So the gist is this: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books that will always stick with you. First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. The Lord of the Rings     the number of times I've read this is shameful
2. The glossy covered creamy papered Edgar Allan Poe collection I read when I drove to North Carolina with my family in 7th grade    killing the cat was pretty disturbing then
3. Lolita   motel names
4. Happy Times in Norway Sigrid Undset       cuz I was raised to think the blonde haired blue-eyed nature-loving Norwegians were the superior race...and Germans were assholes
5. Catcher In the Rye    I'm just one of those goddammed people    pretty treacly these days but I can't say the large imprint it made at the time can ever fade
6. Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories   Joseph Mitchell   best journalism/end of the world kind of nostalgia/NY book which also does more than due diligence on Staten Island
7. Tale of Two Cities   I cried hard.
8. Nick Adams Stories    still want to fish like that
9. Gravity's Rainbow     thought it was cool as shit...total intellectual genius when I first read it. Still think that but am  more open to bloated turgid hugeness incoherent indulgent accusations
10. 60 Stories  Don Barthelme       postmodern as you can get with the minimum amount of pretentiousness and most fun
11. in a scanner darkly    philip k. dick   really good tricks, best depiction of drugs,  paranoia
12. war & peace      big enough to get lost in
13. Lanark      Alisdair Gray      I really like to get lost  and I like organized labor
14. Winesburg, Ohio        I like to pretend I grew up in small-town America in my mind (not being redundant)
15. The Big Sleep      been on a Chandler kick lately but odds are it'll stick subgroup of my detective story kick and Chandler is tops     I guess this one's my favorite of his novels


A little more careful than the first fifteen but halfway there

Today I felt the need to write more in this. A friend reminded me that five years ago we didn't speak for almost a year. At first I didn't believe him but it came back to me. He brought it up because he saw parallels between then and now. It troubled me that I forgot. It troubles me more that I might hurt people not out of my own immorality but out of sheer forgetfulness. There are other reasons sure, but to be literally forced to relive a part of my life because I forgot it. That's horrible. Fortunately, it didn't happen.

I feel as if I have been fucked by a god. My lips are tingling, my cheeks are flushed my nose is running, and I was so completely unaware and uncaring of how violently I was shoving food into my face that I discovered a whole new feeling in the joy of eating alone. I recommend the food at Chavella's on Classon as pretty much the best Mexican food to be had in this world or the next, or at least Brooklyn, specifically the potato & chorizo taco and the chicken chipotle one. Please remember to put on the sauce as this makes all the difference.

My Uncle Mark called me earlier today, drunk. It's what he does. Calls me up a little tipsy, sometimes so much as to be a little offensively dumb, other times -like today- just enough to make him voluble. I guess he's sort of a lonely guy. I'm sure he has friends but he doesn't have any kids so I think that puts a lot of extra time on his forty-something year old hands-as well as the hole my grandfather very visibly left in his life. But he does things. He said today he was trying to figure out why his tractor suddenly didn't want to go into reverse. I guess he was taking a break from working on it to call me. Anyway, he called up to ask if I had finished a book he gave me, Grey Seas Under, which is the story of a salvage tug in the mid-20th century that reads sort of like a badly put together series of newspaper articles with lots of meaningless names and dates.

This brought him to talking about as he has told me more than a few times, the fact that him and his brother rebuilt the engine, drive-shaft, and all the accessory bearings and gears on a tugboat from the 1920s when they were kids. They did it for Jack Drury, whose family has been friends with mine since the 1940s, and owned a dairy equipment company and large industrial yard on the Kill Van Kull, and they were paid $1.25 an hour. "Not much money, even then" I said and he said "Yeah, but we learned." And then he talked about kids these days. One facet of the "kids these days" um...discourse...is that they don't have any mechanical skills, which seems pretty valid to me. Not literally, but I think the gap between the regular college-educated person and a person who "works with his hands" is a lot wider than it used to be, because of specialization, the income gap, divergent technology and much else. It's something that bothers me a lot because I'm on one side of it and my family and co-workers are on the other. Not that I seem to them a clutz or a spazz or an total moron like some people. I can change my brake-pads or run a bobcat and I have some idea what journals and bearings are but I don't know what a crocus cloth is and I can't tell what my uncles are talking about when they get into an hour long debate about tractors. So it fascinates me and I do want to learn more.

