Gremlins, Nazis and Bunnies: In That Order

I've been reading "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls over the last week or so. It's a memoir of her insane upbringing under her parents' lax rules and various artistically motivated escapades. They appear to have been creative geniuses, although the author was wary of this even at a young age, but they were not strong role models or good parents. Reading the book has me feeling youthful nostalgia because I can identify with a number of feelings the author expresses, although I was raised in a far more structured, traditional home environment. Eccentricity is very relate-able, even if my glimpses of it are not as powerful as Walls'. Also, working on a history of my grandmother's childhood has me thinking of my own.

One of my favorite movies was "Gremlins." I used to watch it on VHS when I visited my cousins. Without giving too much away about the design just yet, thinking about that movie inspired a T-shirt that I want to make. I've drawn some preliminary sketches, so now I need to find a screen printing workshop to get this thing done. It's going to be clean, minimalistic and nostalgic for the Eighties, all of which appeal to people around my neighborhood of BK (and hopefully the rest of the country). I sold T-shirts only once before from a drawing of mine, and made some decent cash from the deal. All told, in two days worth of work selling them on campus at UGA, I made something like $800. At the time, $800 made me rich.

I read listened to the audiobook of "The 4 Hour Workweek" recently. Tim Ferris seems like kind of a weird guy and I don't agree with or see things from his point of view all the time, but the biggest gem I gleaned from the book was in regards to revenue automation. If I had to change Ferris's subtitle, I would change it to "How to Sit on Your Ass and Still Make Money." I want to have more sources of revenue than I do now, and a tangible product available online would earn me money with minimal effort, because drawing and creating things is fun to me. My dad thinks that it is an outdated business model to claim that in order to make money, you need a product. I don't disagree with that, but creation and production are satisfying to me. They feel like work well done; I can't feel proud of myself without something to show for my efforts. That need for creation has driven me throughout my life. ("Alright already, we get it, you like to make stuff. Wrap this paragraph up and talk about Nazis already; I got to your stupid blog through a link from a white supremacy page!") I may have been reading too many books about art / artists / schizophrenics lately...

Speaking of books, I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about my grandmother and her displacement from Ukraine during WWII. My grandmother and great-grandmother (her father was sent to Stalingrad and they never heard from him again) had to walk west across Europe and were once caught between the Russian and the German armies for two days as shells flew overhead between the lines. She had a very difficult life. That life is the subject of a book I am writing as a keepsake for our family after she is gone, a kind of heirloom.

But in this conversation, my friend drops a bombshell of her own: When her grandmother died, she left her home to her and her sister, and in the course of going through the house and cleaning out many of her grandmother's and grandfather's personal belongings they stumbled across some Nazi paraphernalia. Let that sink in. Did grandma ever goosestep her way over to the window ledge to cool an apple pie? Did grandpa prefer sieg heils to hugs? I know I'd have some questions, too. They found a soldier's uniform and a Nazi propaganda book for kids. She said they were taken aback and considered the idea of burning what they had found.

I'm glad they didn't. For one reason, right now, to my left, sits a book called "Kampf um's Dritte Reich" with a subtitle of "Historiche Bilderfolde." It means "Struggle for the Third Reich" with historical pictures. It is essentially a sticker book for children, like this one for Disney's "Finding Nemo", except that instead of children placing stickers of animated sea creatures into a cute story about a fish adjusting to ocean life, this one has stickers of Hitler, Goebbels, and some other of the worst human beings in history for licking and sticking in a propagandized history of the Nazi party. Now I don't speak German, but I can read some of what is in here. Everything is represented: Hitler's early years and the Beer Hall Putsch; a chapter on Dr. Geobbels; Hitler on vacation in Bavaria; and more, culminating in the current events of Nazi Germany in 1933, which is when this book was published. This thing is creepy. There are sections on the different branches of the military and the government, including the SS and the Hitler Youth. The children are probably the part of the book that disturbs me the most. (Well, those kids and a couple of fruity poses from Hitler.) In one photo, a mother holds a boy wearing a full Nazi uniform (with armband) as Hitler walks by. That kid could still be alive today. He'd be maybe 85 years old, but he could be alive. Here are some shots: Sorry for the crappy cell phone pics, I am going to scan some of this eventually.

