To whom it may concern,
It’s not okay for your dog to sniff me. I know, before you even tell me, I know. Your dog is friendly. He, she, or it is the canine Mr. Rogers and he just wants to be my friend. That being the case, you should teach the cur that snuffling people with a glistening snooter is not going to put everyone in a very sociable mood. And please don’t tell me that that is how dogs experience the world. There are numerous innocuous ways to experience my testicles without putting a snot drenched nose against them and huffing furiously.
I am fully aware that it’s “just a dog”. They don’t reason very well, nor are they capable of learning social rules any more complex than not pooping on the carpet. Any creature who can happily squat down on a busy sidewalk and pinch one off, legs a-quiver tongue lolling dreamily while people pass by trying not to look is going to have a hard time remembering if it has to kiss on one cheek or two when greeting new acquaintances. That’s why they are our best friends and not the other way around. That is also why, when your dog starts to accost me with a muzzle that smells like old meat and a Sunday morning hangover, I tell you to control your beast and don’t bother politely asking your pet.
But I will still kick the hound, if only because you are usually a few steps behind and therefore out of my range. Don’t worry though, at first, it will be a warning blow – the hound dog shuffle, I call it – meant to send a message more than any kind of real pain. But if it doesn’t desist from its sniffing or licking or growling of jumping up on me with dirty paws, I’ll bend it like Beckham without much second thought. I don’t consider myself a violent person but if it comes down to me or a canine, I will be tickled pink to punt your pooch. I’ll slap your Weimeraner, I’ll upper cut your mutt, I’ll body slam your Labrador, I’ll stomp your Chihuahua or Pomeranian like a medium sized cockroach and I will dance on its carcass like drunken Mongol.
Please don’t accuse me of being a dog hater. I like dogs. I just don’t like your dog, and I don’t like you. Oh, he’s friendly? By all means, have him buy me a drink. Oh, that’s right, it’s just a dog.
That’s funny because, before the beast started doing unacceptable things to my leg, it was another member of the family. You talked to him and let him sleep on your bed and bought him special collars and coats for when it gets cold and a food bowl with his name on it and you scratched him behind his ears and kissed his head. Now, all of a sudden, he’s just a damn, dirty dog who’s dry humping into my knee cap. As the speed of his thrusts quickens, I get the feeling that you are lying to me and you really don’t think he is “just a dog” at all, you simply respect him more than you respect me and my soon to be soiled trousers.
Despite myself, I can understand that. Dogs are wonderful companions and they fill an emotional hole that you have in your life. Dogs need us, love us, and it’s important to feel important. It may be something of an shallow relationship, but so what? I’ve had tons of those with real live people and none of them were half as satisfying as the fierce unconditionality of canine luvin. But these types of bonds have their problems too: namely, you are involved in a deeply satisfying, life affirming relationship with an animal, and not even a particularly intelligent one. If it were a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you could work on it: take them to the natural history museum or the theatre, help them pick out clothes at J-Crew, gently teach them how to kiss without licking your entire face. If worse comes to worse, you break up. With a dog, you’re pretty much stuck with it until the thing gets worms, or you back over it while rushing to work. Of course, you can always drop it off in the country or tie it to the door of the pound at night, but that is not quite like flushing the goldfish down the toilet. It feels much more like a skeleton in the closet than just a domestic peccadillo – right up there with stealing from your senile grandmother. No… you’re in this one for the long haul, which means coming to terms in one way or another with the fact that Spike, or Annie, or Eli, or Guinness or Bo Seefus or Nancy Reagan is never quite going to attain the rank of “polite company”.
What really doesn’t add up is why you are always blaming me when your dog does something inappropriate or aggressive. As far as I know, I’m not the anti-Christ nor the harbinger of any sort of ancient evil that animals can just sense, so please stop telling me that I’m provoking it. Instead, try saying: “Sorry, my dog is a stupid, lesser form of life who has trouble controlling his more base instincts.” If you just say this, I will smile, give you an understanding, “you can’t control everything” sort of shrug, thank you for being candid then elbow drop the terrier.