Today in the shower (of course) when thinking about what my uncle told me, I realized a good opportunity has come up. He and my uncle David spent a whole summer taking the bus across the island and then coming home covered in grease with towels wrapped like turbans around their heads. By an odd coincidence it  was the same one my great-great grandfather, Emil, had worked on for over a decade as the engineer. The interesting thing I found out today is that Emil would not set foot on the thing. It can pay to hear the same story told over and over again. You think to ask different questions.He would tell my uncles stories like how he took down all the plumbing, wiring, gears and whatever else from the ceiling of the engine room and replaced it so that it was just one foot higher so that he didn't have to bend his head when walking around, and he would give advice, but he adamantly refused to go near it. Even when the boat was part of the regatta in New York Bay for the nation's bicentennial, he refused to go. My uncle just said "You could never tell with those old-timers. Sometimes they worked for sixty years on the water and they never wanted to set foot on a boat again." It could make a good story with a little digging, and gives me a chance to learn about more what tugboats must have been like to work on when the work was a little more serious and dangerous.

And of the captain: today the deckhand related an excellent story, not at all unusual or out of character. Leaving the parking lot of the supermarket, they were blocked by two trucks. The captain slams on the horn repeatedly, but one of the truck just backs up toward him. He manages to pull around the truck but stops next to it and asks the deckhand to roll down his window.  and shouts in his heavy New York accent    " 'Ey what the fuck is wrong with you?" The driver says ""-Eh! Fuck you!" The captain, who has a heavy New York accent, shouts "Fuck you and fuck your mother!" The driver, an Albanian, comes back "Fuck your mother!" The captain then tells him "Fuck your mother again and go fuck a donkey and go back to your motherfucking country you fucking raghead" and drives away. The deckhand asks the captain who is pale and overweight and probably covered with sweat because he sweats when he exerts himself in the least like when he's eating, "Why do you do that? Don't you think he could have a gun or something? You could get shot." The captain, is still pissed and yells at him "You don't think I have a gun? You think I would drive around without a gun? You fucking moron, of course I have a gun."

I asked him about later on and he told it again. He added "With those foreigners you gotta bring their mother into it. Something about their mother really gets them."

He grew up with my dad. We talk about the joys of having Norwegian ancestry. Of course, he terms it "Superior Aryan Blood."

I said Kavalier and Clay was "pure fun." The starting point for this novel is the Holocaust. What I mean is: there is not much thinking involved. Or meant. Because we are delving deeper into the Holocaust, folks. And it is not all candy and marmalade. Originally, it felt like it was just background. This is the part of W.W.II that's "pure fun." You know who the good guys are and you root for them.  But once you get into the feelings of helplessness revolving around tolerating atrocities it is more morally ambiguous. Less pure fun.

The record is corrected and now I can sleep.

Haircut today. My beard is thinned down to almost nothing and my haircut is boyish and clean. The barber took liberties like always but I let him. It is me being a women in a novel, like what I was reading today in the diner, a feminist novel Pig Tales, which made me feel gross so I had to switch to my other new book. It felt good to cut my hair. To have my hair cut. Beards have pros and cons, sometimes they are the tangible evidence of sloth and filth and insecurity. Though mostly it is purely functional-my winter sweater. I wonder often about people's comments: "Nice beard" "It suits you" "I wish I could grow one like that." Do you really think that much about beards? Do you want one that much? Beard is something to be grown between twenty-one and thirty.

I bought a bunch of stocks recently and now have to check them incessantly. It is time for another internet fast. This technology is creeping forward too quickly recently. A bunch of people sitting around an apartment, it is only a matter of time before the laptop is taken out. How many iphones are whipped out in bars? Rising on par with the weather for conversation filler is the latest youtube phenomena. (I don't get the Christian Bale one. I have played through many sides but it is still weird and pointless. I prefer Alabama Leprechaun or Otto the Cat anyday. Guilty as charged.) It's all fine but I wonder if its penetration is too viral, too quick, too fast for the losses to be noticed. I think about the very deep loss of literacy and focus. Of course this is the story of the past century but we had that whole postmodern dash which in some ways acted against it. That was a constructive self-consciousness which is no longer active, shot itself in the foot. At least I think it did. But we must be always vigilant.

Pop culture and the co-opting of it is sort of the answer but I am the least knowledgeable person in the world when it comes to this. I can't remember the words to any song-To Happy Birthday. I am a very blind man. It leaves me quiet at parties with geeks that I like.

There is dangerously little breathing room between the baby-carriages and me. There is the mass of rich people in Park Slope who have slowly but surely taken over Prospect Heights and there is just the few blocks of Carribeans mixed with Yuppies between me and them. I felt this today when I was assaulted at the closest coffee shop to me by a number of small German-speaking children. Small children. My stop, Franklin Avenue, is the last for white people. It is embarassing. Segregation is rotten.

