scenes from capitol hill

In the last 10 minutes, I had the pleasure of overhearing two separate altercations on the street right outside my apartment.

Scenario 1 involved a (clearly mentally unstable) man who felt that the car backing out of the driveway next door to my building came a little too close to him for his liking.  He challenged the driver to a  fight.  When the driver refused to throw down the gauntlet, the aggrieved party attempted to explain why he was upset by yelling various combinations of the words "fuck" "pussy" "twat" "bitch" and "motherfucker" before spitting onto the windshield.  Eventually, he meandered on and the car, wipers blazing, was able to fully depart the driveway.

Scenario 2 I sadly don't really know the background of, but what I saw was a burly man leaning over the balcony of his apartment (across the street from mine)  using impressive voice projection methods to tell another man, leaning out of a window a few buildings down, that he was going to fuck his ass up.  Man #2 loudly expressed his doubts that Man #1 was capable of this, and went so far as to offer the counterpoint that he, in fact, would be the one to fuck Man #1 up.  Big time.  Both men soon retreated into their respective domains, and from my observation, no further action has been taken. 

 All in all very exciting,  like what I imagine the mean streets of Brooklyn may have had to offer back in the 1930s, if there had been meth back then.

The Company I Keep

These are all actual contacts in my phone, noted while culling my address book.

(Alphabetical)

A (Likes Bacon)
Also Don't Answer
B Mom
Bum Phone
Bum Phone 2
Catalin Looks Like Gargamel
Don't Answer
Don't pick up
Ds WW
Hot Ira Glass
Jamer in us
Mane n Tail
New BFF (girl)
Probably don't answer

De Rien

My creativity has been at about the caliber of driftwood/a j. coug meinkampf album this week, so enjoy some xmas phots of tin tin and flossie instead:



They are both dead.

Excerpts from The Office Debate On "Blade Runner" I Have Had The Pleasure Of Listening To For The Last 20 Minutes

" So, the replicants were humans, they were just changed."

"No, they were androids"

"They were genetically produced"

"No, they were produced from organic and metallic materials"

"You have to understand, you're entering into one of the great debates of all time."

"the director has come forward to say he's a replicant"

(angry silence)

something that is dumb

Not to be all stand-up comedian "what's the deal with something mundane"-ish but you know what is really stupid? When you have to make a password to use a website that like, tracks your daily calorie consumption, or informs you about your vision insurance benefits, or basically like serves any other function dealing with non-sensitive information that noone in the entire world would care about besides you and they make you choose a password adhering to like 2983748932 different specifications... like you MUST have at least one uppercase letter, at least one number, and that number cannot be in your birthdate, etc etc

Which then totally fucks up everything because I have like one generic password I use for everything, and my bank seems to think it's fine, but apparently it's not safe enough for my online food diary, god forbid someone should hack it and find out how many grams of almonds I eat in a day.

AND I just registered to pay my J Crew credit card online, and I had to choose FIVE different security questions that I will have to answer the next time I log in because I've already forgotten my alphanumberic-special symbol-weirdly capitalized password I just made up and the options they give are all really hard because they like somehow make me feel bad about my nomadic childhood/ I'm convinced I will forget the answers and be forced to call a customer service person on the phone, my worst nightmare.

Stuff like:

• what is the street you grew up on?
• what was the name of your first grade teacher?
• what was the name of your first pet?
• what city was your mother born in?

I lived on about 15 different streets before I turned 18 so clearly don't remember any of their names, and I attended two different first grades in different states, and do my sea monkeys count as my first pet, or is it my guinea pig? My mom was born in new york city, do I put that or just "new york" or Manhattan? I just know I'm going to forget all of these things and then the credit card will go unpaid and both my bridesmaids dresses are going to be repossessed before the weddings.

so that's why online passwords are stupid... this reads like a sample routine I might perform during the daytime for an assistant manager at "Giggles" who, after I leave, turns to his colleague and says, "Bro, when will women learn that they just aren't funny?"

The Pony Car

This morning I was driving to work all bleary eyed and disoriented because i had my phone on silent so, obviously, didn't hear my alarm and I couldn't sleep all night and then when I did manage to drift off my cat would try to fall asleep directly on my neck which she can't do without first forcefully kneading her giant paws into my trachea which causes me to choke/stop breathing and, luckily, wake up. So I wake up and check my phone praying it's like, 5 AM but it is, in fact 8:50... so I get up and get ready in 3 seconds and run out the door only to get stuck in horrible I-5 traffic, but this is where it all gets note-worthy...

So I look to my left and there's a scratched up blue Ford tempo and the back window is totally crowded with toy ponies. Plush toys, plastic replicas, even models made of aged tin. seriously like, 10-14 toy ponies crowded together, staring out the back window with blind painted eyes. An assortment of overflow ponies lay limp in the backseat, which looked a lot like my backseat, in that the floor was covered with wrappers and bottles.

And then I see that there are ponies on the dashboard too! And we're like, stopping and starting so obviously someone has gone through the effort of styling/posing them and gluing them down. There were only like 3 on the dash, all medium sized and plastic.

In the passenger seat was a large stuffed horse.

The driver was an obese, grizzled man.

There was a rusty hitch on the back of the car which I guess you could use to drag a horse trailer or a body.

One thing I have always been interested in, is how many times in life I've actually been in real danger... or even, how many times in life have you been in close proximity with someone who is capable of committing a crime of unspeakable nature. Like, what if when you die you go through all your close calls... if you had taken a left turn here, you would have gotten T-boned and died. If you had gone home with that guy that night, he would have eaten your eyes. The guy you sat next to on the bus when you were 15 was totally a serial killer.

I am confident that this would be one of those times. This man was not just a pony fan. This man was evil. He took the 45th Street exit.

Beware the pony car.

please welcome to the family

My new baby ocelot.

We will be spending the rest of our days together until the time comes that I have to bite its face off because it's too cute to live.

"Hello!" says the baby ocelot.