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My Review of My Summer, Part One

19 Nov

from September 11, 2009

Summer never did arrive, at least not in terms of temperature, and that was good enough for me. Who wants 90 degree weather? We had about three days of really hot and humid weather but I was in California for two of them so they don’t count. (More on California later.) Were you here for those days? Go write your own blog. If I want 90 degrees and humid I’ll stick my head in Michael Moore’s armpit.

Temperature aside, not-so-summer was a pretty unusual one. Like, just for one example, I did stuff. Oh sure, I had plenty of days where I slept until noon, but I also had plenty of nights where I didn’t get to sleep until 4 am. Partying? No, you obviously don’t know me. Insomnia, which even the magic of Ambien was unable to conquer. What did I do on those nights? IM Liz on Facebook. (More on Facebook later.)

I traveled to San Diego for ten days, Massachusetts for a few hours, Rhode Island for a dinner, and broke into an abandoned asylum on Staten Island during a tornado. (More on all that later.)

I went to a dinner where I learned far, far too much about how Maria lost her virginity. (Perhaps no more on that later or at any time at all.)

I was snubbed by Bonnie, who did not invite me to a wedding I did not want to go to. Sounds like a favor, but I wanted to be invited before I didn’t go. (More on- oh you get the idea.) I’ll start here.

Can’t say why I was snubbed. Bonnie seems to be under the opinion that I stopped talking to her. This despite my sending her (with Michelle, more on her later- sick of that yet?) a condolence card and planting a tree in Israel after a death in her family weeks before the wedding. Do you have any idea how hard that was? Michelle and I flew 18 hours across the Atlantic to Tel Aviv and trekked across the Gaza strip, dodging PLO missiles, avoiding car bombs, and getting sand in places people should not get sand just to plant that tree. And the worst part?  Once we got to the memorial park I realized we had left the tree in the airport back in New York. Michelle was not happy when she had to fly back for the tree.

I also sent Bonnie a couple of messages to her email address that, unbeknownst to the entire world, she had changed six months previously. Bonnie, in her zeal to get married (she was engaged for about a millennium) updated her email to include her married name, as well as copywriting it on her official letterhead and tattooing it on her uterus. Here’s the fun part- she didn’t tell anyone. So while I sent my condolences to her old address, she thought I was snubbing her by sending nothing to her new address, despite no one knowing her new address. I’m sure, somewhere in her old mailbox, is my email, along with Nigerian money come-ons and plenty of unwanted spam for Viagra. (I assume it is unwanted, I know nothing about her sex life.)

Eventually, when she got married, she announced to the world that she had changed her address. Thanks.

It was tit for tat (so to speak, I have never seen Bonnie’s breasts) when I got a thank you card for the tree that was non-personalized (ex- no “Dear Barry,” or even a “BEN! THANKS FOR THE FLOWERS! I THOUGHT YOU HATED ME! LOL!- I have been waiting for weeks to work that into something). Could have been worse- Michelle didn’t even get that.

So I was not invited to the big Price-Altman soiree. This despite hearing for months and months “you better go to my wedding” and me lying “of course I’ll be there!” For those of you who don’t know me, I tend to be anti-social to the point that I won’t go anywhere unless I can drive across four states and trespass on government property. Then its party time! (HONEST DISCLAIMER- Had Michelle been invited I would have gone. But she was snubbed for reasons that probably make even less sense than my snubbing. Bonnie, if you are reading all this, I still don’t know why you snubbed me before, but I guess this blog gives you a good reason to now.

I burned one bridge, let’s continue the fun.

Just a day or two into the summer I was parking my car around midnight when I heard someone yelling at me. I did what I usually do when people yell at me, flipped the bird. Turned out it was Liz, in her car across the street. (BTW: Liz was also snubbed by Bonnie. Liz thinks it was because Bonnie’s new hubby doesn’t like her. Doesn’t like Liz, I mean, I assume he likes Bonnie. If Bonnie’s husband kept her from inviting a friend to the wedding, I’d like to think he was taking Snoop Dogg lessons and keeping his pimp hand strong. But on the other hand, the non-pimp hand, he allowed her to invite Alex to the wedding, and that’s the guy Bonnie really wanted to marry. I knew them for years and they were really the perfect married couple. Alex dumped on her; Bonnie hated Alex but came back for more. But I digress. A lot.)

Anyway, Liz was double parked across the street and I went across to talk to her. She was coming home from a family dinner, I was just getting home, and I hung in her car window and we talked for a few minutes before Liz got right to the point- “want to go to a motel?”

I’m a gentleman so I let her down easy.