Finally, for the love of whatever craven image you worship, pick up the beast’s mess. Don’t stand their politely looking in the other direction, whistling Brian Adams’ songs while your companion lays a thick, fetid coil of feces in the exact spot where my foot will undoubtedly step in the near future. It’s not like the dog needs privacy. Just carry a bag, or a Tupperware container, or strap on one of those bags they use for horses and I will respect you even as I snicker at the sight of a grown person stooping down to plunge their plastic-covered hand into their “best friend’s” eye watering jobby. If the dog has an upset stomach, you are on your own. Perhaps there is some sort of siphoning technique involved.
sincerely,
T.E.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is all types of grey. All the greys in the rainbow. Monochromatic splendour: Granite grey, flagstone grey, rainy day grey, cold winter grey, fog grey, dawn grey, ghost grey, North Sea grey, Earl grey, gray grey. Take your photaes in black and white because you won’t be able to tell the difference. If that’s a problem for you, well, go to Cancun and stop wasting my damn time. As for all the rest you’s, come swim with me in the Old Smelly.
Watch out for the ghosts – here be spirits. Not counting the 20 quid tours or the wax museums or out of work stage actors shambling around in costumes and face paint, this is a place bathed in the shadows of its past. Whispers swirl through the cobblestone streets stinging your cheeks and freezing your ears. They whistle inside churches and castles, echo off crumbling stones and twist into little cyclones like dry autumn leaves. Chase them down dark passages, deep into the stone maze of the city built upon itself. They elude you at every turn with the mischief of children at play flitting around corners or disappearing down hidden closes, forever one step ahead. But keep on, my friend, don’t be deterred by the shenanigans of the dead for they’re an ornery bunch. You’ll find them again when you least expect it and resume your chase through the perpetual twilight. Every corner reveals new delights, every passage forks into new options. Go right, left, up down, and don’t miss a chance to detour…until, as if awakening from a dream, you look around to find yourself lost and alone while thick clouds like puffs of dirty wool rush by overhead.
The winds always blow cold and clammy from the sea steeping the place an ageless brine. It is a bouillabaisse of smog, runoff and melancholy spiced liberally with sea salt, malted barley and a pinch of something wild and peppery blown in from those big, empty Scottish fields. It soaks in and chills you, makes your steps heavier and sharpens each breath to the edge of a sigh. The days are bleaker, the nights darker. Solitude tippy-toes behind you, closing with every block as you wander through the deep, jagged chiaroscuro of the Old Town, the lonely sound of your footsteps echoing off the MC Escher architecture.
But there is laugher in the dark – short reports that spill from the open doors of lambent pubs that shine like pirate treasure. Look in the window street urchin style and see the grinning people crowded around the gleaming hardwood bar quaffing pints, sipping wine, and starting to talk just a little too loudly. Famous drunks, these strange, northern folk. See how they smile as if they have never known winter? Don’t stand outside and stare like a tourist! Go in. Go in because the damp’s long fingers can’t reach you there. The light and the laughter burn off the eddying gloom, turn it out and beat in back into the street, holding it at bay for as long as the taps flow.
Inside the murmur becomes a din, Oasis on the juke box, video gambling machines ring and jingle…. and the smell, oh the smell. Hops and fried goodies, eau de steak pie, stale beer, vinegar and ketchup, scones and sticky toffee pudding grumble in the hollow of your stomach. But no food for the hungry when there is drinking to be done: Tenants or Stella – the quintessential Scotsman’s conundrum. National pride vs. foreign quality. Have a whisky if you like, but you’ll have to either join the pensioners at one end of the of the bar, all tweeds and snaggle toothed glares or those grinning Americans to the right, cloistered away in their corner pontificating on the authenticity of their ‘discovery’. Best to avoid both and grab a lager, its safe, its tasty, and it comes in a pint with a respectable head that never goes flat to leave you with something that looks like a bucket of dehydrated pish.