Took the train to Bay Ridge because I was already drifting out into that part of Brooklyn to get my haircut. The black barbers in my neighborhood would surely make a disaster of my hair which is straight as spaghetti. One day I should try it for kicks. Southwest Brooklyn is nice. The idea of being in a corner, of it being a neighborhood with a more permanent family-centric feeling, and the lack of any dominant ethnic group or race. That place, at least, is not segregated. But there are no blacks, though many Arabs. Recently, I have consciously tried to lay off the driving and it pays off. To sit and read and stare at people and figure out what books they're reading themselves leaves me much calmer than driving down the same streets alone even if it takes much longer.

I will take the bar of Norwegian chocolate I bought in Bay Ridge out of my jacket pocket and get a glass of milk and take myself to bed and finish reading Kavalier and Clay, which I got today at the library. It is so good and soothing because it is pure fun and well-written. I will do my best to wash away the chocolate with the milk but I will still go to sleep without brushing my teeth for once because today is the last day on earth. I go back to work tomorrow.

And also:

I did the forty-eight hour internet fast. It was good. It was right after I got back from work when I keep myself busy catching up with friends and alcohol, so the effect was dulled. I do think I am more impervious to the hankering to constantly check my e-mail and the New York Times website (bless them, they don't get blessed enough for their free services and they will soon be null or close to it).

Today was a nasty day to come back to work. Its New Years in Gravesend, its not very nice. It started snowing as soon as I got back and as I went to bed at nine am it turned to ice. Pleasant. And when I woke up at twelve I spent almost two hours outside because we had to breakdown after making up in push-gear. The mate didn't realize that the barge was so high up in the water. That particular barge, the DBL 31, is more difficult to handle in wind, he says, because its short and high and so has less...I forget the word. Train? And then we came out here and I spent another hour and a half outside except it was worse because its not so protected outhere and the spray was coming over the bow of the barge and then ten feet in the air when it was compressed between the barge and ship where I was standing as we landed. Like jumping through a waterfall. The wind is really not very nice to us today. And hot dogs for dinner. Hot dogs are gross and should be abolished. Chocolate Cannolis from Renato's, however... I was so happy to finally get out of my wet clothes and into my sleeping bag to go to bed, now, at six thirty.

We need to have destructo-books. Books that intentionally take themselves apart so they can't be resold on the internet. Not that they should necessarily be shoddy. More like something you will want to take apart and eat or give to your friends. This is my plan to save the publishing industry. I will start with Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter. Reading it halfway, I had already thought of three chapters to give to people. I almost want to eat some of them. It will be the revival of the short-story to boot.

Such dreams.

More on Steven Millhauser later.

In other food news, I tried the inside out burger at Plan B. It was disappointing: the cheese squirted out with the first bite. Cheese should always be on the outside - but the novelty is fulfilled.

I looked at someone's twitter online. It was terrifying. I would like to keep the internet at bay. When I get back from work I'm going on a fast. Forty-eight hours. Livejournal is the only internet I believe in (now).

Its been a year since I've posted on this place. I promise to come back.

To start:

I had eggs with peas this morning. Good idea.

Edit: This means a non-dry omelette sprinkled with peas just before the last drops of good solidify. Peas are my long secret love. They have been hidden, even from me. I have strong memories of eating peas as a child, lovely peas, very sweet.

My grandmother told me a story about peas recently. She said there was a girl in her elementary school that nobody liked very much, though nobody disliked her much either. She would sit on her porch and when my grandmother passed by she would say "Would you like to come and share some peas with me?" And she would open a can of peas and heat them up and they would share some peas.

I have downloaded "Lolita" read by Jeremy Irons. This was a terrible idea. It makes me want to find pretentious English people with nasally voices and torture them until they sound like beasts. Jeremy Irons' voice is maybe too much Humbert.

To read Henry Miller while being a suburban wunderkind perched on a suburban back porch, drinking coffee, eating cake, ah to be a bohemian. Memories of Paris. Being stupid again.

Finally, yesterday, after four months, they got back to me about my license renewal (school actually started in September...) only to inform me that they had lost the documents I sent them.

Apparently, the teacher who I filled in for for a semester at Tottenville High School shot her husband in his sleep. This, kids, is why its bad to be a teacher or a policeman (he was) in NYC. It drives you insane. I never her met her except in a sex dream in which I reluctantly made love to her obese self in a restored Federalist wooden boat.

