The Known Universe

Channeling Howard Hughes

March 15, 2010 – 9:21 am

2 #

School Supplies and Cigars

Included in a battery of tests recently ordered by my doctor is a 24 hour urine test. I was given a half-gallon jug marked “Biohazard” and told use it instead of a toilet for 24 hours, then return it for testing. Although I got the jug a week ago, I decided it was best to wait until the weekend so I wouldn’t need to bring a jug of piss to work. Lucky for me, yesterday was another gray and rainy day where I barely left the house, perfect for playing Howard Hughes.

“Why did they give you such a huge jug?” Deborah asked. “Did they think you were going to go out drinking all day?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “It does seem a little excessive, doesn’t it?”

“It was St. Patrick’s Day.”

“I actually had a dream last night that the jug was full and overflowing. I had to pour some out. I remember thinking it was going to ruin the test and I’d have to do it all over again. But who knows — I guess they just make it big to play it safe. Maybe some people have problems”

“Oh people have problems all right.”

Although I’m not taking the piss jug to work with me, I do have to take it on the bus to drop it off at the lab. It makes me wonder what other people are secretly carrying around with them on the bus. I can only imagine.

In other news, I’m playing around with creating a gallery of some of my favorite photographs. A portfolio of sorts. It’s a work in progress, and it probably takes a million years to load, but if you’re bored, click here and have a look.

By Jamie | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)

March 14, 2010

Summer Pants

March 14, 2010 – 4:19 pm

3 #

Rubber Supply

Although he originally planned to stay for six months, Brian cut out from the Buddhist Monastery three months early. He drove north from Virginia, stayed with our friend Joe in New Jersey for a couple of days, and then disappeared into the wilderness of western Connecticut where he remained incommunicado for months.

I called Joe to ask if he had any news, he didn’t, and we were both a little worried.

“He’s pretty out there,” said Joe.

“Yeah, but being ‘out there’ has always been a part of Brian’s charm,” I said.

“True, but, I mean, I don’t know.”

When I hung up with Joe, I called Brian, hoping for the chance to judge for myself whether three months in a Buddhist Monastery had done a number on his head, or perhaps enlightened him beyond the ability to relate to us mere mortals. I left a message, didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, and left another. When he finally called, of course, he was fine. Out there, yes, but no more than ever.

“I was worried about you,” I said. “After Joe told me you left, and then not hearing from you for months, I started thinking all kinds of crazy things.”

He admitted that when he first left the Monastery, going to Joe’s place and watching football on a big screen TV without any time to decompress had been a little more than he could handle. “I’m sure I was acting strange. Of course I was. Anyway, I would’ve called you earlier, but I just didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

“I understand. I’m just glad that everything’s okay. How was it? Why did you leave?”

“I’ll tell you all about it when I see you,” he said. “I’m coming to the city in March.”

Pasteup Critter

This was all a couple of months ago and, true to his word, Brian is back in the Big Apple, working on a job at The American Museum of Natural History. “It’s awesome, dude. I don’t even bother leaving for lunch, I just take long walks through the museum. They have so much cool shit there. I love it.”

We spoke last week and made tentative plans to see each other over the weekend, but neither of us followed through with a phone call. “I barely even left the house,” he told me. “I went food shopping, that was it. The fucking weather.”

“I hear you. I had to get a prescription filled and was totally soaked by the time I got to the pharmacy and doubly soaked by the time I got home.”

“The wind,” he said.

“Totally. It stirred up the rain from all directions. All kinds of shit was strewn in the streets — garbage cans, plastic bags…”

“Umbrellas.”

“Yes! When I was leaving the pharmacy, there was a woman just ahead of me. She stepped outside, opened her umbrella, and in an instant it turned inside out. She stood there trying to figure out a way to fix it, but it was beyond hope.”

“Dude, get this: I went to the supermarket, right? I had exactly two pair of clean pants, my heavy denim work pants — no way way I was going to wear those, they’d still be wet by the time I go to work on Monday — and a light weight linen pair. So I threw those on — without any underwear — and ran to the supermarket. By the time I got there, I was drenched. I looked down and realized my pants were totally transparent. You could see everything. Everything, dude.”

“Oh man, that’s fucking hilarious. So what did you do?”

“Fuck it, what could I do? I had to do my food shopping.”

By Jamie | Posted in Let's Talk About the Weather | Comments (3)

March 13, 2010

VYE-ta-min D

March 13, 2010 – 11:01 pm

5 #

Rory and Deborah's Knitting

I pulled my hood up and ran from my front door to the shelter of the elevated highway, where I could remain relatively dry for five blocks before I had to turn left and head up the street to Walgreen’s pharmacy to fill a prescription.

I hunkered down and walked as fast as could, but by the time I made it into the store, my pants looked like oil soaked rags and my feet sloshed around in soggy socks.

“It’ll be ready in about a half hour,” the pharmacist said after I handed her the script.