By the third or fourth, it doesn’t matter anyway – you’re charged up and ready to make merry. Dive back into the night, brace yourself for that first lung full of brine, feel it seep down your collar even as your shoulders tense to head it off. But wait, not slithering in so easy this time, eh? Your alcohol aura beats it back valiantly. Make haste, now, the remedy is fleeting, and there is much yet to see. Follow the whispers: searching, searching, always searching in this city as if its secrets will be revealed if you just look hard enough. Ah, you should know better ya wee fookin drunk.
Pay the ten quid for the club, past the Eastern European bouncers who are probably nice guys in their free time and…welcome to Hell. From icy cold to sweating hot in seconds, bodies move like Sodom and Gomorrah, now if you can just make out a face. Woah, that’s a lot of makeup, bonus points for the short skirt though, shame about that extra weight. It’s necessary for the winters, like a seal. Not fat, maybe, but something torpid about it, sallow in the strobe lights, a strange crook to the eyes, a small gene pooled skew of the features that is either enchanting or nightmarish. The ghosts are quiet here in the Cathedral of Kanye West, Westlife and DJ Westwood. WWDJ? Drink and dance, no doubt. Your free mixed drink goes down the hatch like water and you start to miss those mischievous echoes. What did you say your name was? Well, nice to meet you too. There’s a girl under all that makeup and she digs you, stranger. Think she said she was a hairdresser…or maybe just in beauty school, the lowlighted hair is the give away. She talks pretty, rolling her ‘r’s’ over rrrazor sharrrp rrrocks every time she leans in close to tell you something because you can’t understand a damn thing over that music. Conversation is shouted and never more than half understood, the mysteries of the world contained in all the words swallowed by the tumult. Doesn’t matter though, you’re both driving to the same end, kissing before you know it – Gable and Leigh with everything burning down behind you – Scottish girl eh? Check that one off your list and hurry out the back before she asks for your number.
That’s what cold feels like. It puts a hop in your step and reminds you that death is not so far off. Follow those whispers and try not to stagger like the dead because the bars close at four and you need a final drink to stave off that ever-gathering gloom. Somewhere far below the castle lit up in the night like the gates of heaven, through the low door, back into warmth, laughter, cheer. The Barmaid is Polish, certified peaches and cream, but you know she hears that from every drunk loser who bangs his head coming through the door so whisper those sweet everything’s to your pint. The end draws near, the acqua vitae drains from your veins, evaporating into ether, replacing immortality with a dull fragility, mortality regained with just a little less time on the clock. Can’t go home like this, can you? Get one more round in for all your new best friends. It won’t hurt till the morning when the light and the laughter have gone and your room is icy cold, chafing your skin raw where it peeks out from under the too short duvet. You need a pish and a drink, but your head says nay to even lifting a leg out of bed, much less stumbling down the hall to a communal bathroom. So hangover swagger to the sink, turn on the warm tap –always the warm tap, as a Scotsman once said – and let it loose. When you’ve washed away the medicinal smell of alcohol pee, change taps and take a drink. The water is colder and sweeter than French kissing an Eskimo princess. That’s the taste of hope…that the hangover will pass, the shadows will recede and the coal skies will lighten to grey once again.
Watch out for the ghosts – here be spirits. Not counting the 20 quid tours or the wax museums or out of work stage actors shambling around in costumes and face paint, this is a place bathed in the shadows of its past. Whispers swirl through the cobblestone streets stinging your cheeks and freezing your ears. They whistle inside churches and castles, echo off crumbling stones and twist into little cyclones like dry autumn leaves. Chase them down dark passages, deep into the stone maze of the city built upon itself. They elude you at every turn with the mischief of children at play flitting around corners or disappearing down hidden closes, forever one step ahead. But keep on, my friend, don’t be deterred by the shenanigans of the dead for they’re an ornery bunch. You’ll find them again when you least expect it and resume your chase through the perpetual twilight. Every corner reveals new delights, every passage forks into new options. Go right, left, up down, and don’t miss a chance to detour…until, as if awakening from a dream, you look around to find yourself lost and alone while thick clouds like puffs of dirty wool rush by overhead.