So insane. Look at the little boy in his mother's arms wearing full Nazi uniform and waving a flag. He has no idea what he is so proudly representing. Also note the DJ swastika insignia; that's the Hitler Youth branch of the Nazi party. Not all DJs are Nazis, but next time you hear 99 Luftballoons, go ahead and wonder.

The girls in flower headbands and saluting the Nazi salute are just barely creepier than the number of propaganda songs that are found throughout the book.

Walt would be der Fuhrious with me.

I feel lucky in a way that has nothing to do with fascism or supremacy, but simply because I am better than you. I'm holding a piece of history that belongs in a museum. It shows the early indoctrination of children through what basically amounts to a toy, an activity, a game. A Nazi game. This was published in 1933, so by 1942, the child who read it, learned the songs and placed stickers throughout its pages as a 9-year-old could have been old enough to enlist in the army. Insane.

My friend says she wants to donate this stuff to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but that she's been too embarrassed by the fact that this was found in the house that she grew up in. I hope she does so eventually. It isn't her fault; she doesn't know much about her German ancestry. 

To lighten the mood of this post a little, which seems to have gotten a little dark, I will say that I decided to buy a dwarf lion head rabbit today. My friend called and told me I had to come over to the pet store near my apartment because they had just gotten the best lion head rabbit ever. She has a bunny, too, and she knows how much I love him. Her lion head bunny's personality is like some strange mix of dog and cat, and he is hilarious, mischievous and sweet. One time, we were lying on her bed and eating a chocolate bar, and the bunny kept trying to snatch it out of her hand. I kept grabbing the bunny and putting him on my chest to pet him, but he'd just get up and go back over to the chocolate bar. This little sequence took place three times, and on the third time he didn't go for the bar. Instead, he hopped right over, squatted down and peed right in the center of her chest. The bunny golden shower was totally intentional! So bad! So funny! So gross... Anyway, once I got there and saw her beard, I knew she had to be mine. Here I am holding her at the shop.

It's like a cross-breed of a squirrel and Martin Van Buren.

I haven't had a pet of my own since I had fish in high school. In college, my brother and I found a kitten in our apartment complex parking lot and chased her out from under cars for nearly two hours before finally catching her. We brought her to my brother's apartment and fed her milk and tuna fish, the two most obvious cat food items we knew. We had dogs growing up, and even though my grandmother had a cat that I really liked, we knew nothing about caring for cats. She lapped up the milk, downed the tuna fish and fell asleep on my shoulder. We thought we had done the best thing ever. That cat let out probably the most horrible funk to ever find my nostrils. She farted without prejudice, without care, without consciousness, without conscience. She stunk up the entire apartment. We took her to the vet the next day: Cats are lactose intolerant. But she's cool now, and lives with my brother, so I figure if he can take care of a cat then I'll be fine with the new bunny, the Nazi book and my Gremlins T-shirt. The things I must do to get through the month of January...

(P.S. How could anybody get through reading all this nonsense??? How have I become so prolific and simultaneously so boring???)

The Solution to Homelessness: A Study of Fame and Celebrity in America

In the quickly approaching two years that I have lived in Greenpoint, I've become enamored with the homeless, vagrant, drunk or — in the case of one very grumpy lady who wears vibrant, ornate hats, carries several stuffed grocery bags, wheels around a Samsonite suitcase and lives at the McDonald's — the strange fixtures of my neighborhood. They're as much my neighbors as anybody else around here, and their varying levels of public intoxication, odor and migration patterns make them that much more noticeable to me. Whereas I can go weeks without seeing friends who live mere blocks away, they're always on parade. Maybe it's because I'm more apt to notice a person who passed out on the street while eating a tin of Vienna sausages with a toothpick than my friend at the fruit stand buying bananas, but I don't think that makes me a bad person.

