Eric

I CAN'T SLEEP.

This is what's keeping me awake:

I am thinking how Eric, the homeless guy in front of Kellogg's Diner, looks a lot like Jamiroquai, but with more lesions. I don't feel I'm outing Eric by describing him in this manner. He knows he has lesions. It's a big topic of conversation with him.

I don't know what the lesions are, exactly, but sometimes he's on antibiotics for them.

Eric's also a strict vegetarian (his opener, almost always: "Ma, can you spare a miracle for a veggie burger?") and a seriously devout Buddhist. He once stayed at an ashram in India for months studying Sanskrit texts. I think this is actually not bullshit. He has a great story about that ashram--how one morning he was outside the barracks thingy where the yogis slept, leaning against a wall taking a shit, miserable with dysentery. His friend crouched likewise pooping, and comiserating. As they squatted there, a monkey strode out of the woods into the ashram's courtyard. Paying them no mind, the monkey deftly turned on the courtyard's water faucet and drank from it, like any five-year-old kid in the suburbs. Cute, right? So Eric and his friend laughed.

The laughter insulted the monkey, though. He quit drinking, stared them down for a horrible second, turned off the faucet, and charged at them. All screechy and arm-waving and what-have-you.

The moral of this post?
You tell me.
Go on, tell me.
Because I've got no idea.

Poetry *SPOILERS*

I went to an open mic tonight at Pete's Candy Store, the Pete's Big Salmon Reading Series annual one. Three minute sets! An ingenious timeframe allowing little time to get seriously sick of anybody. It was excellent, thirteen performers and everybody was good. Like 90% poetry...or like 87%. This was the third event put on by Pete's Big Salmon that I've gone to, and they've all been terrific. Unfortunately, they're on hiatus now but will return in the fall.

One woman read an essay about Mayor Bloomberg, and a performer named Sean McNally did a sort of phantasmagorical work of humor erotica involving Gary Burghoff and Ronald McDonald. One of the poets, Jason Schneiderman, whose name I was briefly convinced was Paul, did a fantastic poem about Carmen Miranda. A woman called Maureen Thorson read an improbably beautiful piece about going to the movies with a ghostly drunken sailor. She invoked zombies. Susanne Lustig had one about American Idol that made me feel briefly better about my compulsion to watch it. I wish I could remember the other performers' names.

you can get on the series' e-mail list:
Pete's Big Salmon Reading Series

Here's a magazine with some great poetry in it:
Painted Bride Quarterly

Pete's Candy Store is a great venue over here in Williamsburg, it's a fun, comfy bar and their performance space feels like a vaudeville club car, or something.
Pete's Candy Store

A Practical Question

How do you mend a hole in polyester?
It's a little hole.
Like, end-of-pinky-sized.
The fabric where the little hole is, is black.
Should I just forget about it and count my blessings, or what?

Broke

I edge closer and closer to a life of crime. I am tired of having no money. And by "no money" I do not mean I can't buy a car at this time, or can't invest in the stock market, or no vacation this year-type "no money."

Now, I do get paid on Friday, which means I'm better off than many Americans, but in the meanwhile I have $2.76 to my name. Or, rather, I had $2.76. Margaret Dodge lent me ten bucks at Rev. Jen's AntiSlam earlier (unbidden, mind you, simply as a result of listening to my constant broke-ass bitching. Unpleasant as it is to bitch, it must be more painful to listen to).**

Anyhow so Margaret raised my total net worth to $12.76. This was pretty neat. I have a Metrocard, plus some saltines at home, so really, $12.76 was gravy.

Then, as it happens, the L train was out. Train trouble is rough on us poor people, y'all. I'd taken the C train from Tribeca to the L at 8th Avenue, and found there that the L was just cancelled for the rest of the evening. (Editorial note: MTA employees really don't wanna hear people whine. Or talk.)

So I walk over to the JMZ atation down at Delancey, blocks and blocks further than if I'd walked there from the Antislam itself, and wait a half-hour. Then some drunk thug teen gang starts hassling so I have to murder them and flee the scene***, and then had to take a cab home, which, because of the fucking traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge (traffic consisting mainly of cabs, seeing as how there was no L train) cost $7.50. And I didn't even take the cab all the way home! I had them drop me on the corner after my exit off the bridge and walked from there!

So, I have been on my way home, from two miles away, for two and a half hours. Had I just gotten a cab home from the open mic, it'd've taken fourteen minutes. But it woulda cost like three more dollars too.

But I guess this story is pretty uplifting, in that after all these transportational shenanigans, my current net worth is $5.26, which is still $2.50 more than I had before I was lent ten bucks. Plus, actually, come to think of it, Tom Nevin gave me a DVD of the first episode of Deadwood tonight also.

I'M LIVIN' THE DREAM, Y'ALL!

**Margaret: thanks, dude. Had you not insisted I maybe wouldn't'a gotten home at all.

***Okay, um, the teen harassers are true, and I did flee. But no, I didn't really kill anybody. I just wanted to sound like a badass for a second, because the rest of this post made me sound so so so so so so so so so so so so sad.

Apparently I Got Nothing to Say in Print

What the hell is wrong with me?
Suddenly I feel all blog-stymied and whatnot. I don't know how good of an idea it is to try to rectify this by writing a post about not having posted, but it's better than nothing.

That's my new motto about everything: BETTER THAN NOTHING.

I have been going to an assload of open mics, again. So if you wanted to, you could come see me in person, if you, Barbara, are of the New York persuasion.

So, um.

Okay, here's something. A little earlier this evening, after I got home from work, I had CNN on. It was the Anderson Cooper show. Today is his birthday, apparently. And a cutesily annoying news chick announces she's got "a special treat for [him]," and I'm thinking "I hope she knows he's gay." Then I wonder if Gloria Vanderbilt knows he's gay. So anyhow, CNN proceeds to air this, like, four-minutes' long gag reel of special-treat-for-Anderson "wacky footage," like a bear falling out of a tree onto a trampoline, and a rear shot of some frat-looking dude dancing, and people hit with pies, and that sort of thing. There's nasty carnivalesque music in the bkground, and intermittent "HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANDERSON" titles, also.

One of the clips is an enraged Indian elephant busting through a plate glass storefront window into what looks like an ATM vestibule. And I feel horrible for the elephant, and hope it didn't cut itself breaking through the glass. Then I note, with relief, that the elephant has a...some kind of a performance get-up on. Like an enormous satin shirt, it looks like. And I think, well, maybe that satin shirt protected the elephant from the broken glass somewhat.

Then my adult brain kicks in and intones SARAH LUCILLE FISCH, YOU ARE WATCHING CNN. THIS THOUGHT YOU JUST HAD, ABOUT THE RAMPAGING ELEPHANT SHIELDED FROM FALLING SHARDS OF GLASS BY A GIGANTIC SATIN BLOUSE, WAS OCCASIONED BY "AMERICA'S MOST TRUSTED NEWS SOURCE."

I wish the next thing I'd seen on CNN was Walter Cronkite busting into the studio and punching Anderson Cooper in the nose. But it wasn't. It was Anderson Cooper fucking BEAMING.

Happy birthday, Anderson Cooper. My birthday wish for you is that the Gravitas Fairy comes and gives you a magical birthday talking-to. Or that Gloria Vanderbilt does. She seems pretty hardcore, in her way.