Speaking of those boat things, I now work on the Scotia Sea, out of Philadelphia. It is probably the easiest job in the world. I work a week on (living on the boat) and a week off. My principle challenge is not watching too many bad DVDs, as we do an average of two to three hours work per day (whilst I am still getting paid for twelve hours). Mostly we bring oil and ship's stores out to foreign freighters. Sometimes we take their crews ashore. The company is an odd place because they were bought by the largest marine transportation company in the country and soon after that all the rivals of this larger company stopped doing business with its (now) subsidiary. On the bright side, I will eventually transfer to New York Harbor (ancestral homeland, higher pay, busier), and/or Alaska or Seattle.

I had originally worked in New York for the same company my great-grandfather and grandfather worked for, Great Lakes Dredge and Dock. It was dirty and I was constantly being woken up off-shift to go out on deck and be dirty. I made hella money because of over-time but the chief delight was the other deckhand, who I worked closely with. He had two cell phones. One for his personal use, and one for the police! He told me some great stories about going to jail-yes, child-rapists, even if they are 6'6" Hells Angels will be made to cry, have their clothes burned, etc, if they go to prison, marriage-he once burned all his wifes clothes in his fireplace which caused a ten foot high flame to shoot out the top and required the fire department to fill his living room with water, ash, and half-burn clothing, and how to treat "foreigners"-he had endless stories about his relationship with Slobodan Peepovitch, a dumb Croatian who he apparently convinced the Washington Monument was known as "Genocide Park," and was a tribute to John Wayne. The captain was also a sweet guy from Port Richmond with the heaviest New York accent I've ever heard not from a guido. He would wake up everyday and growl about his coffee and ask me questions about teaching and then growl some more in commisseration. Somehow, he knew my great-grandfather and said he was "a nice guy." He remembered the boat he had worked on.

Just so you know that Staten Island is not composed solely of guidos. This

here is people I know acting like people I know.

Folks, I have about a zillion fishtanks complete with fish and various aquatic plants. They are going to be in a dumpster on October 20th. If you or someone you know (that is not flaky) would like them, let me know. The plants can (and have been for fifty years, so I know its true) be shipped in wet newspaper throughout the continental United States, if you're really keen on them and want to pay for the shipping. I would rather they didn't go to waste.

Recently read/watched/happened things:

state of things (obvious)
Italo Calvino (If On A Winter's Night A Traveler...)
J.G. Ballard ("Concentration City")
conversations with Tom Matthew about dystopian technological future,
The 400 Blows (platonic love, hands)
unlistened to voicemail from Steve

I asked Steve, the police officer, "Is the city fully...besieged?" I had to think about the word besieged before I used it. It was difficult to accept that it was the correct one.

"-Yes, there's no safe way out now."

I left him and wandered across the city to one of the defensive walls. Just piles of things and dirt stuffed between and on top of houses, thirty or forty feet high. It was a very large city. From the wall I could see far across it and it looked domestic and defenseless, familiar houses and buildings; garbage was uncollected and seemed to be discoloring what seemed so normal to me. Small groups of people milled pointlessly in the streets where there were very few cars.

Tom Bonelli came clambering down from the wall. We had a conversation which I can't remember. I wandered away again, alone.

I found Tom Matthew and James. We walked slowly and talked quietly with lots of silence. I told them we could not get out of the city anymore. That we would probably get caught if we tried. They were non-plussed. They seemed to have accepted this already.

"But" I said, "Bonelli has something that is worth getting out of the city."

"-What is that?"

"Some kind of engineer's documents."

I immediately regretted telling him what Bonelli had because I realized they would torture him if he were caught, and make him tell. I should have told him as little as possible.

"We should try and get out in the middle of the battle."

Tom walked beside me. I looked over and I saw that I was holding his hand. I was surprised that we were holding hands but I realized that it made sense considering all that was happening. I looked up at him and smiled, amused that what I was about to say was true.

"I guess we have to find Gandalf."

I just watched "Communion" with my sister. It is pretty ridiculous. Christopher Walken is Whitley Streiber, the abductee. At the climax of the movie, he dresses up in a black suit with a funny hat and goes to see them. They dance for him, give him high-fives and then explain how he is a chosen one. I still have residual xenophobia when I'm in the deep dark night but I was absolutely non-plussed by the movie. Then I went on a communion website and read this little exchange:

Interviewer: The assumption that the visitors are "lifting" cigarettes doesn't imply that they're taking anything else, like food. In my opinion, their apparent activities are staged for the benefit of the witness. It's likely that their seeming preoccupation with earthly fixations is projected, and might not even have anything to do with material objects, per se. I think more in terms of holograms or induced perceptions.

Whitley Streiber: I halfway suspect that they smoke. I've gotten dozens of letters from people who smell cigarette smoke when they are around. If they do smoke, it is going to freak a lot of people out totally, including me. Can you imagine finally getting to go to the mothership and discovering that the place is full of cigarette smoke? That they smoke like coneheads and they don't care about cancer? It's a nightmare, I must admit. And surely only that!