Anyway, it has me feeling somewhat friendly toward them. Like, I feel like saying "hi" when I pass them on the street. I haven't done it. (Actually, not true: I sorta mumbled "hey, okay" as the Herman Munster lookalike with PTSD recognized me from the coffee shop and said, "NO COFFEE, NO ICE CREAM, ONLY JELLO!", but I'm not sure that counts. Then he tucked his umbrella under his arm and searched through a garbage can.) But as I approach certain "stars" of the local transient street life, I can't help but feeling like I know them — and, even weirder, I get the feeling that they recognize me as one of the only people in the world who notices them. I know I'm not the only one who feels like this, because my favorite person and I have tossed around ideas about how to keep tabs on these real-life rock stars. Because that's what they are in a way: Rock stars. They rarely shower, drink copious amounts of cheap booze regardless of time or day, hang out wherever, do whatever they want, disregard the law, piss on the man, and generally don't give a damn about anything ... these old men make Keith Richards look like a choir boy. Okay, maybe that's just hyperbole, but the middle finger they give society is pretty damn "Exile on Main Street" sessions Rolling Stones, when they partied in that house in the south of France (while evading tax evasion charges in England) and wrote maybe the greatest album of all time.

One idea is an iPhone app called "BumTracker 2.0", basically a GPS-based system where app users could "tag" spots where they spotted a street-life star and note any fun activities/laws broken, so you could find your favorite urban urchin and track his (or her) movements. This idea is temporarily on the shelf due to lack of round one angel-investor backing and a lack of kickstarter donations.

But the idea that I really like is neighborhood-specific homeless people trading cards. Just like baseball cards, only better, and more relevant to daily life. Think about it: US Weekly, that celebrity-driven rag of a magazine prevalent in check-out aisles, has a national circulation of roughly 1.9 million copies per week so that people can compare their mundane, nose-picking and grocery-shopping boring lives with those of their celebrity counterparts. The section "Stars, They're Just Like Us", does exactly that.

Who the hell is Shanna Moakler? Oh, the ex-wife of a guy from Blink 182? Tell me more.

Look, I find it mildly entertaining to see a picture of anyone, let alone Russell Crowe, picking his nose, but I'd rather see action shots of a guy drooling on a bench than the Asian woman from Sideways wheeling her groceries out of a Ralph's Whole Foods. Plus it isn't like these celebrities are getting any money from these photos; instead, a bunch of acne-ridden masturbators with cameras make their living in LA from stalking. I want to make a few people laugh and "give the homeless the kind of change they can really use" (NYC PSA, you're welcome). So check it out: my prototype for "un-sheltered persons trading cards", in all its glory.

Believe it or not, they were jackhammering the pavement mere feet from this man who sleeps on the bench outside the coffee shop almost every day. Sometimes he is joined by his friend with bad posture, "Schlumpy."

Notice the tasteful thickness of the card stock. High-quality photo, name, team affiliation, primary position on the "field of life", right there on the front, just like a baseball card. I would like to transform the back of the cards to involve statistics, similar to those that would be on a baseball card. Stat categories could include: beers consumed, cans collected, average daily change collected, favorite places, etc. I don't know. Can you laugh at someone and help them at the same time? Can you sneeze and pee at the same time? Yes, but it hurts. Maybe that's the same as with these cards.

Google Image Search: Maybe The Ultimate Entertainment (For Bedwetters and Invalids Like Me)?