This, however, was just the first of our late night summertime chats. Typically, I’d be on Facebook (Their Motto: Too Many Farm Games) and I’d see she was online, or she’d see I was online, and we’d IM each other. I know that sounds dirty but it isn’t. (At least it wasn’t on my part. I have no idea what Liz was doing when she wasn’t typing. This was late at night.) What did we chat about? I don’t remember. Something about high scores on games, her daughter sleeping on the couch, fluff mostly. Same as our emails. I’m not sure Liz and I are capable of exchanging more than two serious emails in a month. I ask her how she’s doing, she says fine, asks how I’m doing, I say fine, make some joke or witty (sure, right) line, Liz emails back and tops me, etc etc etc. It is a little disheartening, honestly. If I want to send goofy emails I have all of the internet and eighteen false names and phony email addresses to do it from. I used to think Liz and I were a little closer than that. Oh well, I can always poke Bonnie on Facebook. But I won’t because I’m snubbing her. Liz, BTW, has changed her settings so I can’t see when she’s on Facebook anymore. Hmmm.

And speaking of Facebook, what a waste of time. A waste of time I am totally addicted to. I have a farm on Facebook. I grow crops. I harvest the crops and sell them to buy buildings or animals. Then I buy seeds and grow more crops so I can harvest and sell them and maybe buy a banana tree or a windmill. Then I plow the fields, sow more seeds, harvest more crops. Yay! I’m on level 27! WHY HAVE NONE OF YOU STOPPED ME YET? I have been invited to join three other farm games, and guess what? They are all the same, except that on one I can buy a pig that sniffs out truffles. I am NOT making that up.

I also play a zombie game on Facebook. I am a zombie. I bite other people and turn them into zombies. I fight other people. I go on quests. All this takes about three minutes. Typical quest: CLICK! You’ve done a quest and earned ten points. Typical fight: CLICK! You’ve beaten XYZ Zombie and gotten ten points. That’s it. Really. No animations, no clever sounds, not a single graphic. Just a message. (If I get bored I can fight a vampire.) This is all of Facebook in a microcosm. I’m up to level 13. Watch out 14, I’m on my way!

What I really want is to get my zombie to run my farm and harvest brains. That would be cool.

Facebook has quizzes. Ever wonder which serial killer you are? You can find out. Want to know which part of Minnesota you should move to? There’s a quiz for that. Facebook has a quiz for everything, from what your name would be if you were a puppy to which color boot you should wear to hunt rattlesnakes. (For the record, my puppy name would be Snuggles and I should wear brown boots when hunting rattlers.) I’ve taken them all. The funny ones I post on my page, the unfunny ones I skip.

And who looks at my page anyway? Facebook has an app to tell you that too. The number one person who looks at my page is my old pal Marc. The number two is a former student, Yafo. How odd. I bet Yafo won’t snub me for her wedding.

TO BE CONTINUED

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My Trip With Marvin Ming to Atlantic City- part 3

15 Nov

from July 26, 2008

So there I was in the back of a deathmobile, and not the funny one from Animal House, speeding to Philadelphia with a family of bizarre cheapskates with broccoli in their pockets. Take that, man.

I spent the trip deeply engrossed in the static on my headphones. We were in some bizarre Bermuda Triangle of the radio, where the New York stations didn’t come in, the New Jersey stations didn’t quite come in, and the Philadelphia stations almost came in. But the sounds in my ears were better than the sounds coming from the Ming family, which consisted of Marvin yelling at his mom in Chinese, his mom getting all pissy in Chinese, and his dad getting lost and misreading all the highway signs, which were not in Chinese but may as well have been as every time I saw an exit sign I prayed that Marvin’s Dad would see it in time, which he did not when we arrived in AC and he almost flipped the car swerving through a lane of traffic to get off.

It was dark when we go to Philly. I didn’t see a single guy in a silly 1700s suit.. I did see at least 176 colleges but I wasn’t counting on this trip. That was twenty years in the future, and in Boston, and I had no way of knowing that at the time anyway.

The plan was to pick up Marv’s brother and go to dinner. There were only two things wrong with the plan. One- he wasn’t home. Two- he didn’t know we were coming.

Marv’s brother had no clue we were coming. We got to his apartment, parked the car right outside, and rang the bell to his building. We waited. We rang again. We waited. Marvin noticed that the lights in his windows (his brother’s windows, that is) were out and the whole apartment seemed dark.

An argument in Chinese ensued.

I stood back a bit and prayed that I was really back in Brooklyn and this was all a dream caused by some sort of overdose of cough medicine. Or a medically induced coma, or the last stages of oxygen deprivation causing me to hallucinate, anything that meant that I was not really there with a bunch of kooks.