With the weather the way it was, I decided to stick around and kill time in the store.

As I perused the cough and cold remedies, a pre-recorded voice kept repeating itself over the intercom: “Customer Service to Shaving Knees, Customer Service to Shaving Knees…” Huh? She had to say it several times before I realized the woman wasn’t saying, “Shaving Knees,” but rather “Shaving Needs.” Not nearly as provocative. There was something alluring about the prim and proper — though with a slight I’m-wild-on-the-weekends huskiness — voice beckoning customer service to the knee shaving section. I pictured a nurse in a pristine white linen dress and white patent leather Mary Janes set up in the middle of an aisle with a razor and a leather strop waiting for Customer Service to arrive. Fantasies aside, it was still bit of a mystery why Customer Service was so desperately needed in the shaving cream and razor aisle.

VYE-ta-min D it said on the printed insert stapled to the paper bag containing my pills. I said it out loud, with exaggerated phonetics. “VYE-ta-min D? What in ‘tarnation?”

“That’ll be sixty dollars,” said the pharmacist.

“Wha?”

“Six dollars.”

“Oh, whew, I thought you said sixty. I was about to flip my lid..”

Recent blood tests showed me to be significantly deficient in Vitamin D. “It could be what’s behind your recent bone breaks,” my doctor said. I’d been told once before, about a year ago, that I was deficient in Vitamin D and I was already taking a vitamin D supplement (when I remembered to take it, that is) but apparently a few hundred units per day wasn’t doing the trick. My new pills pack a whopping 50,000 units of the elusive VYE-ta-min D in a green gelcap that I’m supposed to take once a week. “I want to see you again in three months,” the doctor said when he prescribed it.

“Not if I see you first.”

By Jamie | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (5)

March 9, 2010

King Croesus

March 9, 2010 – 9:47 am

8 #

Stoves

A couple of modern-age Norwegian explorers go on an around-the-world tour on 70 year old Danish motorcycles, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

Last night, NYCVinMoto and Bar Matchless hosted a slide show presented by a couple of Norwegian blokes named Klaus and Tormod who are on what they call “The Dumb Way Round” — a dig at Ewan McGregor’s well-funded documentary “The Long Way Round” where McGregor and company went around the world on brand spankin’ new BMWs, while being followed by a camera crew in a support vehicle.

The show featured photos of the Norwegian’s trip to date (Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, South Korea, and so on) and stories of their adventures in these places — general themes being finding shit-faced old men with gold teeth and welding rigs willing to repair broken forks and frames in towns with spotty electricity, and drunk Russian women in bikinis at Russian biker rallies. When the slide of a bikini-girl came up, Jason whispered that Tormod had confided to him that the Russian women were easy. “I think he’s a been frustrated by the women here in New York,” Jason said.

“Tell him welcome to the club.”

You can read about their trip so far, and follow along as their adventure continues, on their fascinating and hilarious website The King Croesus Contempt for Death Trip.

In addition to selling T-shirts to help fund their trip, they also held a raffle where the winner was offered the opportunity to shave Klaus’ beard — which has been growing since they entered Russia. I bought a T-shirt, but not a raffle ticket, and, in fact, I didn’t even stay for the spectacle, though I must admit I was curious to see who won. For 100 dollars extra, they said, the winner could wax it.

A Man Thing

Our friend Rosko was there, recently back from a trip of his own. His wife is Australian and they go there once a year. He came over and shook my hand. “How’s the arm?” he asked.

“Not bad,” I said.

“When do you think you’ll be riding again?”

“Not sure. The weather has been so nice, I was tempted to go out this past weekend.” I raised my arm over my head to demonstrate having my range of motion back . “It’s still a little weak, but not too bad.”

“Best to wait until you’re 100 percent and have no lingering problems,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Jason, “It’s not like you’re getting paid to ride or anything.”

“Yeah. I suppose,” I said, and changed the subject. “How was your trip, Rosko?”

“Uh, it was okay…”

“Yeah, I heard about your ear,” said Jason.

“Your ear?” I said, “What happened with your ear?”

“A cockroach crawled into it and I had to go to the emergency room.”

Suddenly the slide show had competition for the evening’s most interesting story.

“I was sleeping on the floor,” he explained, “and about an hour after lying down, whoop a cockroach crawled right into my ear.”

“What did it sound like?”

“Pretty much exactly how you’d imagine it would sound like.”

“So what happened?”

“I couldn’t get it out, so I went to the emergency room..”

“And they just pulled it out with tweezers or something?”

“Well, at first, they tried to coax it out.”

“Coax it out? How? By dangling a crumb of food outside your ear?”

“It was kind of funny, actually, they turned out all the lights and everyone tried to be really quiet. It didn’t work.”

“So then what?”