This is my second winter in New York and there are times that I just refuse to leave the house because it can just be so depressingly, bitterly cold and treacherous for walking. I need to take walks often to clear my mind and reset my thoughts. But when it's gross outside, I convince myself to stay in and "work", which means "work as hard as possible for as long as possible right now, because inevitably you will soon become distracted and waste the next 2 hours chasing some tangent around the Internet." At night this can be a good thing, because even if I'm wasting time at home, at least I'm not out wasting money, eating tater tots, drinking whiskey and talking trash to strangers. #theinternetsavesmefrommyselfbutputsmeonanalternatedownwardspiral

In a recent development, I have become totally engrossed with Google's image search function. Although it isn't as outright hilarious as Yahoo Answers and its never-ending supply of sad Q&As (this gem for instance), or Craigslist's Missed Connections disasters (example of greatness, here), I can't even believe how much I have been laughing lately at the random photos that are floating around in this bizarre sea of accessible images. You can type in the most innocuous search terms and come up with all sorts of mildly offensive or weird photographs. Actually, I started a tumblr page to keep track of all my nuggets of gold. I feel there might be sociological value in discovering the link between why the Dali Lama and a hello kitty tattoo show up when I search for a photo of Hannibal Lechter. But whatever. In no particular order, here are a few recent treasures:

From Cats the Musical. Ahem, "The heat had gone out in the building that cold December night, and the young cat went to a shady block downtown and paid $20 to hire a professional to find his Magical Mr. Mistoffelles." – T.S. Eliot

Jesus Christ, Frasier, get it together. It's my personal dream to be famous for literally 15 minutes, make a few million dollars and disappear from the face of the earth to read and write and swim and screw on some Caribbean beach. Why the hell can't anyone else figure out how great that would be?

Its body is warm, but its cold, dark eyes say, "Fuck you."

Wow. WHAT IS THIS??? It fascinates me.

This is so creepy and disturbing. It's from a coloring book. In my Rorschach test, I see a pitiful old man who has just finished digging his own grave under his favorite tree. Now this greedy miser wants to be buried with his bullion like Scrooge McDuck from Duck Tails (wooo OOO ooo). But someone was watching all along, and once again the young man will screw the old out of his money.

I don't know, man. I think this guy used to sell "ice cold beeaaaahh" at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium. "Rowland Office" sounds fake and his signature looks like two different people wrote it. 

First post: Strangers in the Night

... or, how I was nearly sleep-raped by a drunk girl from Kansas.

Let's get intimate right now, Internet. That's what I'm supposed to be doing here, so let's get down to it. I have resisted the idea of a personal blog since personal blogs became what everyone was supposed to do. I likened it to revealing your personal oddities to the world (kind of like pooping with the door open, get it?). Plus I was a professional writer in the making with training and experience in journalism; I was getting paid to write at my job, so I saw no reason why I should put my writing out there on the Web for free. Well, after seeing countless bloggers get book deals (F U Penguin, Can I Has Cheezburger, Sh*t My Dad Says — which was only a Twitter feed, not even a blog for godssakes, although when I saw the book I discovered that guy is pretty sharp as a writer — and more), having countless mental breakdowns, and the fact that even though I say I'm a writer I never share my published clips with anybody because once I finish writing them I get bored-of-slash-hate them, I am starting this blog and trying to be a bit more open-minded about this whole thing that the cool kids have been doing since 2003. I'm also starting out with a lot of run-on sentences, and there will be more where that came from (due to lack of talent).

I've been working really hard of late on a seemingly endless string of projects that I want to create. I have a lot of scattered interests that, to describe them, would probably depict me as a person with every neurosis possible topped off with sprinkle of OCD. But I had spent the entire day, basically from around 9am until nearly midnight, working hard on these projects in addition to the copy-editing work that pays my bills. Around midnight, I flipped the laptop shut and decided to have a small glass vat of bourbon and water and stare at the TV until my brain went numb enough to fall asleep. This did not take long. I was in bed well before 1am.