But I was and I said, hopefully, “So I guess we should go home?”

That caused another argument. I already knew a bit about this one because Marvin and his brother weren’t getting along so well and Marvin would have been thrilled to go home. But not his mom who started crying. Marvin was scowling, mom was crying, dad was trying to make peace, and I was standing there out of place, very awkward and very Caucasian.

I was trying to stand about as far from then as I could so that no one walking by would see me and think I was a part of that noise. It was a quiet street and I expected the cops to show up at anytime and arrest them for disturbing the peace. In fact that was what I was desperately hoping would happen. I could always take the train back home. I backed away so far without looking that I bumped into a wall.

However, it wasn’t a wall. When I turned around and saw what it really was a burst of insight came upon me. I suddenly experienced a moment of perfect clarity. I knew what to do. I knew how to fix the situation. In that moment every synapse fired in perfect rhythm, every thought was focused, I could solve everything. It was genius. I cleared my throat and said “why don’t you call him?” I had bumped into a pay phone.

Call they did.

After calling the apartment which he was not in, they reached him at another number which I was not able to discover. Predictably, the brother had plans and wasn’t happy that he had to cancel them. In fact he refused to see them. Marvin, smugly, gave me a play by play of the call. He wanted to go home too. After all, he had a pants full of purloined chicken teriyaki. .

Mom cried, dad begged, and the brother agreed to meet them at a restaurant in Chinatown. Yes, Philly has a Chinatown too. Unlike the NYC version, this one is relatively straight and confined to one avenue, as opposed to the catacombs and warrens of Mott Street, Hester, Canal, et al. However, the restaurant we were going to eat in was, illogically (as was most everything that Marvin was involved with) located down a dark alley and in the basement of a store that sold, I think, crap. Though he never said it, I’m sure Marv Sr found the “cheapest Chinese restaurant in town.”

The basement was dark and furnished with a single long table at which we sat. Around the walls were coolers like you would take to the beach. I found out that they held cans of soda and finally got to drink some Pepsi, if only because I asked the waiter for it in a low voice and opened the can before Marv Sr could spot it and send it back.

Ever see “A Christmas Story,” where the family spends Christmas in a Chinese restaurant and they were served a duck with the head still attached? I had the same meal. But unlike the well-lit place they ate in, I was in a basement with cheap, peeling wood paneling, a waiter in a stained apron, and I was inspecting the chopsticks because I was sure they were left over from whomever ate there last.

To say that tensions were simmering at the table was an understatement. I could see the love glared from Marvin’s brother’s eyes and drilled into his mom’s head. I heard all the angry Chinese words but understood none of them, except “fuck,” which I understand is one of those words that means the same thing in Chinese and English, like “shit” and “Playboy magazine,” which really did come up in the angry conversation but I have never known for sure in what context. From what I know about Marvin, his lack of a bed, and his desire to “avoid temptation” I think he must have been mad that his brother brought it into the house and, I’m sure, forced Marvin to look at it, which in turn caused him to give in to temptation and, well, jerk off. (I have a basis for this theory and it involves pornographic stories hidden in a public library. You’ll have to wait for that story.)

I spent a good deal of time reading the fine print on my Pepsi can. It was strange. Back then, I wasn’t the seasoned traveler of the world I am now. I’ve been to London, Scotland, Paris, and Cleveland since then, but at that time a trip any farther than New Jersey was exotic. The soda can had an ad for a Philly radio station. It looked like any old NYC can but for the call letters. It all felt a bit like The Twilight Zone episode where a time traveler zaps back to the past and steps on a prehistoric flower and changes history, so that when he returns to his correct era all the Pepsi cans have strange ads on them. That episode was written by Art Lieberman, as was the Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder” on which it was based.

I ate very little at this meal because, in the dark, I wasn’t sure if the fowl was really a duck or, as I feared, a crow. Whatever the bird was, Marvin stuck some in his pockets and his mom got the bones (yes, bones) wrapped up to go.

The three Mings were all tense, having said very little (and even less to me) throughout the meal. I was just glad it was over, but the happiness was mixed with white-knuckle fear since I had to drive back with Marv’s dad behind the wheel.

Marv’s brother shook Marv’s hand, kissed his dad, said something terse to his mom and left. Marv Sr paid the bill and left no tip as far as I could see, and we got back in the car to go home.

I made it safely, though I was in a cold sweat because we spent twenty minutes heading towards AC again and I was afraid he’d make more wrong turns and I’d end up in Newark, or maybe Outer Mongolia.

I never got in that car again.

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