The winds always blow cold and clammy from the sea steeping the place an ageless brine. It is a bouillabaisse of smog, runoff and melancholy spiced liberally with sea salt, malted barley and a pinch of something wild and peppery blown in from those big, empty Scottish fields. It soaks in and chills you, makes your steps heavier and sharpens each breath to the edge of a sigh. The days are bleaker, the nights darker. Solitude tippy-toes behind you, closing with every block as you wander through the deep, jagged chiaroscuro of the Old Town, the lonely sound of your footsteps echoing off the MC Escher architecture.
But there is laugher in the dark – short reports that spill from the open doors of lambent pubs that shine like pirate treasure. Look in the window street urchin style and see the grinning people crowded around the gleaming hardwood bar quaffing pints, sipping wine, and starting to talk just a little too loudly. Famous drunks, these strange, northern folk. See how they smile as if they have never known winter? Don’t stand outside and stare like a tourist! Go in. Go in because the damp’s long fingers can’t reach you there. The light and the laughter burn off the eddying gloom, turn it out and beat in back into the street, holding it at bay for as long as the taps flow.
Inside the murmur becomes a din, Oasis on the juke box, video gambling machines ring and jingle…. and the smell, oh the smell. Hops and fried goodies, eau de steak pie, stale beer, vinegar and ketchup, scones and sticky toffee pudding grumble in the hollow of your stomach. But no food for the hungry when there is drinking to be done: Tenants or Stella – the quintessential Scotsman’s conundrum. National pride vs. foreign quality. Have a whisky if you like, but you’ll have to either join the pensioners at one end of the of the bar, all tweeds and snaggle toothed glares or those grinning Americans to the right, cloistered away in their corner pontificating on the authenticity of their ‘discovery’. Best to avoid both and grab a lager, its safe, its tasty, and it comes in a pint with a respectable head that never goes flat to leave you with something that looks like a bucket of dehydrated pish.
By the third or fourth, it doesn’t matter anyway – you’re charged up and ready to make merry. Dive back into the night, brace yourself for that first lung full of brine, feel it seep down your collar even as your shoulders tense to head it off. But wait, not slithering in so easy this time, eh? Your alcohol aura beats it back valiantly. Make haste, now, the remedy is fleeting, and there is much yet to see. Follow the whispers: searching, searching, always searching in this city as if its secrets will be revealed if you just look hard enough. Ah, you should know better ya wee fookin drunk.
Pay the ten quid for the club, past the Eastern European bouncers who are probably nice guys in their free time and…welcome to Hell. From icy cold to sweating hot in seconds, bodies move like Sodom and Gomorrah, now if you can just make out a face. Woah, that’s a lot of makeup, bonus points for the short skirt though, shame about that extra weight. It’s necessary for the winters, like a seal. Not fat, maybe, but something torpid about it, sallow in the strobe lights, a strange crook to the eyes, a small gene pooled skew of the features that is either enchanting or nightmarish. The ghosts are quiet here in the Cathedral of Kanye West, Westlife and DJ Westwood. WWDJ? Drink and dance, no doubt. Your free mixed drink goes down the hatch like water and you start to miss those mischievous echoes. What did you say your name was? Well, nice to meet you too. There’s a girl under all that makeup and she digs you, stranger. Think she said she was a hairdresser…or maybe just in beauty school, the lowlighted hair is the give away. She talks pretty, rolling her ‘r’s’ over rrrazor sharrrp rrrocks every time she leans in close to tell you something because you can’t understand a damn thing over that music. Conversation is shouted and never more than half understood, the mysteries of the world contained in all the words swallowed by the tumult. Doesn’t matter though, you’re both driving to the same end, kissing before you know it – Gable and Leigh with everything burning down behind you – Scottish girl eh? Check that one off your list and hurry out the back before she asks for your number.