Then I come to. I have horrendous vision (thanks dad) and waking up, to me, is an unnerving thing that happens every single day at least once. I usually don't know where I am or how I got there, regardless of sobriety level, and it usually takes me at least a second to figure out if the blurriness around me is the blurriness of comfort and home or bathtubs of ice and missing kidneys. I want Lasik so bad it hurts. I would definitely be fitter, happier, more productive (blatant Radiohead theft) if I could wake up in the morning and see the clock without straining. But so I come to and my bedroom door is wide open, the bluish light from those energy-saving fluorescent bulbs I've got out in the hallway is streaming in, and a darkened, listing silhouette is holding a beverage in one hand and talking at me. The silhouette is mid-sentence when the audio kicks in.

"... so I know we met the other night but I thought that we needed to meet again. I'm Jessi."

A hand is presented almost in front of my face. Instinctively, my hand sneaks out from under my fortress of down blankets and sheepishly shakes the sorority ghost's hand.

"I'm Chris."

"Yeah, so did you do anything tonight? We just got back from this place in the West Village..."

I cut her off. "Yeah, it's just that I'm trying to sleep right now."

"Oh, okay. Well, really I just wanted to tell you that you are cute, so I thought we should meet again and I could tell you that."

It was then that I had a choice to make. I really didn't realize the gravity of the situation nor the adolescent fantasy that was being presented to me until the next morning. As an early teen (ten-year-old... hell, maybe 7-year-old), due to the fact that my bedroom window was very close to the roof of the screened in porch, and, due to the fact that I read a lot of adult mass-market fiction where people were having sex at every juncture in their lives that wasn't fraught with peril/danger (Christopher Pike — who was like that guy who wrote those Goosebumps books but with more humping — Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, etc.), and, thanks to my achievement of having seen every episode of Saved By The Bell and John Hughes movie, thereby knowing that coming in through the window is how youngsters outwit parents who might be guarding against late-night trysts, I used to imagine that one night a hot girl from the grade ahead of me might sneak over to my house, climb the back steps, shimmy up the rain spout or something (stop judging, this is MY fantasy) get up onto the roof and awaken me so we could make out and pet heavy. It never happened.

But it was kinda happening now, and I realize that the reality is way creepier than the fantasy. (Plus in my fantasies it was always some girl that I liked and who secretly liked me and, since she was shy and coy but still kind of a freak, that would be the way she would show her true feelings for me. And since I, too, was kind of shy and coy and a freak, it would be perfect because we would totally get each other's insecurities and then make out and pet heavy and then I would kick her out of the bed before the sun came up because that's what James Bond or Jason Bourne would have done.)

"Okay, well thanks," I said. "Let's talk in the morning, huh?"

Then I heard my roommate and her other cousin yelling at the Midnight Rider to get out of my room, so she turned and left and closed the door (loudly) behind her.

The next morning I went to brunch and told a few of my friends about how I was almost consensually raped the night before, and how I had been one "let's snuggle" from a free lay (or vomit in my bed), and how my 13-year-old virginal self would probably be disappointed with me. I told my other roommate about it, and asked her to picture the situation if it were reversed; she admitted that it would be very creepy, and downright scary, if she woke up and some guy (perhaps one of my weird friends) was drunkenly swooning over her, telling her she was pretty in her sleep in the middle of the night.

Fast-forward to the next morning. I briefly left the apartment to get a Vita Coco Tangerine coconut water (the greatest beverage in the universe) and saw the Intruder standing in my living room, using a mirror to apply mascara, but only sorta said hello. When I got back, she was still there, and apparently she was ready to apologize. Her words:

"Hey, really sorry about waking you up the other night. Total Raper Style."

I gotta hand it to the girl, she has a way with apologies.

Epilogue:

So there it is: Real life, real writing, for all the world (maybe 1 person in 6 months) to see. It wasn't that hard. Just like in real life, maybe I'll soon get as comfortable with you, Internet, you black hole of my free time, as I am with the people who might turn the wrong corner in the house one day and see me pooping. And, most likely, talking to my brother on the phone, which is what I do during 80-percent of my bowel movements.