“They poured oil in my ear to suffocated it, hoping that when I tilted my head and the oil poured out, the cockroach would come out with it. Didn’t happen. So they managed to kill it, but I had to come back the next day for them to extract it. The doctor used this long tweezer kind of thing. It took a long time. he couldn’t get a grip on it. Finally he was like, ‘I got it, I got it,’ and then, snap, it broke in half. After they finally got the bulk of it out, they used a vacuum cleaner type thing to suck out the remaining bits.”

“Like some kind of gentle ear vacuum?” said Jason.

“Um…it was pretty intense, actually.”

Church Parking Lot

I stood around outside with Jason and kicked tires on the old bikes and watched as they Norwegians let a kooky old man in a long gray beard take one of them for a spin around the block. “Who’s the old guy?’ I asked Jason, thinking it would be a shame for the bikes to make it through several thousand miles of Mongolian desert only to have the bike smashed to smithereens by a New York City bus.

“That’s Dave Roper,” said Jason. “He’s a legend.”

“Who?”

“Dave Roper, He’s the only American to have ever won an Isle of Man TT. He’s the guy to beat on the vintage circuit.”

I felt dumb for having worried.

When Dave Roper came back around the block and parked the bike, Jason took a million pictures of him and Tormod, posing with the 70 year old Nimbus.

Cameraless, I hopped a bus home.

By Jamie | Posted in Motorcycles | Comments (8)

March 6, 2010

Newillaimsburg

March 6, 2010 – 11:54 am

6 #

Wires

Hello?

Feeling a little cloudy, lately. Foggy, or whatever you want to call it. It’s been a while, but let’s see if I remember how to do this.

Deborah and I were walking around Williamsburg after work last night — she needed to pick up some yarn from the yarn store to feed her knitting habit — and decided to get something to eat afterward. “How about Diner?” I suggested — a rehabbed Kullman Diner car in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge that I used to go to all the time until I met Deborah. Around the time we met, Deborah was hired as a bar tender at Diner but bailed on the job at the last minute, choosing to take something closer to where she was living at the time, instead. She was always afraid of running into the the guy who hired her and having an awkward moment so she never wanted to go there. That was years ago, though, and Deborah was willing to give it a go. “Do you think it’s early enough to beat the crowd?” I said.

“I doubt it,” said Deborah, somewhat relieved, perhaps, to have an excuse to go somewhere else. “It’s already seven o’clock.”

“Let’s see.”

She was right. You could see the old style Diner seething and humming from a block away. Opening the front door was like peeling open the lid on a tub of nightcrawlers. “No fucking way,” I said, and turned around only to be engulfed by a gaggle of yupsters anxious to add their beards to the tangle of facial hair already inside. Their momentum nearly pulled me into the plasma of yellow light, but managed to swim against the tide and make it to the safety of the sidewalk. “Oh well, so much for that idea. Where to?” I said.

There’s a fancy restaurant next to Diner (same owners, I believe) called Marlow and Sons. Neither of us had ever been there before, but we knew it expensive. It was a Friday night, though, and we hadn’t been out in ages, so what the hell.

We were offered a choice of two tables, one in a back room that was humming at near capacity, and a small table in the window. “Let’s sit in front,” said Deborah, “the back looks too cramped.” Unfortunately the front didn’t turn out to be any more comfortable. The table was only 2 foot square at most, squeezed between the front door and a another small table where a couple sat engrossed in romance. I offered to take the corner and we sat down. The hostess brought us water and menus and told us the waitress would be around to tell us about the specials shortly.

“I’m not really feeling this place,” said Deborah, pulling the tale towards her to give me more room, while at the same time sliding her chair in to avoid getting knocked as someone walked in the front door. “What do you think?”

“You want to leave?”

“I think so, yeah. How about you?”

“Let’s go.”

We apologized to the hostess and were back on the street, the elevated J train clattering overhead.

Bus Stop

Deborah made the executive decision to simply go home and order a pizza. As we walked to the bus stop, we passed by Dressler, an even more expensive, even fancier restaurant. We made reservations for there once, but canceled for one reason or another. I can’t remember why, though it was probably because neither of us felt like spending a hundred bucks on dinner at the time. We didn’t feel like spending a hundred bucks last night, either, but even if we did, judging from a quick glance in the window, we wouldn’t have gotten a table anyway.

How ’bout that recession, eh?

We waited for the bus across the street from Peter Luger — a famous steakhouse that’s been around since the nineteenth century. A line of limos and taxi cabs picked people up and let people out like roller coaster cars at an amusement park. As I stood watching a waiter in a white shirt and black bow tie take an order, Deborah looked down and found a set of keys on the sidewalk. A guy standing nearby, waiting for the bus with us, was listening to his iPod. Deborah jangled the keys to get his attention. “Are these yours?”

He pulled his headphones out of his ears. “Oh my god. Those are my apartment keys. You saved my life.”

By Jamie | Posted in Whining and Dining | Comments (6)