That’s what cold feels like. It puts a hop in your step and reminds you that death is not so far off. Follow those whispers and try not to stagger like the dead because the bars close at four and you need a final drink to stave off that ever-gathering gloom. Somewhere far below the castle lit up in the night like the gates of heaven, through the low door, back into warmth, laughter, cheer. The Barmaid is Polish, certified peaches and cream, but you know she hears that from every drunk loser who bangs his head coming through the door so whisper those sweet everything’s to your pint. The end draws near, the acqua vitae drains from your veins, evaporating into ether, replacing immortality with a dull fragility, mortality regained with just a little less time on the clock. Can’t go home like this, can you? Get one more round in for all your new best friends. It won’t hurt till the morning when the light and the laughter have gone and your room is icy cold, chafing your skin raw where it peeks out from under the too short duvet. You need a pish and a drink, but your head says nay to even lifting a leg out of bed, much less stumbling down the hall to a communal bathroom. So hangover swagger to the sink, turn on the warm tap –always the warm tap, as a Scotsman once said – and let it loose. When you’ve washed away the medicinal smell of alcohol pee, change taps and take a drink. The water is colder and sweeter than French kissing an Eskimo princess. That’s the taste of hope…that the hangover will pass, the shadows will recede and the coal skies will lighten to grey once again.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Welcome
Time as you know it means nothing in New York City. It’s a place that doesn’t know where its going, can’t be bothered to remember where its been and is only concerned with the gas in the tank, the cigarette dangling from its lips and having the pedal firmly planted on the floor. Yesterday is ancient history, today is too late and tomorrow is already passing you by. Fasten your seat belts and hold on tight, baby baby – things only get crazier from here.
This city whispers the language of Babel. It’s thousand tongued breath whips through concrete, steel and glass canyons to snatch your hat off and water your eyes. Don’t matter where you’re from, my friend, everyone understands you in New York. It’s a labyrinth of the insane, which is just a cynical way to say that it’s the biggest, wildest party in the world and anything goes as long as you pay the piper. Farsi in the cab, Chinese in the restaurant, Japanese at the bar and Spanish anywhere else. Maybe you just speak that other language that comes up occasionally here, but don’t fret, baby baby, because everyone understands the green. That’s why they have come to this city reaching unto heaven and that is why you are here too. One world, united in the pursuit of dead presidents. That’s beautiful corruption – shining and stinking “like a rotting mackerel by moonlight,” *
Don’t be fooled by the fun. It may be a party, but it’s not a punch bowled, finger food and funny hatted affair. It’s an exclusive deal and the odds are on you not quite making the cut. Only the richest, hardest, best connected, or just plain lucky make it across the East River to sip 10 dollar biers and sneer at the less fortunate, and the more you think about it as you lay in bed alone at night, the more you suspect that maybe babee…that’s just not tú. It’s the biggest fishbowl in the world, my little minnow and everyone likes sushi, so grab some chopsticks, a bottle of soy sauce, and let the cannibalism begin because they strive like pyrates on Manhattan island – no quarter given and none expected – let the bones of the fallen pave the sidewalks.
Constant. Pathological. Renewal. New York has been the city of tomorrow since roughly 1939 and shows no signs of giving up that position. Unlike other places whose reputations are built upon past greatness, every day is a hey day in Nueva York. Every 24 hours the bar is raised, mounted, then raised again, infinitely onward because it’s too late to turn back and they lost sight of the ground long ago. Every morning, the city yawns, stretches and gets back to the grim business of outdoing itself.
And you want a part of all of this? You want a little slice of this concrete anthill that you can call your own? Perhaps. Or perhaps what you really want is to walk to the edge of apocalypse and out there in that rushing darkness you want to squint off into the directionless void and scream and howl right along with it. You can find that kind of thrill in a place like this. If you brace yourself and open your eyes, you can catch a flash of the true wonder and ferocity of the human endeavour. It will last for a second then disappear like the tail of a shooting star – a tear in the gossamer of reality. You can’t forget though. Not once you’ve seen it. Its burned into you with a white hot acetylene glow so you either slap a bad-aid on and keep swimming or sink to the bottom to have your bones picked clean by the other fishies.