I thought this was hilarious. Aliens stealing cigarettes! Then I remembered this weird experience I had where I drove down a deserted road in the middle of the woods recently and smoked a cigarette. I was kinda freaked out because it was pitch black and I felt sort of vulnerable with the window open. In the car, I started writing a story about an alien who comes out of the darkness, takes my cigarette, smokes it and leaves. I remember it as being very vivid and I liked it. Though I didn't get to finish it because I was creeped out. I looked at it later and thought "why the hell would I write a story about an alien smoking a cigarette? why would I think that a ridiculous idea like that would work?" I was temporarily chilled by this coincidence, and again a few minutes ago when the dvd player went on screensaver mode and turned the room black, but now I am ok.

I am waiting to hear back about a job working on a tugboat in Philadelphia-it will happen, they say, or something similar will happen. Its the union people saying this, dirty-minded people that talk to me about the blowjobs of Jersey girls as soon as I walk into the Union Hall, as I am now a member of the Longshoreman's Union(I will slash you with my hook!)/Seamen's Union/AFL-CIO.

But I'm more worried about my sister, who had an appendectomy last Saturday and is still in a lot of pain. I will probably have to sit with her for twelve hours in the emergency room tomorrow. I will be sticking around here until she's better. My mom is frazzled because...her father died of complications from an intestinal surgery just recently. But I'm sure she will be fine because she's eighteen, and healthy (yeah, my sister, not my mother). My brother is incommunicado for two weeks for his "indoctrination" to the maritime academy. He will be the only person I know whose college experience consists of waking up four days a week to be in his uniform in formation at seven a.m.

I had a dream last night that I was with a girl I used to date. She no longer speaks to me. That's what you get for trying to bribe a girl to your apartment with a bottle of Jameson. Even if they are alcoholics. And you were trying to make up for something you said about their eating disorder. And you wanted to show her your dog. Because she likes dogs.

We were with and her bandmates. We were in their apartment and we had a sort of fun wrestling match, her and I. I think she won. Then something happened that everyone liked me. A sort of universal revelation/validation. I don't remember what it was, of course, but it was something creative. Then I noticed that she had a cage with a harris hawk in it-I don't know why it was a harris hawk but it was (or at least I called it that-on looking at pictures, it appears to have been either a kestral of some kind or a peregrine falcon)-and the cage was too short so the hawk was on its side. Then there was a rabbit in the cage and the hawk and the rabbit were fighting. It was brutal with the rabbit having the hawk's head in its mouth and the hawk scraping and clawing the rabbit's face. I thought we should stop them, but she said she wanted them to be friends.

On waking up, I e-mailed her the dream with the additional comment "I thought you might want to know what my subconscious thinks of you." Then I went back to sleep. I intended it to be amusing but I think maybe I've inadvertantly insulted her yet again. I don't really care and am surprised that I dreamt about her but still, I hate to keep insulting people unnecessarily.

And yes my dreams are always pretty straight symbolic stories. I'm an open book to myself, evidently, and with a flair for fairy tale narratives.

I hope I like this boat thing. Its what my father does and nearly every male member of my family on both sides. My dad's dad was a lighthouse keeper, etc. while in the Coast Guard. His dad was a rum-runner during prohibition. Most likely, his "family" moved from Maryland to Staten Island in the 1800s as a result of being in the oyster trade.

My mom's dad did not like working on the ocean because he missed his dad a lot while he was a kid but he tried it out for a while and owned sailboats throughout his life. His father was an engineer on a boat-fulfilling the stereotype that all Norwegians are carpenters or sailors (is there something I'm missing?). When I went to Norway last month with my grandmother and uncle and cousin, we would introduce ourselves, to people who did not know us, first by saying we were relatives of Ule Sigvartsen. Him, they wouldn't know. We would have to call him by his nickname: Ule "Storm" and then they would understand. He got the name from his reputation for going out fishing in the middle of storms that would keep the other fisherman holed up in the fjiord. And everyone we met was either a carpenter or a fisherman-the older folk that is.

Genetics and family history is bullshit but there is something mystical about following footsteps that go so far back. Something unfamiliar to every other aspect of life. The irrational nature is probably the main feature of it. And traditions should only be thrown away with care. I am practicing my knots.

What do you think about ghosts?

What we're basically demonstrating is the unusual phonetic similarity between the Dutch language and our own.





Courtesy of the best radio station: http://www.wfmu.org/.

These maps are just crazy:

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

and this

These maps are just crazy:

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

and this