was cool. Two worlds colliding. Which for me means, I mean, I have always felt this way, but publishing, as much as BIG COMPUTER wants you to pretend is dead and everyone is going to look down at screens from now on until forever, soon we will all have robots reading us to sleep, I mean, sure, technology always changes, but since the beginning of society and throughout the history of mankind, the published word is core to conveying what it means to be alive, it is not going anywhere. Maybe it won't make anyone rich anytime soon again, but it sure the hell aint going nowhere. You think the Pharaohs scratched that shit into the sandstone to make a quick buck? That the cave drawings in France were part of some media tour from the assistant to the chief of some wandering tribe of Neandertals? Fuck capitalism and fuck big tech. I'm not even going to dignify their existence with capitalization.

Speaking of which, I have an ice machine! And it is FANTASTIC.

[Insert Ice Machine Photo]

Who knew? I mean, I always knew, but I never thought about it. Like a history of working and I never thought about the ice machine. It's not even that it's fascinating, it kind of isn't, but I have worked, what? 30, 40 jobs in restaurants around the country and the idea of a portable ice machine never once crossed my mind? It is just so perfect, so weird. Seeing it next to my black and white printer kind of feels me with respect for technology. I don't need these things to do much, at all, what I hate about my phone is that it does too much, I don't want more internet in my life, I don't want all of my "Devices" to be connected. I want to flip a light switch when I leave a room. I want to turn a lever to wash my hands. I want to turn a dial to heat things up when I am making soup. I don't need to be reminded by my fridge to buy milk. Maybe I don't want anymore fucking milk, you ever think of that? You know? Maybe I want to be hot for a second before I choose to cool down, maybe I don't want to live in a world where I don't think about my surroundings at all because something has already thought about it for me? Fuck efficiency! I'm not going to somehow become a better person if, I don't even know what, I am standing here trying to think of a single thing in my life that would be better if it was just easier for me to do, if only something, someone else would do it for me. I mean a robot that went to work for me and brought home a paycheck would be nice. But that is just Universal Basic Income. I mean, of course there are all sorts of things related to economy that other people do for you, but that is not what I am talking about, I am talking about disconnecting from life so you can somehow be free to, I don't know, not read a physical book? Not have to shop? Turn the thermostat down? Or up? Flush the toilet? Fuck that, bruh.

But your own personal ice machine? Eight fresh chunks of ice every 10 minutes? You don't have to worry about jiggling the fridge, or pouring water into ice trays, one of the most unsatisfying actions the human body has to go through. Will this ice be solid and break free easily from it's bonds? Or am I making ice slivers that suck? Find out in four hours when you're either very satisfied or incredibly frustrated.

And why an ice machine instead of a mini-fridge? What's your timeline? You want to run a fridge 24 hours a day so you can have a tasty soda-pop sometime tomorrow evening? Or would you rather drop a few juicy chunks of ice in a glass and not worry about it at all? Yes, on one hand it actually is about efficiency. Not in the sense that it is efficient, but in the sense that paying your bills because everything you own has to be running 24 hours a day is incredibly in-efficient. On the other hand it is about freedom, the freedom to have a juicy cold drink with ice cubes in 10 minutes like Moses and Ramses II intended.

[Insert 15-10 Commandments]