The game is fast and the stakes are high in the Giant Fruit Machine, so keep your wits on your sleeve and your nose to the grind. If the rules keep changing, well…that’s par for the course, baby baby – it’s what you get for going 18 with the maniacs. If you fail to rise, sometimes you have to dig your way up through the basement just so you can get a seat at the golf-green table where the real game is happening. If you can’t beat’em, cheat’em,” as my acquaintance Kid Klipse likes to say; so if you get tired of the same, change the game, because rules mean nothing to the insane.
*John Randolph
This city whispers the language of Babel. It’s thousand tongued breath whips through concrete, steel and glass canyons to snatch your hat off and water your eyes. Don’t matter where you’re from, my friend, everyone understands you in New York. It’s a labyrinth of the insane, which is just a cynical way to say that it’s the biggest, wildest party in the world and anything goes as long as you pay the piper. Farsi in the cab, Chinese in the restaurant, Japanese at the bar and Spanish anywhere else. Maybe you just speak that other language that comes up occasionally here, but don’t fret, baby baby, because everyone understands the green. That’s why they have come to this city reaching unto heaven and that is why you are here too. One world, united in the pursuit of dead presidents. That’s beautiful corruption – shining and stinking “like a rotting mackerel by moonlight,” *
Don’t be fooled by the fun. It may be a party, but it’s not a punch bowled, finger food and funny hatted affair. It’s an exclusive deal and the odds are on you not quite making the cut. Only the richest, hardest, best connected, or just plain lucky make it across the East River to sip 10 dollar biers and sneer at the less fortunate, and the more you think about it as you lay in bed alone at night, the more you suspect that maybe babee…that’s just not tú. It’s the biggest fishbowl in the world, my little minnow and everyone likes sushi, so grab some chopsticks, a bottle of soy sauce, and let the cannibalism begin because they strive like pyrates on Manhattan island – no quarter given and none expected – let the bones of the fallen pave the sidewalks.
Constant. Pathological. Renewal. New York has been the city of tomorrow since roughly 1939 and shows no signs of giving up that position. Unlike other places whose reputations are built upon past greatness, every day is a hey day in Nueva York. Every 24 hours the bar is raised, mounted, then raised again, infinitely onward because it’s too late to turn back and they lost sight of the ground long ago. Every morning, the city yawns, stretches and gets back to the grim business of outdoing itself.
And you want a part of all of this? You want a little slice of this concrete anthill that you can call your own? Perhaps. Or perhaps what you really want is to walk to the edge of apocalypse and out there in that rushing darkness you want to squint off into the directionless void and scream and howl right along with it. You can find that kind of thrill in a place like this. If you brace yourself and open your eyes, you can catch a flash of the true wonder and ferocity of the human endeavour. It will last for a second then disappear like the tail of a shooting star – a tear in the gossamer of reality. You can’t forget though. Not once you’ve seen it. Its burned into you with a white hot acetylene glow so you either slap a bad-aid on and keep swimming or sink to the bottom to have your bones picked clean by the other fishies.
The game is fast and the stakes are high in the Giant Fruit Machine, so keep your wits on your sleeve and your nose to the grind. If the rules keep changing, well…that’s par for the course, baby baby – it’s what you get for going 18 with the maniacs. If you fail to rise, sometimes you have to dig your way up through the basement just so you can get a seat at the golf-green table where the real game is happening. If you can’t beat’em, cheat’em,” as my acquaintance Kid Klipse likes to say; so if you get tired of the same, change the game, because rules mean nothing to the insane.
*John Randolph
Monday, November 3, 2008
"If you can't be with the person you love...pay somebody. But always keep your receipts. Remember: this is New York City."
-- A street performer going about his nine to five at the 68th street and Hunter College metro stop on the number 6 line. Aside from lifestyle advice, he also sang and played the drums.
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