Podcast Jack would say, “They are watching you!”
All these Top Tens are making my head hurt! How about this week we cease with the love-fest and instead discuss things that are generally agreed upon as sucking (for a change). I never get to whine and mope and rant. Can’t I have my way, just this once? Enough of the Top 10. Let’s examine the Bottom 10. No “gas prices”, no “Pitchfork Media”, and certainly no “Radiohead”. This is the real bottom 10. All those other things are just…well, they’re blogging fodder for days when I feel like I’ve really bottomed out, and the only thing keeping me from hanging myself with a shoelace is an absurd news story about how The Shins want to release their new album on their own label, or something.
The Bottom 10: A Top 10 Of Awful, Awful Things
10. salmonella poisoning – Thanks for making me afraid of tomatoes, you piece of shit FDA/CDC fuckers. All I ever wanted was a Subway sub garnished with some succulent tomato to go along with my chicken, bacon, cheddar and jalapeño sandwich, but I’m such a neurotic mess I’m afraid that if I eat anything with tomato in it I’m going to die. I guess that’s the downside to being a hypochondriac, but still — I don’t need any more illnesses to fear, and now that salmonella is on my radar it’s going to be a long time before I can feel comfortable ordering a sandwich made with tomato.
09. blogger authors – What’s the deal with all these pathetic, boring bloggers getting book deals, or pitching books? They’re not writers, they’re assholes! Have you read the proposal penned by former Gawker editor Emily Gould? It reads like the worst ENW 202: Nonfiction Workshop piece I’ve ever encountered, and that includes the one I had to edit as a Sophomore for that kid who used to wear sandals to class every day, and wrote about taking peyote and having spiritual encounters that involved dead jazz musicians, celebrity mentalists and Native American mystics. Her flowery prose spells “horrible lay”.
08. New York Mets – I’m watching the first game of the home/home double-header against the Yankees right now, and I can’t remember the last time I was so disappointed with my favorite baseball team. I mean, I guess it would be the end of last season when they missed the playoffs, but that was a freak incident. I’ve never — in the middle of a season — considered giving up on the team before. I’ve always felt compelled to watch every game that I could. This year is different. I cannot stand losing, but what’s worse is the way the team is losing. Listless play, poor relief pitching, a– hey, look at that, David Wright hits an RBI single in the top of the first inning. Maybe this isn’t such an awful, awful thing after all!
07. television sucks – For a while, it seemed like LOST (and its surrounding lore, including various fan-sites) was the only thing that kept me from a total psychological breakdown. Then there was Top Chef. There might have been something else in between, but it probably wasn’t anywhere near as fascinating as those programs. Now the latter program is off the air, and LOST doesn’t begin its new season until February. I’ve been introducing Nicci to Six Feet Under, but it’s just not the same as obsessing over something new and captivating. If I wasn’t so tired after spending all day on my feet working, or worried that my minuscule paycheck couldn’t justify egregious spending, I’d consume myself with matters unrelated to television.
06. Rick Rubin – He doesn’t even do anything. A friend of mine e-mailed me from a studio where he was recording keyboard shit for a band Rubin was producing, and he told me that in the three months he spent in an L.A. studio, he saw the famous producer/bearded guru a grand total of twice. So much for Rubin’s awesome mystique, right? Maybe this is the real secret to his trademark “stripped down” sound. He’ll walk into the studio and say, “you guys record, I’m going to chow down on some In-N-Out and go to shul.” Someone who knows Rick Rubin once said, “He’s tremendous with artists. They love him. He shows them how to make it better, and he gets more honest and exciting performances out of people than anyone.” I guess it is pretty exciting to work with Rick Rubin because there’s a chance he’ll show up at the studio and tell you what he thinks.
05. social networking – I thought I hated social networking when it was MySpace or Facebook. Now there’s all this new shit like Twitter, Bebo, Jaiku, Pownce, Flickr…pretty much you could make up a word on the spot and soon find out that its a micro-blogging service or a social networking tool. Ulur! Gorbsch! Denku! Fun, right? No. They’re expanding and changing faster than I can possibly keep up with, and I don’t even really care to try. I still use Blogger to compose and publish my blog posts, and I barely understand how this page works. How can I be expected to adapt to all these fancy new innovations? I can’t. Because I’m a moron. The same could be said for Internet memes, because everyone was talking like retards for a while when those pictures of cats speaking broken English were popular…If you’ve ever quoted or followed an Internet meme, I don’t want to know you — unless its through a hole in the wall or a Craigslist NSA hook-up.
04. working weekends – It’s fucking awful, let me tell you. I can’t remember the last time I went on a really fun day trip. Didn’t you have more fun reading this page when I was unemployed, and going to San Diego, San Francisco, Vegas, Joshua Tree, and generally exploring the areas surrounding my new home? Of course you did. I had shit to write about. I spent money frivolously even though I had no income. Now I’ve got a five-day-a-week job and a burgeoning online business, and I can’t go anywhere or do anything fun. My job isn’t even interesting enough to devote blog entries to. It’s a wasteland, man.
03. no air conditioning – I refer you to my Top 10 Things To Do When It’s Hot Outside list. For the second summer in a row, I don’t have any A/C in my apartment. It gets hot in there. Last week, when temperatures hovered around 100 for three or four days, just sitting in my room in my boxers was gross and uncomfortable. It’s only June. Things can get a lot worse as the summer wears on, and Los Angeles experiences more heat waves, or days of continuous warm temperatures. Lucky for me, Nicci’s place has air conditioning, so it’s not like I have to sweat it out every night in my apartment, but still, no air conditioning is awful.
02. Harvey Milk tour – Why the hell aren’t they playing Los Angeles? I mean, I guess if you’re going to fly to Europe for a summer tour, it would make the most sense to depart from the East Coast, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t start out west, drive east, and then depart for Europe. What a bummer. Lucky for me, my thirst for Harvey’s face melting milk has been satiated by the recently-released re-issue of The Pleaser, which I picked up at Amoeba yesterday (hey, my store isn’t the best at stocking new vinyl). If you haven’t heard it, you should. And if you like it, you should order it now from Chunklet’s online store, because they only pressed a few copies and its guaranteed to sell out very soon. As if Harvey Milk couldn’t be any cooler, they have possibly the best t-shirt design ever?
01. No beer – I told the guy at the fancy 711 to call me when the new rare, exotic beer shipment arrived, and he hasn’t called. I’ve never been so upset about giving out my number and not getting a phone call in my entire life. And this is a guy I’m talking about. I shouldn’t care at all. It’s like that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is waiting for Keith Hernandez to call, and he isn’t sure how to act around him because he “really like[s] him”. All I want to do is get on this store owner’s good list so that I can dictate the beers he chooses to stock to meet my desires. Is that too much to ask? To want to get really drunk after a long day of work but come home to find that I’ve got to drink the same old beers night after night in an attempt to forget all about this bland, mundane, totally sucking piece of shit life of mine. With all due respect to loved ones, family and friends.
Carlos Beltran just hit a two-run home run. The score right now is 3-1 Mets. Maybe if I can just turn around one thing on this list from a “Bottom 10” to “Top 10”, it will give me a new optimistic outlook on life. Hope. Hope that — perhaps — this life isn’t so bad after all. That anything is possible. That I can change myself for the better that…that…ah, who cares. They’re just going to rip my heart out once I leave for work in ten minutes. I’ll come home later, tired and sore, and see that the final score was 4-3 Yankees. Billy Wagner will probably blow the save. Fucking hell.
